I find myself outside sitting on the gravel driveway in a dress at 8:30pm on a Sunday pulling crabgrass out from between the stones. It’s so dark I can hardly see, but I persist. It’s been an unconventionally hot and humid summer in Virginia and the plants are threatening to take back our house. I can’t say that I blame them since we excavated so many of their friends to put it here in the first place.

Well, we can’t rewrite the past and it’s hard to know if it would make any difference most of the time anyway. We can hope that as time passes, stigmas decrease and humans become more capable of extending grace and love in lieu of judgment and assumptions…that the weariness of living up to unrealistic expectations and wearing ourselves thin trying to be something other than ourselves will eventually soften our edges and bring gentleness to our ways of being in the world.

My sister SaraLisa died on November 17, 2000 with an open phone book and a card with Philippians 4:13 by her side. She was 26. Her life was filled with challenges and trauma matched with immeasurable joy and faith in her fellow humans. I know now that the mere fact she got out of bed every morning for as long as she did to face the world was a daily miracle.

After a year of having nearly all art activities canceled, I was really excited to have a reason to get back to work during the first month of 2021.

Write a 10 page paper, the syllabus said...but then down the page a ways, it also mentioned that possibility of a creative project. Maybe I thought I was going to give myself a break from writing boring academic papers, or sneak one by my professors as I colored my way through my homework. However, about a quarter of the way into my project, I quickly realized the paper would have been the much quicker, easier option and the joke was on me. Also, I continue to learn nothing from procrastinating other than a hard deadline scares me into extreme action that results in a photo finish.