MEANINGMAKER

love

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • funerals and birthdays…

    Yesterday, I went back to my hometown for my aunt’s funeral. For my mom’s oldest sister, my Aunt Ruth, whose tiny body held death at bay for so long that no one could understand why or how she did it.… Continue reading

  • five things on a blue sticky note

    All my life, my mom kept a running, hand-written grocery list. Always on the fridge, stuck there in the top corner with a cocker spaniel fridge magnet. It was one of those simple things that moms do that are probably… Continue reading

  • an angel we could see

    A little over a year ago, my cousin Nancy gave me this aloe plant from her collection. I needed a good hair-do for this plant holder person and, by some miracle, it has stayed alive. Nancy & Benny came for… Continue reading