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Showing posts from 2017

Purses, Pockets, and the Malware Installed in Every Woman

  In August, I stopped carrying a purse. It started just with complaining with women friends about the lack of pockets in our apparel. I’ve got pantsuits with zero usable pockets. I’m a parish minister, and after the service, I take off my preaching robe, and wander around our fellowship hall, chatting with folks. And because I have no pockets, it means I either have to carry my keys and phone around with me, or hand them to my pocket-bearer, I mean, husband. Those conversations sent me to articles about the history of the lack-of-pockets in women’s wear, and how – goodness! – if clothing manufacturers   began putting pockets in women’s clothing, then we’d kill the whole purse industry! Purse manufacturers have children, too, you know! Heartlessly, I decided I’d had enough, at least for a little while, and I was going to experiment with not carrying a purse. And I’d only purchase clothes with pockets in them. (One morning, I headed to work and realized I’d left my bla

Waters Give, Waters Take Away

There are no baby pictures of me. Not that I wasn’t loved; I was. But my Dad took only slides, which are not made for easily passing around. When he and Mama retired and began traveling, the slides and most of their worldly goods were carefully put into climate-controlled storage. Climate-controlled doesn’t mean flood proof. Which hurricane was that, I ask Mom. Rosa? We can’t remember. Water has always been a part of my life. Dad was a fisherman, so every vacation, we were somewhere with water. The Texas coast, Florida, Colorado mountain lakes, creeks in Canadian campgrounds. Weekends on East Texas lakes. In some primal way, it feels like water was my first language. In those long-gone pictures, there were slides of me as an infant, covered with an umbrella on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Growing up on the coast, hurricanes have always been part of my life, too. Little details still swim around my brain. The tape residue that never could be completely removed from criss

Do You Really Want Us to Adjust to the New Normal?

I read a tweet from Jan in the Pan and heckya, did it hit home. I remember years ago, right after my youngest was diagnosed with cancer. Before we knew anything was wrong, I was stressing about how to redo my kitchen. After diagnosis, I looked back on that with both undesired perspective and a deep wistfulness. God, how I longed for the normalcy of stressing over something so shallow. I ached for normal .  The thing about that kind of normal? It's a temporary, privileged state that not everyone gets. A happy normal means that you have enough money in the bank to pay your bills. And you're not worried about your child playing outside. You feel safe waving at police officers. You go to Walmart and don't have a store clerk following you up and down the aisles. No one in your family is in the hospital. You're not concerned that war is imminent or that maybe you just might have an un-elected Fascist running the country. You leave normal, and for a time, you long f