When we moved into this house last year, the back of the yard was basically a honeysuckle forest, a dense wall of green stretching across the hillside. We couldn’t even walk through it to get to the dogs if they wandered back there, and all that thick growth was ideal tick habitat. With two dogs … Read more
Looking back, July felt like a month of doing things a little afraid, a little unprepared, and going anyway. We took our first Amtrak trip and weren’t sure how any of it would go.Tom sent a message to a band we’ve loved for years and didn’t expect anything back.I wrote about two of the hardest … Read more
It’s the last week of July. I just looked at the calendar and realized we’re four days from August. I seem to have this realization every year. Summer always feels longer when it’s ahead of you than when you’re living it. We’ve had a good summer. We took the train to Chicago, went to a … Read more
Ten weeks in. We missed a weekly update. We didn’t miss the work. We’re Spending Less Time Negotiating The biggest change isn’t that we’re doing more. Before, a busy week usually meant movement disappeared. Now there’s always a smaller version that keeps us going. The decision about what that looks like has already been made. … Read more
We live here. Long enough that the Gateway Arch became part of the skyline instead of somewhere we actually went. Then Tom’s boss and two coworkers came up from Dallas for a work trip. We planned the kind of evening we’d put together for visitors — the Arch grounds, dinner at Ballpark Village, a Cardinals … Read more
We found it the way we find most things now — by googling “hiking near St. Louis” on a Saturday morning when we didn’t quite want to waste the day. Don Robinson State Park came up. Thirty minutes away, free to visit. Neither of us had ever heard of it. By 9:30 we were on … Read more
It’s one night. You pack a bag.Drive somewhere close.Check in. Nothing dramatic. And still — something shifts almost immediately. Your House Is Not Neutral Your house holds everything. Not just your things — your responsibility. Even when you sit down to rest, part of you is still tracking what needs doing, what’s waiting, and what … Read more
April is where people start pushing again. More movement. More plans. More energy. And with that comes the quiet pressure to do more than you actually need to. To catch up. To use the momentum. To not waste the season. This is where people burn out. Not because they’re doing nothing—but because they don’t know … Read more
There’s a specific kind of restlessness that only shows up when things are finally working. Not when life is hard. Not when something needs fixing. When things are actually stable — routines holding, work manageable, relationships okay, health steady — and you look up and feel this low-grade urge to disrupt all of it. You … Read more
