For my Darling Files entry this month, I am sharing an essay I wrote as an example of a character analysis when I was teaching 8th grade English, and another one I wrote on the same character about 20 years later. 2004 I become nervous and tense when I think about Aunt Alexandra in To Kill A Mockingbird. This is… View Post

Advent calls us to wait with expectation, to notice and attend to the mysterious, to sit in the dark. And maybe this is how it’s supposed to be, but against this call is the rush, the demand, the stress to finish all the things while making them pretty (read: Instagrammable), too. I think I have to live at a slower… View Post

Harper and I are in the car on a Friday morning under a grey sky that’s sending soft snowflakes like cherry blossoms that flew off the trees’ branches every April in Washington DC. “It’s a pink day!’ Harper proclaimed that morning in her blue dress, her blue shoes with the jaguar print because she loved Diego and Baby Jaguar, and… View Post

For Christmas in 1987, my Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ron gave me Cynthia Rylant’s Children of Christmas: Stories for the Season. It’s a book of six stories that are brutally heart-wrenching. You are living alone on a Christmas tree farm, keeping watch for the tree that didn’t get picked. You are a little girl at a diner with your father,… View Post

It is somewhere around 2010, and I have a friend named Hannah. Our friendship began literally, in the preschool carpool line. Hannah got out of her car and walked up to mine and started talking to me like we were old friends, and like I am an approachable, friendly person. Since then, we shared driving our respective children back and… View Post