Tony Woodlief | Author

Faith and Life

A Whisper

The day after I wrote about the miraculous recovery of Caleb’s goldfish, the damn thing up and died. We had a funeral service in the back yard, beside a tiny redbud sapling. I decided to make it a dual funeral, and include Eli’s goldfish, who died in the middle of the night some weeks before. …

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Flowers

I keep finding tender purple pansies growing in corners of my yard where they were never planted. Stubborn and fragile, cheerful without cause, they remind me of Caroline. Purple was her favorite color. She used to help me plant the pansies every fall, or at least I think she did, because too many of the …

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Birthday

Sometimes when people learn that I have three boys, they say something like: “don’t you want a little girl to go with all those boys?” I remember when we thought we were in the worst of Caroline’s dying, after she couldn’t speak but before the pain made her scream for hours, I would stare out …

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Dependent

I’ve been sick, the kind that lingers and begins to make you wonder if you will ever feel good again, or if instead something ghastly has hold of you. Nothing does, says the doctor, just a combination of fatigue and virus and various peripheral complications. I hate the feeling of physical weakness; it puts me …

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The Path

With a sigh she was gone, five years ago tonight. Somewhere in these last years it became true that the time since we lost her is greater than the time we had her. I’ve come to measure the years by this date — what has happened since she has been dead four years? And five? …

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Our Neighbor

Charles Dickens wrote of children: “I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.” Fred Rogers was loved by millions of children, and his life was no slight thing. He has left us today, and the world is much poorer for it. …

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Forty Million

Thirty years ago on this day, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the writers of the U.S. Constitution intended for citizens to have a right to terminate a baby inside the womb. The justices opted for the clinical-sounding term advanced by abortion advocates, “fetus,” which is Latin for “baby,” and in two …

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Faith

I have an apartment over my garage. The illegitimate and ill-behaved children of the girl we gave a home to for several months had pushed out the screen on the door, so last night I went up to fix it. My two year-old, Stephen Caleb, demanded to accompany me, having grown tired of splashing about …

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