I’m currently in Seattle with my family and a few of my siblings—we’ve had lots of time with each other and the cousins, including my little nephew Milo.
Milo does not like to be perceived.
The past few weeks with all the family has been so very delightful. I love every second with them, especially the nieces and nephews. Their little moods and whims are endlessly relatable, especially in the morning (I am not a morning person, not at all).
I don’t have a lot of time to write and draw, but I wanted to drop in with a brief update before I knock off again for the rest of summer. This season has been unusually full for us, not only because the kids are out of school and need a caregiver (me) but also because, except for a handful of days in mid-July, we’ve been away from home since June. This happened somewhat by accident.
We’ve been in two different corners of the country—first, a three-week stint in New York. Now, one entire month in the Pacific Northwest, evenly split between Seattle and Portland. We’re still in Seattle at the moment, breathless from a week and a half spent catching up with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and the family dogs.
We’ve seen so many things, sat around so many new tables. I’ve felt the pieces of myself slide over and into each other like tectonic plates. All these shifts are forming a new continent—one that travels light and makes its home in unfamiliar bedrooms.
I’m trying to sit with what it means to be home, to be away from home, or to make a home in a new place.
Before Annie died, I didn’t really consider whether I should stay in Utah. I felt at home in my circle of friends, something I’d rarely felt before in my life. I was used to having one or two close friends at a time, not a circle with space to stretch and fall into whenever I needed it. In this circle, I also learned how to hold someone else, how to watch them expand and change and let go of things that needed letting go of. There were lots of late nights and tears and back-and-forths on our devices, but we built something solid enough for what we knew at the time.
Annie wasn’t the center of the circle, though she often connected us to each other.
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