Laura Kelly Fanucci
Recent Posts
Full confession: our kitchen fruit basket is where produce goes to die. Maybe you have this problem, too. Each trip to the grocery store finds the counter fully stocked with too-firm bananas, too-green avocados, the occasional treat of a peach or pear waiting to be savored. Early in the week I find myself hovering over the bowl,…
READ MORE31 + 31 + 3 + 1 He’s obsessed with numbers now. All he wants to do is stand at his easel and scribble numerals in chalky pastel, then furrow his brow and punch the digits into his cash register. Adding and subtracting have transformed his small world into an explosion of equations. He begs…
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“The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision…He brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (from…
READ MOREI loved you truly, madly, deeply for three and a half years. And now you’ve abandoned me. It wasn’t an abrupt breakup, not the kind that knocks the wind out of your chest by its utter shock and surprise. No, you snuck away slowly over time. Disappeared for a day or two, then returned again, feigning…
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God of Ash Wednesday, whose hands first gathered dust to create us, whose Spirit breathed new life into brittle bones, whose fingers traced the sand to save a sinner, take the dirt of my life— the tempers lost, the doors slammed, the complaints muttered, the harsh words thrown, the dark doubts seethed— take all these…
READ MOREEvery year I try to love winter. A little bit, at least, as much as a Midwesterner ought. I usually fail, flounder by February with dramatic declarations about how much I hate snow and sub-zero temps and skin cracked so dry it bleeds. But this year I’m trying to be humbled by the cold dark,…
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Laundry round here is eternal. Diapers, dirty dishclothes, daily heaps of socks and shirts and pants and bibs and towels. It piles up in towering heaps overnight, and just when I slam the dryer door shut with a satisfying thwack and declare it tackled, I turn to find my boys covered in marker or yogurt…
READ MOREIt’s one in the morning, the bleary-eyed hour. He’s up crying for me and only me, no other consolation will suffice. I stumble across the dimly lit hall, make my way to his bed where he sits with tousled hair and wet eyes, sniffling in the dark. I need you to stay! he wails into my arms.…
READ MOREI feel their smiles press upon us as we pass, their sunglassed faces turning down to see my son lounge in his stroller, dangling his feet over the front bar as he babbles to the waves, a morning song to greet the dawn. We are all beach-roaming as the sun sneaks up, some strolling at a…
READ MOREThe joke regularly circles round the Internet and church bulletins this time of year: What if the three Wise Men had been women? They would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts! But beyond the silly stereotyping, the harmless joke always rubbed me the wrong…
READ MOREThe cattle are lowing; the poor baby wakes. But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes. It wasn’t my cheeriest Christmas thought. But pacing the back of church with my baby screaming in my arms, wailing and wrenching whether I put him down or picked him up, reeling back and smashing his head against my…
READ MOREYesterday the O-antiphons of Advent began. But mine started early, driving home last Friday on a snowy freeway, catching the afternoon news after a day of meetings. Oh God, no. Oh God, not again. Oh God, not children. So many words have been spilled since Friday, and yet I keep struggling to voice how deeply this news wounds. As…
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