A few years back, I developed an obsession with the Pottery Barn catalogue. I’d spend evenings with it, memorizing the spreads, fantasizing about the day I could buy one of their $2,000 cranberry sofas to replace our mismatched hand-me-downs. Some part of me believed that cash translated to cozy, that I could buy my way [...]

I pulled over beside a fire hydrant bleeding water from two sides, a smudge of rainbow faintly visible in the spray. In my rear-view mirror, I saw the road, broken glass sparkling like gold on a river-bottom, purple wildflowers pushing up between Walmart bags and Coke bottles. From my car, I saw a sign for [...]

“The anguish completely paralyzed me,” wrote Henri Nouwen in The Inner Voice of Love. “I could no longer sleep. I cried uncontrollably for hours. I could not be reached by consoling words or arguments … All had become darkness. Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn’t know existed, a [...]

When I was in third grade my brother came home from school one day with exciting news. He had learned that an unprecedented event was to take place that evening. If, he told me, at exactly seven o’clock, I was to hop on one foot for three minutes and then rub my head on the [...]

As my husband and I drove through the Columbia River Gorge I gazed at the red clay cliffs, the evergreen forests and the wide Willamette River. Despite Oregon’s startling beauty, my heart sank. We were headed to a city where we didn’t know anyone and our housing was still under construction. We were to spend [...]