I woke to the song of mourning doves. Their soundtrack seems a part of the landscape here in the Texas Hill Country, along with the buzz of locusts on hot summer afternoons and the chirp of tree frogs in the scrub that separates our home from a fairway often inhabited by golfers with a penchant…
I keep thinking about bodies lately. My own as I pick something I can control, scrubbing my kitchen floor furiously, convinced that keeping it clean can fix things, change things, make things better. I think about my mother-in-law Nancy’s body, beginning its swift descent back to the earth. I think about what it means to…
Nature doesn’t always wait for us to hand over our toys. Sometimes, she takes them away without our permission. When I was 16, I memorized a poem that struck me even then with its poignant truth about the cycle of life. In his poem “Nature,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) compares nature to a loving mother…
Courage whispered the autumn leaf He, born of spring’s budding hope commissioned for summer’s verdancy yet most glorious in decline Courage urged the autumn leaf As he, in trust and gratitude…
A while ago, my mentor challenged me to think about what might happen after I die—more specifically, what heaven might look like. Although middle-aged, I never pondered this mystery before. When I was young, I saw myself as indestructible, protected by the solid shell of my own energy and the strength of naivete. Now, I…
The red light on our answering machine blinked. We had just returned home from an evening children’s Christmas program, joyful in the spirit of the holiday. But my mood suddenly changed when I pressed the button on the machine and heard my mother’s voice, “We had to take Dad to the hospital. It looks serious….
I looked down at her hands, worn by so many years of labor. They seemed mostly of bone now, the fat and muscle mostly gone and the skin like a rag, twisted and stretched until it can never return to its original form. And, yet, they were beautiful to me. I spent much time looking…