What are my spiritual practices now that I’m retired? No one in particular has asked me this question. My prayer sisters (especially one) keep on me about a church-going practice. But, no, I ask myself the question on this quiet day in November with the sun shining, Temma sitting beside me in her wheelchair looking […]
Growing up in Michigan is a story of winter, at least in my memory. The harshness of winter when things cannot grow in the ground and the fun of winter tobogganing at the golf course hill, snowboarding on the small hill in our backyard, sledding, snowball fights, and walking out on the big ice waves […]
Last night, Tim and I finished watching the series, The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s book by the same name. I’m haunted by the characters depicted on the screen. I finished reading the book a couple of years ago now, so watching the written images come to life on the screen brought the characters […]
My mom is beautiful. She just turned ninety-three-years old. I don’t know if she ever really yearned to be a mother—especially of five children. I’ve not asked her that question. Or was it the only alternative to a woman of her generation, married young with an eight-grade education? Her own mother died when she was […]
My best friend, Susie, from my Kindergarten class, died before the end of the school year. I keep a photo of her in my scrapbook, in the first part where the pages are still neatly arranged. After about twenty pages the neatness ends and the rest of the scraps are thrown in. I forgot about […]
Yesterday I finished reading Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own, by Eddie S. Glauber Jr. I read it for a book-discussion group and I’m so glad that I did. I have not read all of James Baldwin’s writings, and I know that I will never be able to do […]
Is it the ongoing isolation of a pandemic that is the cause of my lack of concentration? Is it my age? The change of going from weekly writing of sermons to my own writing? I don’t feel a restless “cabin fever” so much as a desire to watch and listen. There’s a lot to see […]
In the three months of my retirement from local church ministry I’ve been doing what I love the most—reading and writing. One of the books I took off my shelf to reread is Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, which led me to another of her books off my shelf, Home, and that led me to her […]
A few days ago I finished reading our friend Riva Lehrer’s new memoir, Golem Girl. I closed the back cover of this most beautiful book and felt so full of wonder, joy, spirit, and hope that I wanted to get down on my knees and pray and then get up and dance and sing. It’s […]
I’ve grown crooked, at a tilt.
Writing From the Margins 