Since I’ve Been Gone Pt. 1: Can You Go Home Again?

I’m deeply grateful be back in America – but it’s not the country I left. Slurping a perfectly ripe peach, I watch a 400-year-old play from a lawn chair and think about the America I used to know. Meanwhile, As You Like It careens towards its – spoiler alert! – four-wedding finale. (In Shakespeare’s comedies, […]

When You’re The Friend In Need

I lay in bed with a pounding sinus infection, the day before an 18-hr international flight. My doorbell rang. My newish friend Millie had brought me samgyetang, a nourishing Korean soup of chicken, jujube, and ginseng. We weren’t close enough for her to bring me soup, but she had. We weren’t close enough for her […]

Heavenly Bodies

Offering Our Pear Shapes and Fuzzy Brows in Worship “I hardly ever do things like this,” my friend Becky told me on the phone yesterday, “But my daughter needed makeup for a play she’s in, so I took us down to the makeup counter at kind of a nice makeup shop on Main, and I […]

Since I’ve Been Gone, Pt 3:Triggers and Shibboleths

Part 3 of a series on America’s changes: So here I am, sweating on the scattered mulch of our school playground, trying to make a new friend in our first month of Normal Life In America. It’s late August, 2022. Muggy. Cicadas screaming. I’m waiting outside my kids’ school to pick them up, and I’m […]