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Big Wheels Peace Accord
This morning I’m sitting on the couch, drinking coffee, and listening to the boys upstairs playing with some new action figures. The tension between the two of them has been through the roof the past couple weeks, so hearing them playing together does my heart good. Sometimes the struggle of parenthood is managing to equip children with conflict resolution tools while the bullets are flying… at each other and at you as the parent. Sometimes I succumb to the chaos…
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Pumping Soap and Counting Mississippis
She walked into the locker room holding her bags and mumbling to herself. People mumble to themselves, especially when they’ve just walked across a rainy parking lot to the gym, but as she started unloading her bags to open the corner locker, she kept on speaking under her breath, not making eye contact with any of the other women changing around her, seeming to be conversing as her voice quietly undulated with indecipherable words. I’d seen her in the gym…
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Wrinkles and Relationships
It’s amazing what photo filters can do for wrinkles and relationships. As I scroll through my instagram feed, I see one continuous incongruity – I rarely edit photos of plants and scenery, but pictures with my face in them have gone through filters, sometimes more than one. Photos with my kids go through another sort of filter, the one where they are presented as loving, creative, motivated, funny and kind. I rarely capture the tantrums, the boredom or the fights. The…
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Rain on Asparagus
Last night the sky dropped over three inches of rain, and the beads of water left glittering blanket over the plants in the garden. All but a few tufts of asparagus have been cleared from the beds to make way for spinach sprouts and cool season crops. Crouching over the plant trying to get my camera to focus on a select few tiny globes required a stillness that I don’t find outside in the rest of the city. Sometimes guilt…
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Ocoee
Since the fall of 1999 I’ve driven between Chattanooga and Raleigh, and for several of those years, I’ve taken the route along the Ocoee River. At some point another student convinced me that the route through Knoxville was quicker, but I do still love the scenic route.
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On falling off the face of the earth
I had never before seen such a vast expanse of bricks. My school prided itself in its endless supply, but it wasn’t in the brickyard that I was first overcome by the feeling. I was walking down the street in front of the health center with its fairly new construction and not yet matured trees. I looked up at the sky and for a moment feared that if gravity were to stop, I would just fly off the face of…
