Welcome to the blog
August 4, 2020
I wrote this (but hadn’t posted it yet) just a couple days before everything started with my dad, and then I forgot all about it. But this morning Todd took Kiefer to a third-party facility to *finally!* get his driver’s permit, so it seems like the right time. No sweet stories of pain and hope here, just a tale of website woe.
July 30, 2020
The other night my mom put on the Bee Gees and sang along while she cleaned up dinner in the kitchen. My dad sat nearby in his wheelchair. He was a little low and a little sleepy, but he watched my mom, and I watched him watching her, and it was so tender I had […]
July 18, 2020
Sometimes, when the kids are chattering away with each other about silly nonsense, I look over at Dad, and he’s smiling as he watches them. Sometimes I see my mom bend over to give him a kiss, and he smiles up at her, full of affection.
June 29, 2020
If you’d asked me a month ago what a glioblastoma is, I’d have shrugged. A month ago, I had literally no idea that such a thing even existed. But several weeks ago, my dad suffered a series of sudden and alarming seizures that led to not one but two emergency brain surgeries, and now he […]
May 21, 2020
I’m a non-sentimental pseudo-minimalist*, so getting rid of things usually feels great, even liberating. It usually brings me joy, Marie Kondo-style.
May 14, 2020
The mountains are breathtaking and more than a little overwhelming at times, and yet there’s a quietness in the mountains too, a sort of otherworldly separateness in the high clear air, that resets the worried pace of my soul.
May 6, 2020
Murder hornets. MURDER. HORNETS. That’s 2020’s newest nightmare, and the thing I can’t get over is that someone named them “murder hornets” and the name “murder hornets” stuck. I know I should be concerned about the murder hornets, but I think maybe I’ve reached my concern threshold for the year because every time I read […]
April 28, 2020
Week 1 Quarantine-Elisa was really going places. She was taking the kids hiking, she was reading books outside, and she was soaking up oodles of sunshine and thoroughly enjoying the fresh, cool air.
April 21, 2020
Being a person who laughs versus being a person who’s glum is a choice, and it’s an infectious choice. And unlike other infectious things, laughter has a healing, life-giving quality to it.
April 11, 2020
Plastering on a smile and saying that technology is wonderful at a time like this feels kind of like slapping #blessed on the end of a post about how exhausting your life is. It’s the candy coating on a turd sandwich, the bow on a present that no one wants. It’s a way of taking a crummy situation and trying to act as though it isn’t a crummy situation, which is only a pseudo-Christian approach to difficult times.
