Segullah Journal

ON A DAY OF SMELLY LAUNDRY MOUNTAINS, a day when I felt mother-grumpy, my grandma’s letter arrived. She had typed it out and sent copies to all her young-mother granddaughters. I opened it hoping, in a weepy emotional way, for a tender mercy, something to ease my fatigue. The letter did not disappoint. My grandma wrote, [...]

HE SAYS IN NEW MEXICO the weeks before Thanksgiving are High Fall, autumn in abundance, all bright colors and fruits. Thanksgiving is the high point of that season, and also its end. Then it’s whooping crane season, Christmas, and winter. In the weeks before Thanksgiving the cottonwood leaves turned bright pumpkin yellow. We were driving along [...]

MOST READERS of Matthew’s Gospel take one look at that first page full of “begats” and impossible-to-pronounce names and quickly turn the page. But Matthew was a deliberate writer; he didn’t begin his gospel with a boring list, but rather with a selective portrait of the progenitors who made Jesus. Perhaps the most interesting facet of [...]

I LOOK LIKE MY SISTER. We’re not identical, mind you; if we stand side by side, you’ll be able to tell us apart. Elaine is two inches taller, for one thing. My hair is more blonde and less thick. She is far less freckled, and my skin is paler. She has the nose I wish I [...]

MY GRANDMA JENSEN COULD MAKE the perfect bowl of Cream of Wheat. The kind that would glide smoothly up a straw into your mouth to be greeted with delight by your tongue. As a child, I was unaware of how long Grandma labored over her old avocado-green stove, stirring the smooth mixture to perfection. Cognizant only [...]

IN THE PHOTO I am leaning in stiffly, artificially, with an exaggerated smile. The man at my side is not leaning back. Although the couch is crowded with people, there is a visible gap between my grandfather and me—narrow, maybe, but deep. When I first pulled the picture out of the envelope, the only thing I [...]

THE TREE IN FRONT OF ME stood alone in the small garden, its limbs stretched upward as veins spreading through the air. I looked around me. No one was watching. The tree seemed sturdy enough to climb—a solitary, ornate “I” at the beginning of a story. I caught the lowest branch, swung my legs over it, [...]

“ . . . AND PLEASE HELP Mommy and Daddy to have another baby. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.” I remember saying those words night after night by the side of my bed in our New York City apartment, the only child of two incompatible personalities, the only link that held their marriage together for twenty-four [...]

“SOMEONE IN MY FAMILY is coming to visit me,” my mother says, tears spilling out of her eyes as she hangs up the phone. Though this doesn’t sound like something that would normally provoke tears, knowing my mother’s story, her roots—and thus mine—illuminates the present moment. Unlike my dad, who grew up in North Avondale, Colorado, [...]

MY GRANDMA HAS LIVED two lives. She’s lived one life here, in St. Louis, as my Grammie—feeding her grandchildren cucumbers dipped in sugar, taking her first driver’s ed class when she was seventy-two, yelling into the telephone to make sure her voice made it all the way to my house, bossing her daughter (my mother) around [...]

I CLUTCHED THE METAL sidebar of the hospital bed and dug my nails into the cold steel. My body posed rigidly as each contraction swelled and crashed over me like the surf at high tide. Sweat poured down my back. It left a salty pool above my lip, which I bit to stifle a groan. Bile [...]

THE SPAGHETTI NOODLES always arrived from Portland in a two-foot long box, carefully curled in half at one end, which made it just possible to ease them slowly into the rapidly boiling water and cook them whole. We never ate them whole except when we had the missionaries over for dinner. It was Dad’s favorite way [...]

We are watchmen for your safe passage; pacing at the harbor, readying for unloading, the bustle, the clatter exclamation, reunion. but for now, we, watchmen wait impatient knitting together our nets, our brows, our families, passersby. coming or going? they ask, and we smile. staying, continuing, watching, ever hoping, ever vigilant, until, with wind’s last [...]

air cools. rich, lucent blue ripples, flaxen with slanted sunlight. canoe slips through narrow pine-shadowed inlet, nuzzles coarse sand. jumbled cargo awaits— remnants of play. laughter fades sun-weary, content. sandcastles sag as little waves greet one small stray shovel. suntips slide behind the alp. wind stops. the lake rests silent as glass. In her previous [...]

she’s no longer a child but no more than a child yet still plays Narnia and builds mansions of Lincoln Logs and blocks her eyes glow with tears when I confirm her cautious suspicions about Santa she remembers wearing the same clothes to school all week— easier to find every morning on the floor, before [...]

How did she see peaches, never seeing a Cezanne? This mother of my mother who passed to me, across a generation, her own deep-burning need for Beauty. Or so I’m told. “You remind me of your grandma,” my mother used to chide as she coaxed me from pages abloom with Renoirs and Monets. “Only she [...]

Leaning over the bathtub rinsing the dye out of my hair, I notice that the droplets splattered on the porcelain look like blood. It reminds me of my mother, whose death had nothing to do with blood or bathtubs or hair-dye, but who had always prided herself on not coloring her hair: “It crosses the [...]

Since you were born I’ve never been alone, never will be, standing now at zero on a line that stretches out forever to the right. Always at the edges of my sight you pull at me, your dance a haunting grace. Nevermore I’ll live in just one place: my restless senses stretch like tentacles into [...]

I swaddle you tight to mimic the watery womb of your metamorphosis, where you emerged, tugged by froggy legs from your mother’s belly not two hours ago. The doctor cut you free from the enchanted pond of your gestation and laid you on her chest, a lump of jelled flesh held together by waxed skin, [...]

Dawn rides the morning air over silent houses and abandoned gardens, flickering light along the edge of the windowsill, ushering in my grandmother’s fearful cry. Like a crumbling yellow leaf dropping suddenly from an ancient oak, the stillness shudders and startles me from my dreams. I find her, golden, warm and white. Eyes, closed as [...]

Did Eve fear death the first time she bled? Did she yell for Adam, sweating from his labor, to come running, afraid he would be alone again? How many days did she wait and wonder, cleaning, bleeding, avoiding her husband’s glances and rough hands? Did she dress and trudge through mud to the altar kneeling [...]