I'm too Old to Sit like That

The 11 year-old puppy (77 in dog) has taken to lounging in this position.

Spring Awakening?

A view from the upstairs window, bleak and cold for an almost April morning and below that the rodents have been busy under the snow carving interesting patterns in the grass.

An Easter Sunday...

ROW 1: Tamara, Preslee, Kaitie & Mckell blowing bubbles - Mike, Darren, Melanie & Grandma Saundra
ROW 2: Admiring the "red" in Grandpa Doug's new media room - Grandma getting caught throwing Snow - Preslee - McKell & Land egg hunting
ROW 3: An Easter Windfall - Land - Kaitie & Colin look for Treasures

Sometimes it Causes Me to Tremble...

Land made this quilt in a class last month. It is colorful, warm and bright. He needs comfort. A family needs comfort. Friends need comfort. Land received a call yesterday that informed him that a friend and classmate that he had just been hanging out with on Friday had died while skiing. It was so sudden. It was so final. It is so sad. He is at the church with hundreds of other acquaintances for a devotional in her memory. It will be a chance for them to talk and start to work out this incredible grief. They all miss Jocie.

The River from up Here

This is what I wanted to write (really, I'll show you the notes from my journal) while peering out of the plane window at the houses lined up along the curve of the water outside of Chicago. The structures forcing the river to conform... how does someone express your own feelings so much better than you ever could?

DISTANCE by Mary Jo Salter

From up here, the insomniac
river turning in its bed
looks like a line somebody painted
so many years ago it’s hard
to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat
winks in the sun and leaves a wake
that seals itself in an instant, like the crack
in a hardly broken heart.

And the little straight-faced houses
that with dignity bear the twin
burdens of being unique and all alike,
and the leaf-crammed valley like the plate
of days that kept on coming and I ate
though laced with poison: I can look
over them, from this distance, with an ache
instead of a blinding pain.

Sometimes, off my guard, I half-
remember what it was to be
half-mad: whole seasons gone; the fear
a stranger in the street might ask
the time; how feigning normality
became my single, bungled task.
What made me right again? I wouldn’t dare
to guess; was I let off

for good behavior? Praise
to whatever grace or power preserves
the living for living…Yet I see the square
down there, unmarked, where I would pace
endlessly, and as the river swerves
around it, wonder what portion of
love I’d relinquish to ensure
I’d never again risk drowning.