Newsletters

BkBit: Thunder in the Soul

I bought Thunder in the Soul from Plough Books by mistake. I’m generally not fond of excerpt books; they tend to display the mind of the editor better than the heart of the writer. However, I loved Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath. Egged on by Thunder’s subtitle, To Be Known By God, and a deal for subscribers to their scrumptious magazine, Plough Quarterly, I paid the paltry penny and ordered the book.

A Reader's Journal for 2020

Book and Journal

In November of 2009 I started a Reader's Journal. It was my mom’s idea. I had sent her a beautiful spiral notebook, Pausing for Beauty: The Heron Dance Poetry Diary. It featured small watercolor pictures by Roderick Maciver, little quotes and poems by an assortment of people, undated monthly calendars, and pages that were lined on one side and blank on the other.

BkBit: The Tender Bar

The Tender Bar is a memoir about growing up with a single mother, and an absent father, who was known only by his voice on the radio. The kid lived, most of the time, in a disjointed household comprised of a crazy grandfather and an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins. The bar where his uncle worked, became his community, his male mentors, and the home of his heart.

This Little Light of Mine

I often wake up earlier than my husband, which can be problematic in the long dark mornings of winter. For a while the novel attributes of my Bible on the iPad and computer bridged the gap between his retirement and my desire to visit with the  Psalms, stories, letters and parables first thing in the morning.

Eventually I wanted to write before the glow in the sky lit up the page. “Just turn on the light on your side of the bed,” my husband said. But it seemed so rude.

Mother's Day Memory May 2017

When my mom came to the end of her run in Colorado and I came to the end of my ability to help her stay there, I went out to bring her to a retirement home near me in California. She didn’t fight me on this, although she had resisted it previously; she knew she was no longer able to manage alone. Sitting in her living room, surrounded by half filled boxes, she said, “If I don’t like it there, I will come back.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not coming back.” The minute we left, her husband’s son would sell the condo. There was no turning back.

“Then I’m not going,” she said.

On Bathrooms: May 2016

As for bathrooms, I would like to say that I am for them: Lots of bathrooms. This is due to being 7 - 9 months pregnant three times, where-in my sons practiced trampoline moves on my bladder and I had to make mental maps of every available bathroom around my favorite haunts.

These mental maps proved useful in ensuing years when messy diapers were dripping down my left hip, or that period when the little darlings had finally learned to say, “pee, pee,” which gave me 15 seconds flat to find the nearest toilet.