I don't know that people can really be taught how to teach. Anyone can memorize strategies. Anyone can follow the Teacher's Guide. Anyone can give a multiple choice test. But what do you end up with? None of that accomplished what I thought ought to happen in a classroom. I once had a sophomore English…

Most families have some tradition they can't explain. I once read the account of a woman who always cut the end off a ham before cooking it. When her daughter asked her why, she answered, "That's what my mother did, so it must make it taste better." The daughter asked her grandmother, who replied, "My…

I resisted labyrinth walking at first. I thought it would be upsetting in the way that walking a maze, with its Point A to Point B prescription, made me panic. Finding my way through the tall shrubs was a living nightmare. I didn't know if I should turn left or right. My heart raced. I…

I don't know what it is about me. My presence, specifically my name, doesn't compute. I finally tried to create an author profile for the Goodreads page about Sweet Moon Baby: An Adoption Tale. I began clicking here and there, only to be told that HENRY was not an acceptable last name so I should…

If I were a better person, I wouldn't admit this. But my favorite part of Christmas happened when Maggie and Cliff returned to school after the holiday break. I didn't need another sack of flour or spool of ribbon. Nothing was left to mail. I sat down with a cup of coffee and listened to…

It's odd the things you don't think of when you adopt a baby. It never occurred to us that Maggie would be any less our daughter than a biological daughter would be. But now I realize people think all kinds of odd things about adopted children. My husband recently listened to a friend talk about…

When Cliff and I moved from Tulsa to Wisconsin, I wrote a Holiday letter to let everyone know how we were doing. It became a tradition. We aren't folks who get sales bonuses or athletic trophies to announce, and based on Maggie's trepidation through her finals, we won't be flying a valedictorian flag anytime soon…

When we moved to Minnesota from North Carolina, Maggie noticed something different about her new middle school. "There are lots of gay teachers up here," she said. We explained that her last school had gay teachers, too, but they had to keep it secret in order to hold their jobs in a narrow-minded community. She…

Ancient cartographers wrote Here Be Dragons to indicate unexplored territories and their imagined dangers. Fair warning, I guess, if you enter mysterious lands. I’ve lived plenty of places in my life and every one of them is a mapped dot —a city in a county in a state. Nothing mysterious is left. But I tell…

When you go to the fair, you know what to expect. You admire a 500-pound watermelon. You coo over a blue-ribboned pig on a leash. You think fried butter on a stick is a good idea. But sometimes the fair can take you by surprise. That's what happened to me last Thursday when I was…

When I was a little girl, my summer highlight was visiting my grandparents' farm in Crawford County Illinois. I gathered eggs, made mud pies, and chased lightning bugs. But the best part was the Saturday night picnic. Relatives arrived by train, car, and pick-up truck. One of my dad's best friends came in a dazzling orange and…

Writing with my mother is among my earliest memories. My three-year-old mind was fascinated by my mother's literal writing with all its loops. Hers was a round hand, bouncing wherever it landed on the paper. I was desperate to learn how to make a pencil say things. I hovered over her arm as she wrote grocery…

I try to walk our dog Maria twice a day. We found her through Animal Ark, a no-kill shelter association who rescued her from the Red Lake Reservation where she'd been left at a dump with her two puppies. Hers is a difficult biography, and her soulful eyes indicate she's been through plenty. She's learned to…

Because I’m a writer, I spend a lot of time alone. Too much time alone probably. When we lived in North Carolina, I decided to volunteer at a retirement village to get myself out of the house and to show Maggie, who was twelve, a way to get involved in communities. I was…

When my husband Cliff and I adopted a baby from China, we were amazed at all the advice we got. One look at us and people must have known we didn't know up from down. A woman watched me let Maggie crawl in the grass and offered, "If you let her keep doing that, you'll…