Summer has emphatically arrived in Montana, with a solid week of highs in the 90s and little wind or thunderstorms to break things up, but enough lightning strikes in the broader neighborhood to get one worrying that August might justify its seed with a burly crop of fires.  It was in brief an ideal time to move, for the third time in 9 months and hopefully the last time for the next half century.
Ideal is largely sarcastic, but summer has become my clear choice for least favorite season, and I’d sooner give up a scorchingly azure weekend in July than a foggy one in October.

Our new house is a dream, and to a lesser extent a nightmare.  We started moving in almost immediately after close (M insisted on an ice cream cake for celebration), and that night after Little Bear had gone to sleep we both walked around marveling at the 130 year old details, and at the major projects standing plain in almost every corner.  Absent the houses magnetic pull on our instincts, our good history of trusting those, and our plan to be here a very long time indeed this move/project would not make any sense.  Five days of filling the garage with boxes, enjoying a yard shaded by 90 foot Doug Firs, and watching LB sprint through the halls has along with some basic painting and cleaning gone a long way to remind us that the good things in life are not always especially practical.
Little Bear has been with us every step of the last fortnight; backpacking, packrafting, touristing in Yellowstone, negotiating last minute financial niggles, and cleaning out two storage units.  As a toddler he’s been tabla rasa for our anxieties, which has not made daily parenting any easy but has helped us come back again and again to the essentials of getting things done and being nice enough to each other in the process.

As has been the theme of this year my memory has been hard put to retain and process events at a rate which can even hope to amount to a few essays now and again.  I marvel at how great writers throughout history rarely had long-term spouses and even more rarely, children.  Translating experience into words isn’t about exceptional content so much as it is about a life quiet enough to understand what just happened.

I’ve been tempted, for the first time in a decade, to let this website lapse for a while, but was quickly reminded that this was not an option.  Both for my own creative sanity, and because Mike, Tim, Jason, and Monica all provided invaluable moving assistance this week, and we wouldn’t know any of them had it not been for this corner of the internet.  So special thanks to them, and for all the readers putting up with content even more stochastic than usual.

The miracle of this year is that I’ve still yet to get sick.  Moves, loss, existential crises, and more good on the career and housing and personal front than I had any reason to suspect have added up to the most eventful year of my life, which is barely half over.  I’ll thank circumstance if it is kind enough to give me space to understand it all this fall and winter.  We hardly plan to leave the state until 2018.