I woke this morning to cool air, soft blankets and the sounds of construction. I didn’t mind. Someone (Eli) had slept mostly quietly through the night. And woken with his Dad earlier than me. This is a small (perhaps medium-sized?) miracle as we are working on crate training and we are all (John + I included!) terrible at it. Eli – for all his manic energy, pouncing and jumping – is an excellent snuggle bug and fits perfectly between John + I most nights for at least a few hours before retiring to his own bed for the majority of his resting time. It works well for all of us, as we have crafted our lives this way – hubs and me and puppy. The dynamic shifted – in some ways dramatically – from Lucy to Eli but both have moments and traditions that fill our hearts (& memories) with untold joy.

In a few moments I’ll hop in my Volvo crossover (which we almost traded in this weekend but that’s another story for another day) and drive down to our local coffee shop and get John a brew and me a chai. I will smile driving past Talleyrand Park because its beauty is untold and just grows from season to season and I will have a moment of true contentment. Because the road to here has been awful, very bad, painfully hard – and sometimes it’s hard to remember and appreciate all the good.

Like open windows and birdsong. Crickets and peepers to drift to sleep to. And a beautiful house that fulfilled so many dreams.

A year ago John was away at NIH. I was home alone, with no obligations because my Dad & Lenny were enjoying themselves with friends on HHI. I got Covid. It was pretty awful for a full 48 hours. By the time John got home he’d decided that waiting a year from Lucy’s death to consider another dog no longer worked for him. Eli came home with us that Saturday.

He was eight weeks old so all his quirks and challenging issues now are pretty much completely our fault. But I was still sick. And we had already been feeling fidgety in life. Little Eli Emerson was just along for the ride. When we decided to sell our house in Chester County (a place, may I remind you, we thought we’d retire to eventually before making it happen much sooner than anticipated, so we loved it there) and move permanently to Centre County … well, because, there were myriad things we didn’t anticipate. Honestly we had reasons to do it. A lot of them. Mostly valid. All still more or less true. We just didn’t anticipate everything that would fall out from underneath us as the journey progressed.

Anyway, we did all the things that go along with moving. We cleaned (sometimes things that might never before have been cleaned – like the baseboards in our stairwells), we de-cluttered and staged. We left for weekends and Open Houses happened,. Two weeks, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears later, we had a cash offer and a close date. We’d done it.

Sort of.

After the selling came the moving and the storage units and the logistics of John working from home in our tiny Penn State house. It became about taking care of Eli while we spent Christmas in France with my brother and his wife (a trip we booked after Lucy, but obviously before Eli). It became about figuring out how to survive, endure. And sometimes, it became about making biscuits.

We put a (substantial) deposit down on new construction in December and we waited. And waited. The building process didn’t start until the second week in March (more on that another time because it elevates my blood pressure in unhealthy ways). By which time I was fairly certain we’d made a colossal mistake. I was miserable, trapped, sick. Eli was insane. Life felt impossible.

When closing finally arrived (construction was not complete yet … WTF) I was still on the fence. I knew that time – life – everything only moved in one direction. And that direction was forward. So I had to just get on with it – movers again and painters and contractors for various projects we felt we wanted to do straight away. But I spent most of my free time (which, to be fair, wasn’t much) wondering what hellscape I’d landed in. And couldn’t escape.

Everything – and I mean everything – felt hard.

Sometimes, it still feels hard. John’s company, and in turn his job, completely changed direction and focus and in their mess, John found himself in a completely new job, new duties, new products … the list goes on and on. We are still in that and it has been incredibly difficult. But here’s the silver lining for all those Pollyanna types – unlike at the start of Covid when John lost his job – right now, he still has one. With benefits and retirement contributions. Everything else has been flipped on its head, but that’s still true. And for that we are grateful.

I took a vicious fall a few weeks ago. That’s been challenging. For my ego, for my health, for my happiness. My yoga studio up here isn’t what my studio used to be. I miss that. More than I ever thought possible. I miss my friends, I miss my flow. I miss the community. That is a wound that is not currently healing well.

Eli is still a maniac. Jumping and chewing and just generally being more enthusiastic than I can always handle. He leaves for boot camp in a few weeks (hence the crate training) and John and I are both hopeful and terrified. I hate the idea of him being away from us but I *love* the idea of him learning some very helpful skills (like not jumping on people and knocking them over… to start).

But this past weekend we had no guests. We had no home football. We just had us and our house and coffee dates and movies and NFL. We slept in. We opened windows. We cooked dinner. It was -in a word – blissful. Everything we hoped moving here would be it was. Even if only for a few days. Just a whisper in the chaos that is currently life.

The Giants had a miraculous comeback. The Steelers won because their defense was rock solid (or at least T.J. Watt was). Penn State won away. We fell asleep with open windows, votive candles flickering their last flame. For a brief moment, it felt as though we’d come out the other side.

Xox, g