Yesterday we welcomed 13 new students for the fall session of our Refugee and Immigrant Sewing Enterprise. They came ready to sew, but also were eager to share with us about their lives, meet one another, and learn a skill that will allow them to contribute to their community and their families. They were all smiles and so were we. During the evening session, in the middle of an explanation about seam gauges, a news alert came across my phone so I walked over to silence and p

Before we moved into our house last year, we constructed a long list of things we needed to purge and cable television was one of them. It doesn’t take up space, but we also threw in things that took our money without giving us much in return, and cable easily made the list. So now we have an antenna that sits inside one of our front windows and gives us two local stations and about ten stations that make no sense to me. So we don’t watch any of it, but we have it if we need

My proclamation a few weeks before Lent began – that I was giving up grumbling for the six weeks – was probably a relief for the people who live in my house. While everyone else was depriving themselves of chocolate and soda, I was going to simply stop whining and groaning about every little winter thing that had been crawling under my skin for the past three months. Cold weather is becoming my cranky catalyst, and it had gotten so bad that even I was tired of listening to m