My favorite part of all this, however, is always the people. We have quite a few returning pilgrims on this one, and I can’t wait to see them again (several have been on three or more with us), and of course, I’m eager to meet new friends, too. Every year we wonder how it happens, but it never fails: everyone who travels with us are genuinely fantastic people—folks we’d hang out with no matter where we were.

This week I let Scotland pilgrims know about next summer’s location and itinerary, this weekend the rest of my previous pilgrims of mine will find out, and I’ll share the news with the rest of you fine readers soon.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. I didn’t know before publication about this piece that mentions me, but it was a pleasure to read and I nodded my way through it. explores the challenge of being a noticer vs. enjoyer of some good, and how making a public defense of goods can unintentionally challenge the pure nature of living it. Aka—don’t neglect your life at the expense of being an influencer of said life: “The digital maw is insatiable and respects no limits, so public figures need to learn to set healthy boundaries themselves.”

2. As a fellow Catholic convert (and someone who just wrote a book about the reasons for my own journey), and as someone who finds ’s art simply lovely, I really enjoyed reading part one of her conversion story: “In Catholicism, I found a language so resonant with my most interior experience - a living faith that held the full complexity of suffering and joy. I took a leap without all the answers - probably with even more questions than before. And I’m so grateful I did.”

3. Heads up about a good new-ish Substack newsletter: 100 Movies Every Family Should See. Put out by the guys of this newsletter, this is a collection of movie reviews I’d have appreciated when my own growing brood were younger. …It’s hard to find decent family-friendly films that don’t make the adults want to stab out their eyeballs with forks.

4. Academically I’m still very much in summer mode (except for my own class booklists), but if you’re hankering for a bit of mid-summer homeschool planning, ’s your gal. She’s got a lovely collection of videos chock-full of practical wisdom and encouragement.

5. And finally, the talented Winston Marshall delivers a delightful banjo tribute in honor of our 250th anniversary. Beautiful.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, on audiobook (finally, I know!)

Quotable 💬

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘oh how beautiful’ and sitting in the shade.”

-Rudyard Kipling

The Next Poll 🗳️

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

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Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What have you been dreaming about getting done this summer? How can you either finish or get started on it this weekend?

Heads up: There’s no new 5QT next week in lieu of all my traveling…. And there’s a slight chance this might become a two-week pause if I’m also not able to get one out between the pilgrimage and some domestic family travel. But I’ll be back with you soon enough!

Have a good couple weeks,

- Tsh

p.s. - Great respect in their culture.

I’m spending most of actual today (as in, the day this lands in your inbox) finishing some stuff for next year’s pilgrimage so that I can get it ready to share with this year’s pilgrimage participants—because we leave for Scotland in seven days! Wild how it’s now here. …With that in mind, I’ve got to keep this brief so I can get back to it. I really am so stoked to tell you about next summer’s location—I think many of you will be just as excited! I’ll pull back the curtains soon.

Onward!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Earlier this week Commonplace subscribers shared what they read last month and what’s on their reading stacks now—if this is you, join in and add your lists (and give me a Scotland read suggestion!). I’m still seeing Theo of Golden and Emma M. Lion trends, which has been the case for months now… Interesting.

2. Speaking of local community, I loved ’s recent piece on the freedom of rootedness: “Our deepest error, our modern culture’s deepest lie, is this: we should wait for a stable place to justify our commitment. Stability has never been the precondition of rootedness, however. It has always been the product. The good town you cannot find anywhere in America is not found. It is made by people who stayed and made it, none of whom had a guarantee of success. To look at the risks and walk away is merely asking to inherit what you refuse to build.”

3. We’re reading ’s translation of Inferno in my humanities class next year (here’s the full reading list, if you’re curious), so I’ve bookmarked this conversation with on symbols—what they are and why they matter—for watching sometime in the next few weeks. Both men are smart thinkers.

4. From my not-too-long-ago archives, here’s a piece of mine I myself needed to re-read again: “God wouldn’t have made us to sleep a third of our lives, to need to stop and eat (as well as cook beforehand) several times a day if we were put on earth only in order to get stuff done. Jesus wouldn’t have said that Sabbath was for man, not man for the Sabbath, if he didn’t think it was a gift given to us to enjoy and use.”

5. And finally, why did the chocolate ration bar of World War II taste terrible? We got into a side chat about this recently when watching Band of Brothers for the week leading up to Independence Day, and lo, one of my favorite creators, Max Miller, goes and posts about this very thing. Delightful.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Ludwig on BritBox

Quotable 💬

“Summer afternoon; summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

-Henry James

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

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Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

Who can you call and catch up with this weekend, just for friendship’s sake?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - A portrait of a small boy reading. …May this never change.

It’s hard to believe it’s already July—summer is whooshing by TOO fast, in my book. Maybe it’s because I had such a bonkers first half of the year, or maybe it’s because I spent the past three weeks deep in book edits (though I submitted them this past Friday! 🙌), but I haven’t had as much chill …

Read more

Honestly, though, I’m at the book-writing stage where my words no longer have meaning and I hate everything I’ve ever written (anywhere, not just in this book). Why do I use ‘ultimately’ so much? Chuckled? What a weird word; it’s the worst. If I say ‘replied’ instead of ‘said’ one more time I’m going to put me in time-out and throw my book off a cliff.

Like the transition phase in labor, this is how I know I’m almost done and the book is actually getting quite good.

In the meantime, happy 250th Independence Day weekend! My plan is to soon hit ‘send’ on an email to my editor, take a long sweaty walk, then tomorrow sip a bubbly something while my uncle ignites his fireworks collection valued in the five figures. ‘Murica! I love it.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. As I recently said, this time of year we typically watch an episode or two of John Adams in memory of our country’s founding. This year, we’re aiming to watch the whole series, plus Band of Brothers1 (which we usually watch around Memorial Day). Both are excellent mini-series (arguably the best ever made2), and both are excellent tools for fostering patriotism in adolescents (teen boys in particular). Don’t forget, patriotism is a legit virtue.

2. Speaking of watching stuff for Independence Day, I’ve bookmarked this in hopes of watching it sometime this weekend. I’ve heard good things about it, and I do appreciate a lot of what Hillsdale creates (I’ve taken several of their free online classes).

3. I appreciated this short essay from and echo much of her sentiments: “There’s something profoundly good about being in America, and being American. It’s a truth we ought not forget even among the busyness and conflict of today’s public discourse and political life.”

4. I’m making this for my July 4 dessert—I eat about 85% carnivore, but I relax when we’re eating with friends or for special occasions. I’m using the Sarah brand heavy cream I get from Costco, plus my Creami. Let’s see how it goes!

5. And finally, the oldest restaurant in every state—it turns out we live thirty minutes from the one in Texas! Time for a little date night field trip.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

My new Summer 2026 playlist

Quotable 💬

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

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Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are three things you love about your country?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Oh look, it’s me.

This past week, he installed the last of our window replacements. Yes, it was cool that all of our 24 windows (a heckuva lot for a 1,400-square-foot cottage!) were original, single-pane, and that old-school wavy glass style, but they were horribly inefficient and mostly in horrible shape, all the way from the frame to the glass itself. We like to use old materials whenever possible, but with windows we had to upgrade to modern for a bajillion reasons—and in sticking with our overall ethos of respecting the bones and aesthetic of its 1930s structure, it still looks like the era from which it was raised. (And let me tell you, our heating and air bill approves.)

I’m so proud of Kyle’s ability to do every bit of our home renovation, and watching him install windows was no exception. Now we can proceed with finishing the siding replacement (we had to wait on the kitchen window; it’s complicated), then new trim and paint—and then on to what’s next on the list! It never ends. 🫠

It’s always slower to do it yourself, but the earned satisfaction is almost always worth it.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. I have so many thoughts—and about a quarter of an essay draft written—on the topic brings up so eloquently here: why so many people are so immature these days. Hoo boy, do I have thoughts! Before I hit publish in the meantime (translation: I need to be mature and focus on my own book edits deadline), go forth and read his many gems, such as: “We don’t need maturity because it’s annoying that lots of dudes are sitting around playing video games; we need it because we need mature imago Deis who have the confidence to do what God designed them to do.”

2. I’m currently outside in the back yard of our coffee shop, and while it’s breezy at the moment, I know I’ll get gross and sweaty before too long. Last summer Kyle and I made a pact: We will not complain about the weather. And lo, it helped so much! We all already know Texas summers are brutal, and nobody likes the humidity, the mosquitos, the [fill-in-the-blank of your least-favorite hot-related thing], but complaining only makes it worse. We tell our kids this all the time; why would it be any different for us? I’m finding that embracing the hot season and all that comes with it—and not letting it deter me from being outside—has done wonders on my mental health. I look for ways to swim as much as I can, I keep my go-to bug spray (the only kind that works on me, whom bugs love) on me at all times, and I simply acknowledge the reality that I may take multiple showers in a single day. This mindset has helped me love where I live even more.

3. Write for your roots, says —oof, yes. It’s all too easy to despair about the rapidly increasing illiteracy of our modern culture (says the woman currently editing her next book manuscript clocking in at 103,000 words). But I say despair is a sin (really) because it’s believing the lie that God is not in control and His promises are not worthy of hope. …That aside, it’s also still so very worth it to write, and write long-form at that (and to read it, naturally!). As Joel says: “We believe that our purpose as creatives is to give people oxygen masks, but we’re not wearing one. We believe that we’re trying to connect everyone else to the source, even as we are unknowingly cutting ourselves off. Friends, before you can save others, you have to save yourself. Before you can call others to attention, you must cultivate that attention in your own heart, soul, and mind.”

4. Observation, which is the same observation I make several times a year (thus further proving my point): whatever the discourse du jour that people are talking about a lot at the moment—it’s truly the same topics people were talking a lot about a decade ago. Letting children be more free-range, not letting tech rule your life, not making trad life a LARP.... It’s all the same stuff we were talking about online when blogging was in its heydey and discussing stuff on the internet was still new. Hopefully that’s encouraging to you—that even in seemingly current topics like this, there’s nothing new under the sun.

5. And finally, has a new middle-grade book! A win for us all.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

Quotable 💬

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”

-L. M. Montgomery

Upcoming Pilgrimages 📍

There may be one or two more spots on the Scotland trip left (we leave in less than a month now, so don’t delay!)—reach out to Select (info on that link) to find out details. But in the meantime... I truly cannot wait to share next summer’s pilgrimage with y’all. For those of you who’ve gone on a trip with me before: be watching your inboxes because you’ll find out first (hopefully in the next week or two), and you’ll get first dibs on spots! I have a feeling this one will fill up fairly fast, so sign up asap.

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What hard thing can you do this week that the You one year from now will be really glad you did?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Ouch.

Therefore—like many 5QTs published during the summer months, the next few issues will be short and sweet. It’s for the greater good of a stronger book to bring you for your shelves, so it’s worth it! But in advance: thanks for understanding.

Onward!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Earlier this week I shared to subscribers an essay I first wrote 17 (!) years ago—I still think of this idea from time to time: “Our days’ quotidian everydayness numb our senses. Routine begets monotony, and before you know it, it’s been a year since you were given that perfume. And then two. It’s easy to simply forget about that good lotion, the bone china, the silk skirt. There’s spit-up to contend with. Traffic to fight.”

2. I’m currently finalizing details on the summer 2027 pilgrimage, and I’m super eager to share this one with you (though previous pilgrims always get the news + registration dibs first)! In the meantime, if you haven’t chimed in on where you’d one day like to go, head to the poll here and let me know.

3. My X feed is currently filled with lots of chatter of who’s America’s Homer? The obvious answer is ‘Homer is the America’s Homer’ because we were nothing if not built on a collective group of ancestors who embraced the idea of a hero’s journey and a mythic love of the Greek ideal. But since the question is presumably more about storytelling, then my answer is Mark Twain, with Tom Sawyer a sort of Iliad and Huck Finn a sort of Odyssey. …I’m still mulling over this idea, though.

4. One of my IRL friends wrote this lovely reflection on living physically near your friends (I’m the one who “lives in the historic square” nearby), and obviously I agree with her: “People move for job and educational opportunities. Why aren’t we willing to move for the opportunities that physical proximity to family and friends can bring? Most often, community is something we forge, not fall into.”

5. And finally, this whole essay from on the current Catholic dating scene had me both laughing out loud and grateful that I got the last chopper out of Nam (I didn’t, really—I’ve been married 23.5 years and we weren’t even Catholic at the time, but still, I’m grateful we were in the sunset era of normal-ish dating practices). There’s at least one solid phrase in every paragraph: “Sometimes you are simply trying to find out if this person is pleasant, kind, funny, grounded, and capable of holding a conversation without using the phrase ‘the crisis of modernity’ more than three times.”

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Here One Moment, by Liane Moriarty (the audiobook is quite lovely—also, hooray for easy summer reading!)

Quotable 💬

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”

-Ray Bradbury

What’s your M.O. on birthday parties? 🎉

Clearly last week I was feeling the semi-regular pressure I feel as a mother with a kid having a birthday… This has always been a point of consternation for me, because I want to be the fun mom who goes all-out with parties, even simple ones, but a long time ago I relented to the reality that I’m just not a fun party mom. That’s okay; I’m good at other things! …I love celebrating birthdays and other milestones, but I hate the pressure to make them epic and memorable.

Once our kids turned 13, we told them they could have a few friends over, but that they’d have to do all the planning and hosting themselves. Some years they’d have parties because they wanted to bother with the details; some years they just didn’t and we kept it a family affair with dinner and cake. It’s been a solid compromise.

In other words: I’m with the majority here most of the time.

• We celebrate, but keep them simple and just family gatherings: 58.8%

• We do occasional parties with friends, but not every year: 27.7%

• Meh—I prefer birthdays fly under the radar: 8.5%

• We go all-out with themed parties & a friend-filled guest list: 5%

Note: I hate to say it, but handling the poll section of this newsletter is weirdly one of my more time-consuming tasks, so until my book edits are fully submitted, I’m briefly hitting the pause button on them. I know, I know! …I’ll do my best to hurry. 😭

Quick Links 🔗

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Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are three easy ways you could get out in nature this weekend?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - A super-cool photo.

I first wrote this in 2009—that’s seventeen (!) years ago now. …And I’m happy to report that I still agree with myself here. Perhaps you need this encouragement at the moment, whether you first read this ages ago or are reading it for the first time.

A few years ago, I read this excerpt from one of Erma Bombeck’s columns, when she discovered she was dying from cancer—it was titled, “If I Had to Live My Life Over”:

“… I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage. I would have talked less and listened more. I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded. I would have eaten the popcorn in the ‘good’ living room and worried much less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace. …I would have sat on the lawn with my kids, even if it meant grass stains.”

It hit home. I have a bottle of perfume—one that I love—that was a Mother’s Day gift from several years ago. I’ve used about a quarter of it. I’m not sure if I’m waiting for the queen to visit, an invitation to the presidential inauguration ball, or just some romantic date with my husband, but for some reason I’m hesitant to use it as though it’s a precious commodity; once it’s gone, it’s gone.

This is true, to some degree. But if I love it so much, why don’t I just …use it?

Read more

Today (well, the day before you’re actually reading this) my youngest has turned sixteen years old, and we have a family gathering in a few hours: we’re walking to the neighborhood pizza place for dinner, then returning home for games and ice cream. Soon he’ll host a friend gathering to celebrate the milestone (his plan: cheap canvases and paints to follow along a Bob Ross episode; I’ll add the drop cloth on the couch), but in the meantime, tonight it’s just the grandparents, the parents and siblings, and the newly-christened brother-in-law. [Insert deep thought about how the kids are all growing up too fast, even though that seems to be all I write about here these days.]

Today (the actual today you’re reading this) Kyle’s briefly heading out of town for a quick trip, and both boys have summer jobs to attend to—so after my morning writing, I’m tackling the first items on my summer house project list. If the weather cooperates I’ll be painting some wooden cabinet doors destined for our bathroom’s open shelves (it’s only taken us 9.5 years to get to this point), then potentially decluttering my wardrobe if the spirit moves. I’m craving a return to a summer capsule wardrobe, seeing as 90% of the time I wear the same thing anyway. We shall see.

Huzzah for summer’s (lack of) routines and rhythms! School—what’s that?

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Yesterday I shared my latest State of the Newsletter “address”—it’s been literal years since I’ve written one of these, yet I felt the need for my own sake (and then it’s nice to share the resulting thoughts with you all). I’m thankful for each and every comment you’ve left about your Commonplace origin, and I also appreciate those of you taking the time to take the included poll (wrong answers and all).

2. When the calendar flipped to June, the High Holy Season of Cold Brew began. Here’s what I do: I take a half-gallon mason jar and insert one of these, add one cup of coarse-ground fresh coffee, then fill it with 7-8 cups of filtered water. Let it sit at least for at least eight hours in the fridge, then enjoy as a concentrate all week long (I make a half-size decaf version in a separate jar for the afternoons). I usually drink it black with ice, but occasionally I’ll add a splash of straight heavy cream (look for a one-ingredient offering at Costco!) and 2-3 tiny drops of a homemade sugar-free syrup.

3. I thoroughly enjoyed ’s recent thoughts about a theology of awkwardness, and what it means to be real people living real lives, unencumbered by the technology that strips away the gifts of human awkwardness from us: “Awkwardness matters more than most of us realize. It is what so many of us spend our whole lives running from. We are terrified of saying and doing the wrong thing, coming off the fool, finding ourselves humiliated through our own inadequacy, and not measuring up. Awkwardness is also what makes so many forms of technology—artificial and otherwise—so appealing. It promises us protection from awkwardness—from uncomfortable conversations, badly written emails, poor decisions about paint colors, encounters that don’t go as planned, disappointment in friendship, rejection in love, and so many of the messy moments in romance, work, and life that expose us for the imperfect beings we are.”

4. Even though we rarely go camping during the summer months here in Central Texas, I know it’s the dawn of the major camping season for a lot of you. So, our foray at a local park last weekend reminded me of this quick tip, in case it’s the food that feels daunting to you: make a simple soup ahead of time, then freeze it in a 64-ounce container. Let that serve as part of the ice in the cooler for the rest of your perishables. Bring your Instant Pot, because there’s zero shame in that game, and a few hours before dinner, plug it in and pop that now semi-frozen soup into the pot (which fits perfectly). Let it warm up until dinner, et voilá: a no-fuss already-made meal to eat in paper bowls with disposable spoons. (Yes, this is “car camping” and not hard-core backpacking, but I presume this is the most reasonable style of camping for most of you reading this.)

5. And finally, a few days ago one of my sons (the birthday boy) and I went down a memory lane rabbit hole of rewatching some OK GO music videos… I first encountered them about twelve years ago and was entranced by their creativity. Glad to see they’re still on their a-game!

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Patience, on PBS (well, two episodes in… So far I like it though)

Quotable 💬

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

What’s your favorite summertime activity? 🏖️

An impossible question, I know, and one whose answer changes for me by the day. Overall, I’d say simply being outdoors, but with a huge caveat that my favorite outdoor activity is swimming because, hello, Texas… Honestly, I love it all. I know August is scorched earth around here, but overall I’m Team Summer, big time. (My Oregonian husband feels very much otherwise.)

• Being outside (including camping): 43.7%

• Travel: 18.2%

• Reading indoors: 17.8%

• Swimming: 11.8%

• Grilling & eating outdoors: 8.5%

Find the next poll here.

Scotland: It’s Almost Closed! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

There’s only a few more spots left and we need to close registration soon… If you’re on the fence, sign up NOW (as in, this week). We’d love to still have you join us!

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one thing you could bravely say no to right now? What’s one thing to bravely say yes to?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Barcelona, you win.

It’s quite easy to write about what’s wrong in the world. The topic du jour (année?) is A.I. and its cousins, such as rage against The Machine, the dangers of the modern world, and how everything is going to hell. Even calmer versions of this, such as why it’s so hard to not be on a screen, or how to not focus so much on global news to the detriment of your mental health, still sit on a perspective that notices first and foremost what’s wrong. “The reason you feel bad is because things are bad” gets a lot of clicks and likes, a lot of comments, a lot of engagement. It’s easy to publish and it’s easy to respond to.

The pendulum swing is also rather easy to write about. Look at this cat video, here are ten ways babies are cute, this is why it’s beautiful to wear all linen, and wouldn’t it be lovely to live on ten acres and gather apples from your orchard every fall but in a way doesn’t involve the mud and muck of farming? —these are also click-magnet topics. It’s often a reaction to the above: everything is awful, so here’s a C.S. Lewis quote about how we’re made for another world paired with a photo of a young woman hanging her all-white sheets out on a clothesline surrounded by grassland and a toddler at her skirt. That toddler isn’t crying.

It’s much harder to focus on the in-between of all that, where most of us actually live and what’s based in actual reality. Because sure, A.I. is everywhere and messing up a lot of stuff, and yes, farmland is idyllic and I’m still keeping my eye out for free nearby land with a babbling brook that no one else miraculously wants, but the honest truth is that I live most of my life wiping down counters and listening to my kids’ “fun facts” about how much PSI it takes to crush a human skull and commentary on their shift bussing tables at the nearby diner. I bet you do too, in some iteration of your own. Reality, in reality, rests on a foundation of three-dimensional skin the game and not pixels; grocery lists and not bullet points about why [insert latest global catastrophe] must be protested; let’s ignore our actual lonely neighbors so we can focus on our global outrage.

Every couple years, since I’ve been actively writing online in 2007, I’ll write up a State of the Union about the space I’ve been given to publish. It helps me remember why I bother doing what I do, and it provides clarity to readers and listeners, new and old, what they can (and can’t) expect from me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done one of those. So, this is that.

Welcome! Here we go.

My Personal Priority

Cutting to the chase: Right now and for a few more months, I have two kids left in my home. As of this fall, I’ll have one, when our middle guy starts his freshman year of college (which means he’ll be coming and going for the next few years, like his older sister recently did). My youngest will be starting his junior year of high school, which means I have two years left of him under my tutelage, both as his mother and his humanities teacher. Sure, I’ll always be his mom and I’ll always be given the solemn duty of imparting wisdom on all of my children. ...But I know from experience that it’s different once they’re adults, and my full-time influence will shift. This is good and by design, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a recurrent smack in the face at how these days of kids at home are insanely fleeting.

I have two years left with any of my children in my home full-time. Two. Years. 🤯 I remember continually reading that online trope of “we only have 18 summers with our kids; make the most of them!” and each time mild panic would set in, as though if I were checking email for thirty minutes instead of swimming with them in the nearby river I was doing something wrong. When I started my blog (from which many of you first read me), my oldest was two and my middle, who just graduated high school, was a four-week-old. I was literally nursing him when I held him with one hand and clicked ‘buy’ on a domain name with the other. It was a Sunday afternoon in our Turkish apartment, and the sun was angled from the living room window onto my laptop screen; my toddler was down for her nap.

I know from personal experience that there is nothing online that matters more than being fully present with my family. Nothing. For two more years, while my youngest lives at home, this remains my first priority. I know I won’t regret it, because I don’t regret one whit all the minutes and hours and days that added up to years from the past two decades that I prioritized focusing on my brood of kids in the midst of writing and publishing. I missed a fair amount of opportunities to “grow my platform,” I know, and I’m well aware of all the things I didn’t do to become more of an Influencer™ because I just didn’t have the bandwidth. No regrets in the slightest.1

But admittedly, I do have more time now than I did a decade ago, a few years ago, or even earlier this spring, when I was chock-full busy planning a wedding, navigating the college admission experience for a second time, and rewriting entire chapters of a book. These kinds of seasons ebb and flow, I know, and I know I’ll have them again soon (more book edits might land in my inbox any day now, and in a few months I’ll start teaching again). But on the whole, in comparison to my early days of growing a blog and podcast with a trio of kids under age five, I now have more time. Who knew that would ever happen?

My Work Priority

I had an ‘aha’ moment in 2018 on the first pilgrimage I led, and it continues to ring true: when it comes to my work-work, all I really want to do is write books and lead trips. It’s when I feel most alive, like I’m doing the work God’s given me to do, where I affect the most good, and what I reasonably see myself able to do for decades still. I also love teaching, and I do earn an income doing so, but I categorize that task, for the most part, more as community involvement than career growth. I’m open to teaching for a while after my kids are fully graduated, but it’s not something I definitively see myself doing indefinitely. Like homeschooling, it’s something I prayerfully consider each year before committing to more.

But writing books and leading trips? I see myself doing that until my mind and body will no longer let me. Who knows how long that will be, but for now, I have no plans to stop.2

This means that all my other work-ish things point to those two end goals, which includes this newsletter, The Commonplace, and its podcast, A Drink With a Friend. To put it bluntly: to those of you who read and listen to my words here, I hope you are convinced to eventually read my books and travel with me.

(If you just read that last sentence, this means I’m talking about you.)

This is my desire and ultimate goal with this newsletter. What, then, does it look like to “convince” you to eventually do those things? It looks like writing and talking about topics here that people who would also read my books and travel with me would resonate with. Those people are also largely Carries, but not always—yet as I’ve said for years, if you write for everybody you write for nobody, so I keep her in mind.

My Priority for You

...Which brings me to how I initially started my thoughts here in the opening paragraphs. Carrie can find plenty of other podcasts and newsletters on how the world is burning and what’s the unattainable ideal. With me, I want Carrie to find encouragement in the in-between. She needs readable and listenable reminders that, despite all the hard around her, she’s able to roll up her sleeves and do the hard work of living her ordinary life. She’s able to question the theology she’s always assumed was true and do the scary thing of changing streams, if needed, and co-leading her family to do the same. She’s able to make choices about how to best educate her kids. She’s able to host her neighbors for dinner and make time to really know them, because she’s also able to live her life offline and recognize that community is found in the real world, not in some Influencer’s™ social media account or newsletter comments. She’s able to save up her pennies so that she and her husband can join Kyle and me on a game-changing pilgrimage, should God allow. She’s able to participate in her local book club and teach her child cursive and make time for nightly drinks on the deck with her husband after all the kids are asleep. She’s able to read fiction for fun. And as I’ve long told my own kids and students, she’s able to embrace the truth, even when it’s hard, that she’s a beloved child of God who’s able to do hard things and trust in the goodness of Christ.

The words and conversations I publish here, and plan to publish in the future with even more narrowed concentration, hopefully help Carrie do just that. They’re essays and episodes that remind her to stay buoyed in hope and not despair, to love her ordinary life, and to dig deeply into the real world in which God has placed her. The words and conversations here do not, Lord-willing, trigger anger or malaise, distraction, or addiction to too much screen time. They give her hope that her ordinary life is good, that there is Truth that is knowable and findable, and that it is worth it to do the hard work of living in the flesh-and-bones world.

At the risk of cashing in on clichés and relying on quotes from other people (I’ll leave off any sharable graphics or stock photos of the back of someone on a hike), here are the three quotes I keep coming back to when I think about what I want The Commonplace to prioritize:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” -G.K. Chesterton

“Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” -Wendell Berry

In spite of all the facts, I want us to be joyful, to recognize just how extraordinary our ordinary lives are, and to take off our shoes when we truly see all of it.

I hate publicly committing to something because as soon as I do, I either change my mind or something out of my control comes up that makes the commitment less feasible, but it’s also good for me to do so. And it’s good for you, reading this, to read where all this is going. So consider the following as the overall plan for this newsletter that I’ve been trying to get at since my first sentence here.

Here’s what you’ll find at The Commonplace, now in its seventh year:

• Weekly 5 Quick Things (always free for everyone)—I’ve been doing these since before I migrated my newsletter to Substack, and have no plans to change them.

• Weekly or bi-monthly podcast episodes during the school year3 (still free for everyone)—I’ve been doing some form of podcasting since 2008 and in spite of all the changes, I still overall enjoy the medium. This fall, I’ll be returning to favorite book conversations, which are also reportedly your favorite, too. They’ll also include conversations on favorite places around the world, ranging from some famous monument on the other side of the globe to a beloved corner armchair.

• Monthly essays reminding us to be joyful though we’ve considered all the facts (free for everyone)—The foci will be on the Transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which easily covers a huge range of topics. This includes thoughts on the natural world, art like books and films, travel, the goodness or raising a family, where truth is really found and why we can’t just make it up based on our whims or preferences, and occasional stream-of-consciousness observations about the joy of neighborhood third places or grilling meat on the back deck. Oh, and super occasional short stories.

• One more monthly essay that digs a little deeper into the above, perhaps with a bit more practicality or some personal experience (for paying subscribers).

• Bi-monthly conversations with you all about books we read and books we plan to read, as well as invitations to name our monthly gratitude lists (for paying subscribers)—these simple chats are some of the highlights of my month here.

• The ability to leave comments (for paying subscribers).

• First dibs on pilgrimage news and registration openings (for paying subscribers).

I plan to keep the annual newsletter fee for paying subs as low as Substack will allow me, which is currently $35. This is because I want to make it as accessible as possible, and because I know how many things are vying for your wallet these days.

For those of you who can, I’ll still encourage you to pay to keep the lights on around here, because it really does help and because we all vote with our dollars. If you want to see more focus on beauty, goodness, and truth on the internet and less despair and anger, then one way to help is paying the small subscription fee for The Commonplace. I’ll be honest: while free subscriptions have gone up around here this past year, paying subscriptions have gone down, for whatever reason (I have my theories). I have no doubt that some of this is due to inflation and the economy in general. But to be up front, this newsletter’s revenue has dropped substantially in the past year, and yet instead of despairing over this, I’m choosing hope that those of you who can help keep the lights on the newsletter and podcast, will. As of now, I plan to keep my current offerings ad-free, so long as I’m able.

As always, thank you for reading these words. I’ve long said that I have the best readers on the internet, and I still believe that to my bones. You all pick up what I’m laying down, and every reader and listener I’ve met in real life turn out to be the best, most hope-filled, ordinary (in all the right ways) people.

This summer I plan to make progress on my novel, make edits on my next non-fiction book (out next spring!), record conversations for this fall’s podcast season, and publish this newsletter when it’s good to do so (unlike most summers, when I typically take my annual much-needed break). I’m also leading a small group of us to Scotland on pilgrimage during the second half of July, which you still have time to register for! I’d love you to join us.

And as always, during the second half of the summer I’ll also start prepping for teaching next year’s classes, help organize our co-op, volunteer at my parish, have friends and family over for dinner, and weed the garden. I’ve got another kiddo to launch into university life, another one to launch into upperclassmen status as a high schooler, and yet another one to encourage in her early days as a wife. Life is good.

If the spirit moves, I’d love you to do two things next:

1. Take this short anonymous poll, and

2. Tell me in the comments here how you first found this newsletter (if you can remember!)—I’m opening up the comments for everyone.

…I’m so grateful to publish here. And that’s because of you, so thank you.

As you’re reading this I’m out camping with my husband, and only my husband (well, and our dog). The boys are at church camp, the daughter is off and married—so, I guess we’re able to just ...do things now? What a time to be alive.

It may very well be pouring down rain, so TBD on whether we call it and head home to our shower and bed. However, we do love our new-to-us camper, so I dunno, it also sounds like an adventure to power through the rain and stay cozy in the camper while looking at nature through rain-streaked windows. The dog is the big contender though. No one likes a wet, muddy dog, even when you’re camping.

The goal is to eat steak cooked over a campfire (though: rain, etc., so maybe?), read just for fun in a foldable rocking chair (perhaps under our awning), play a few card games, and if weather permits, go paddle boarding in the lake. After our chock-full spring semester, no agenda but nature for 48 hours sounds positively lovely, no matter what comes forth from the clouds.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Speaking of meat cooked on fire, I’m looking forward to an upcoming long season of dinner prepared mostly in the backyard. I create seasonal menu plans, mostly copy + paste with a few variations here and there, because my clan is simple and doesn’t mind repetition. My summer priority is not turning on the oven while getting us all plenty of protein, so that typically means the grill (alongside the trusty Instant Pot and air fryer). Have a go-to meat-based meal that’s super-simple and meets this criteria? I’d love to hear it.

2. ICYMI, a few days ago I shared with you all what it’s like to marry off your daughter—I’m still reflecting on all the thoughts and feelings, but for now, I’m glad my initial words have resonated with you: “We stand before God and community to promise each other our fealty until death do us part, and what a step of faith that is. We have no idea what’s coming, all the stretch marks and bills and budget-friendly date nights in the living room after the kids are asleep and late-night bedroom chats about how the teens are doing, and how not knowing what’s all in store is probably for the best.”

3. On that note—a few days ago, Kyle and I went on a double date with our daughter and her new husband, and I’m happy to report that it was a lot of fun and not as weird as I thought it’d be. It felt very ordinary and as-it-should-be, a nice hybrid of easy family hangout and dinner out with another couple like we’ve been doing for decades. …Like in all stages of life, where we don’t have the grace to be in it until we actually are, I’m starting to look forward to this next stage of life.

4. Also, at the beginning of the week, Commonplace subscribers and I shared our June book plans (plus what we read last month). It’s our traditional way to start each month, so if this is you, pop over there and share what’s in your stack!

5. And finally, if you’re an old-school podcast enjoyer—meaning, you still like laid-back, short-ish, simple conversation-focused episodes, I’d love to hear from you here regarding your thoughts on the trend of making podcasts video-formatted. I have my opinion, but it’s genuinely helpful to hear from you too as I make plans for Drink’s next season. I appreciate it in advance!

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📖

The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley (but I’m only about two pages in, so I admittedly just started)

Quotable 💬

“The Earth has music for those who listen.”

-Reginald Vincent Holmes

How do you organize your books? 📚

Hoo boy, can this be a contentious topic, and I’m regularly made fun of here in my own household... I am a firm believer that books should be alphabetized by author, as the good Lord intended (though I can make some space for topical organization, if it’s then still done alphabetically by author). I tried topical once, but then I lost my Lewis collection all nice and tidy together—who wants Narnia all the way over there, while Screwtape Letters is in another section, while Till We Have Faces is in yet another section? None of that nonsense. Respect the creator of the work, I say.

The vast majority of you are nuts. How can you live in the sheer chaos?

• Topic: 39.5%

• My own particular method: 28.7%

• Vibes: 16.4%

• Alphabetically: 7.6%

• Color: 6.8%

• Acquisition date: 1%

Find the next poll here.

Scotland: Join Us This Summer! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Time’s running out to register, but there’s still a bit more space… Come join! Make this summer one for the books.

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one thing you could do this weekend to make your next week’s self happier?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Amen.

I was curious how I’d feel during the first week after my firstborn’s wedding, and the honest answer is: elated, overwhelmed, and very, very tired. I had no idea how tired I’d been, and by 2:00 pm most days I crawled into bed for a mandatory afternoon nap. Who am I? I almost never take naps. It was like my body had been holding on to so much emotion, administrative mental load, and spiritual recognition that what our family was embarking this spring was a Very Very Big Deal, that once the big event finally happened, my body responded by needing to charge like a device on one percent in need of an outlet.

That week’s exhaustion hit me how much I’d actually been holding on to for the past eighteen months: my daughter’s studying abroad and meeting of her guy, getting engaged, finishing her time in college, and hosting her wedding; writing my most important (to me) book to date (and then edits so big I basically rewrote the whole thing a second time); finishing my final year of homeschooling for my second-born, helping him navigate the college admissions process, keeping him on task with scholarship applications in order to afford his first-choice university, helping him finally get his driver’s license and first job (these things take a bit longer for him with his autistic challenges); plus still running our local co-op and teaching my class (focusing on a historic era I don’t teach often, so I had to create a lot of new lesson plans for books that needed dusting off). Plus carrying the weight of aging parents and their health issues, continuing on with our forever home renovation and managing the funds for said projects. Oh, and plus planning for and promoting this summer’s pilgrimage, spinning my many volunteering plates at our local parish, and all this along with the usual rigamarole of keeping our bills paid each month and dinner on the table night after night.

When I’m tempted to wonder why I’ve been so much quieter in my newsletter here this past year (which is not my preference), I simply need to step back and recognize all that God has asked me to carry the past year and a half—and then I’m not surprised in the least. Yes, writing is part of my job, and that includes this newsletter. But when real life beckons, hitting publish on words takes a backseat, even when they’re simmering to a near-boil on the back burner.

The honest truth is that most of the reason I haven’t been as prolific on here as I’ve been in the past is because my real, offline life is much sweeter, richer, and more fulfilling than any semblance of life online. I check Substack, and it doesn’t take me long to want to close out the app—it’s so painfully obvious how much ‘grasping’ is going on; people begging for relevance and reposts, staking their identity on being mentioned by others so they can justify all their time and brainspace spent on the platform. There are exceptions, of course; I want to write poetry all day, and I’m so buoyed by ’s recent expose into her heart and writing situation, as heartbreaking as it is. I want to muse on digital paper what it’s like to live in the Yorkshire Dales as much as he’s willing to give us, and I will stop whatever I’m doing whenever hits publish, as rare as that occasion is (a practice of hers, intentional or not, for which I applaud).

The best writers are the ones who do other things besides write. At minimum, this is because they have something to say. I remember back in 2018, when I was first asked to teach at my kids’ school, that my first concern was a wipeout of my time and focus on writing. Turns out dedicating part of my waking hours to class prep, teaching, and grading did nothing but make my writing sharper and my time-management more effective; this is because we need to be people with multi-dimensional, flesh-and-bone, dirt under the fingernail lives in order to be worth any pixels we publish. I don’t mind people earning a living off their writing; I do, too. But if they want to earn my hard-earned attention, they need to do more with their lives than think of their next essay topic and scroll feeds in order to know what to say next to please the algorithmic gods.

I have nothing to say about AI that hasn’t been said ad nauseam in every. single. essay I’ve been shown the past few weeks. I’d rather tell you about the sparrow that just landed on my table here next to my mint cold brew in a mason jar, its beak full of microscopic twigs, which I imagine it will bring to its nest-in-the-making in the tree behind me. I’d rather wonder why the morning light hits different this time of year, and I don’t mean ‘hits different’ in a soul way, I mean literally hits differently on the walls of my living room as the sun peeks its way into the neighborhood, orange and waking up the people who live within my four walls and tells our new rooster, who was not that long ago a pullet on its way to life as an egg-laying hen with the rest of his flock, to clear his throat and begin his pubescent crow. (Related: anybody need a rooster?)

I want to tell you about how one of my favorite baristas is due with her first baby in mid-September, which makes me wonder whether she’ll return to the coffee shop afterwards or if her days here are numbered (good for her, sad for me). I prefer to tell you about the delightful encounter Kyle and I just had a few hours ago, wherein we met a reader of mine who’s in town with her husband and who came to this coffee shop because she read me waxing poetic about it (I promise I do other things besides come to this coffee shop... but I do come here an awful lot). We parted ways and Kyle asked me to find out where she got her husband the t-shirt he was wearing, because it’s a little nod to Pearl Jam and we are part of that Oregon Trail, Star Wars, in-between Gen-X and Milennial generation that prides itself on generational homelessness. I also want to tell you how dadgum friendly our neighborhood is, and how half the time when I’m at this coffee shop I overhear conversations between fellow patrons either catching up like long-lost war buddies or meeting each other for the first time, sharing likeminded perspectives of their canine companions and concert tees and becoming fast friends.

And mostly right now, because it’s really all I’ve been thinking about the past two weeks, I want to tell you about what it’s like to now have a married daughter, and how strange it is to now be suddenly thrust into this stage of life. The two of us are as close as its possible to be in a healthy adult child-parent relationship (at least, I hope so, and is my now longstanding fervent hope and prayer), which means our closeness now looks different. She was already on her own in many ways, having gone to college a thousand miles away, studied abroad, and generally came equipped with an independent, can-do spirit that’s often the case for firstborn daughters (especially those who spent their earliest years as a third-culture kid). But I’ve still been her go-to person for her thoughts and reflections on life, and that person now needs to be her husband. This is good, and how it should be, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy and it doesn’t mean it’s a seamless transition. It’s an inner journey that, two years ago, I didn’t know I’d be taking right now, that’s for sure. It involves so much prayer that my knees are battle-bruised and I’m forced to bring to Jesus all my needs to remember whose I am and what’s my purpose in life, first and foremost.

As for the wedding itself—I never knew I could feel in my bones such unadulterated joy. Hokey and clichéd, I know, but it’s true. For days afterward I rode the ripples of joy from the all-too-quick plunk in the water of the Saturday afternoon wedding we’d been planning for months. The whole week after, my eyes would water without my permission at the remembrance of the tiniest moment from that day: getting to drive to the church, just my daughter, her dad, and me, as we were given the unexpected gift of relishing together in her last twenty minutes as a single woman. How she and I were whisked off to the quiet room off to the side of the narthex so her groom couldn’t see her, which meant two sweet minutes of just the two of us to quickly pray and then spy on who all was there in attendance.

The whole week after, I’d play my playlist that echoes a mix CD a friend of ours made us as a gift for our honeymoon, and a song would conjure up a memory from our own week post-wedding, smacking me in the face how quickly time really does fly.

One minute, and I’m begging my two-year-old, for the love of all that’s holy, to stop drawing on the walls of our Turkish apartment, and the next minute, I’m watching her walk down the aisle with her dad at her arm. I know all the pintucked alterations done on the dress she’s wearing, lovingly sewn by my mother, and I wonder if the shoes she’s wearing are pinching her toes. She’s holding the bouquet she made two days ago in our living room with her bridesmaids, who’ve all come from out of town to stand with her, and she’s wearing my own veil that she tweaked a month ago with a needle and thread while she sat on our couch and watched a movie. She and I traded necklace chains so hers could sit at a better spot on her décolletage, and it does indeed make her dress’ neckline pop, just like she hypothesized.

Behind me right now at the coffee shop as I write, a gaggle of little kids are collecting snails and making Very Serious Plans to build their snail village—it was two weeks ago when my own daughter, too, built Terabithias and Roxaboxens and critter compounds and stick forts with her siblings and new best friends from the playground. …But that can’t be, because actually two weeks ago, I watched her bond with girlfriends who span all different stages of her life, dance to Tom Petty with her dad, and I threw potpourri in her face as she ran off, smile plastered on her face while I wondered how very tired she must also be feeling since I was there with her all week, holding the hand of her new husband who then whisks her off in his four-door sedan painted with ‘Just Married’ on the back windshield. They drive off and I wave goodbye.

And then, Kyle and I rolled up our sleeves and cleaned up alongside all the friends and family who graciously stayed to help. I changed out of my handmade dress and back into shorts and t-shirt, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and gathered flowers, charcuterie trays from the bridal suite and groomsmen changing rooms, leftover curling irons and oxford button-downs, and the black-and-white framed photos on display for the ‘Love Stories Before Ours’ family wedding gallery. I pause again to look at my own, the one of my husband and me hugging in our white dress and tuxedo, very aware on this side of things of how in love we were and how, by all accounts, how very little we really did know each other. Isn’t that just the way? We stand before God and community to promise each other our fealty until death do us part, and what a step of faith that is. We have no idea what’s coming, all the stretch marks and bills and budget-friendly date nights in the living room after the kids are asleep and late-night bedroom chats about how the teens are doing, and how not knowing what’s all in store is probably for the best.

After we throw away what needs tossing and pack up what needs taking, the caravan of vehicles leave for where they need to go. Kyle and I leave last, and the required security officer and venue representative can finally leave. But Kyle pauses, makes a little turn, and heads back to the venue once the coast is clear. He parks, the two of us get out, and we head back to the meadow behind the old Tuscan house we just rented for its required twelve hours, now empty, and for which we still have twenty minutes left. He laces his fingers in mine, and we sit on a back limestone stoop, where minutes ago we watched our daughter and her husband have their first dance, and now we watch the orange sun paint the sky purple.

“We did it,” he says. I lean my head on his shoulder.

We sit in silence, playing back the joy of the day, of all the toasts and cheers and congratulations from friends. And I play back all the diaper changes, three a.m. nursing sessions, stroller walks, lunches made, middle school friend drama-fueled hugs, inconveniently-timed conversations about whether God really is good, and late-night waits in bed to hear the front door open as she comes home from a high school date.

“Yeah,” I reply, “...We did it.”

The two of us stand up, briefly twirl like we’re still dancing, kiss, and walk back to the car. Our twelve hours are now up. So are our two-plus decades. We are asked to move on, and so we do.

We drive home. The next morning, I make bacon and eggs for my daughter’s brothers, both still at home for at least a few more months.

The days are long but the years are short.

I’m so grateful it’s the first day of June, because 1. It means Maycember is officially over, and 2. It means the wonderful season of summer reading has officially begun! ⛱️

I’m still leaning into cozy murder mysteries, but I’m looking forward to more overall reading JUST for fun this month, which …

Read more

Greetings from my first normal week in …three months? Six months? A year? I don’t know anymore. What’s normal? At minimum, greetings from my week in which I do not have a Huge Major Family Milestone Moment on the calendar. —I hardly know what to do with myself.

Our oldest is officially married, our second is officially graduated, and our youngest officially turns sixteen (and hopefully gets his driver’s license soon after🤞) in about two weeks. How am I at this stage of life? Among the many other wild things I’ve had to process lately, this is a big one Kyle and I keep repeating to ourselves like a couple set out to pasture at a retirement home: time sure flies, doesn’t it? Weren’t we just married? Wasn’t this scholarship-amassing new college student of ours just worrying us with his lack of speaking? Weren’t we just dealing with our youngest as a three-year-old constantly getting in to everything, climbing out-of-reach shelves to reach Halloween candy and super glue? Alas, all the clichés about time, etc., have been loudly ringing true these days. I’ve got an essay in the works reflecting on some of these thoughts, and I hope to hit publish on it soon.

In the meantime: the summer season is here! 👏 Even if these months don’t reflect my favorite temp on the thermometer, summer is my favorite season because of its pace of life. Perhaps it’s the homeschool mom in me, perhaps it’s the teacher in me, perhaps it’s simply the Texan in me who prefers cut-offs and bare feet, but summer mode is the Best Mode. Bring on the easier books, cold drinks, and porch swings. I am so very ready.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Earlier this week I asked Commonplace subscribers to share their monthly gratitude lists, so if you’re a sub, don’t forget to add yours! (it was on Memorial Day, so you may have been wisely offline and thus missed it). Some favorites I’m seeing so far: ‘The beauty of a thunderstorm and the rainbow that followed,’ ‘an ancient light pink patchwork quilt on our bed,’ ‘the camaraderie around the Route 66 celebrations going on during the 100th anniversary of the Mother Road—it’s been fun meeting people from all across the nation who are traveling through,’ and ‘having a few friends that I keep in touch with via hand-written letters.’

2. A new papal encyclical dropped this week! 🙌 For those unaware (because I didn’t know until I swam the Tiber), popes often write documents that serve as letters to a global audience, often about social or theological issues. Here it is directly from the Vatican, and so far this is my favorite commentary slash explainer (though I look forward to eventually watching this discussion when it’s available to the public). …Lots to unpack in this document.

3. Speaking of the spirit of being full persons in the age of technology, I appreciated these words and photos of Carmelite monks in Wyoming building a Gothic cathedral by hand, while also using technology and modern tools, like robots: “…Everything from Champagne to lowercase letters to water-powered forges have been invented by enterprising monks. It is this tradition of innovation that the Wyoming Carmelites are leaning into to answer their prayers for a mountain monastery.”

4. hits it out of the park with his recent reflections on having kids when there’s never a good time to have kids. As I told him—there is, indeed, never a good time to have kids, which is why it’s always a good time to have kids. His words beautifully capture the essence of parenting: “Sometimes, I’m even thankful that the world she’s coming into isn’t perfect. Neither of us ascribe to the belief that a life without resistance, hardship, let down is what makes for a flourishing life. We need every note on the scale of human emotion in order to stumble into a textured, beautiful life.”

5. And finally, from the archives… A few years ago one of my students requested a summer reading list from me for her transitory months between her junior and senior years. Here’s what I came up with—I’d love to have written another one for this year, but I just haven’t had time. Nonetheless, I think this list is still a strong one! (I’ll share my own summer reading plans for this year in our monthly subscriber book chat soon).

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

My Summer playlist from last year (until I have time to make this year’s)

Quotable 💬

“Someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

-C.S. Lewis

What’s better in the shower? 🧼

A completely random question, I know, and I bet you can guess where I was when it came to me… I used to be a ride-or-die liquid soap gal, but for about a decade I’ve used good, minimal-ingredient bar soap inside a bag sorta like this, and it’s a game-changer. Not only does it last longer than liquid soap (and therefore cheaper), but the scratchiness on the skin is weirdly therapeutic. 10/10, would recommend.

• Bar soap: 52.6%

• Liquid soap: 47.4%

Find the next poll here.

Scotland: Join Us This Summer! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I can’t emphasize enough how formative a pilgrimage like this is in your life…. If you’re on the fence, take these words as a sign from the Lord and SIGN UP. You won’t regret it.

(Psst… Those of you already going: check your inboxes—I wrote you this week!)

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one of your favorite ordinary summer memories from your childhood?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Window pane glue! …I have so many questions, but especially for Norway, Lithuania, and Germany.

Seems fitting to do our monthly gratitude chat on Memorial Day, and after this absolutely craziest month on record for our clan, I personally have so much to be grateful for. Let’s all remember the good things, big and little, that make our lives what they are.

As a reminder, here’s what w…

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One cannot possibly describe in only one paragraph how it feels when your oldest and only daughter gets married, surrounded by family and friends on a perfect breezy spring day—so I’m not even going to try. I’ve got an essay in the works that’ll better unpack all that I experienced last week, how God gave me grace upon grace to partake of this thin-veiled moment, and what unadulterated joy her father and I both felt during the day of and in the days afterwards… We’re still floating on cloud nine! They’ll come back from their honeymoon tomorrow and I’ll ask her permission to share a few photos here soon, but truly, there’s really only one word to summarize everything about the whole experience: JOY. It’s clichéd, but it’s true. Pure JOY! Such an answer to a decades-long prayer.

…And now tomorrow we graduate our second-born from high school. He’s the kid cut from a slightly different bolt of fabric from his siblings, but is also, quite frankly, the best of all of us: he’s got a heart of gold, he’s brilliant beyond my understanding, and he’s the funniest person I know. I’m so stinking proud of him, and I trust God will sustain me this weekend, once again, as I let the waterworks flow and witness another milestone in one of our kid’s life. What grace.

All this means by this fall we’ll have ONE KID left in the house, and I can hardly believe we’re here at this stage of life already. I’m grateful for the next two years of finishing up high school with him under our roof. …I want it to go by as slowly as possible.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Several years ago I spoke as the commencement speaker at our school’s graduation—here’s a slightly-edited transcript of what I said: “Listen to tradition. Tradition is the stuff we humans have carried with us for a long time, and while some of it we’ve needed to shed over the ages, much of it is too quickly thrown out as outdated, unnecessary, or holding us back to the past. GK Chesterton called tradition the ‘Democracy of the dead, which means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.’ It is very trendy these days to ignore anything that’s old. Don’t be trendy. Listen to good wisdom that’s been around a long time, whether that’s from Dostoevsky or from your grandpa.”

2. I needed this short-and-sweet reminder from my old friend , on how sometimes God speaks to us in our distractions, and isn’t impossibly stuck by our own human diversions: “it struck me: perhaps God is present even in the distracted, curious days like this one.”

3. How not to be an anxious parent—these are simple but true words of wisdom on what our actual roles are as parents, and what it means to love our children enough to let them live with the free will God has given them (this is a newsletter written specifically on parenting boys by , but the wisdom applies to girls, too): “You bring into parenting the same limitations and defects you had before your children arrived. Expecting to make many mistakes is not pessimism but realism; it is the only reasonable stance and, paradoxically, it is a source of peace.”

4. Very rarely do I share a piece from the same writer two weeks in a row, but knocks it out of the park again with yet another timely poem (particularly for me, since he and I are going through very similar life events and are roughly the same age): “Now, on a dark evening, I sit in the lamplight, our house quiet, and I wonder what my son, the one who just moved out, is doing in his new place, if he is reading any of those books we lugged up the steps, and if he remembered to lock the door.”

5. And finally, for some much needed levity (at least for me this week), always delivers with his insightful, timeless wisdom: “Graduates, I want you to take a moment to look at the person sitting on your right and left. In five years, one of those two people will be dead. And you will be married to the other one, so choose carefully.”

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

My old Shmoopy playlist, thanks to our daughter’s wedding1

Quotable 💬

“God spoke today in flowers, and I, who was waiting on words, almost missed the conversation.”

-Ingrid Goff-Maidoff2

What are your summer travel plans (so far)? 🚗

We’re doing a tiny bit of in-state travel in a few weeks (Kyle and I are going on a much-needed weekend getaway!), and then there’s a chance we may make it up to Oregon again to visit family later this summer. But our biggest family travel is to Scotland, which of course you can join us (and should!). I’m so excited—it’ll be a fantastic pilgrimage with delightful people, as always.

• Domestic travel: 46.3%

• Staycation: 24.2%

• In-state travel: 16.4%

• International travel: 13.1%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Us This Summer! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I can’t emphasize enough how formative a pilgrimage like this is in your life…. If you’re on the fence, take these words as a sign from the Lord and SIGN UP. You won’t regret it.

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What would your high-school self be glad to know about your current-day self?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Moving cars with the swipe of a hand.

It’s Wedding Week around here! As you’re reading this I’ve already written these words several days prior, and I’m happy to report that I’m feeling surprisingly calm and less busy than I’ve been in several weeks… It feels like we’re now just plugging-and-playing all the planning we’ve been doing for months, and simply letting All The Things happen, come what may.

I’m naturally channeling all my focus and emotional energy right now on, you know, my oldest and only daughter getting married 🤯, so this will be short and sweet. Onward!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Several years ago in celebration of our anniversary I wrote a list of nine lessons learned in marriage—though I wish I had more time to write a fresh list, I honestly wouldn’t disagree with anything I said several years ago. …So if you missed it the first time, hopefully it’s an encouragement to you, and if you read it back then, well, perhaps it’s worth a re-read: “Don’t keep account of wrongs. Notice the good things—how that one color t-shirt looks good on him, how he always drags the trash cans to the curb on Monday nights, that he’s inordinately kind on the phone to that one high-maintenance client of his—and then tell him so. Say a thousand more encouraging things than the tens of issues you may have with him.”

2. A few years ago I also had a podcast conversation with one of my favorite local friends (whom we first met on one of our pilgrimages!), and he and his wife are some of Tate’s favorite people, too. Rick Reynolds is a marriage therapist specializing in infidelity, which I know is a weird thing to bring up, but this conversation was actually super encouraging and uplifting for marriage in general. He’s got great advice.

3. wrote lovely words about why weddings are a communal celebration, not a private affair—this idea has been on my mind for months now as we’ve planned this thing that has sometimes often felt a bit… overwhelming. She hits on so many points I wish I had more time to write myself, so instead, I’ll let her say the words for me: “A wedding is a couples first ‘official’ act of hospitality. There is something wonderful about the way a wedding may display the distinctive character of each couple’s relationship, the qualities and strengths their union will bring to the world.”

4. A few years ago, Edward and Beth Sri recorded a great conversation with Fr. Mike Schmitz on marriage. It was at a college conference, but the focus is still on the nitty-gritty mess of marriage, which I really appreciated—I think it’s an encouragement for all of us. The above is part one; here’s part two.

5. And finally, what’s the most important part of the wedding ceremony? This is a solid answer.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Remarkably Bright Creatures on Netflix (as someone who loved the novel when it first came out a few years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by this adaptation!)

Quotable 💬

“In the twilight of life, we will be judged on love alone.”

-St. John of the Cross

Whatever your state in life, which quote best describes marriage to you? 🪢

I’m honestly not sure if I could pick a definitive answer here, since I like all these quotes. …So for right now, as I’m writing this, I’ll go with Schubert’s ‘true friend’ idea. Yes and amen—this has definitely been the case with Kyle and me.

• “A perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other.” -Anonymous: 38.2%

• “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery: 17.6%

• “Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.” -Franz Schubert: 15.2%

• “The art of love is largely the art of persistence.” -Albert Ellis: 10.8%

• “Mature love has a bliss not even imagined by newlyweds.” -Boyd K. Packer: 10%

• “If I get married, I want to be very married.” -Audrey Hepburn: 5.2%

• “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.” -Peter de Vries: 2.8%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Our 2026 Scottish Pilgrimage! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Travel is one of the most formational activities we can do on earth; one of the few that, for the most part, is worth the money spent—that’s been the case with pilgrimages for me, and it’s one of the reasons I love leading them.

Consider joining my family and me (along with some new kindred spirits) in Scotland this summer! We’ll walk through the rugged highlands, wander through the halls of medieval castles, and more. You won’t regret it.

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What small thing are you grateful for this exact second you’re reading this? (pause right now and name it to yourself)

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Seeing as most of Tate’s wedding attendees will be non-Catholic, here’s a friendly list of what not to do at a Catholic wedding. Our programs have a lot of written explainers so that our friends and family know that all the “things” aren’t just random (they all have a purpose!), but these are still good thoughts. …With a caveat.1

Last night we had what I hope was not our last family dinner ever (far from it, Lord willing!), but at least a focused family dinner that I insisted we intentionally put on the calendar before extended family and friends all start coming in for the wedding next week. I wanted time with just the five of us for one last time, around the table eating dinner, with a post-dinner walk and an evening of board games.

It did not disappoint. Our dinner conversation was delightfully ordinary—we simply went around and named our favorite parts of our days, as well as something we each learned (as we’ve done for years now)—then we took the dog on a walk and witnessed a beautiful pink-orange sunset. We came back, cleaned up from dinner, and then played a few rounds of Apples to Apples and a few rounds of Clue (which we have officially outgrown). That was it. But it was just what I wanted.

She’ll still come over for dinner, of course, but it’ll most likely be with her husband in tow (as it should be!). I wanted to make sure I mentally captured one final evening with just my three kids, goofing around with each other, poking and prodding at each other with their humor (when did they each get so funny?), and watching my husband slowly fall asleep in the chair next to them. It was a lovely evening.

…And now: eight days and counting until the wedding! 🤯

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. If you’re a Commonplace subscriber, head over to May’s chat for all things books: what you read last month, what you’re reading now, what’s on your TBR stack. After a long season of reading and rereading ancient works for both my class and for my book-writing research, I am SO ready for summer reading… I have so many ideas and won’t get to a fraction of them, but the anticipation is lovely.

2. Earlier this week I took a mental walk down memory lane, from my daughter’s day of birth until basically yesterday. I may write a separate essay about that experience sometime, but in the meantime, I’ll summarize by saying I’m so glad I followed the Lord’s nudge to do so, because while yes, I was a mess of hot tears doing so, it was both cathartic and encouraging to just let myself feel all the feelings about my first-born getting married. …Wasn’t she just that two-year-old toddler playing with blocks and talking my ear off incessantly? Wasn’t she just the nine-year-old we took on our round-the-world school-year trip who celebrated her tenth birthday in a hot air balloon over the Masaai Mara in Kenya? Didn’t she just start middle school and become friends with the two girls who will be her maids of honor next weekend? Didn’t she just get her driver’s license and drive to the store for me for the first time? ...Don’t blink, parents. All the clichés about time are true.

3. I quite enjoyed following along ’s experience of becoming a beekeeper (something on my own must-do-just-for-fun list). Delightful! Bees are remarkable.

4. Thanks to a reader here (make yourself known in the comments here so I can thank you personally again!) for linking to a dress pattern when I was bemoaning the lack of good mother of the bride dresses… Because I ended up using that pattern to make my own dress! It was never on my bucket list to make my own MoB dress, but I’m so glad I did. Is it perfect? …Don’t look too closely at it. But I really like it, and it’ll be fun to wear. Plus: IT HAS POCKETS.

5. And finally, if you want to nod furiously in agreement and let your eyes water inconveniently, read ’s poem about AI. Yes, AI. “And be sure to use AI when your next child gets married, so that you can write them the perfect toast or poem or speech or song because no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changed hundreds of diapers for said child…”

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

My daughter’s Reminds Me of Mom playlist she made me a few years ago for Mother’s Day

Quotable 💬

“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.”

-Alden Nowlan

What does the month of May mean to you? 🌸

It wasn’t until I had school-age children that I understood what was the big deal about “Maycember;” up to then it came across to me like parents putting too much on themselves and making the end of the school year busier than it needs to be. …Then I understood—even as a homeschooling parent—that there are just so. many. events. that are kid-related and put upon us in May which are simply outside our control. (Clearly my asking this question had to do with my state of mind last week.)

I’m happy to report that even with my daughter getting married next weekend and my son graduating the week after, I’m already feeling saner, now that my only day of teaching left is basically the “presentations + wrap-up game” kind of class. Put a fork in me, I am DONE. I’m ready to celebrate my children! …And then move on to a much, much chiller summertime schedule.

• It’s Maycember — tied with December as the most insane month of the year: 30.5%

• My favorite month — spring weather, delightful calm: 22.7%

• Freedom! School ends and it’s the start of summertime: 21.9%

• Meh — it’s just another month: 19.9%

• Blergh — the weather’s blah where I am (and/or allergies are insane): 5%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Our 2026 Scottish Pilgrimage! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Travel is one of the most formational activities we can do on earth; one of the few that, for the most part, is worth the money spent—that’s been the case with pilgrimages for me, and it’s one of the reasons I love leading them.

Consider joining my family and me (along with some new kindred spirits) in Scotland this summer! We’ll walk through the rugged highlands, wander through the halls of medieval castles, and more. You won’t regret it.

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

If you have children: what’s your earliest memory of parenting? Or, what’s your earliest memory from your own childhood? -How do these compare to yesterday?

And a happy Mother’s Day to all moms reading this! Your work is so valuable, so needed, and so often unseen… Cheers to you and your late nights, early mornings, and all the errands in-between.

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - I love watching this… (I saw it in person in Ireland, and have a feeling we’ll get to see it in person again this summer in Scotland!).

Happy Maycember!

It’s 12 days until my daugher’s wedding, 19 days until my oldest son’s graduation, and just for good mesasure I’ll go ahead and toss in 38 days until my youngest turns 16, putting me officially into a WHOLE NEW STAGE of parenting. It’s crunch time. 💪

...Which means it probably won…

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I turned in my book edits on Monday! …And then immediately took a rare, mid-afternoon hour-long nap in celebration. 🎉 Every time I hit some major milestone—turning in a book manuscript, coming home from leading a pilgrimage, graduating a kid, even simply ending a school year of teaching—my body celebrates by getting sick. Either getting sick, or just getting really, really tired. It’s like I’d been running on fumes, but by God’s sheer grace I was able to power through… I woke up from that nap with had no idea what time it was or what planet I was on.

This now means I’m only moderately busy on an insane level vs. outlandishly so. I won’t belabor the issue, since no one loves reading someone else’s laundry list of to-dos, but let’s just say after I get this email scheduled for your inbox, I’m working on finishing wedding programs and reception signage, followed by scheduling our parish’s monthly email.

But at the time you’re actually reading this, Tate and I will be on a quick, mother-daughter pre-wedding overnighter: nothing major, just a local guesthouse for some time away where we will decidedly not talk about the wedding. …Marriage, though, is definitely on the table. I’m hoping we’ll have good conversations, enjoy a massage and pedicure, get some local take-out for dinner back at the house, and maybe enjoy the backyard pool (though thunderstorms are forecasted). Oh, and maybe watch a movie or two. I’ve been looking forward to this getaway for weeks!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. If you’re a Commonplace subscriber, head to April’s gratitude check-in from this week and add your lists! It’s always a highlight of mine to read them: some favorites include breakfast for supper, a local Italian market in a reader’s area that has the most delicious bread & food, steak from steers raised by another reader, reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for the first time, the smell of freshly cut grass, and The Boxcar Children on the Libby library app for yet another reader’s 7-year-old.

2. Every morning there’s a group of neighbors, mostly older, that meet here at the local coffee shop (I’m here right now, writing this), and I love that this simple gathering has become such a mainstay in their lives. They don’t stay too long, but they do show up religiously. They welcome newcomers to their table, they squeal with delight at all the regular babies and toddlers that come through the door, and seeing as the baristas know my order by heart, I’m sure they know this group of locals’ orders, too. Seeing them here is a bright spot in my morning.

3. “Go touch grass” has nearly become a cliché these days, but I say there are worse ideas to turn into a platitude—I mean, it’s true; we do need to touch grass. I enjoyed Arthur Brooks’ recent episode of why we have to get outside more than we do in our modern world, along with practical ways to do so (hint: evening walks!).

4. In the same vein, I appreciate ’s reminder about why we need more, not less, friction in our lives: “…It is here, my friends, that we really feel the friction: what we need is not what we want; and what we want is not what we need.”

5. And finally, this week I taught on the 4th-century Council of Nicaea in my humanities class, so I revisited this excellent Catholic-Orthodox dialogue on the Creed between Bishop Robert Barron and Metropolitan Nathanael Symeonides from last year (which was the 1,700-year anniversary of the historic moment!).

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

The Chill Mix made for me by Spotify

Quotable 💬

“I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.”

-Dodie Smith

Where/what was your first job? 🛒

This week’s question was my son’s suggestion (again!), and I thought it an apropos one, since he’s about to have his last day at his first job in order to embark on his first day at his second. My first “real” job (I babysat here and there, but nothing major) was at Target. Yep, retail. It actually wasn’t too bad for a big-box chain store, but I think I only worked there for about six months before I became an assistant at my church for several years, followed by waiting tables at local restaurants for years and years (that’s where the good money was).

• Babysitting: 68.8%

• Food service: 12.6%

• Retail shop: 7.1%

• Camp counselor: 3.8%

• Grocery store: 2.7%

• Newspaper delivery: 2.5%

• Lifeguard: 1.5%

• Movie theater: 1%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Our 2026 Scottish Pilgrimage! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Travel is one of the most formational activities we can do on earth; one of the few that, for the most part, is worth the money spent—especially when it’s invested in something that pays dividends in our souls for years afterward. That’s been the case with pilgrimages for me, and it’s one of the reasons I love, love, love leading them.

Consider joining my family and me (along with some new kindred spirits) in Scotland this summer, where we’ll walk through the rugged highlands and listen to God’s voice on the Isle of Skye, in the halls of medieval castles, walking through historic St. Andrews, and more. And if you sense through prayer that this pilgrimage is meant for you, I’ll join you in prayer that God will provide all you need to go. It’s worth it!

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

Don’t forget—it’s still Eastertide! What’s one small thing you could do this weekend to keep celebrating?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Comments about Catholics turned into Gregorian chant (I have my son, yet again, to thank for this one).

Hard to believe, but it’s already the end of another month! Which means it’s time for us to remember the good things, big or little, in our lives. Let’s roll up our sleeves and do this thing!

You know what to do: in the comments, share ten things you’re currently grateful for, big or smal…

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