“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'” — Kurt Vonnegut Any minute now the door to my sons’ bedroom will swing open and the house will shift from calm…

I went swimming this morning. This might not sound like that big of a deal, but up until two weeks ago I hadn’t been in the water to…

Little did I know, four years ago, when I sat in my friend Angie’s kitchen, this is  what would happen. As I sat on a stool at her…

The phone rang in our motel room around 9 a.m., startling us all. In 1987, motel room phones only rang if it was a wake-up call or a noise complaint. Unfortunately, it was neither. My mom answered the phone, sitting sideways on the bed next to the nightstand. She talked…

January has been a long slog of a month. If there is one word that comes to mind when I think of the past four weeks, it is…