Three years ago today we closed on our home in Maine, selling our beloved space and all it contained.
We left the dishes we received as wedding gifts a decade earlier stacked neatly in the cabinets. We left the dining room table we built with our own hands (and those of our sweet friend, Emy, who offered not only her hands to the job but also her laughter) one sunny weekend our first summer there. We left the bookcases from Ikea that took hours to assemble and us to the edge of our wits.
The teapot handpainted in the Polish style that I adored and used nearly every snowy afternoon during our long Maine winters. The chest of drawers that had traveled with my Navy family as part of my parents’ bedroom set when I was growing up and I’d refinished during finals week my second year of law school. The canvas print of one of my very first photographs of Maine, a sunrise at the Portland Head Light where any doubts I’d had about our move were swept away with the crashing waves on that rocky slice of coastline…
Read More
GUESSSSSS WHAAAAAATTTTT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
WE GOT A NEW DOOOOOOOOOG!!!!!!
Meet Chili Pepper.
Also known as Chili Dog, Chili Boy, Chill Pill (Justin keeps pushing for Chili Bob, but…ummm…no.).
He’s a red heeler rescue from Texas and he just arrived on Friday.
We are in love.
We are all still in the midst of getting to know one another and my full-time job at the moment is holding back the urge to snuggle my face into his neck and squeeze him until the big empty space in my chest that Tessie’s absence left starts to feel full again.
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, the way we can feel so many things at once? In the midst of my over-the-moon excitement for Chili to be here, there are infinite tiny stabs of grief that Tess isn’t. His arrival is full of so much joy and welcome and love, and it also sort of feels like losing her all over again.
Change is like that, isn’t it?
It shines this big spotlight on all the ways things are different. We stand on this threshold, reluctant to let go of the way things were even while we are eager and excited (if also a little unsure and maybe even a bit nervous) for what’s next…
Read More
I can be impatient.
Like, seriously impatient.
Once I decide I want to learn something or accomplish something or build something or renovate something (are you getting the idea yet?), I impatiently want to dive in headfirst and DO IT ALL RIGHT NOW!!!
Which looks like motivation for about five minutes and then quickly turns to overwhelm (cue the “ohmygod there is soooooooooooo much to do here” voice of panic)….
Read More
I was eighteen years old and sleeping on the couch of the dingy apartment I shared with Naomi, John, and Brad.
I didn’t have a bedroom of my own, so my nights were often disrupted by the comings and going of my roommates. Naomi’s late hours arriving home from her job at The Wild Zebra “Gentlemen’s Club” that our apartment shared a parking lot with. John’s drunken rages at Naomi, fueled by convenience store malt liquor, jealousy, and impotence. Good nights meant broken dishes and bad ones meant broken bones and another trip to a new emergency room with a sobbing Naomi defending his latest outburst. Brad was a quieter presence, eyes sleepy from whatever he’d smoked and occasionally even interested in a book I was reading. He’s a background player in my memories of that time, shadowy and indistinct…
Read More
I am writing this morning from under my fluffy comforter, nestled into my bed, Tessie snoring beside me.
We arrived here in Saratoga on Saturday and have been running around doing the 647,000 things big and small required to settle into a new life…
Read More
I am writing this days before we depart and life is a flurry as we pack up and grocery shop and do the million and one mundane tasks that must be dealt with before hitting the road.
We’re taking two weeks between locations to head off grid, to simply be together in the quiet with minimal interruption from technology or obligation. We have plans to…
Read More
Well…this is my last dispatch from Tucson. We hit the road on Sunday and begin making our way to northern California.
I’ve said it before, but this is always a bittersweet time for me. When we land in a new place, it always seems like three months is this enormous wealth of time…
Read More
Has it really already been three months???
It has, unbelievably. We are closing out our time here in Tucson and have just signed on the dotted line for our next assignment:
Read More