Search results for "all are invited"
So, this is Christmas. The photo? It’s me and Dad, in the living room at our house in Marathon, Iowa, in 1972. The Life magazine is there on the floor, declaring the “Joy of Christmas.” Dad’s tarnished gold watch is stretched onto his wrist. That’s probably a pack of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket. […]
He showed up unexpectedly on our front doorstep, while fat flakes fluttered down from the heavens, in moonlight. My husband, Scott, opened the door. And a man stepped in, stamping his snowy feet on the rug. Winter exhaled this frosty cloud into our house. I couldn’t see him. But the man’s voice was familiar, and […]
We came home from Haiti last week, wrecked. While we were gone, our country had been strung in blinking lights and decked with signs screaming “50 percent off!” Our feet were still dirty, covered in the dust of third-world Haiti. And all the consumerism choked us for days. We vowed to do Christmas differently. Like […]
It was our last day in Haiti, and a grinning boy on the schoolyard plucked a photograph from his front pocket. He held up the photo of an American girl. And my mama-heart swelled. The girl in the photo? She’s our oldest daughter, Lydia. The sweet boy: Romario. He’s 11 years old, and he lives […]
I’m sitting beneath the starriest starry sky, out where the moon glints off the rippled glass of the ocean. The scattered city lights of Port-au-Prince pulse stubbornly into the dark. We’re here. Sit with me a while, under this velvet tapestry of Haitian night. And listen. Hear it now, the wind through palm and the […]