The Hinges We Almost Miss

What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

Three moments, caught before they slipped away — reminders that love and wonder often whisper, not shout.

Life moves like weather — quick, familiar, and somehow always surprising.
Most days we stand in its wind, meaning to notice, but not quite seeing.
Then a photograph, a sound, a smell — and suddenly, the door swings open again.
These three moments remind me: we notice what we love, and love waits patiently to be seen.


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When Wonder Takes the Wheel — Before It Outgrows Us

A few days before Halloween, Lucy decided to test her costume.
No stage, no audience — just the cracked driveway behind our house, morning throwing shadows across the driveway.
The suit was green and fuzzy, with soft horns that bobbed as she pedaled her bike in slow, proud loops.
Heat shimmered off the concrete, but she didn’t mind.
She had a stick she liked — de-barked, solid in her hand — and that was reason enough.

I was in the garage sorting through years of excess — jars of bolts, boxes of “might-needs,” the dream of order that always outpaces the day.
Somewhere between Marie Kondo and my own need for simplicity, I looked up — and there she was, joy disguised as a small wild thing, pedaling through sunlight.
I put the box down. Reached for my phone.
The shutter caught her posing, horns tipped toward heaven, imagination positioning into real.

She has since traded monsters for princesses, and the costume lives in a bin for another child’s wonder.
But the image endures — proof that play is a kind of prayer, and that the world waits to be seen as it is.


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When Love Leans into the Water — The Quiet That Holds

Late August at City Beach Park, Oconomowoc.

The cousins’ laughter had settled into contented hums — their empires of sand already half returned to the lake.
The air carried sunscreen, grill smoke, and that faint mineral tang of Wisconsin water.
Lindsey and Henry stood at the edge, hand in hand, watching the shallows stir.
His turquoise foam wings still hugged his arms long after he’d stopped needing them — a small badge of safety he wasn’t ready to shed.
Light danced across the water like a language older than words.

I began folding chairs, shaking sand from towels, performing those small rituals that close a day.
When I looked up, they were there — not posing, not still, but attentive.
A mother and son, joined by quiet more eloquent than talk.
So I took the picture.
Not because it was remarkable, but because it was true.

Years later, I see what I missed: love doesn’t always speak; it leans.
Peace doesn’t always announce itself; it settles.
We find what we look for, and what we look for reveals what we value.
The world waits to be seen as it is.


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When Time Casts Its Line — The Pull Before the Storm

Early July at Fox Brook Park, a quarry turned lake, half-swim, half-fish.

Grandpa provided the rods and reels — gifts from a man whose patience lived in water.
Lindsey showed Henry and Lucy how to cast, her hands sure, her voice soft.
They fished with the serious play of children: alert to every ripple, alive to what might bite next.
The air was warm, the sky split in two — gold on one side, a bruised gray on the other, the wind beginning its sermon.

“Look at that one tugging.”
“What kind you think?”
“Don’t lean too far, Lucy — the mud’s waiting.”
Voices rose and fell like the line itself.
I stood back with my sketchbook and humor, already plotting how to prevent the muck from finding the van seats.
The storm rolled closer, but the rods stayed steady, silver arcs against darkening light.

Now, looking back, I think of Wilder’s Emily in Our Town, pleading for one more look — at coffee, at sunlight, at the faces she loved.
Her cry was never about regret.
It was about recognition.
She saw too late what was already holy.
We, the living, still have time.
The world waits to be seen as it is.


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The Still Point

Three hinges:
a girl pedaling joy,
a mother and son leaning into light,
a family casting before the storm.

Each ordinary. Each eternal.
The miracle isn’t that they happened — it’s that they can still happen.

Pause.
Look up.
The world is shimmering, waiting for your eyes.
What hinge waits for your notice today?   

Tags: #Mindfulness #FamilyMoments #OrdinaryHoly #NoticingGrace #EverydayJoy #TimeAndTenderness #LivingFromTheInsideOut #ParentingReflections #AttentionIsLove