After stopping at my daughter and son-in-law’s apartment in Bozeman, the halfway point on my way to visit my mom in Wyoming, I packed up my suitcase in the morning and pulled it over snow-covered sidewalks to my car. Driving out of the parking lot, I took the detour around a construction site on the MSU campus. There wasn’t much… Read More
All Your Chains Broken
Dad told me about 50 times that I’d better watch out, because one day that brother of mine would be bigger than me and able to lay me low. Whatever, I said. Of course, dad didn’t know that a few decades later I would find myself crying my way through the Celtic Woman’s Oh, Holy Night. (Aren’t they lovely in… Read More
Five Prayers That Disarm Stress
My calendar made me hyperventilate on Saturday morning. Well, the calendar didn’t make me –because it’s just a Wyoming Wildlife calendar with a picture of a great gray owl on it for the month of December. It was all my scribbles on the calendar that sucked the essence of life right out of my lungs, like a vile science fiction… Read More
Enter Your Future with a Secure Heart
I suggested to both moms that perhaps going in on an E-reader would be the perfect gift for Matt’s birthday this November. So I could have my Kindle back, for Pete’s sake. They gave in, and I was able to buy a novel for my Kindle this Thanksgiving break, with the lofty goal of reading for pleasure. And God used… Read More
You Wonder How It Will Turn Out
Matt smiles at that romantic part of the show, when the girl is anxious about if she’ll be safe and the guy says, I got you. I got you, girl. He always turns to me, works up a good smoulder with the eyes, and says the same words. I got you. I got you, girl. It’s silly. But it makes… Read More
The Drill for Your Internal Emergencies
Sometimes I feel like a fairly intelligent person –able to manage a household and be a writer and teach a Spanish class. Then there was last week when the fire alarm went off at school, and I could not for the life of me remember all of the procedures. The students and I left the room, and I closed the… Read More
Um, Isn’t Anxiety Getting a Little Old?
I am not one to scream, but that lawn mower… Sixteen years in service, and I suppose it had the right to stop dead in its tracks on only the second pass around the yard, although this seemed unjust after the numerous, shoulder-separating yanks I gave just to have it sputter reluctantly to start. I don’t know how many years… Read More
Happy (Internal) Labor Day!
We spent hours learning about quality assessment, and I thought it was so FUN, which I’m pretty sure is weird. I love being with teachers. When we took breaks and had lunch, do you know what we talked about? Assessment. Meanwhile, during the teacher in-service retreat, we had opportunities to go back to our rooms and rest, which is when I… Read More
A Life Outside of Anxiety?
I could not blame him for saying out loud that he had some trepidation about Sundays (not something you’d expect to hear from a preacher.) But you don’t know what it was like at our house every Sunday last year –me in my first year of teaching and Mondays coming. Monday eve (I am so calling it) would always look… Read More
Is God Asking Something Too Huge of You?
Even though I became a writer who maneuvers words more easily than numbers, I’m glad dad made me take high school physics. Yesterday I mowed the lawn and hefted a heavy bag of grass into our already-stuffed dumpster. With today’s trash pickup in mind, I grabbed the handle of the dumpster and pushed against the bottom of the dumpster with… Read More