ROCKWALL, TX (Oct. 18, 2021) I once stood face to face with the devil, and I didn’t like the looks of him. I suspected the figure in red was really the boy down the street. He only demanded candy, yet a slight shiver ran down my juvenile spine at the sight of his pointed tail […]
ROCKWALL/HEATH, TX (August 22, 2021) A lot of students take their educational opportunities seriously. Since I was not one of those, I’ve spent a lifetime making up for my losses. A world atlas catches my attention as I pass a certain bookshelf. I throw it open to survey the Caspian Sea. Ten minutes later, I realize […]
ROCKWALL/HEATH, TX (June 24, 2021) The azalea bushes reached their peak of bloom the week a realtor planted her “For Sale” sign in our yard. The house shouted “ready” too since we’d spent weeks preparing for our move to another home only miles away. Perfect timing—we thought. After driving boxes of kitchen items to the […]
ROCKWALL/HEATH, TX (May 6, 2021) Saturday mornings were the worst. My usual routine of dusting each room and dry-mopping the floors grew tedious in the weeks after losing my mother. For over a decade I’d held a phone in one hand and cleaning items in the other while my weekly conversation with Mom made the Saturday […]
April 2, 2021 – My friend Cindi, in the words of Dr. Seuss, has been in a “terribly prickly place.” Cindi undergoes intermittent treatments for an incurable cancer. During Cindi’s recent round of chemotherapy, her husband suffered an unexpected health crisis of his own and spent a week in the hospital recovering from emergency surgery. While […]
ROCKWALL, TX – February 3, 2021 — The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple. –Psalm 119:130 Holiday lights long after Christmas can be a sign of procrastination. My own late-hanging porch lights are more intentional—their cheerful glow offsets the gloom of long winter nights. However, a neighbor once asked […]
ROCKWALL, TX – Dec. 22, 2020 – In the days after the latest presidential election, with the outcome still uncertain, folks were wringing their hands. As the week dragged by, a large percentage of the populous drooped like Super Bowl attendees wearing the losing colors. There is more at stake in an election than in […]
ROCKWALL, TX – October 8, 2020 — We sat on the floor hugging our knees to our chest for protection, wide-eyed at the scene before us. Several people with the same ghastly appearance stumbled forward— not in living color but in half-dead black and white. That was my first encounter with zombies, when Mom allowed […]
ROCKWALL, TX – August 24, 2020 — The wheels on the bus go round and round after nearly six months of sheltering in place. Two of my grandchildren – sporting colorful new masks – are hopping aboard. Attending school may well become the most notable event of Fall 2020. To open or not to open? […]
(ROCKWALL, TX – June 22, 2020) My usual Saturday morning phone call to my elderly parents opened with a question I’d never before asked them: “Do you have plenty of toilet paper?” Isolated in the early months of COVID-19, they depended solely on my time-challenged sister’s weekly visit and grocery run. My father answered and eased […]