Live life ✔, Write ✔

Friday afternoons are like tiny versions of Christmas in this house, and it’s all because Friday morning is “groceries day”.   Saturday-Thursday is a whole process of looking at the calendar and seeing which meals would work best for which nights - (Do we need to do a crock-pot dinner on a day that I’ll be gone all afternoon?  Which nights have softball games and would be best with portable food?) - and then writing up the menu, taking inventory of the ingredients, making out the lists, and rounding up any discounts I can find.  The stockpile of the previous week starts to dwindle by about Wednesday night, and on any given Thursday you can find my kids trying to decide between eating a stale cracker they found in the bottom of the popcorn bin or the half brown banana by the fruit bowl.  Sometimes I manage a midweek stop to grab a few tide-me-overs, but we’re a busy family and I can get pretty creative in the kitchen.  Anything that can be pushed off till F...

  The shadows were growing long, and what the late afternoon summer sun could still touch was bathed gold under a hazy blue sky.  The shouting and splashing of a few dozen other kids faded into background noise as a determined seven year old girl in a pale pink swim-suit, quite small for her age and spindly, climbed the nine rungs of the wet metal ladder that led to the high-dive.  She hesitated only a second once her feet were securely on the rough surface of the board.  Then, with her fingers clamped over her nose and a resolute expression on her face, she took halting, faltering but ever forward steps that carried her the length of it. There were nine terrifying and exhilarating feet - almost three times as high as she was tall - of open air between her and the water.  She leapt. And if that isn’t impressive enough, let me tell you the story of how she got to that moment. We all have things we remember being afraid of.  We probably all have things we’re ...