You little dervish
All red hair and fire
Pint-sized
You would get in a mood and storm
Then get distracted by your toys
Begin alternating between
The distraction of playtime and the vague memory that you had been
so recently aggrieved
If I am honest, you were often a pain in the ass. Your attachment disorder meant that I was the primary target of your anger when you were growing up, which was not fun, but good for me.
I remember you when you were little, I remember the stress, chaos and exhaustion. We would look at you and Charles when you were asleep and say, they are cute when they are asleep.
find myself trying to construct an old play fort out of this gray day, the sky folded into the quilted tent
This is heaven, I tell myself, this is Mary, she was college-aged, after all. She could be here, Heaven could be this, the thin line between the realms could be as gossamer as time itself–
Yesterday you were among the living
And now I return to the prayers I prayed when I held you as a child, fierce ball of anger
Oh, God,
Make us real
Make us vivid
Wipe away the tears, the past, the unbearable
All things made new
Last week I flew to Pittsburgh, got a rental car to Ohio, picked up my adopted granddaughters, and flew home.
Overall they both did remarkably well traveling cross-country with a stranger, but in the Nashville airport Em lost it. She just did not want to go from gate C whatever to gate A whatever, so she wailed and squirmed as I carried her.
By the time we got to A whatever I was reddened and drenched with sweat, utterly convinced that cardio-resistance workouts do not “go with” masking
And she remained in high dudgeon, as Jane Austen would say.
I was genuinely concerned she would not calm down and I would not be allowed to board a plane with a screaming, squirming child and I would be stranded, far from home, with an inconsolable child.
An amazing woman came to my rescue. She bought the girls coloring books, a bottle of water, tic tacs, She talked us through, back to normal and calm enough to board a plane.
I did not ask her name or get her address, but I wish I had
Knowing, as I do, that I could never thank her enough.
I don’t have time to write this blog. My house is chaos, I am behind in my “day job,” and my adopted granddaughters live with us now.
Both girls have been through fires, literally and figuratively.
As I see headlines about the Texas heartbeat law, I cannot stop thinking about what an appalling loss to me and the world entire it would be if they were not here.
They, like all my kids, light up my world. If one were missing, the loss would be unbearable.
That is what the rhetoric hides–each child saved from abortion is a
Little girl twirling in a princess dress
A little boy looking for spiny lizards
A child who knows grownup words long before they should
An irreplaceable light in the darkness.
A friend who lives in another state told me–
She drives by a pharmacy in her town and recently noticed a shiny new BMW with a personalized license plate which read COVID parked there each day during business hours.
No one should celebrate the economic boost caused by the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans.
I live in New Braunfels, Texas and I routinely call pharmacies about a variety of drugs, including ivermectin.
Pharmacists at one of the local CVS pharmacies and two local Walgreens have refused to fill prescriptions for ivermectin for combatting active Covid infections. They say that it is not approved by the FDA. One pharmacist told me they won’t even stock it.
By contrast, these pharmacies reported that they do stock and sell drugs which end pregnancies-abortifacients.
So, it could be said that here in New Braunfels, it is easier to convince some pharmacists to help end your pregnancy than it is to save your own life.
Daniel 10:12-14 KJV
[12] Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. [13] But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia. [14] Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the vision is for many days.
We have so misunderstood and utterly misrepresented
What angels do
Who they are
Or how they might appear
(While surely they might be anyone–
Women, children, the dispossessed)
They stand their ground
Fight for us
Maybe when it would seem
We are otherwise entirely
Abandoned
What if there was no other choice? Or if the pain were even more protracted than this? This, after all, is mild
The woman in the windowless room notes there are no children in the pictures from the Kabul airport–where are all the children?
And in my attempt to swim off my fear and grief and anger, the lightning storm descends
So close to water, no rain
I have friend who is an aficionado of romance. I am too old for that stuff myself, but I tell her that
Jesus is like the nerdy guy who likes you at the lunchroom table you should sit at but what will the cool kids think?
Yep. I am way past cool kids and would argue that if that were a thing, the guy who pays it all for us would have to be the coolest one of us all
But he is ok being
The nerdy guy who
Sends us love songs
All the time
Carrying Light 