Me: “I’m using the bathroom, you’ll have to wait.”
Kiera: “Oh, I don’t need the bathroom—I just wanted to ask if I could have donuts for dessert.”
Me: “You don’t think you could have asked Dad?”
Kiera: “Well… he was talking, and I didn’t want to interrupt him.”

Oh. Ohhh, the irony. 🤦‍♀️😂

Leave it to my little one to pack wisdom into a simple question. Teaching history is important, but learning from it is what truly changes hearts.

Here’s to doing better and watching out for one another.

Ruby’s story reminds us how far courage and resilience can go, but it also challenges us to open our eyes to the spaces and systems around us. Are we making sure everyone—especially those we care for—is met with love, safety, and security?

I paused, looked at her, and said, “You’re absolutely right.”

Her question hit me hard because it’s such an important reminder: A place that feels safe to us isn’t always safe for others.

At one point, we came across a source that described William Frantz Elementary as being in a “safer area” of New Orleans. Kiera stopped writing, looked at me, and asked, “How could it be considered safer when it clearly wasn’t safe for Ruby?”

Right now, our food pantry shelves are getting harder to fill, and your local pantries need your help to keep serving those who rely on them.

If you have any more questions about what food pantries do and how they help - I’d love to answer them 💖

It does! But I hope that if all of us who find this important work together, we can bring a sense of community back.

Relief isn’t coming. Not from the top, not from some distant savior. If things are going to change, it’s on us.
Love your neighbor. Love your fellow human.

That’s the only match we have left to strike.

But now I see it every day, social media puts those matchstick children in front of us. It’s unavoidable. It’s loud. It’s right in our faces. And still, the world walks by.

I think about The Little Matchstick Girl, how I watched her suffer on screen as a child, wondering how anyone could walk past her in the snow.

Now, more than ever, I lean on community, especially in these winter months when giving feels natural. But kindness shouldn’t have a season. We have to carry it forward, because trust me… we’ll need it.

Poverty comes from red tape, from systems built for big business, not small people. Who cares about the shrinking middle class? There are “bigger fish to fry.”

And that’s when it hit me,poverty doesn’t come from laziness. If it did, loggers, fishers, and construction workers would retire in comfort. Instead, they limp toward Social Security checks that barely cover a month’s rent.

But she was told no.
No, because what if she brought trash from another town?
No, because bureaucracy trumps trust.
No, because our small-town dump, still stuck in a pre-recycling world in 2024, couldn’t risk it.

When he passed, years rolled by, and no one took his place. Then, a young woman,a peer of mine,stepped forward with grit and determination, saying, I’ll do it. She wanted to build something honest, a business rooted in hard work.

I agree. I am about to graduate and be a librarian. Working for a school that bans books feels an awful lot like breaking the ALA code of ethics. We are going to see a decline in real librarians teaching at public schools. I know I won’t but I’ll attend any PTA meeting about it and be a menace.