Stories With Heart And Soul 
One of my professors has a cynical view of love and healing, as if the power of love for emotional renewal is magical thinking. I thoroughly disagree. Love is the very best medicine we have. Some of us need manufactured drugs, and I take a fistful of vitamin supplements in the morning along with a
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My mother’s love was big. Rita was the parent waving wildly from the audience with a toothy smile. In high school I messed up my solo in Oklahoma when I saw her arms fanning above her head. Other parents sat patiently, palms in their laps, and looked at the stage with neutral expressions. Rita couldn’t
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Aunt Kay is my second mom. She taught me so many things by example, including valuable life lessons. She also offered love and comfort when we baked thumbprint cookies together. The ritual had a spiritual quality. We worked side-by-side in silence under the kitchen window where the afternoon light spotlighted our effort and made the
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“I share being bipolar because it is an act of love.” This just came out of my mouth last night while I was talking to a friend of my husband. She was telling me about her daughter’s struggles without sharing intimate details, so I told her I was bipolar. This usually makes people more comfortable
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There’s an example of all that is good buzzing at the end of our block. It’s a home being re-built. My friend Judith lost half her house from the wind. It was the only victim of Hurricane Irma in our neighborhood. Her oak tree, with hundreds of rings, gave in to one of the last
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Love is love. It’s not something you bottle or define, but it is everywhere. Look around, and you’ll feel love in some form. For me there are endless symbols of love in our garden and many inside our home. The blooms, the photos and mementos of childhood. The big and the small dog. Symbols of
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E. E. Cummings wrote the perfect poem of love. It reaches right into your soul. My favorite line is, “I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)” A heart within a heart is such a powerful metaphor. And then there’s the weight of the promise. To carry a heart inside your
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Forgiveness was never top-of-mind when I thought about my mom. A list of childhood grievances sat on my heart for decades. Now I think about how hard it was to be a young, single mother with a mental illness. Rita did some extraordinary, hair-raising things when I was growing up, like throwing her boyfriend’s computer
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I’m in love with our foster puppy Maggie. This morning she was a toasty little bean bag in my lap. We sat in an upholstered rocker by a window, rocking and looking out at a tall magnolia and the milky sky. When she started to drift into sleep she tucked her head in the crook
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I’ve been fostering puppies for years, but I never had one like Maggie. I met her when she was nearly lifeless. In the lobby of the Atlanta Humane Society, I saw a vet tech turn the corner with a bag of bones dangling from her arms. It looked like a burn victim, red and blistered.
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