As a parent, I have one particular child who is unusually obedient. She says “yes” with a willing heart, whether I ask her to clean up her room or empty the dishwasher. I have another child who struggles. She had a hard past and sometimes wrestled with whether she can trust what someone is asking of […]

The New Year started with a bang; not in a good way, but with one calamity after another. After two years of a virus that hypnotized people, leaving many fumbling in the darkness, spinning seemingly indefinitely… We had all hoped, the New Year would be brighter. Like bullets blasting towards the fleeing; people are trembling in […]

Store shelves lay empty. Barren, skewed and aimless, like Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboards. Or like the day after Black Friday. How was I supposed to buy shoes for my five-year-old daughter when I couldn’t find any anywhere? Worse yet, my fifteen-year-old had suggested she needs a heavier winter coat. She has many, but most were for […]

The longest day of the year. That’s what they call today. Winter. Dark. Even darker than the usual darkness of this Northwest tip of the nation I live in; the one where artists and creatives are born, and legends are formed by the emotion of winter. The valley, where trees block the sun, dark clouds hide […]

I nearly collapsed, when I turned to see giant chocolate bars lining an end isle. It was a casual grocery store stroll, just me and my husband. We were looking for piniatta’s for our daughter’s fourth and fifth birthdays. They were born three days and one year apart. Who would guess when we were fifty, we […]

The world is an expert at advise. Walk into any bookstore and you can see the shelves lined with how-to’s, need-to’s, and have-to’s. We’ve become unsympathetic to others dark valleys, but increasingly reflective and exaggerated about our own inner dwellings. We keep company with a world holding magnifine glasses to our every flaw, our open scars, […]