The White Deer

One fall evening around dusk we had gathered around the kitchen window to see out into the woods on the northern side of the yard where there was making her way down the trail toward the house a small white deer. There were ten or so other does with her

Phone Privileges

The Things We Have Now She calls at ten a.m. I want to talk about school. How she’s doing, what she’s learning. She entertains my wishes only momentarily, then gives me her meter reading. I say the number back to her and write it down. She asks

Knowing Beans

Meanwhile, we were very hungry for information. We knew very little about diabetes and what we did know consisted mostly of what we had learned from my father’s type 2, which he suffered after a long while of poorly managing his congestive heart disease. Even that, because we did

Logbooks, Lows and Larry

Before, much earlier, a year or two prior to Lia’s diagnosis when all of our children still lived at home, including our now-collegian son, one of the kids would be given the task of setting the table for dinner. Then if they lingered too long afterward we would ask

A Lattice Work Community

When I first worked with Les B. we were both Lieutenants serving under the same Brigade Commander in Operation Desert Shield on the Saudi Arabian peninsula of the Persian Gulf. It was a strange and difficult time for both of us and though our paths in the war never crossed,

Pilgrimage

Shortly after our eight year old daughter Lia had been moved to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit late in the evening of December 23, the same day of her diagnosis for type 1 diabetes, the nurse working nightshift came in to check her vitals and IVs and she asked how

A Simple Question

Things are getting better now, aren’t they? I was standing outside my daughter’s school preparing to go in for a Valentine’s Day party when my sister asked me this question over the phone. I paused only briefly, my hand on the door. It had been seven weeks

Compromise

How the dispute ended with us and sugar was not so much a compromise as it was a surrender on our part. But since surrender conjures in the mind images of winners and losers, making it a hard word for at least one of the two to swallow, especially if

War on Sugar

When it was just the five of us and no diabetes it was the desire Franca and I had of eating healthier foods, produced more sustainably and responsibly, that drove us to declare war on sugar. It started, as many such conflicts do, as a simple disagreement over turf: our

Without Envy

When the three of us arrived at this lavish resort there was much excitement and gaiety. It was sunny and warm and the hotel and landscaped grounds were elegant and stunning. We had travelled before as a family to other various interesting places — Paris, Rome, Belgium, Germany — but those trips