Blog

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I just came in out of the rain after giving up on an errand to buy George Gagliardi one of those large plastic bags to cover and dispose of a Christmas tree when the season is over. You put the bag down around the trunk before you put it in the tree stand, and then you pull it up over the tree and it keeps the needles and sap from leaving a sticky messy path to your door as you drag it out. I was wanting to get the bag today because George doesn’t have a car, and tomorrow I’m going to help him get his tree into his apartment. It’s a decade-long tradition I enjoy very much.

Continue reading “Slow Down”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Sunday morning on the way to church, LeAnn asked if I ever sang the song “Over the River and Through the Woods” as a kid. I said I did, and then we pieced it together from our memories and began to sing it:

Over the river, and through the woods,


To Grandmother’s house we go;


The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,


Through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the woods,


Oh, how the wind does blow!


It stings the toes and bites the nose,


As over the ground we go.

Continue reading “Over the River and Through the Woods”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Some weeks crawl along or breeze by with nothing remarkable happening, and then some will make your head spin and mess with your breathing. This week has given my lungs a workout.

It started on Monday when we had lunch with my cousin Katherine – my second cousin, actually. My parents had no siblings, so I have no first cousins. But, by a quirk of spread-out births among my grandfather and his brothers, my father’s cousin Katherine is exactly my age. We didn’t grow up knowing each other, but we started at Baylor in the same classroom on day one, sat together alphabetically on commencement day, and we enjoyed getting to know each other during the four years in between.

Continue reading “Inhale . . . Exhale”