And the Winner of a free copy of A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is . . .

Anny! Please email (brown.jolyn@yahoo.com) or message me your address so I can send you your free copy of A Circle of Sisters. 
Thanks everyone who shared something they were grateful for. Keep watching for a second giveaway the first week of December.

November Graditude and A Circle of Sisters Giveaway!

It's mid-November and I can feel something coming over me,
It's a slow excitement building, but not just that.
It's hope and love and a wash of memories
that seem to be stored up just for this time of year.
Like everything sweet in my life is about to circle back into it in one way or another.
It's family parties.
Singing a weird combination of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and Grandma Got Ran Over by a Reindeer with my siblings.
It's being curled up in sleeping bags unable to sleep because my mother and her sisters are upstairs laughing while they plot their after Thanksgiving shopping trip.
It's pie sampling the night before Thanksgiving.
Aunt Jane wearing Granny's old apron.
A line of tables stretching from one end of the house to the other and everyone laughing when someone asks for the potatoes and they get passed the long way around the table, twice.

It's music.
My senior year in choir. Blue corsages, red roses made of chocolate kisses, and the sound of Silent Night and The Halleluiah Chorus.
It's the first time I held my own baby at Christmas.
It's Mary and a manger and another baby born to save me.
It's God and everything He's given me unfolding itself again as I remember.

What has God given you? A memory? A loved one? An experience?
November is always about giving thanks. So I'm jumping into the experience with a giveaway of a free copy of A Circle of Sisters. Even if you already have a copy for yourself, with Christmas coming, this would make a great gift for someone you visit teach, a mother, grandma, sister, or friend. To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is post one thing you are grateful for on the blog. I'll be picking a winner at random a week from today.

I can't wait to see what you are grateful for!

Everything Has Changed

You fell asleep to a Taylor Swift song this morning.
I slipped you into bed.
Shower forgot, I turned on the computer.
I needed to write.
It's how I make sense of the world,
of me,
of you belonging to my world now.
Five minutes, you are awake again.

The words to Taylor's song
make a rhythmic backdrop to my typing,
all I know, all I know.
I don't know how to explain this new reality.
This place I've come to in the last four weeks.
All I know is everything has changed.

So I let Taylor do my talking, her words mine,
my heart overflowing.

Maybe someday I'll have time to write it all out.
How that moment we met was everything I've waited for
and more.
How four years of longing were ended with intense pain followed by
breathtaking joy.
How I forget to stop watching you.
Ten minutes, twenty, an hour.
Your daddy laughs "Are you still staring at her?"
Yes, I am. You're beautiful.
All I know since yesterday
is everything has changed.