AUTHOR
All winter I watched a neighbor’s deck lights from my back window as they glowed against the grey and cold. The string of lights stretched between tree branches above the wooden deck. Morning and evening, I watched those lights create a small space of warmth against the dark woods beyond. I suppose I needed that... Continue Reading →
It layered itself like a fuzzy film along baseboards I didn’t often clean. It gathered on books I hadn’t opened in years. Dust marked what I liked to forget. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the clergy would recite on Ash Wednesday in the church of my childhood. I remember... Continue Reading →
“How’s your back doing?" my father would ask with a hope-you’re-okay smile from across the dinner table. He struggled to remember many things during the last years of his life, but he remembered that my back was hurting. Perhaps he worried, knowing at his age how pain can accumulate and weigh us down. I felt... Continue Reading →
Before the pandemic, the scent of warm, yeasty bread would have filled the chapel. Someone from our school’s café would have walked down in the hour or so before the service to leave a fresh-baked loaf wrapped in a white towel on the table. We’d have smelled it through all the prayers, music, and spoken... Continue Reading →
Lately, I’ve been fighting it. Pandemic life has meant so much change already. I’m feeing less and less desire to adapt. I’m feeling strongly protective of things I wouldn’t have expected to hold onto so tightly. As summer passes and days shorten, I find myself feeling inordinate amounts of grief about small things like the... Continue Reading →
I remember lying on my back, looking up through tree branches. Leaves crunched under me, and my new mountain bike lay on top of me. It was not a promising beginning. In fact, it was a broken rib. Painful as the injury felt, I actually found it a bit comforting. This fracture gave me a... Continue Reading →
Callie J. Smith 