always never done

I watched him standing there in the yard last weekend, a little girl in the stroller in front of him, a dog on a leash beside him, his three boys nearby. Surrounded by children but alone with his thoughts, I found it hard to venture whether he was looking forward or backward. Maybe he was just wondering what the hell was happening in the actual present.

It's been more than a year since Andy dropped a letter at the house on the end of the street.
I remember last winter, packing up holiday decor through the lens of whether it might fit in a storage facility. While the packing felt like a frenzy, we persisted. While selling our first house, the one our family began in, felt like a small loss, we survived.
I remember when we signed the mortgage and started the renovation this time last spring :: Tolliver had friends over to play and to tour the house, and as we all piled out of our cars he hollered to ask whether they'd like to see the dead animals outside in the woods or the ones inside the house?! I may have wondered what the hell we had gotten ourselves into.

Although it feels as though we've lived in some kind of chaos, some kind of worry, some kind of out of control for a year, the temporary experience also brought feelings of cautious optimism and expectant hope and tremendous gratitude, the kind I still feel when I spin around, the kind I want to stamp forever on my heart.

We're settled in here, still with so much more to do, still with some boxes to unpack and shelves to build and walls to repair. There is always more to do, it will always never be done.
And now, as the weather begins to say spring, we've been tackling outside jobs too - tearing down an old shed, removing dead trees. Serious work should begin here this week, grading the ground and seeding the grass and putting in stone steps so we can begin to use the big glass sliding door in the kitchen.

From this relatively quiet rectangle of lawn, this place of century old bones and healthy young boys running around in rain boots, it feels so much easier to call out to the future than the past, to think about all the things we have accomplished here already, how much it feels like home. How we are always closer than we think.