I have become stretched thin. It did not happen quickly. This was a slow thing. Life and growing old are things which–like children giggling behind oak trees in full summer–play hide n’ seek with your heart. In one moment, you see the slip of a shadow behind the trunk of the tree but you believe you have all the time in the world to go hide. In the next moment you take off to your perfect hiding spot but you’ve been...

Despite what people tell me, I don’t feel like a writer. There are stories in me that muck about swirling and whirling and flicking their tails at me from the surface of my mind-water. But they’re awfully fickle. Hard to grab onto. Most often when I think I have a story to tell something in my life pulls me away from it–either my own self-doubt or something else shiny that is far easier than writing. (I’m sorry, but...

My first home happens to be a one bedroom apartment. For Shawn and I, we who have children that are feathered and furred instead of human–this fits us perfectly. For the longest time, with our bad financial decisions when we first got together + the way the economy was going, I dreaded that we would become one of those couples. Stuck forever living in a room within his parents house feeling ridiculously uncomfortable for living in a...

Sometimes you just don’t know how much you can do until you set a ridiculous goal for yourself. This year, I decided to participate in something I’d never heard of before: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The trick to this little contest is this, between November 1st and November 30th you write novel (hopefully) of at least 50,000 words. The better half was participating this year and, since I’d just been promoted...

Outside of the Baptist Church I went to every Sunday as a little girl was a great stone obelisk. It sat, massively tall to my stunted height just to the right of the U shaped dirt drive way. Or at least, it would had you been driving toward it up the road from where we lived. It was a dark gray granite that hovered near black with a large, flat rectangular base. In the middle sat the long piercing spire that pointed toward heaven. Within...