You’ve been here a while — or maybe you’re just arriving — either way, there’s something I want to tell you that I should have said sooner.
A few weeks ago I sat on the front porch in the soft chaos of an April morning, watching the grandbabies chase a frog through the grass, while a half-written post sat open on the iPad in my lap. The article I was working on felt very polished.
Tidy.
Safe.
The kind of thing that sounds pretty but doesn’t really ask much of you.
And somewhere between the squealing, the smell of the freshly cut grass, Cluck Norris crowing proudly, and the way the light was falling across the yard, something in me just… quit.
::: the box had gotten too small
This Sacred Season gave me a place to write about faith and midlife and the questions that rise up somewhere around 2 a.m. — the ones most Christian writing smooths over or answers too quickly. I’m grateful for that.
But somewhere along the way, the edges started to feel too tight. Something began to feel smaller than the life I was actually living.
And when a thing feels too small, you notice.
I found myself pulling back. Not because I stopped caring, but because I could feel what was missing.
I don’t want to sound polished into sameness when I’m writing with dirt under my nails and a lifetime of memory in my bones.
I don’t want to write as if memory, labor, grief, family, land, and ordinary days are somehow beside the point.
My faith is central to me. But it isn’t the only thing about me.
It took me a long time to understand I wasn’t meant to be reduced to one thing.
My life was always wider than that.
::: I’m not here to write inside the lines
I’ve been told, like every writer is, to pick a lane. And for a while I tried.
I trimmed away the parts of my life that didn’t fit. I wrote inside the lines because that’s what I was told writers are supposed to do.
But I don’t want a smaller life on the page anymore.
I want faith and land and kitchen tables and grandbabies and grief and beauty and the ordinary holy things that make up a life.
There’s a whole essay I never wrote about the shadow box hanging on my daughter’s wall — the one with my grandmother’s driver’s license from 1970, gas rationing coupons from the 1940s, my grandfather’s appointment card as Honorary Deputy Sheriff, gin receipts and checks from the 1920s, and my daddy’s employee handbook from Boeing Aircraft.
A hundred years of one family’s ordinary life, framed and hung where the grandbabies walk past it every day.
It didn’t fit a category. So I set it aside.
That’s the type of essay I’m going back for.
::: from teaching to living
If I was going to write the whole life, I knew I needed a name that could hold all of it.
The name came the way most true things do—quietly, and without much effort. It’s simply what I want to write about: a whole life, captured in ink on the page. This particular, unrepeatable life on this patch of land, within this family, and in this specific season. It’s the life of a grandmother, a writer, and a woman who is, finally, beginning to take up the full space of herself.
It came easily because, in some way, it had been with me all along.
I spent decades teaching others to put their lives in ink—showing them how to write their way toward authenticity and find their voices on the page. I taught them that writing is how we make sense of what we are living. And then, for a long time, I stopped doing that for myself. I wrote inside the lines because I thought that was what an author was supposed to do.
::: sixth generation is me finally practicing what I preached all along. It’s the space where I’m finally writing as if my own lessons are true. All of it belongs here: the faith and the land, the grief and the ordinary holy things, the grandmother and the writer, and the woman still becoming herself.
None of it gets left behind.
::: what still belongs
This Sacred Season isn’t disappearing. It’s being folded into something wider, something more honest.
The spiritual questions are still going to be here, the ones about dryness and doubt, church hurt and calling, what it means to be a woman of faith in the second half of life.
But there will also be the poetry written by firelight. The essay about finally setting a boundary that needed to be set. A psalm that came out of watching a honeybee buzz around the front porch. A letter at the end of the month about what I’ve read, what I’ve made, what I can’t quite stop thinking about.
You’re being invited into my whole house now, not just one room.
::: the parts of me you haven’t met yet
Yes… I’ve been hiding.
Not in some dramatic, theatrical way. Just in the quiet, careful ways women learn over decades, tucking whole parts of themselves behind roles and expectations until they almost forget they’re there.
I hid inside roles for over five decades. When I finally started writing, I hid inside a narrow place I thought I was supposed to stay in. And somewhere in all that careful narrowing, I forgot that a life can hold more than one true thing at a time.
I’m the grandmother on the front porch.
I’m the woman in the kitchen trying to remember how my mother made that dish.
I’m the writer of prayers I don’t always understand.
I’m the teacher who became a student again.
I’m the country girl who never left.
I’m a woman of faith who still has questions.
I’m someone who believes feeding people is its own kind of prayer.
I am all of it. And ::: sixth generation is where I’m finally writing as if that’s true.
If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you. Truly. You’ve been part of the reason I kept showing up, even when I wasn’t sure what I was building. I hope you’ll stay.
If you’re new here, welcome. Come on in. The coffee’s always on.
Join me each week for thoughtful essays, writing prompts, and quiet encouragement for a beautiful, intentional life.