MEANINGMAKER

Digging into the beautiful,
complicated truths
that make us human.

Latest Posts

  • the weight of the world is love

    It’s lunchtime and I closed my office door. I feel sad today. Nothing happened to me. I’m blessed in an embarrassment of ways. And yet, some days just seem to sit on top of me like a stone. The world… Continue reading

  • i’m still here

    She kneels down next to me and presses her palm to the side of my face.The softness of her.Her hands always so warm.She leans close.We stay that way for a minute or two.I’m still here, she says.All you have to… Continue reading

  • stars

    On a crisp January night, I look up through the scalloped treetops, at the twinkling mansion of the night sky. I don’t know much about the constellations or the heavens, or what’s beyond those things, but they make me wonder.… Continue reading

  • the blue house

    A poem I haven’t thought of in some time has been hanging around me the past few days. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe it’s a message. It turned up for me again this week as I was doing some research.… Continue reading

  • lessons from a gravedigger

    I stood at the upstairs bedroom window for a few minutes this morning, watching as a man chipped away at the cold, hard ground, squaring up the sides of a new grave in the cemetery that butts up against our… Continue reading

  • house of cards

    It was a house of cards. Everyone was busy playing their hand. We took our own deck, a bottle of wine and a corner table. At the end of that night, the bottle was empty. Everyone was gone. And there… Continue reading

  • love, in the end

    He kissed me the first time one night in front of the Francis Furniture store. The moon was high and, for the fifth or sixth night in a row, he ignored his aunt’s curfew and her pleas not to hang… Continue reading

  • the telling

    For some reason — I don’t remember why — same-sex marriage had been in the news around June of 2012. That Sunday night, as I grappled with what my own coming out story would be, we talked about it at… Continue reading

  • baggage claim

    I couldn’t have known it that night I found myself laying on the carpeted floor of the basement in our old house on Catherine Street – with the land line pressed hard against my ear – that you and I… Continue reading

  • pride thoughts 2021

    Every year in June, I think about Edie Windsor and Thea Speyer. Though they’re both gone now, in the not too distant past, Edie (in her 80s) fought a long battle to have her marriage to Thea legally recognized. She… Continue reading