I don’t like guns.  I understand that in our country we have a right to bear arms.  But I wish that we could do a better job of regulating their use.  If licenses are required for driving a car or even cutting someone’s hair, couldn’t there be a more effective licensing process for owning and carryi...

David and I like to take a different route each time we drive back and forth between Michigan and California.  We are particularly attracted to small towns and interesting hotels.  I have stayed several times in the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa, but Dave had never been with me.  So, I put it on our r...

My cousin, who is a hospice nurse and administrator, was having some difficulty with a social worker who lied about her to her superior.  Her uncle asked, “Shouldn’t lying lead to an automatic dismissal?”  I then shared with them my husband’s three rules of Hollywood, based on his experience working...

“If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
  even there your hand will guide me.”  Psalm 139:9-10

Last Saturday the time finally arrived for leaving our summer place.  I’m never ready to go, but there are reasons to be heading home:  birthdays, baseball games, book ...

                         the eagles have moved their nest 

                       this is not the first time they’ve found
                   a tree less accessible to curious watchers
                                  training their eagle-eyes
                              on their prey in the lake b...

Next Monday will be my granddaughter Chloe’s ninth birthday.  I love this picture of her praying.  There is something so pure, so humble about the prayers of a child.  I wish I could pray like that.  But the pain of the world is sometimes just too much.  The pain of micro and macro aggressions, pers...

The Canada geese are flying by;
they seem to be going the wrong way.
Skein after skein they wedge their way north
in the cool September morning,
unaware of what the calendar says.
They flock to find food
for the long winter months.
There is method to their madness.
Soon enough they will gaggle in place
or he...

What do you say to a naked lady
when she shows up by the backyard fence,
arrives overnight out of nowhere,
volunteering to adorn the garden grounds?

Don’t stand too close to a naked lady.
She’s best appreciated from farther hence.
While her pink, astral blossoms are arresting,
it’s her statuesque form th...

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his merciful ones.”  Psalm 116:15
JUB

He died in the middle of the night.
I didn’t learn of it until the next morning,
but the sky over the lake had given me a sign.
A bank of clouds pushed across the lake toward me,
threads of cloud reaching heavenward...

One of my cousin’s sons married a woman who was born and raised in Ukraine.  She moved here to go to school and continued on into graduate school in International Business.  Even before Mira and Jesse married, Mira had become a US citizen.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mira put her businesses in oth...