Kalispell, Montana averages 151 sunny days per year. We were in the middle of one of our long winter stretches of inversions, which means days stretch into weeks, with nothing but cold temperatures and gray skies. Vitamin D becomes nothing but an old memory of summer long gone. Moods start to match the weather. Everyone…
I bought groceries yesterday. Sigh. Is anyone else wishing an oxygen mask would drop down in your car after going to the grocery store? This inflation thing is for real. I just paid $4.86 for a bottle of canola oil. Rising prices make it easy to start a downward spiral of hopelessness and panic. We…
They asked my daughter to lie down on the gurney at the urgent care clinic and hold her two-year-old son, who was secured tightly in a papoose. But I could immediately tell that was not going to work. He was freaked out because he couldn’t see his momma, and her third-trimester belly was making for…
I would never use a bread machine. This is no judgment on you who have one, except to say you’re missing the best part. It’s the kneading that satisfies. There’s something about tilting the bowl with my left hand and then working the loose materials with my right, until they form a cohesive mass of…
Those grown girls, my daughter and daughter-in-law, were chatting with me after our weekly Sunday lunch. The conversation turned to housekeeping, and I found out both of them watch YouTube videos of women cleaning–for fun. They watch them for fun. “It’s just so relaxing,” Jayme said. Mallory agreed. So there I was, a 53-year-old woman,…
It was sobering several months ago, when my normally very healthy mother informed me that she had been to the doctor for a physical and had been told she had diabetes. Any A1C number around 7 is diabetic, and her number was 7.1. We had watched her dad suffer for years with the slow and…
I’m just going to say it: I love all things gluten. (Dear gluten-intolerant friends, please don’t hate me.) When Matt and I went to Israel a few years ago, I almost wept at the entire table full of different kinds of breads laid out in baskets for every meal. I dipped humus with a different…
The furnace went out last weekend, but I did not cry. Although it was 4 degrees outside and 55 degrees inside when we woke the next morning, I rolled with the punches and did just fine through the whole trial. But yesterday I went down into the crawl space for the first time, to put…
From where I was sitting, I could only see her hat and shoulders. The chair in front of the living room window blocked the rest of her body, but I knew immediately who it was. It was the woman in our subdivision who rapidly laps the circle of homes multiple times per day. “That’s at…
We’ve been watching The Chosen video series. I admit that I was skeptical at first, because I generally don’t like anyone imposing on me their cinematic view of who Jesus is. But these shows are heart-melting good. Before I tell you why I like The Chosen, I need to tell you about the conversation Matt and…
I held my grandbaby on my hip for 15 minutes in the pharmacy line the other day, only to get to the front and be told the prescription that should have been done earlier wasn’t even filled yet. But while I was waiting in line, I read words that squeezed my heart. It was a…
A few friends have asked me recently, “Have you stopped writing?” I’ve been blogging for a decade and have written well over 1000 articles on my own website and contributing to others, but I’ve barely written anything over the last year. Except in my private Growth Book. King Solomon, with his special gift of wisdom,…
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