LETTERS

I keep trying to put my father’s dying in a story. I guess I’ve thought that might help me, and possibly others, make some sense of this vale. A couple of weeks after the funeral, my son drove to my mother’s house to visit and spend the night. Mom went to bed early that evening,…

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.   That’s how Joan Didion begins what I consider to be one of the truest treatments of grief—The Year of Magical Thinking. Prior to February 23, 2021, I bet I’d read Didion’s book ten times, at least. Why? Well, in addition to a book about death and…

  Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it……

Today’s Advent reading: …now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.—Romans 13:11-12 Word of the…

The runt Aspen tree in our backyard is almost bare now. The wind and cold have thieved the green and gold away. I say thieved, but that’s my perspective. The runt Aspen would say her leaves were not taken, but given. Nature knows better. My daughter’s Aussiepoo has been our guest this weekend. His name…

“There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place, that was true.” —Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son Our favorite local weather personality’s first name is Merry, like Merry Christmas! Kudos to her parents for that. Merry told us this wind would blow in this…

“You’re a piece of work, Bryan.” That’s what Tom said after Bryan announced plans for his new podcast: For Such a Time as This. Bryan had been born again again about two years ago and ever since had increased in zealousy for Jesus to the point where he was losing friends and winning enemies—not Jesus…

He eased open the sliding glass door leading outside to his back stoop, stepped out, sat down, and breathed in the gathering dusk. He looked down at his calves, certainly not the cannonballers he’d dreamed of long ago. He’d actually looked into calf implants while at college, not seriously but curiously. That was a time…

Tell her I wasn’t scared. That was the line, clear as day, that he woke up seeing. What it was tied to—dream, vision, nightmare—he had no clue. He wasn’t shaken. Heart rate? Non elevatio. No beads of sweat on his brow. It was quite the opposite actually as he felt, well, the word is placid,…

His yardman said Your tree is dead, beetle-killed, bark beetle. He really wasn’t a yardman so much as a friend, a good man who helped him each fall and spring with turning on and turning off his sprinkler system. His yardman friend added This was Mother Nature’s doing, nothing you could have done to stop…