Category Archives: Uncategorized

Writer Anne Lamott has said, “Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart…is ageless—all the ages you’ve ever been.” Today I am fifty, and my inside person feels that. It also feels as jubilant as the second grade me who wore her Mork from Ork rainbow suspenders and Wrangler jeans withContinue reading “Your One Wild and Precious Life”

Being a child of the 1970s is probably one of the greatest gifts I’ve received: I didn’t have to worry about the embarrassing moments of my youth being captured and shared with the world in the blink of an eye; neither did I have ready access to images and information that filled me with feelingsContinue reading “Mountains Speak and Wise (Wo)men Listen”

Did you hear the one about the vegetarian who moved to the Elk Hunting Capital of the World? What might sound like the beginning of a bad joke was actually the life I inadvertently chose for myself about twelve years ago. I am a lifelong vegetarian, and when people hear this, they assume deep socio-politicalContinue reading “Can Vegetarians Eat Crow?”

“Hey, have you ever gone to therapy?” began a dinnertime conversation last week, prompted by the youngest household member talking to her father. “Um, yes,” came the startled reply to the abrupt question, to which she asked, “Did it fix you?” Although there was some intended humor on the part of the 17-year-old, the questionContinue reading “Letting the Light Shine”

Generations before Pink invited listeners to “Raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways,” kids who dwelled on the periphery of nearly every communal circle had no odes to oddballs in which to find solace. Today being “socially awkward,” “quirky,” “eccentric,” or “fringe” are qualities that are worn as a sortContinue reading “Long Live the Oddballs”

Recently I reconnected with a friend of over twenty years when she called out of the blue with a question. In the way of many enduring friendships in which there are seasons of regular communication and others when the perfect storm of life’s demands necessitate us going dark, we picked right up as if theContinue reading “We All Need Somebody to Lean On”

Last week I found myself in line at Office Depot with a seven-foot long snake skin draped over my arms, waiting for the laminator to heat up (a phrase I would have previously bet any amount of money would never be uttered by me), feeling antsy at how long I had been standing there, armsContinue reading “Do You Know Kiki?”

Growing up in my family’s Southern Baptist church when my focus seemed split evenly between trying to get comfortable on the hard pew in a scratchy dress and counting the minutes until the altar call, crossing my fingers that the benediction wouldn’t include all the verses of “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling,”  two particularContinue reading “The Secrets We Keep”

Recently the fall semester began at the college where I teach. The start of any new semester necessitates educators to explain the expectations of their classes. It was during a discussion with my students about a particular assignment—peer feedback for an upcoming essay—that a participant earnestly asked, “Soo, do we have to do the peerContinue reading “You are Free to Choose…”

I’m a sucker for any online quiz that asks me a few seemingly random questions based on an algorithm that would insult any self-respecting quantitative researcher. I do not care one bit how reliable the data are—I just want to know what kind of cheese I would be. Provolone, for anyone who’s curious. I can’tContinue reading “A Little More Country Than That”