Lessons from Yellowstone (+ Yellowstone Guides)
When Christmas Surprises You
Dad and I crossed the steamy asphalt, melty ice-cream cones in hand. We’d driven cross-country to Yellowstone for a nature-writing seminar and stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs for two reasons: huckleberry ice cream and piano music. The ice cream was a sure thing. The...
Tracks and Transitions
Out west, our family sometimes stays in a cabin on a parcel of land plunked down in the middle of a national forest. There—with no cell service, no cable, and no wifi-- we watch the weather unfold in the sky rather than on radar. A couple of years back, a sunny...
Sparkling in an Unfamiliar Life
My great-grandma was a woman of summer. She kept a garden. She grew the flowers and vegetables that graced her table. She picked the berries that topped our ice cream. Once in a while I helped her in the garden or the berry patch and it always shocked me when she...
Christmas In August
Steamy air radiated from the asphalt as we crossed the road in front of the diner. Dad and I had traveled to Yellowstone for a nature writing seminar and a quick stop at Mammoth Hot Springs for an ice cream cone marked the transition from our leisurely tour of...
Summer Notes
Seasons--the days, the weeks, and even the months they are made of--are easy things for me to give away. I saw this tendency when my son and daughters were small and I referred to them as the age they would be on their next birthday rather than the one they...
No: A Long Bridge to Yes
When I slipped off the wide gravel road and into the woods, I knew it was a risk. The worn, earthen trail between the trees was wore a dark, saturated look, as if just a few drops of rain would transform it into shoe-sucking mud. At first it was solid and often...
What Gives Her Away
Elyse was four when she first showed us how brave she was—and what mattered enough to bring that bravery out. We’d moved, pulling into the driveway at a new house after dark on a Sunday night and popping out for a pre-school visit at nine the very next morning....
Embracing a Big Summer {& a Giveaway}
While the rest of the world waited for February 2 and Punxsutawney Phil to declare just how many more weeks winter would hold on, I looked to February 1. That was the date I allowed myself to count the days until my kids would be done with school and...
When the Mind Won’t Stop {5 Ideas That Might Help}
There you are, on the couch with your kids, in the stands at the game, at the coffee shop with a friend. You’re sitting. You’re supporting. You’re socializing. But you haven’t stopped. You’ve pushed pause. Your body is still, at least enough to watch and cheer and...
Waiting For What We Can’t See
Along the road between Mammoth Hot Springs and Cooke City, the meadows are open and greening, quite in agreement with the calendar: spring has arrived. Leave the dry, temperate north end of Yellowstone and try to head into the interior, though, and you'll see a...
Gifts and Graces: Spring Edition
Yesterday I hurried into Walmart for a few things and emerged--much more slowly--pushing a cart. Right outside the door I caught the fragrance of something I'd seen but not stopped to appreciate on the way in: flowers for sale. It was the scent of spring. I...
Every Day We Show Up
Encouraged by this post? Receive an audio file of another story from the stage:The Single Seat. Subscribe to the quarterly{ish} newsletter in sidebar. Every Monday during the winter, I drive into town. There, twenty young actors and a few directors gather to work. We...
Overwhelm: A Bridge Toward Saner Living
J and I took our first trip to Yellowstone together twenty-two springs ago. As we zipped down the interstate ahead of schedule in the middle of the afternoon, I realized we could make it to the park that night. We could cancel our along-the-way reservation, drive to...
Winter’s Good Graces {and Why to Keep Track}
The bleak midwinter, Christina Rossetti called it. And while her poem is lovely, living with continual strings of short, cold, sunless days is not. I believe that there is a time for everything, even bleak days. And yet. It's at such times when my practice of pausing...
Seeing Blue Beyond the Grey {and Welcome!}
Because it intersects with two subjects that fascinate and teach me, the rhythms of the seasons and Yellowstone, I bought a book, For Everything There is a Season: The Sequence of Events in the Grand Teton-Yellowstone Area. Through it, I see the general happening of...
Taking the Best of One Year Into the Next
Gravel crunched under the tires as I made my way through early morning’s darkness down the lane, away from my home in the country toward a hospital in the city. Des Moines has six general hospitals and I could picture and plot a route to every one of them. Every one...
Look at the Pretty Lights
Our headlights cut through the blinding darkness of the December night, illuminating the country highway as my littlest girl and I made our way home from church. “Look at the pret-ty lights, Mom-my,” she called from her car seat in the back of the van. “Do you see the...
Gifts and Graces
Gratitude. It doesn’t always come naturally. grat i tude noun the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. Along with the continual quest to lift my eyes so I can see, I’ve been trying to acknowledge life’s...
Bridges Between
One fall, when I attended the University of Iowa, I went a few weeks between visits home. When my parents drove me to school, the fields were full and green. When they brought me home, the fields stood empty. Even the combines and trucks had gone home. Growing up...
Because Winter is Inevitable
Once, long ago, before babies and moves to houses in new communities, I picked up the beginning of an understanding of the seasons—their rhythms, their tasks, their hard realities. Learning to be a mom to three babies while finding my way in three different towns left...
The Light of Summer
As the sun set over the baseball field at the end of a sweltering July day, I sat in the stands and tried not to long for fall. Extreme heat is kind of my kryptonite, so I found myself fighting to not wish the light of summer away over a little...
Because of New Normals
On the eve of our son’s return to college when the kids were snarly and I was weepy, my husband looked at us and said, “Transitions are always tough.” They are. I know. But I forget. With his words barely out into the air between us, I remembered...
On Clearing and Cultivating
Eight years ago, two months after we landed in a new place, spring unfolded like the twelve days of Christmas, each morning bestowing blossoms of a new color. Crocus peeked over the winter’s covering of melting snow. Creeping phlox draped over the rock wall and tidy...
Rest Along the Way
We sprinted up the switchbacked trail, pausing occasionally to measure how far we'd come, to rest our already used-up legs, to fill our lungs with as much oxygen as the mountain air would give. In previous years, I would have decided that it wasn't worth it. Not the...
Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Proverbs 4:26
