She noted with obvious satisfaction the riotous purple, pink and white impatiens marching along the front of the chicken coop.  “All that color just makes me happy,” she said with

“Dear Mr. Schrock.” That’s how they always began. Written by me, beleaguered housewife and mother of his children, it was my SOS, a twenty-first century smoke signal to The Mister

We chat then, coffee scent curling like ribbons through the air. The baristas, they bustle behind the counter. Doors open and close, patrons coming in, going out, finding fuel, finding

I laugh. “If it pours,” I say, “I’m going back. Turning around and running.” The Mister, he’s done it before. Run the road in the pouring rain, shoes squishing, clothes

He’s doing it out loud. Thinking it through, putting pieces together in that way small people have. “So daddies are men?” he asks, blue eyes earnest. “And women are girls?”

“All of them,” he says, eyes glowing, a-light. “And look,” I continue.  “Look at the green, green grass up against those colors.”  I point at the impatiens glory marching along

It was shocking. There they were, the elite cyclists in the racing world, climbing one of the Pyrenees Mountains in the Tour de France. Demonstrating incredible strength and conditioning, they

The rains had come.  Drought still gripped the land, but the liquid gold, so long delayed, had begun to fall, transforming brown landscapes with advancing shades of green. In our

It pained me to see it. Driving along, the signs were stark, sobering. Past lawns, dry and brown. Past fields of corn, leaves curled and brittle. Past homesteads and farms

It had taken a crowbar to do it.  That, and Mr. Schrock’s famous limb, the Left Leg of Leverage, to fit us all into the truck. The holiday had come.