Confessions of a Clay Pot

Somehow, the embarrassment I felt wasn’t nearly commensurate with the absurdity of what was happening.   On the other hand, too many beers,...

The girls have coined a new term this summer.   They like to point out my “Mom Mode.”   More specifically, they like to celebrate the instan...

In our years of church life, my husband and I encountered a fairly steady stream of troubled kids.   Often they would come to church activ...

My husband and I were already engaged before I met his favorite uncle, and that uncle’s fiancée.   They were planning a July wedding, about ...

Well-traveled as I might consider myself, I know next to nothing about Arkansas.   I’ve never seen a PBS travel show about it.   I’ve never ...

Picking the kids up from school recently, an exceedingly young couple was walking home together, holding hands.   They paused to hug at the ...

My husband picked up the soundtrack to Message in a Bottle back when we were first married.   The movie was nothing really special, but t...

Last weekend was a blast, starting right from Friday morning.   I pulled my sewing machine out of mothballs and discovered that I can still ...

Communication is usually one of my strong suits.   It’s never going to earn me a medal, but I’m the goddess of the drive-thru.   Back when I...

Hell for me is a phone with a headset, hooked up to an automatic dialer.   It’s torture, having to muster a pleasant tone of voice, and conf...

I know I’m going to tread on some toes here, and there is not much I can say about the series that hasn’t already been said, but it seems t...

My high school friends hated to ride with me, because I charged every stop sign.   Not to the point of throwing anyone into the dash, but I ...

…well, I used to, at least.   As my family started to splinter and spread out geographically, it became a bigger and bigger challenge to sta...

I interviewed a Catholic monsignor for an assignment once.   He was elderly, very pastoral, and won me over right away with thoughtful respo...

Nothing felt odd or out of routine to me until the women I was standing with dropped their jaws, and one asked what I had done to train my h...

It is a tremendous blessing that I have a large extended family. I have dozens of first cousins, beloved aunts and uncles, and grandparents ...

It offered free uniforms, on-the-job training, and a complimentary pop whenever I wandered in – beat that! They said in my first training se...

The deck needed to be freshened up. We had a day and a half without rain in the forecast, but we were pretty sure we could get it done in on...

I knew going into it that caring for a newborn again was going to test the very limits of my endurance. Anyone who says they get “baby fever...

Heading into the week of Spring Break, it looked like our family was about to turn a huge corner. In very similar fashion to how things prog...