As I write this, I am keeping company with a mama robin on our backyard balcony, so I’m treading lightly. Tapping, not pounding, the keyboard. Sliding, not slamming, the door. Basking in the breeze.
The journey from a suburban Home Depot to our new country home spanned 11 miles and three helpers, winding over the river and through the woods. In the end, three crabapple trees successfully reached their destination — their trunks, an inch wide, their potential, infinite.
This is the story of a tree. An eastern cottonwood soaring 108 feet high, stretching its arms across three yards and anchoring the entire street. It was a defining feature of its St. Paul neighborhood near Nativity of Our Lord.
The McConnon sisters needed a trumpet player. The three young women performed in a liturgical ensemble at St. Luke in St. Paul (now St. Thomas More), and they were seeking a little brass to enhance the upcoming Christmas Eve Mass.
Growing up on a small farm, vacations were rare for Liz Gilbert. But one summer, her parents enlisted a neighbor to tend to their goats and chickens so the Gilberts could retreat to the beach for a week.
There was a time when Katherine Louise DeGroot didn’t consider quiet suburbs or small towns. She was a city girl, thank you very much, and it suited her work as a nanny and a photographer.
The little church in the river town of Newport looks like the kind of porcelain church you’d place in a Christmas village, its white siding dotted with tall green windows, centered by arched green doors and topped with a green gable roof. It lacks only an oversized wreath with a red bow.
Do more: one Catholic’s call to action