When my oldest two were four and seven and I was pregnant with the youngest, we went to Yellowstone. It was May. Deep snow lined the roads through the high mountain passes even while the sun made long sleeves unbearable. Because I'm into conversation, every night I...

Parked on a chair in the hospital lobby, I was beyond the reach of the wind's icy fingers. I'd come for a routine test and stayed to make my grocery list in an attempt to delay meeting the arctic air that had blown in that morning.  A family went about their work of...

Because I inherited my zeal for vacation planning from my dad, it wasn’t long after he invited me to go to the writing class that we began to plot the hikes we would take along the way. He charted our route, one that would take us into Yellowstone through the Tetons...

“Come look at the sky–before it’s gone.” It was my dad. He was hard at work outdoors last weekend, building a wall with my husband and son. As usual, he had his eye on the sky and when he saw that the evening’s sunset was worth sharing, he did. My youngest walked...

My children are all in various stages of learning to wakeboard, a sport which uses the wake, that trail of water disturbed by the passage of the boat as it moves over the surface. They wakeboard because my husband comes from a water sport loving family. They’re a...

An insistent noise intruded into heavy sleep, waking me just enough to know that I had to silence it, but not enough to allow me to understand what it was or where I was.  I stumbled through the dark toward the incessant pounding, wanting only to find it and make it...