I’ve learned to pick them out. These “folks of a certain age,” they stroll in early, usually packing laptops to surf the ‘net and check email as they eat a

“It’s a freeway out there,” she said, pointing at the road where a slew of soccer moms whizzed past. “During the summer, it slows down. Then school starts, and it’s

Oh, hi. You look like one of Mommy’s friends. She’s not around right now.  She said her brain is frazzled and she’s terribly busy, so she asked me to say

Finding out that you’re expecting when you weren’t expecting it is so shocking and, well, unexpected that it takes awhile to wrap your brain around it. Which, as we learned,

And he’s gone.  There he went, backpack on a tiny frame, swallowed up by a big, yellow bus that rolled to a stop, brakes screeching, on a cool August day

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?”