Photo by james j8246 on Flickr's creative commons.
I have a bit of a crush on Advent.
I buy things for Advent and I daydream about Advent and I want to spend as much time with Advent as possible.
And every year, I am disappointed. This isn’t because Advent stands me up, however, but because I make Advent stand in the snow, and put a Santa hat on her head, and fill her arms with enough books and music and art and calendars to make anyone topple.
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Photo by stockmonkeys.com via Flickr's creative commons.
I ran a marathon last week, and it broke my heart.
"It was hard, but at least I finished," I tell the people I don't know as well. With others, the words "excruciating" and "demoralizing" and "disappointing" might make their way into my answers. But I'm still smiling as I list the reasons why my race was all those things.
I'm not very good at letting people see my grief. I know this because sometimes they've laughed when I've told them about my race, and I'm sure they thought they were laughing with me.
One week ago, I was shivering in shorts and a T-shirt and marveling at the colors in the morning sky. It had been a long week and I knew it would be a hot day, but I had no misgivings, no latent fears that my body might fail me.
Read MoreMy baby birds died yesterday.
They weren’t actually my birds, but it felt like they were.
Last month, a pair of blue jays built their nest right up against my house on top of two floodlights. Another pair of jays had done the same thing five years earlier, but we hadn’t known it until we’d heard the chirp-chirp right outside our kitchen window.
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