Life Lately: Summer

We started our summer driving to the Rocky Mountains to be with many of our favorite people. But first, enjoying the drive through Iowa in June with her stunning, lush, green rolling hills. Nebraska hosted the largest, fluffiest, most vibrant white clouds and in them we found the backs of sitting ogres, a boy riding a winged dog, and other spectacular wonders. Lately, we have been cloud watching and looking up more than down. Meeting thirty friends for a hike at Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park: the friends who visited us in the hospital one day after the birth of our first child and sang in our living room “Cath” by Death Cab for Cutie in a way that still takes my breath away. The much younger friends who were still in college but befriended us early-30-year-olds and our very particular and shy daughter. The friends that became aunties and uncles. The friends who creatively gathered during the pandemic in empty Old Navy parking lots to have dinner together. Friends who brought the silliest, strangest games over to play every Saturday night. (Ahem, I'm looking at you Mysterium as my favorite). So many friends who have been so significant and so many who eventually moved away. It was beautiful to be with all of them again, in one place, cheering on my daughter who hiked in the snow to the top of the Emerald Lake in hot pink Converse. Friends taking the hand of my six-year-old son to cross the icy brook that weaved down the mountain. Lately, I am thankful for all the people who have made life so absolutely stunning and in a way I never could have imagined for myself.

I thought I would spend the summer evenings of 2024 painting and writing. Instead, I took a small detour and started a tiny new job requiring a significant lens shift and learning curve. Lately, I am immersed in podcasts and online continuing education classes studying the neurology of sensory systems, the science of play, and learning about neurodiversity affirming practices in my field from neurodivergent voices. I am trying to carry out what I am learning in a small therapy gym with fantastical play schemes that weave in all the imagination we can muster. I keep thinking back to the fact that play helps release dopamine which is a feel good hormone. When we are engaging in play AND learning new things, we are linking learning with feel good hormones. Why do we ever stop doing this? But then I think of how I am absorbing all this delicious information: over headphones while I am moving through the garden, on long walks in the evenings, during pilates videos in the early morning, on the drive home from a friend’s house, and by creating informational handouts on Canva (and making sure the pictures and font are also “just right”). My learning curve is starting to flatten and with these last few weeks of summer, I hope to find the space for painting and writing. But I can also say I had a lot of fun learning this summer too.

Life Lately... April 2024

Lately, our living room floor has been the primary surface to sit and intricately fold pieces of paper into swans, lions, and fighter jets. I find paper airplanes nose down in the red oxalis or lost in cavernous spaces between the wall and couch. My six-year-old son spent much of Easter on his own while the rest of us had a nasty stomach bug. (Lately, we have endured so much sickness!) The next day, I found no less than 100 paper airplanes parked in the living room, folded into any model he could find directions for in our origami book. He had spent the entire day folding. 


Lately, I keep a book of poetry or prose next to the area where I brew my morning tea. In these six minutes, I promise myself that I will not unload the dishes or try to straighten the dining room table but instead savor the words of someone else’s perspective. I have been able to read through the poetry of Mary Oliver, Bianca Stone, and Annie Dillard's short book “The Writing Life” in these tiny, sacred moments.


Spring has been cool and stunning. Lately, I design all my running routes around the areas I know are brimming with magnolia trees, bluebells, redbuds, daffodils, or tulips. Because my endorphins are pumping, I am moved by the fact that each of these plant entities waits all year to perform such specific magical blooms for a brief period. All year they wait and then dazzle for a particular moment. These flowers will never be seen again. If I blink, I miss it and will have to wait a whole year to see the next generation! And because my endorphins are still pumping and I am listening to Tim Keller, I start to relate this phenomenon to our brief time here on earth and see our little lives on par with the bloom time of the crabapple tree in her magnificent magenta. In my notes app: God’s design for our little, beloved lives. Maximize bloom potential.


Lately, we spend the cooler, rainy weekends with friends playing the game Wavelength. I love a game that brings laughter-tears, a little confusion, and a lot of group problem-solving. This game brought much joy on those evenings that were still so dark. This particular weekend I get to enjoy the “mind-reading” game with a friend’s new puppy on my lap. Lately, I am in love with a three-pound ball of curls named Bev. 

Valentine B

I had wanted to do something lively this past Valentine's Day
but the family was either down with or recovering from Influenza B.

People laughed when I spelled out it’s full name in text
“It sounds like you are speaking from the Victorian era. Just say “the flu,”” a friend suggested.

After enduring a 103 temperature for three days, you just want to make sure people know.
It takes you out- mentally and physically.
This isn’t just a cold.
It’s Influenza B. It feels like something Victorian. 

So Valentine’s Day with a husband and daughter deep in their fevers.
I am just coming out of my own fever dream.

My six year old son is sitting at the kitchen counter 

We watch the sun go down on a romantic evening for other people.
I turn on the local college radio station and am surprised to hear a popular mainstream tune from the eighties.

They are taking love song requests from the public tonight and 

I can tell the nineteen year old hipster disc jockeys don’t quite know what to do 

with a request for Leather and Lace by Fleetwood Mac 

for Molly.

“We’ll take a look in the disc library,” they say, uncertain.

I love every moment of this interaction. 

This radio moment brings me back to life.

Happiness.

The song eventually floods my kitchen and my son asks to add it to his playlist 

(which mostly consists of thumping warehouse club music from the nineties and 

every version of Carol of the Bells).

He asks if he can make everyone toast for dinner and

we pull a stool up to the toaster.

This year my Valentine is learning how to wait 

thirty seconds 

until the heat of fresh toast warms the butter enough to spread easily. 

He is thrilled every time the bread “pops” 

My Valentine carefully serves his family with a proud disclaimer that

he, indeed, made their Valentine dinner.

Life Lately... January 2024

Lately the air temperature over lake Michigan is tens of degrees colder than the water. It is negative thirteen degrees and a rare sliver of sun is minutes from sinking into night when my mom and I step onto the beach. Frozen craters of ice-sand shift and crumble beneath our boots but our eyes are set on the horizon. In the distance, celestial pillars of lavender-gray steam stretch upward from the water’s surface and connect to the low ceiling of clouds brooding above. This type of chemical architecture demands admiration and we stand in awe, wrapped to our watering eyes in scarves and hats, taking it in far beyond the minutes we stand there. Hours after the sun has set. (We will not see the sun again for days.)

Lately, it’s been too cold or icy to complete my daily running path. Instead, I spend evenings under a blanket with my son who has just cracked the phonics code. I enjoy listening to the intonation of his voice when he is feeling confident about the words he is reading and the way he giggles before the funny part has even occurred. Nearby I hear another set of giggles, belly-jiggling, merciless giggles as my daughter finishes another Garfield comic book. The word Arbuckle alone brings laughter to us all. Meanwhile, I continue to read poetry and Covenant of Water. On an extra cold morning, I read a Mary Oliver poem. First to myself, then to my daughter. I am moved by its lines for the rest of the day because lately, I've been thinking a lot about both the beauty and deterioration that the passing of time brings. I love to find these thoughts summed up by another- we are never alone. 

Lately, Mad Libs has taken over all areas of our lives. I love that my son calls it “Mad Lips” just like I used to do. I love to hear my daughter and her friends sit in a stairway for hours and laugh at how their silly verbs, adjectives, and nouns form ridiculous stories. On the car ride home, my daughter shares that she found a poem in one of their creations. Something about a violet cat that ate over the moon. It’s a fantastic image, I agree. Later that weekend, during the Sunday night church soup potluck, more of her friends gather in a circle, laying on their stomachs between the couches, madly scribbling, and bursting out into laughter. And in a light-flooded restaurant booth the next morning, my son carefully spells out a Mad Lib story for his 22-year-old cousin. Words are spelled phonetically and in all capitals which I savor in memory boxes.  He tries not to overuse the action word “fart” but they both do it anyway.