I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion […]

We studied the Holocaust in our homeschool a little while back. It was hard in so many ways, (how do you explain so much evil to children?) but it was past time I came back to it myself, and definitely time my older girls started to learn about it. One of the things I had […]

Obedience is a word that feels a little outdated in our culture today. When “living your best life” so often means “going your own way” and trying to just “be you,” to whom could we possibly owe obedience?

This happened at our dinner table this week. The twelve-year-old wandered off. (Usually not a cause for concern – usually she would be in search of more water, or a condiment, or the bathroom.) After a few minutes I said, “Where’s Samantha?” Not in the kitchen. No one was sure where she had gone. Shortly […]

I heard a homily recently centered around the idea of the “next right thing,” or “one small change.” When I got home and turned to the reflection book I’ve been praying with at night, I found this: “The solution proposed in the Gospels is that of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy. It is […]

There is a chick living under my husband’s desk. How it got there is a long story. Two things happened a few of months ago: my brother-in-law asked if we wanted his friend’s silkie chickens (which turned out not to be the COVID pets she had been hoping for) and Samantha started collecting abandoned duck […]

Last week was recital week. Two of our daughters performed: one danced as a butterfly and a swan, the other portrayed water on the aerial silks. (“On the what?” you ask. It was something like this.) It was a long week – the girls were at the theater part or all of the day Tuesday […]

Here, for your laughter and enjoyment, is my Completely Unreasonable Summer Reading List. I really do want to read all these books, not necessarily in this order. Preferably soon. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) (the second half) The Iliad (Homer) The Making of a Poem (Mark Strand, Eavan Boland) Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinaire (Susan Tan) […]

We did a silly thing. We went to a violin rehearsal, despite the flash flood warnings, with the thought that if the weather was really that bad, surely it would have been canceled. Trying to get home, and circling helplessly with all the other soggy cars on the south-west side of Lafayette, I was at […]

The blackberries have come into their own. We planted a few unassuming cuttings given to us by a friend roughly a year ago, right at the beginning of quarantine, if I remember correctly. Our friend’s gardens are lush with life, so I had high hopes for any gift from her. We put too many plants […]