When our realtor walked us through the house we have now lived in for nearly ten years, he saw me hesitating as I stared at the dated flooring and the peeling cabinets. I still remember his encouraging words: “It could be really beautiful. Can you see...
When the girls were much younger, we often spent afternoons at the park. During the fall, the trees would begin losing their leaves. If there was a bit of wind, hundreds of leaves would swirl down all at once, making it look like it was...
Growing up, my parents had a table in their house known as the art table. It stood adjacent to the kitchen table and was covered with years of crayon markings and dried glue and paint smudges. You see, my mother is an artist (though she probably...
At first glance, the few bees buzzing around home plate appeared to be no big deal. Our family, seated along the third base line at the Diamondbacks’ home game, watched as the people on the field did little dances of avoidance around the bees, swaying from...
As Emma and I walked out of the grocery store, she paused and pointed toward her blue and pink mismatched socks. “That girl standing by the flowers looked at my socks,” she said. Curiously, I asked, “And then what happened?” Emma shrugged casually, “That was it.” We loaded our...
From the backseat, Ella exclaimed, “There’s a goose in this parking lot!” Sure enough, a lone goose sat in the middle of a parking space, a few spots away from our car. Questions flooded our minds. Was it hurt? Unable to fly? Something had to be wrong, Ella and...
I shared two blog ideas with the girls that I was considering writing about and asked their opinion of which one I should use. “Why not both?” they suggested. “Why not,” I thought. So here are two stories. Story 1: Parking at the dentist’s office at 11:20 a.m. on...
Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the death camps of Nazi Germany, one of the great psychiatrists of the 20th century, and the author of one of my favorite books “Man’s Search for Meaning,” once told a story of a woman who called him in the middle...
The man seated beside me on the plane noticed my curious glances at the opened black pouch resting on his tray table. Once the pilot had announced that the plane had reached 10,000 feet, the man had retrieved the pouch from his backpack and carefully unzipped...
“Elmo is just checking in,” the fuzzy red puppet posted on the social media site X a few weeks ago. “How is everybody doing?” It was a simple question. One that most of us ask politely in passing, expecting the conventional responses of “Great,” or“I’m doing well.” Usually nothing that reveals...