Here's what I did today. Drove to Lowe's for trimmer string. Stopped at the grocery store on the way back so I wouldn't have to come back across town later. Went to church. Came home and mowed the yard and ran the trimmer. Got cleaned up. Went to Costco for the rest of what we … Continue reading Trimmer String
Tag: gratitude
Flowering Herbs
There was a Bath & Body Works fragrance in the nineties called Flowering Herbs. My wife was given a bottle of it in 1994, four years before I met her. She was still wearing it in 1998, the summer we got together — we both turned twenty that year, she's two and a half months … Continue reading Flowering Herbs
His Hard Hat
My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper. He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I've ever known — grip … Continue reading His Hard Hat
One Thing At A Time
New round started today, and I've spent most of it taking things apart instead of adding to them. Seven habits, same as they've been. Bible reading, calorie tracking, water, exercise, reading, gratitude, and this — the daily writing. Two of them changed shape, though, and the changes are the whole point. Bible reading and the … Continue reading One Thing At A Time
Ahead of the Room
I've been interviewing myself. It's a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody. What I expected was to remember things. What's … Continue reading Ahead of the Room




