Give Us, Keep Us

Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶

I was so looking forward to 5 days with my sisters and close friends for my birthday, celebrating my big 6-0 in an extraordinary way. I reserved a place at the beach in Southern California, my birthplace. My head was filled with imagining the familiar sights and sounds, the walks on the beach, the fun ahead. I had…
My husband and I are embarking on another season of Home Improvements in the Collins Household. We’ve lived here for over 20 years; the house was built in 1979–the maintenance and care are ongoing. The other night we were calculating dimensions of the opening for a new sidelight to go next to our front door….
I had the joy of being with 40 of my sisters–and my nieces and my daughter and my sister in law–at our Women’s Retreat this weekend. Our Retreat theme was ‘Beauty in Imperfection‘–a theme that resonated most clearly when we set about taking hundreds of bits and pieces…
I have two garden beds in my back yard—one a perennial bed of flowers, the other a 12×6 rectangle of mostly weeds. The flower bed is behaving as expected this time of year–peony shoots with their magenta spikes heading skyward, the clematis tendrils beginning to twirl up and around the bird gazebo. A ‘Sombrero’ Echinacea…
“For who knows how, Better than he that taught us first to Plough, To guide our Mind and Pens for his Design? And he makes base things usher in Divine.” John Bunyan, the Author’s Apology for His Book, Pilgrim’s Progress I wrote at the beginning of this year about starting small, starting now when leaning…
I met Sophfronia Scott at the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids April 2018. I’d admired her writing work from afar, particularly an essay in Ruminate magazine about dancing in her kitchen. I knew she’d be speaking at the Festival and scanned the meeting places, looking for her beautiful dreadlocks and beaming smile. I…