Tanara McCauley

Culturally Imagined Stories

Category: Faith, Relationships, and Other Topics

  • Today

    Be grateful for today and don’t worry about tomorrow. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

  • Risky Embrace

    I saved a life today. Not intentionally, and not of the most precious variety, but a valuable life all the same: that of a fat, feisty lizard. He lives in my backyard. And our relationship is…uh…complicated. (A vague adjective, missing all the negative connotations applicable to our feeble ties, but I’ll go with it.) See, I […]

  • Unpopular

    My oldest daughter wears glasses…sort of. She has a prescription. And a set of lenses matching that prescription. And a nifty little case to put them in. It’s a fight, however, to get the glasses out of their felt-coated den to perch stylishly upon her pretty little nose. They spend a lot of their time […]

  • Twice the Miracle

    I could tell by the look in the nurse’s eyes she wasn’t sure I understood what she was saying. We stared at each other, she with one brow lifted in question for some sign of comprehension on my end; me drifting inside myself with a host of “what if’s” tumbling through my mind. My twins, […]

  • Walk it Out

    El interés tiene pies. It’s a Spanish phrase that often comes back to haunt me when I find myself making excuses not to do something. The literal translation? Interest has feet. “Who has What?!?” you ask. Stay with me, the meaning is a bit more profound. Many of us have approached a prospect or task […]

  • Dare to Live the Dream

    Every dream has a starting point. My love of reading, and the eventual desire to write, began in the pages of two childhood classics. Where the Red Fern Grows is the first book to ever make me weep. Not cry. Weep. Hysterically. As if my house had just gone up in flames and every family […]

  • Too Fat to Fly

    But those who wait on the Lord…they shall mount up with wings like eagles. The other morning I pulled up to my driveway and encountered the fattest pigeon I’ve ever laid eyes on. After the initial shock of seeing its size, I wanted to see it move out of my parking spot. I approached, fully expecting […]

  • Promised

    Life–if we’re honest–is hard. That’s not to say it isn’t good. Laughter, the arms of a child thrown around your neck, kisses from the one you love–these are all precious tidbits of the countless things that keep us striving to lengthen our days. But life does throw many a curve ball. And these unexpected hurls […]

  • White Chocolate Banana Nut Bread

    My favorite banana bread recipe is from William-Sonoma’s Essentials of Baking cookbook. If you can find the book, which is no longer available through their site, I recommend you snag it. It’s a culinary gem. I’ve since slightly altered the way I make the banana bread recipe, mainly adding white chocolate, more nuts, and cutting or tweaking an ingredient […]

  • Tongue on Fire

    My son hovered over the boneless, tasty looking mango-habanero chicken wings with a gleam in his eye. “Don’t touch ’em son,” I told him. “They’re too spicy. We saved you the others.” He grabbed his wings, satisfied enough, but greedily licked the sauce from a finger that had grazed the forbidden ones. The small taste set […]