I took this photo in the courtyard of my house, and then I started thinking about the mixed messages sent by the flowers and the bar...

I recently read this article about Facebook's relatively new "On This Day" feature that reminds us of what we were doing on t...

Book #1 of 2016 was Gary D. Schmidt's book Straw into Gold .  I didn't love it like his newer books, but it wasn't bad.  Late...

How could I ever feel less than LOVED when my seventh grade son makes me a carpet of bougainvillea to follow to my breakfast? 

With the OLW that I chose this year , LOVED, this Raymond Carver poem is a must: Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this...

Yes, I know that by anybody's calendar, the Christmas season is over.  But I was reading about an Irish tradition called "Women...

Now that the earthquake anniversary is over, I feel as though the new year has really begun.  There's something about making it past tha...

Today marks six years since the earthquake that shook Haiti and changed my life.  I wrote about it extensively in 2010, sharing what happene...

It has been wonderful having my daughter home over the Christmas vacation, and today's poem is in honor of her as she heads back to coll...

Here is an illustration of what it is like to be LOVED, focusing on the words heard when Jesus came out of the water after His baptism, ...

In 2010, I chose the One Little Word LOVED.  I wrote here about how I chose it and what it meant to me.  In the aftermath of the earthquake...

The year of the earthquake, a friend sent me this book, A Flame of Faith, by Hazel Littlefield, published in 1972, for my birthday.  It...

Here are links to my posts about the books I read this year.  I didn't write many reviews this year, so mostly this is just a list of ti...

My daughter posted this Tweet on my Facebook wall yesterday. It has, indeed, been a tough year.  One of the things that helped a lot wa...

In 2015, my One Little Word was "unafraid."   I didn't do very well with being unafraid.  In fact, I was frequently afraid.  I...

Book #63 of the year was Because We Are , by Ted Oswald Book #64 was Saint Anything , by Sarah Dessen Book #65 was Armada , by Ernest C...

I love this poem and how it plays with what is "real" and what is "invented" in poetry, and writing in general.  The emo...

It's that time of year again: at Thanksgiving, I always read Pablo Neruda odes with my eighth graders, encouraging them to think about o...

In Mary Oliver's poem "In Blackwater Woods," she says that there are three things we have to learn in life.  One is "to l...

When  Irene Latham invited me to join in her celebration of ten years of blogging by contributing a post on the theme of WILD, I rem...