E-Letter 170
A late afternoon storm rolls in, and Ingrid and I stand holding hands on the front porch of her home watching ominous, purple-gray clouds scolding the sky as they side-arm heavy raindrops across the city landscape. My year and a half old granddaughter wakes up from her too-brief nap hoping to color with hot pink chalk, the porch steps, the driveway, perhaps her mother’s garden planters, and surely the rear bumper of her dad’s car. Seeing the rain, however, she turns around, raises her arms, and asks to be lifted into her swing suspended from the porch roof. I hesitate for a moment...
Read MoreE-Letter 169
It is a gracious gift to be in the presence of someone who “storys” her way to understanding her “real” life, her crowded, sometimes messy life filled with people and events and feelings and small serendipities. As we swoosh down the highway in my aging Honda so early in the morning that even the cows glance at us in surprise, Olivia tells me a story about her discovery of the changes wrought upon her beloved Skittles. In 1974, the Wm. Wrigley, Jr. Company, manufacturer of this enticing, fruit-flavored candy, introduced Skittles to children of all ages. You just popped a handful in your...
Read MoreE-Letter 167
I strain to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, the One who, at the dawn of time, walked and talked in a pristine garden with Adam and Eve. That first couple, naked and innocent, whispered awake at dawn by the Divine Gardener, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and listened to promises of blessedness hidden in the unfolding of a day. In this garden of Eden, the first man and woman had only to tune their ears to the words of the One True Voice revealing the joy to be found in tending a paradise of living things around them – plants, animals, and each other. When, I wonder, did the couple turn...
Read MoreE-Letter 166
It started the night before, in that brief pause between night and day when the Creator ponders the possible and the probable in silence. I leaned forward in the dark to listen as a fierce wind roared through the thin woods behind my house, forcing the canopy of young trees to kiss the ground in obeisance. I have seen these same trees willingly bend their branches to earth like a graceful gymnast trusting the ground to catch her as she flexes her back, arms, and legs like an archer’s bow. This arboreal bowing, this treeful scraping, however, was not a lithe celebration of youth, but rather...
Read More