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Miracles & Biopsy Results

I woke up this morning feeling like today – day six — was a good day for some good results. A miraculous proclamation from the all-powerful. And as I sat on my screened porch with my coffee and prayers, God sent me a little sprig of positivity.

I heard the jangling of a little bell on the wind chimes hanging out by the pool. I turned my head, confused. There was no wind and the chimes were hanging still. But as I squinted, I saw the flash of feathers and heard a second bell jingle.

Now these chimes are comprised of a large tin star with long strands of beads and bells hanging off four of its five points. And there, at the bottom bell of the longest strand, I saw a tiny house sparrow pinching and pulling the bell with her beak.

Now that’s not something you see every day, I thought.

And as I watched, she flew to a pot of geraniums and cocked her head at me. See what I just did there? she seemed to intone. See what unexpected things I can do?

I saw. I heard. And I believed in the sign — the augury, if you will (an Ancient Roman practice of divination through birds). In other words, in little winged messages from God.

And lo and behold, this afternoon, the message officially arrived in Bethany’s patient portal: her biopsy results are NEGATIVE. Her tumor is BENIGN.

Now it’s not lost on me that traditionally, a bell is rung when a cancer milestone is reached, and what a milestone Bethany just reached. Her cancer has NOT metastasized. She remains CANCER FREE after a terrifying scare.

There’s a quote attributed to St. Augustine that says: “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.”

Well, I would’ve said a tiny bird playing with a wind chime and watching to make sure I saw it is completely contrary to nature. But now, I know that’s not the case.

Am I a believer in miracles? Absolutely. We just need to keep our eyes and ears open.

Today, I saw and heard two.

July 15, 2026 0

Biopsy-Day Timeline Journal Entry

10:00 AM

I’ve avoided writing about Boop and what’s on her agenda this morning, instead scouring the internet for Gluggle Jugs to order and going on Christmas ornament hunts for everyone’s Thanksgiving boxes, but now, I’m going to bite the biopsy, as it were and talk about the Big Scary Bubble on the CT scan that floats in our collective peripheral vision.

It’s been a strange experience – and we aren’t done yet— though I pray we’re close to shutting the door on this stage 4 scare. I feel like it’s a Winnie-the-Pooh, “I’m just a little black rain cloud” scenario for us, threatening to ruin the honey sweetness of our lives,

And today, that threat needs tending to. Today, one of Caitlin’s most-trusted colleagues will go in and snag some samples to send to pathology. So, Winnie-the-Pooh and his fuzzy, destructive paw can go fuck himself.

…

11:34 AM

Caitlin just received word that the IR specialist, was able to pierce the tumor and withdraw a good sample to send up for rapid analysis in Miami’s on-site pathology lab. She says it’s a solid mass – which means the blip on the radar may be a legitimate threat — but there’s always a chance it’s benign. I pray the biopsy needle punctures this little black raincloud, removes its teeth and claws.

(About this ridiculous Pooh metaphor: You know how horror films use the most innocent, tinkling nursery rhymes and bright, colorful party scenes in blurry slo-mo just before introducing the killer? That’s the scene I keep imagining. I want the calliope music to stop. The hovering raincloud with ill-intent to vanish. For us to return to our enchanted place.)

…

2:17 PM

Results have come back with no malignant cells detected. A small victory, as the rapid results can give us an idea of what we’re dealing with, but far from an official answer. Still, there’s a possibility that the sample wasn’t actual tumor tissue, but lung tissue surrounding it. So, they collected seven more samples before waking Boop up to send to an off-site lab for official results. That’ll take five to ten days. So, the waiting game continues…

But we feel cautiously optimistic. Boop herself says she doesn’t want to think she’s in the clear yet — only to be crushed in another week — and I totally get it. So we wait on the experts to tell us the results.

Because, as Pooh so cleverly says:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” (A.A. Milne)

So we wait and we pray to God, the biggest expert of all, for “Un-Thingish” results from this Thing occupying our hearts and minds. And we would very much appreciate any and all of you who feel so led to please pray for the same.

PS: Pooh never means any harm and I believe this blip doesn’t, as well. That’s what I have to believe.

July 11, 2026 2

Terrifying Atypical Images on my Baby Girl’s CT Scan

I don’t know if I’m reacting the way a typical mother should. I don’t know what the “typical mother” should react like, feel like, process like. I’m not paralyzed in place. I’m not gnashing my teeth, nor wailing like a banshee. I’m not ready to rip heads off strangers, or the roses in my back yard… or God.

I mean, that would be pretty typical, right? Blasphemous, yes, but typical — to be angry at God, right? And everyone else out there walking around perfectly healthy in His perfect image?

Instead, I’m still going through the motions of my normal life… considering all the things I need to do for the day, the places and practices where the boys need to be, what I should make for dinner… even proceeding with this two-week trip to the UK. Surely that one is blasphemy, right? That’s definitely not how I should be acting is it? That’s not typical…

But then, what is typical anyway?

Because my daughter surely isn’t the typical patient for this disease. This clear cell renal carcinoma that appears to have spread to her liver. As in Stage 4.

That diagnosis is typical of an older person… and a male. Bethany is neither old nor a man. She is a thirty-five-years-young mother of three, who was 33 when she first learned she had a tumor on her right kidney. Thirty-three when she had her partial nephrectomy. If they’d taken her whole kidney, would it have made a difference? Is that typically what’s done?

No, none of this feels typical. So maybe my reactions don’t need to be either?

Besides, we still don’t know for sure that’s what we’re dealing with. Although our family’s margin for error is much slimmer than for most. A typical patient’s family would only know that an MRI has been recommended to supply additional detailed imaging at this stage. (This stage. The irony of that phrase is not lost on me.) But we have our own staff of surgical oncologists as kith and kin.

So while a typical patient’s family would have only been notified of the suspicious lesions on the CT scan, our patient’s surgical oncologist sister immediately asks for a cd of the scan, watches it remotely, knows what she sees, shows the images to her most-trusted radiologist and fellow oncology colleagues, along with every other physician friend she trusts and loves from all over the United States, (because it’s her sister, after all, and she really, really wants to have been wrong), and they all agree the lesions are characteristic of metastasis from renal cell… so much so that the sister-surgical-oncologist immediately has her sister’s treatment moved to the University of Miami where she practices and where her surg/onc partner is installed as caregiver, who then immediately orders a chest CT to make sure there are no additional mets in the lungs, along with a referral to an interventional radiologist for an immediate biopsy, as well as a timeline for immunotherapy and eventual (hopeful) liver resection.

No, a typical patient’s family doesn’t have all these experts and referrals and scans and biopsies and treatments fast-tracked to near hyper-speed. Most patients don’t have that privilege.

I understand how privileged we are. I am grateful. So grateful.

But I’m also here to say it doesn’t feel like privilege. It feels like awfully bad fortune. My daughter faces a terrifying fight. And while the storm howls all around us, I’m doing my best to focus on the tasks at hand. The rehearsals and practices, the dinners and laundry, flights and itineraries. Doing my best to move forward.

Because there is a slight, oh-so-slight chance, that the spots are perfusion abnormalities. That the contrast pooled. Or that they are solid, but not malignant: hepatic adenoma, hemangioma, or follicular nodular hyperplasia… all benign.

And even though 10 out of 10 experts believe that’s most likely not the case, we are praying for and believing in a miracle.

Most patients and their mothers would do the same. At least on that, I’m pretty certain we’re typical.

Miracles aren’t typical. That’s the nature of miracles. If they were, they wouldn’t be miracles. They would be ordinary occurences. As in, typical. But my daughter, her diagnosis, the whole situation, isn’t typical.

July 10, 2026 0

Building a Collected Space for (and from) my endless stacks of words

There are words I love for their sounds, like pixelated, Appalachian, alchemy.

And names I love for their looks, like Dierdre, Ariadne, Fizzy Dianthus, for instance.

And then there’s phrases I swoon for thanks to texture and taste, like green glass goblin, mist-spangled sea oats, and bumblebees tumbling through wildflower banks.

They all tickle my brainstem like mothwings in incomprehensibly wonderful ways, so I collect them like fireflies, then leave them floating like flotsam in a file — a file I call “poetry snippets” — thoughts fleeting, but recorded, pinned in a dark corner, piled up in heaps of broken images. I round up the parts, construct nothing of substance, then go out and gather some more, flitting through fact and fiction storehouses in my mind, snatching scenes, sketching silhouettes, silent stacks clustered in the cloisters of my laptop:

the dried and pressed blossoms of innocence,

the reclaimed wood of childhood,

the trawled testimonies of trauma,

all the tapestries woven not even half-way…

sonorous symbols, signifying nothing.

I so want to craft these trinkets into treasure… but like a painter who never paints her own house, it seems I’m a writer who never writes her own world.

I want – I need — to give them a home. Is it possible for me to rearrange and repurpose them, strip and paint and polish them ‘til the treasures I’ve stored up adorn every floorboard, enliven each corner and window and door? So, when I’m done, I’ll have erected the coziest, most comfortable little work of art with carefully crafted characters living in whimsy and purpose, surrounded by gleaming pewter sentence sets and winks of wisdom?

Where they’ll flourish and feel at home — my characters, yes, but my readers too?

That’s the prose and poetry I pray I can piece together in this next chapter of my life. A collected space – my favorite kind of space — that visitors will return to year after year with a cup of coffee and some introspection.

May 16, 2026 0

You had me at Burrow

I just read a headline from House & Garden UK that says cottagecore has given way to burrowcore. I’d say, they’re speaking my love language.

I’m a lover of little havens full of favorites, both my tribe and my trappings. A good book, a soft throw, a mug of coffee or glass of wine, my family gathered all around is heaven to me. Add soup on the stove or scones in the oven and I will never leave.

I bought into minimalism when we first purchased our house – or as minimalist as I could ever get. I painted nearly every surface alabaster white (which I still love, btw… see my kitchen above), but my favorite room in the house is my office, with its dark bronze walls, books stacked to the ceiling, daybed piled with pillows, and the heavy, muted rug my dear Aunt Jan gave me underfoot.

My truest loves are comfortably cluttered and full of flavor. Always have been, and always will be. I love my home like I love my literature, full of moody tones and blowsy sentences. I love my decor like I love my food, full to bursting with spice and dense layers.

Minimalism is sparse. It feels deconstructed. Like Hemingway details, sharp and dry. Like food plated by a Michelin-starred chef: angle of substance, line of nourishment.

Maximalism, on the other hand, is overwhelming. Too many things competing for attention. See me! Pick me! Exhibitionist energy in big, bold colors, heaps of fussy meringue on display. Like a great big bowl of Eton Mess. A saccharine toothache.

But burrowcore… THAT’s my speed, my flavor, my jam.

It’s introverted, homey, cozy, layered. All soft spaces, lit with lamps and candles and sunny windows. It’s equal parts shadow and sun, forest flavor and fragrant meadow. It’s collected, gathered, connected, maintained. It’s family hand-me-downs, antique shops and internet finds. It’s Beatrix Potter making best friends with Faulkner. It’s comfort food served warm from the stove.

Here’s to burrowcore forevermore.

April 17, 2026 0

The Fate of a Showgirl

We’re all Sisters of the Pleiades — limber, almost-deities,

out here dancing with our assets glowing

like the ends

of cigarettes, like

Schiaparelli silhouettes,

our skilled pirouettes and

lithesome fingertips

spinning Fate

in the palms

of our hands.

Sexed-up angels,

winged goddesses

up on our catwalks, we

set the sun to swooning

and the moon to mooning,

but the true secret is…

Fortune and her

kaleidoscopic wheel

— while a fun ride –

is always a strumpet.

And we’re ever one misstep,

one missed rep,

from being tumbled,

then ground to

quintessence

of dust,

just as the next big thing in her slender, goodly frame struts and frets her life up on the wire.

So goes the providence of a songbird.

March 21, 2026 0

And All the Men Laughed

I loved a lot of things about these Olympics. The dedication of the athletes: the timeless hours spent on ice, the slopes, the weight rooms, the training facilities. I loved the spectacle of opening and closing ceremonies. The routines and runs and games and events. The highlights of the athletes on podiums and the wolfdog on ski-trials.

What I didn’t love is the part where gender became war. Where it became us against them, she against him. If we can’t compete in the rings, then why pit us against each other outside of them?

The locker room joke heard round the world cut me to the quickening place. I mean, isn’t that what was intended?

The jokes on U-terus?

The president took a slice at the slice… and all the men laughed.

Alysa Liu shared a taste of her joy with us this week. Women’s hockey shared communion and love.

Then, men’s hockey came ‘round serving up backwash and bile.

May they all taste the backlash of that.

February 24, 2026 0

Thanksgiving Blasphemy

Since our big meal is Saturday for us this year, and since our tradition of putting up the tree the day-after-Thanksgiving is out the window thanks to the blessing of 3^rd round of playoffs, I’ve done something I swore I’d never do. I’ve decorated BEFORE Thanksgiving.

And y’all, it may be blasphemy, but I’m a big convert. Huge. Obsessed.

And I keep looking at insta for new inspo. It’s a dangerous habit.

I’m officially hooked on retro Christmas. I initially couldn’t decide if I wanted midcentury, maximalist, or Christmas Carol quaint. If I should dry orange slices, add old-fashioned tinsel to the tree, sling in some beads, add ribbons and bows..

So I decided to just do it all.

Over the course of the last three days, our house has become a veritable cornucopia of Christmas.

In the kitchen nook, the Canes tree celebrates the season, plus there’s a new, white beauty with my grandmother’s Shiny Brites (salvaged from her basement straight out of the 1950s), and a few beloved ornaments gifted me by my girls.

In the library, there’s the boys’ tree, featuring both homemade and Bug and Bear themed ornaments, all tied together with paper garland.

In the living room, stands the largest and proudest tree of all, with an eclectic mix of blown glass, and this year, vintage bulbs in all their technicolor glory. And yes, I got tinsel!!!! — I love how it shimmies with the least little draft.)

And in the dining room, no tree, but Thanksgiving Boxes stacked to heaven and waiting on my precious loves, and a mixed metal centerpiece with matching chandelier.

Close by, on the mantel, my dearest Aunt Ann’s hand-sculpted A Christmas Carol dolls that she made for me my first year of teaching, and which my beloved Aunt Jan outfitted to perfection.

The porch got a tree too, of course, along with our snowman blow mold.

And the oranges? Well, I’m still figuring out where those will go, but they’re dried, folks, they’re dried.

In the meantime, dawn has draped ribbons of sun and cloud through my backyard pines. She, too, has decorated early.

Soon, laughter and conversation will percolate – a masterpiece of memories in the making – but for now, there is only my coffee and twinkling lights while my favorite ghosts of Thanksgivings past occupy my mind while I bask in the abundance of this Thanksgiving present and praise Him for whom all blessings in the future will surely flow.

Happy Thanksgiving and God bless us, every one.

November 27, 2025 0

Thanksgiving Joy

I first fell in love with Thanksgiving when I went to live with my grandmother in East Tennessee. Until then, it had always been my immediate family gathered at the table for prayer and thanksgiving. A quiet, fellowship thing.

But then, in Tennessee, I found aunts and cousins, uncles and my grandmother, all around a bustling Formica table with aluminum chairs and red vinyl seats. It was all so busy and breathless, in the best possible way.

There were spinning chairs and laughter and games and pump organs and so many pies. And there were people here and there, and here and there, and here and there and everywhere. My heart and belly were overflowing with joy.

That’s where my love for Thanksgiving began.

And here’s where it flourishes now. In my own home as I prep for the arrival of all the chaos and children — now aunts and uncles, many with children of their own, and I, the mother, the grandmother, the matriarch.

I love a full house, full of blessings and thanksgiving.

Though one of my loves is in Miami and can’t be here this week. She’s tending to others as a brilliant badass surgeon and this year is her year to be there on call. And though I’m happy she’s there for her patients, I’m sad she can’t be here with us.

Still, she’s here in my heart, like all the rest who will be here and there and here and there and here and there and everywhere.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

November 24, 2025 0

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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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