Some people undress, their deft hands moving assuredly.

I reveal myself. It’s a performance.

Agonizing over how and in what order.

I practice slipping off my outer garments while trying to hold the reader’s attention.

So that when I am standing naked beneath their gaze, they offer me some kindness for the effort.

This week, the agonizing won.

With apologies,

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It’s time to wash my toddler’s winter coat, so we empty out her pockets and gather up the treasures that she’s collected during her hours away from me.

In one pocket, a handful of mulch.

In the other: two pennies for good luck, a piece of mica, and some small shiny objects that caught her eye as she walked through the playground. A large, hard pumpkin seed that she couldn’t bear to eat, a few pieces of ice melt from the sidewalk that looked to her like unpolished diamonds. A tube of lip balm. A pale pink heart-shaped ring from an admirer and a bent purple ‘wikki stix’ she pilfered from art class and surreptitiously fidgeted with. Finally, a sticker that she found in a pile of snow, too beautiful to pass up, but which has now rolled itself into an unrecognizable ball of yellow and blue.

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These are the treasured found objects of my five-year-old, which, when held in her perfect little hands and described to me in her powerful little voice, make everything seem sacred and new.

Everything is holy in her eyes. “Pay attention,” she is telling me.

“Pay attention,” God repeats, winking at me in the light that bounces off the ice melt in my daughter’s hands.

With joy, Renée

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Some things arrive large and fully formed, like a baby elephant born at the zoo. Like doubt.

It grows like a cancer, unassisted, but we feed it and nurture it anyway. It lumbers through our narrow lives, knocking pictures off the walls, making wide turns in the kitchen. We don’t talk about Doubt. We don’t enlist the help of friends or animal control to shoo it out into the street. We make soft beds for it in the corner and politely offer it something to drink – as our parents taught us to.

Some things arrive small and fragile, like hand-blown glass. Like hope.

Hope comes buried in bubble wrap and tissue at the bottom of a too-big box. It is so small that you risk missing it entirely. Once you have it, you keep it safe from careless hands. It always goes back in the box, kept hidden on a high shelf. Occasionally, you remind yourself that it is still in your possession, until one day you forget. Thinking it’s an empty box, you put it out with the recycling.

What similes would you use to describe doubt and hope? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

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Her breath caught as her lover took her hand. It always did when they touched in public spaces, in full view of people who now thought simultaneously too much and too little of human contact. But here in the dimming lights of the auditorium, where the voices of school children rose and fell in off-pitch arcs, where people aren’t lovers, but parents and coupled professionals, holding hands like this, warm skin on skin, seemed taboo, almost lewd, and the thought pulled on the edges of her lips.

She looked down at their hands, intertwined on her bare knee, and watched as the fingers that knew her began to trace a well-worn path down the outside of her right thumb, skimming the fleshy mound at the base of her hand, crossing the inside of her wrist. She watched and exhaled as it pressed urgently through the middle of her palm, causing her hand to buckle beneath the firm pressure. Again– and then again, it rounded until eventually, her breathing settled into a rhythm that matched each intentional caress. This sensual path was familiar and comforting to them both.

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She glanced at the half-lit profile of the face she knew so well and then looked beyond it, past empty seats to the other faces in the audience. Everyone masked and focused on the stage in a tableau of feigned interest and rapt pleasure. Mothers smiled, leaving deep wrinkles around their eyes while they practiced being ‘in the moment’. Fathers watched the live performance through the digital filter of their phones, their hands preoccupied.

Her mind rested for a moment on the mental calculus that everyone now makes, the risk-reward of human contact, which left her feeling – malnourished.

Her lover bent an ear to her mouth, expecting a witty remark. She offered only the sound of her warm breath and a sigh before turning away. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, and when it was done, the pilgrimage across her hand began again.

She hid her smile and listened as the children's voices began to rise, flirting with the inevitable crescendo. Through it all, the caresses continued, and she responded with the gentle stroke of her fingertip along the back of her lover’s hand.

What small, perhaps surprising act of love would you feel malnourished without?

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