As Campbell and I began planning our trip to Michigan from California, the one request he made was to see the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.  Once we selected the route, Route 66 adjacent, the one thing that I wanted to take him to see was Meramec Caverns.   Fortunately, the two attractions ar...

Route 66 was established as one of the original numbered US highways in 1926, but was decommissioned in 1985.  By then the interstate system had been completed, and Route 66 was essentially subsumed into I-40, I-55 and I-44, with remnants remaining that followed state roads.  For most of our journey...

In 2009 I was introduced to the interactive street art in the laneways of Melbourne, Australia.  Street artists get permits and do their graffiti-style artwork on the walls of narrow pedestrian passages around the city.  Then, other artists come along and alter each work with their own additions. 

When I was nine years old my grandmother took me on a Greyhound bus tour from Chicago to California and back…twenty-one days on the same bus with the same passengers, our own tour guide and driver, and I was the only child.  The experience of being doted on and exposed to this big beautiful country ...

I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, born at the end of May, when the city is putting on its biggest celebration, the Indy 500.  The year that I was born my mother’s doctor, an old friend of my dad, sent his nurse over to stay with my mom four days after my birth, so that he and my dad could go to th...

One bloom opened up on the hibiscus tree.
She offered her voice in a song to the sky.
The song that she sang was a plaintive cry.
“I’m alone,” she sang.  It is only me.”

The sky sympathized with her lonely state
“I’m here; I see you.  You must not grieve.
Others will join you; if you will believe.
It’s e...

In the account of the formation of the early Christian church in Acts 11, persecution in Jerusalem has scattered and dispersed the new Christians to the wider world.  They go proclaiming the Lord Jesus, first to the Jews, but eventually to the Greeks and other Gentiles as well.  God had made it clea...

In less than a month my husband and I will begin our pilgrimage across the country to our summer place on Lake Michigan, in a community called Epworth Heights.  When I first started returning to Epworth as an adult, it was for eight weeks each summer.  It felt like a decadent amount of time to retre...

crucified
            a poem for Kilmar  

I taste the salt in my tears,
in his sweat the bitter taste of blood

I watch him carted away, buried in a tomb,
a prison built to set all of us free.

Separated from his mother,
from all his beloved tribe.

The ground could not hold him;
rising, he released the...

Who do you say you are?  Do you identify yourself by gender, by job or by calling?  For instance, I am wife, mother, grandmother.  I am a curator and chronicler of stories, a lover of books and writers and literature. 

Recently I had the opportunity to interview writer Adriana Trigiani via Zoom for...