Author: jolina

Last night, my husband and I returned from visiting his grandfather who is recovering from a severe stroke. Over the weekend, watching the love his grandparents exchanged, I was reminded of an article I wrote in 2007 about Randy's other

If it weren’t for the tattered cardboard and tarp shacks tucked into every rock crevice, vomiting whatever fermented garbage they could no longer contain, the Colombian mountainside would’ve been the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. It was surrounded on

Chef Hector Gonzalez, the head cook of the orphanage, was supposedly the former sous chef for Hotel De La Opera: the fanciest hotel in Bogotá, Colombia. He did wear the squashed white hat and white outfit as he ladled up

This morning, still bleary-eyed with sleep and the zombie-ing effects of nighttime Zicam, I decided to make a vat of pea soup spiked with cayenne to combat my and Hubby’s cold. Pretty simple, right? Just dump the frozen peas into

Garish, sodium gleam blinding all except to the hum of Darkness.Onyx Darkness impenetrable, eyes unaccustomed,Pupils flicker from pinprick to marble.Precariously negotiate winding journey, No Map, No Direction.Blind seeking blindThudding heart, surging pulse join in the steady cadence-Hum of Humanity.Unfurled blanket

Over the course of the eight years my family lived as caretakers on Springcreek Christian Camp, toward Memorial Day Weekend we learned to watch for the summer volunteers who’d come shimmering down the lane in their RVs and Winnebagos like

This week on Yahoo News I read that country music singer Taylor Swift surprised two male Auburn students with something they had been seeking for many months…a hug. That’s it: a hug. No big smooch on the lips; no backstage

This week my husband found an article on speed reading. It said the majority of us view words on a page as if through a straw. We see the individual letters, turn them into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, and

Green with envy, I was watching the floatie-free kids swim in the deep end of the public pool when I saw my nine-year-old brother, Joshua, begin floundering and churning the water like a seal caught in the jaws of a

I come from a long, proud line of wedding-napkin-saving sentimentalists and have an uncanny memory for details everybody else knows better to discard. Yesterday, these two factors did not bode well when I decided to purge my closet and myself of