On March 13, 2019, my mother would have turned a hundred. After her death at age ninety-five, I lost her voice for almost four years. It neither echoed in my ears nor whispered in the corridors of memory. That grieved me. Then came the dream that placed life precisely as …
“Two raspberry smoothies coming right up. Time for the berries now, little man.” “I not a widow man,” said the tyke on the tall stool beside me, dumping them in the blender. “I’s Ezwa! I WIKE kitchens!” He’s towheaded, three and unstoppable, our youngest grandbean, Ezra. And he just had …
My favourite childhood Christmas gift showed up beside our scrawny tree on Christmas morning, unwrapped. To Beverly and Kathy. Love, Mommy and Daddy. My father spent part of his adult life as a construction worker. He built churches – a prelude to the later decades when he and Mom propped …
I’d rather go to a saint’s funeral than a sinner’s party. Marking a life well lived calls me higher. Reminds me to live in such a way that my grandchildren will remember my love and follow my faith. Such was my mother Agnes’s farewell. Mom was the sweet and sticky stuff …
Three-year-old Ezra calls me from his face-up position on the living room floor. A bulky mass of grey and black wool obliterates his torso. Both boy and dog are grinning. “Nana! Cash is lyin’ on me ‘gain. Could you git him off, please?” “Come, Cash,” I call. The dog looks …
Like the sweeping arc of a lighthouse beam, illuminating, for one glorious moment, some unutterably lovely scene, a beautiful season of life will soon end for our family. Our six grandbeans can no more race the three hundred steps between their parsonage and our home, the shortest legs pumping …
An hour before church is set to begin, I find the pastor’s wife weeping in the church nursery. She’s huddled in the chair in the corner by the playpen, pressed deep into it, like a wild thing cornered. Over the last dozen years, she has sequestered herself often here during …
“I’m not having a heart attack,” I said. But no one listened. Things move fast when you show up at emergency complaining of chest pain and trouble breathing. So many people checked me out, poking and slapping wires and sticky pads all over the place, that I felt like a …
The Preacher and I travelled a thousand summer miles between Dad’s home and ours recently. We took a bed and breakfast a mile or so down the road from his care facility and visited daily between naps and meals. We played checkers for an hour one afternoon, he and I. …
Today’s itinerary stretches between our son’s place in B.C.’s Kootenay region and my father’s residential care facility in Abbotsford. We set out on Highway #95, the two-lane road connecting Invermere and Golden, B.C. – one of my favourite sections of that route. Under blue sky and dumpling clouds, we motor through vast …
