You need some backstory. It began when I was 15. My friends and I went on a Spring Break trip with a church youth group. One of us decided a quick game of softball would be a fun way to waste a few minutes. But that ended after the first hit when the ball landed on my face. What was supposed to be a fun, 3 day get-away turned into an emergency trip to the dentist to get my tooth shoved back into my gums. I’ll spare you the gore, but blood, puking, swelling, stitches, strange glue holding my teeth together, infection, a round of antibiotics shot directly into my left cheek (not the one of my face), and innumerable dentists visits are all a part of my story.  However, not until many years later did the UPS get involved.  You see, whatever dental magic was done to me between that fateful day and on through my early 30’s was no longer doing it’s job and I needed a dental implant. The prosthetic dentist told me this was a fairly easy process and set my appointment. S...

Just near the border of Connecticut and Rhode Island, there is a tiny tree surviving- and maybe even thriving- because of it’s thin connection to the earth. I am not sure what happened to cause the tree to be in the condition it’s in, but I can see how it is not giving up. You see, the tree seems to be precariously growing out of a dead looking stump, only the stump is about 4 feet high, all dried up, and falling apart and it being held up by planks of wood. You can see the bare roots stretching through the air the length of the stump. Somewhere, about half way down the stump, the roots begin tunneling inside the stump and become unseen. It looks like someone glued together a wheel barrow of mulch. Somehow that mulch tower is providing just the right amount of structure to let the fighting tree make it.  Something about this tree grabbed my attention. I wasn’t too sure in the moment, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that this little tree looks a lot like t...