Somehow, the conversation turned to a supremely difficult time of testing that The Mister had been through some years back.  “How long,” I asked him, “was it tough and miserable?”

With the boys back in school now, things at our house are finally settling into a routine for the baby and me.  The first week was a little dicey.  He

Wednesday:  By now, mother needs mocha or she will high-center on fabled mid-week hump and will never make it over.  En route to purchasing her “therapy in a cup,” she

I may have sniffed, flipping one shoulder up with a dismissive wave of the hand.  “But what if I can’t anymore?  Maybe…maybe I’ll quit.”  He shot me a look.  I

Jesus in skin, receiving the needy, a line of humanity bedraggled stretching before him.  There, the woman bent with an issue of blood that had kept her weak.  Behind her,

I recalled the message we’d gotten just days before.  “Did you hear the bad news?  He was killed.”  I felt again the shock, the disbelief.  “Oh, no.  Not him.”

We’d called my mother to say, “Happy birthday.”  Boy Two (aka Kid Kaboom) was singing a seriously goofy, nasal-ly version on a phone upstairs; I was cackling into the phone

In reality, it was a blessing for the Hoodlum Mentioned Above.  It was a redemption of sorts for him.  You see, the first year we ever got a tree, he