The restaurant is busy. Holiday lights twinkle overhead. The server sets the pizza down in front of him. He looks at it, then back at her. “This is not. What I ordered.” I start to speak. I think better of it. I lean back in my chair and fold my hands carefully in my lap. […]
A family is at once the easiest and the hardest thing to build. Think of it as a garden. Maybe you expected rows and rows of neat tulips, standing straight and tall in their church pews. You pictured them eating organic apples and placing the cores neatly in the trash can. Instead, you have a field […]
Thirty. That’s the number of Christmases we’ve spent together. Ours was an autumn courtship, so that first December was still tender and new. You teased me about my gift – implying you didn’t buy one. Back then, gifts were my love language. When money got tight, we decided to take advantage of after-holiday sales and […]
We got a new stove last week. Two men arrived to install it. One was slight with dark hair. The other was grumpy. The stove didn’t fit. Despite sending someone to measure weeks earlier, the dimensions were wrong. The grumpy one huffed. The slender one apologized. They carted it off to the garage, where it […]