Tag: Family

Another Orbit

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This is my space, but I feel it has eluded me lately in the blur of life.

Like the game of Chutes and Ladders, in this month of April I’ve moved forward a few paces–writing another meaningful libretto for the next Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert, Broadway Lights, in late June–while sliding back to heal from physical and emotional setbacks: two discomforting dermatological surgeries; one momentous funeral for a close cousin.

Grief has a mysterious way of throwing you into another orbit. That is where I live and breathe right now. Part of me stands on the sandy soil of Scottsdale, Arizona. Another piece is spinning somewhere else in the stratosphere.

The loss of Phyllis cut close. Not only because I loved her. But because I know she loved me. And she was a significant part of the fabric of my young life in her proximity to others I loved. Others we loved. All of whom are gone.

Our grandparents, Albert and Louise. Her mother, Violet. My father, Walter. My mother, Helen. Our aunt, Thelma.

Despite my disrupted and sometimes traumatic home life in the 1960s–featuring my father’s bipolar swings and my mother’s evening coping mechanism behind the broadsheet of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch–love existed there in our suburban St. Louis house. Love I felt. Love I excavated. Love I salvaged and carried forward. Love I still feel today.

Phyllis appeared in our home a few times a year. Usually in July to celebrate my birthday in our big backyard and in December in our living room to share Christmas dinner and exchange gifts. She was an integral presence in those moments.

There is one other moment that was purely ours. It happened just once. She must have been twenty. I was ten. She was an undergrad at the University of Missouri in St. Louis (UMSL). We both loved sports. She invited me to join her at an UMSL Rivermen basketball game.

I don’t remember much about it … how we got there, what we said to one another … just that we sat side by side in the stands rooting for the Rivermen. I just remember being proud of her. She was pretty, smart, and fun … and she wanted to spend time with her young cousin. It touched me deeply

As I write this, I realize Phyllis represented a form of stability in my life at that time … an escape to a more even, peaceful place that no one in my family of origin could provide.

Identifying that helps me to realize why this loss has hit so hard.

***

On Wednesday, April 22–Earth Day–my husband and I attended a volunteer recognition event at the Scottsdale Public Library. Alexa, the supervisor of volunteers, recognized Tom for his outstanding-and-popular movie series–and then me for my memoir-writing workshops–at the library in 2025.

We each brought home a certificate, thanking us for our volunteering efforts, along with a tiny succulent plant bearing an important message. We placed both of them on the windowsill of our south-facing sunroom in Scottsdale.

They will serve as a reminder for me that–even in my late sixties–I’m helping others grow in my community.

I know Phyllis, a life-long educator, valued that, too.

Sensitivity

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I pride myself on my sensitivity.

In my book, empathy is an essential quality for writers and human beings in general. It opens the door to developing deep and trusting relationships, but it also exposes us to emotional and physical pain. In this month of April, I have experienced both.

***

On Friday, April 10, Tom and I said goodbye to my cousin Phyllis.

The day before, we flew to St. Louis and enjoyed a nostalgic salad-and-pizza dinner with family in St. Charles, Missouri.

We gathered around a round, wooden table–balancing paper plates piled with food, while sifting through dog-eared photographs of Phyllis with living and deceased members of our Johnson family from the past seventy-five years.

In that space, I felt a meaningful connection with Tom (Phyllis’ husband), Austin and Bryant (her adult sons) and their respective spouses (Amanda and Kelsey).

Meanwhile, Phyllis’ four grandchildren–ranging in age from three to eight years old–danced around the island in Bryant and Kelsey’s kitchen, occasionally patting the head of Bennelli, their large-and-lovable labrador.

Despite the grief associated with the loss of Phyllis, it was a family moment I will cherish. One Phyllis would have loved.

The next morning, Tom and I drove to the funeral at Immanuel Lutheran Church in St. Charles with my sister Diane and brother-in-law Steve.

In a large open space connected to the church, Kelsey and Bryant had carefully assembled still photos–from throughout Phyllis’ life–on boards anchored by easels. They placed them beside her closed casket adorned with sprays of colorful blooms.

Overhead, at the other end of the room on a large screen, other images of Phyllis and her family and friends faded in and out on a large screen TV.

As people began moving into the church for the 11:30 funeral service, I felt anxious. Jumpy.

A mix of nostalgia and peace washed over me, as Tom and I found a place to sit at the far-left end of the fourth pew. Diane and Steve joined us there.

I scanned the program and saw that after readings from the old and new testaments–slotted between two church hymns–I would walk to the lectern to share “Words from the Family”. To give a eulogy. To pay tribute to my closest cousin’s life.

I’ve done a lot of public speaking, presenting, and singing on a multitude of stages in my life–but few things as personal as this. I breathed in deeply to quiet my nerves. I unfolded my prepared words and looked out over a congregation of probably two hundred: Phyllis’ family, friends, teaching colleagues, students, caregivers.

In that moment, my anxiety lifted and flew away. “I am honored today to remember Phyllis. She was my cousin. We were born a decade apart in St. Louis,” I began.

The words and phrases flowed effortlessly from there, as I looked into the tearful eyes of immediate family members–three generations side-by-side spread across the first pew.

“I admired Phyllis’ poise, her style, her intellect, her ambition, her sensibility,” I continued. Before I knew it, I was reciting verses from I poem I wrote for Phyllis: The Love We Shared.

I closed my notes. I left the lectern. I paused to pat Austin, Phyllis’ eldest son, on the shoulder for reassurance, kissed him on the forehead, then returned to the fourth pew and sat beside my husband.

I pulled a wrinkled tissue from my suit pocket, dabbed my eyes, and felt sadness and love reverberate throughout the church.

***

Tom and I returned to Arizona last Saturday.

Today I found myself dealing with another form of sensitivity … sensitivity to the sun.

This morning my dermatologist–in an out-patient procedure called MOHS surgery–removed a small patch of cancerous cells from the bicep of my right arm. As I write this, I am taped up with a sizeable patch over that area.

The good news is he removed all of the problematic tissue. There is no pain, just the anxiety (and the pinch of a few needles for numbing) that immediately preceded this morning’s appointment.

In a few weeks, the remnants of that procedure will fade. My dermatologist will extract the stitches.

I will be left with my fourth such scar–one on each limb ironically–from excisions and dermo procedures.

In a sense, these scars are “badges of honor” for having lived nearly sixty-nine years and survived a series of setbacks.

They are proof that as long as I live–as long as I write, sing, slather on sunscreen, and pause to remember the ones I love–I will also remain super sensitive to the blazing Arizona sun.

The Love We Shared

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Phyllis was my St. Louis cousin. We were born a decade apart–she in November 1947, me in July 1957. Her mother Violet and my father Walter were twins.

On Tuesday evening, I learned that Phyllis died March 24, 2026. A series of health complications over the past eighteen months ultimately led to her passing. Ironically, she left this world almost exactly twenty-five years to the day after her mother’s passing in March 2001.

When we were children and teens–at every Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas gathering from the late 1950s to the 1970s–my sister Diane, Phyllis and I represented the youngest contingent of the Johnson family lineage. We were loved and nurtured by our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

I felt close to Phyllis. As I recount my earliest family memories, I admired her style, her intellect, her ambition. Years later, in the 1980s when my sons (Nick and Kirk) and hers (Austin and Bryant) were all born within a five-year period, the arc of our parallel lives as parents brought us together whenever I visited St. Louis from my home in the Chicago area.

Then, in the 1990s and early 2000s, both of us were consumed by our busy careers. She was a life-long educator. I was a communication consultant. We lost touch a bit as all four of our parents aged and died.

But the beauty of family and longevity is that–if you are willing and able–you can recapture the loving connections hard-wired in your early years.

Ultimately, Phyllis and I did that. In our retirement years, we traded texts frequently. We cheered for our beloved St. Louis Cardinals through the highs and lows. We shared family news and photos. Phyllis absolutely adored her four grandchildren!

Even though I left my St. Louis home in 1980 to build a life and career in Chicago–and later moved to Arizona with my husband Tom in 2017–the love I feel for my cousin remains.

I’m thankful that I was able to see Phyllis four times in the last decade of her life. In 2016, we celebrated her and her husband Tom’s fortieth wedding anniversary. In 2017, Phyllis and her family met Tom and me for dinner at an Italian restaurant on The Hill in St. Louis.

In 2021, we gathered for a family breakfast and reunion at Phyllis and Tom’s home in St. Charles, Missouri. Then, in September 2025, Tom and I visited Phyllis and Tom one final time at Breeze Park where she was convalescing.

Because Phyllis was a dedicated teacher and reading tutor, she enjoyed reading my books. She also followed my blog and supported my writing journey. In fact, she encouraged me to capture nostalgic memories of my paternal St. Louis family on the page. That became my second book, Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator.

So, in a sense, today I not only feel I’ve lost my cousin. I also feel I’ve lost a literary friend.

At one point, I remember Phyllis telling me she hoped to write a children’s book one day. Though that never happened, I am certain my cousin–a devoted teacher–had a positive impact on the lives of hundreds of children in her long and successful career. Her legacy will ripple through their lives and those of her children and grandchildren.

Today is the home opener for the St. Louis Cardinals. The first pitch will be thrown in about an hour. I will be watching the game on TV from my home in Scottsdale.

When the Cardinals take the field, I will be thinking of my cousin. She was a knowledgeable, lifelong, tried-and-true Redbird fan. I will imagine her rooting for them from a heavenly perch.

But, most of all, I will remember the family moments and the love we shared for nearly seventy years.

***

The Love We Shared

Heaviness in my strong heart,

numb with dread,

tells me this chapter has ended.

But I will always know

the love we shared,

the stories we treasured,

the early etchings of memories

with those who came before us,

those who embraced us,

those who left us long ago,

and the ones we shaped and loved later,

who have carved and created

paths, deeds, and destinies

of their own.

Now it is time

for you to rest.

And, as you go, I remember

the person you were,

the gifts you gave,

the lessons you taught.

But, most of all,

I remember the countless ways

your love has touched our lives.

***

Phyllis (in the center below) was eleven years old–Diane was four, I was one–when the three of us posed on November 26, 1958, at the golden wedding anniversary party for our grandparents, Albert and Louise Johnson.

Looking Over My Shoulder

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Back and forth from one end of the pool to the other on this hotter-than-average, magnificent March morning. March 24, 2026, from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. to be precise. Thirty lengths in the deep end of Eldorado Pool in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Somehow, I wrangled my own lane today. I don’t mind sharing but always feel freer on unobstructed Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are fewer swim-class participants to contend with on those days and–now that the Cactus League baseball games have ended–some of the snowbirds have begun to flock home.

Breathing every eight or ten strokes, looking over my right shoulder, swimming south to north, I spy the blazing sun that threatens my sensitive skin and the wispy-white contrail of a commercial plane flying high above.

Serendipitously, the repetitive swimming motion reminds me what I want to write about today. It is the tenth anniversary of publishing my first book: From Fertile Ground.

On March 24, 2016, Barack Obama was president. I didn’t imagine the waves of what was to come: the growing political insanity, the dismantling of once-reliable American institutions, the general implosion of our democracy in one decade. Who could?

Back then, Tom and I were snowbirds–splitting time between our homes in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

I wrote most of my inaugural book–a three-generation writer’s mosaic about love and loss in my family–from the suburban flatness of northern Illinois.

But working online–back and forth like a swimmer logging laps between my editor and book designer in Nashville, Tennessee, and me in Scottsdale–I made my final edits in the rugged western landscape of the Grand Canyon State.

I remember the pride of holding the first physical copy of my first book later that week. I know I cried. It was a release of joy and amazement. Most definitely, a seminal moment I shared with my husband.

Sadness crept in, too, because I had written the book to process my grief after my mother’s passing. In a physical sense, I wasn’t able to celebrate that literary moment with her.

But I also know that writing about her and her wisdom-filled letters, my father and his unrealized poetry, my grandfather and fifty-three years of diary entries, and the general sense of freedom I felt visiting my grandparents in the 1960s at their rambling North Carolina farm allowed me to create a healing path out of my grief.

It was–and still is–a story I was meant to write and publish. One I wanted to share with others navigating the devastation of grief.

In the past ten years since From Fertile Ground was born, writing has become that free, unbridled swimming lane that is purely mine. Welcome waves of water and creativity running from my mid-fifties to my late sixties.

Whenever I jump into my writing in the deep end of my emotions, I find a way back to the surface with a new story. Many of them have landed on the pages of my other five books: Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator in 2017; An Unobstructed View in 2018; I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree in 2021; A Path I Might Have Missed in 2023; and Sixty-Something Days in 2025.

Of course, I take pride in that body of work and–more recently–find it tremendously gratifying to share what I have learned with other writers, who need an experienced coach … and a few practical ideas … to tell their own stories.

Today, I also pause and wonder–with a touch of sadness as I write this–how many more stories lie ahead for me. Though I still feel strong, capable, creative, and alive in these golden years swimming back and forth under the Arizona sun, I also feel more vulnerable.

Part of it is the process of aging. The other is the narrowing swim lanes of American society that constrain freedom and the expression of ideas.

Having said that, I choose to end this story on a positive note. Today, I choose to relish the goodness of my life with Tom in this rugged landscape. To give thanks for all the stories that have come from fertile ground over the past ten years … as well as those I have salvaged from the depths of the pool looking over my shoulder to beloved people and places that now live on the page.

They Still Remain

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Without words, they supply sounds, scents, and texture to our everyday lives.

Their furry souls exist unconditionally, by our sides, under the table, on the coolest tile, or the warmest trail to nowhere special or somewhere sacred.

While they are present, our ever-lovable companions spread beauty, comedy, continuity, responsibility, laughter, goodness, grace, and wisdom across crowded kitchens, cozy front porches, and boundless backyards.

And, when nature calls and they pad along to another plane, they still remain family, they still inhabit our hearts forever.

***

For Mason, Katie, Poly, Maggie and all our furry friends who have gone before us.

Potluck

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My husband is an excellent cook. He prepares our dinners with love and panache. I am more the pancake-and-egg guy in our relationship. Breakfasts are my thing.

Occasionally, we switch things up. Today is one of those days.

Our friend Jeremy has invited us to his Thanksgiving potluck this evening … a low-key gathering with friends and a few in his family.

Yesterday, I decided I would make a pot of chicken chili for Jeremy’s Friendsgiving today. It is simmering in our slow cooker as I write this. It’s a delicious, easy, non-traditional dish.

I haven’t made it in years, but the timing is right. The weather is cooler. I want to prepare something meaningful to share with our friend, who is managing his way on the road of life through a monumental year of personal growth mixed with significant detours and setbacks.

As background, Jeremy came out to his friends, family, and the world a little over a year ago. He and his wife are no longer a couple, but they continue to be loving parents to all five of their children. It’s impressive that even during this period of uncertainty they have maintained a respectful relationship.

I know fatherhood is important to Jeremy. He loves and supports his children. I remember how difficult it was for me to balance my fatherhood, demanding career, and “gay awakening” thirty years ago. I suspect it is the same in this moment for Jeremy.

All of this leads me back to this recipe for chicken chili. In the early 1990s, after Jean and I divorced, I felt broken–broke, too–and I existed in a fog, especially in the colder months.

My sons spent half their time with me in my tiny apartment. I needed to find inexpensive, flavorful dishes, which I could prepare for dinner for Nick, Kirk, and me. To feed and nourish us. To keep us close.

This chicken chili recipe is one I made frequently thirty years ago. Not so much lately. But it makes perfect sense to resurrect it today. To bridge the past of balancing my gay identity and single fatherhood with the present of Jeremy’s.

So, I am making chicken chili now for about a dozen (Jeremy’s supportive friends and a few of his children) who will gather on a coolish and likely rainy Saturday evening in the desert.

Together we will give thanks for friendships … the potluck of life that nourishes us and allows us to learn and grow during good times and bad.

It Just Went Live

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This is a momentous day for me. My sixth book just went live on Amazon.

Sixty-Something Days is the story of my post-65 quest to stay relevant creatively. It is a collection of my best essays, poems, and short fiction from 2022 to 2025.

The book is an artistic tapestry of my writing, singing, teaching, learning, growing, and surviving journey … with family and chosen family … connecting one leg of my life (my midwestern past) with another (my western present) during this period of tremendous upheaval in our country.

In my heart, I know this book will resonate with many of you–my loyal followers–who like me continue to strive to nurture and protect the artists, educators, animals and nature, and diverse disenfranchised people in our communities.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to click the link below and be among the first to buy a copy. Thank you for your support of my creative pursuits!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FZM2724S?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1

Survivors

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She’s survived another summer in the Valley of the Sun. Living life on the lam.

Climbing walls and trees. Stalking birds, lizards, and rodents. Dodging haboobs, monsoons, and ICE agents. Ducking in and out of covered patios … sleeping on weathered blue cushions melting into wicker chairs outside our front door.

Poly is her given name. Given by me to her. No doubt, she has other assumed names from other presumed cat lovers in our Polynesian Paradise condo community.

I hardly consider her a stray anymore, because we are three years into our relationship … our parlor game of fancy treats followed by quick goodbyes.

In 2022, she wouldn’t get close enough to touch. Tom and I left kibble outside our door in the same chipped dish you see here. She ate quickly, then darted off … back into her Sonoran neverland.

But in 2025 we have reached a deeper level of closeness, intimacy, love perhaps. Maybe she’s been reading the news and needs comforting. I know I do.

Every morning around 6, Tom or I open the security door and look for her. Nine out of ten days, she hops down from that day’s pre-selected chair, meows as she glides and stretches on the mat in our foyer.

She trails around our legs, marks our shoes and furniture with the scent of her furry face, and shimmies up and down as Tom or I (we take turns) prepare her dish of Sheba cuts in gravy with sustainable salmon.

The frequency and volume of meows increase as the dish comes close to the floor. Poly purrs loudly, then polishes that off in less than a minute. Her eyes sparkle with gratitude.

Lately, she’s been staying longer after her meal. Sometimes returning later in the morning or evening for a second round of treats. Dry savory salmon-flavor Temptations for the cat that deserves the best.

On September 1, at 11:13 a.m., Poly allowed me to sit on the floor and give her love. I patted her head, back, and tail as we talked about her morning … our day.

Then, I placed brunch before her and captured this kitty-calendar portrait of Poly, our cagey Sonoran friend, modeling in the kitchen on our new, natural oak flooring.

After she consumed her meal and licked her paws, she glided and sniffed through our bedroom, den, and sunroom.

Poly then departed through the front door, left ajar for her safe departure (she is a free spirit, after all!) back into the wild of intense sun, hissing sprinklers, spiky cacti, and random critters (animals and humans) … all of us living each day, giving and taking what we can, embracing or deflecting each moment as it comes.

Because that is what survivors do.

Half a Century Ago

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On August 25, 1975–fifty years, five decades, twenty-five pounds thinner, and half a century ago–I was a long-haired, idealistic college freshman hustling across campus in the rain.

It was my first day of classes at the University of Missouri in Columbia. (My mother took this photo during college break a year later.)

This naive, relatively-shy-but-often-fun-and-exuberant eighteen-year-old boy (he was not yet a young man but was an aspiring pre-journalism major) knew little about the world or himself.

But he was determined to find his way one hundred-and-twenty-five miles away from his parents and childhood home in the St. Louis suburbs.

Mom and Dad paid for my tuition, books, and room and board in Hatch Hall on campus. I vaguely recall the total bill was less than one thousand dollars per semester.

Looking back, I think I may have spent half that amount on frivolous expenses like pizza, sub sandwiches, and beer.

That money came out of my pocket. From what I earned and saved during the summer of ’75 as a rollercoaster operator at Six Flags. But I could always count on care packages and frequent small checks, which Mom sent in the mail.

John was my roommate freshman year on the fifth floor of Hatch Hall. We were good buddies, close friends from the late 1960s when we were junior high classmates.

Though we had different career aspirations which dictated non-intersecting class schedules (John was pre-med), we were inseparable in many ways from August 1975 until May 1976.

There wasn’t much to our room. Minimal clothes. Primitive, uncomfortable desks and chairs. Single beds and random posters on opposite walls.

John brought his stereo, turntable and speakers. I brought a small black-and-white TV and popcorn popper. I recall us convincing our parents to split the cost of a mini fridge.

Wearing tube socks and denim cutoffs like all the other guys, we tossed Frisbees in the quad under the columns and played tennis across the street from our dorm. Through it all, we made friends of all sorts who lived up and down our hall and across campus.

After a full week of mostly boring, required classes, fall Friday nights included parties at Hinkson Creek (an abandoned quarry mine close to our dorm) where all the kids drank and many swam.

Football Saturdays in the fall of ’75 were fun, rooting for the Tigers in the student section. More often than not, the final score spelled defeat.

We wandered home to our dorm rooms aimlessly to sleep off the beer and prepare for Saturday nights … disco dancing to Donna Summer and roller keggars (drinking more beer while roller skating).

I remember zooming around a rickety indoor skating rink, dodging wooden pillars and puddles of beer. What a mess and what a stupid idea … and I didn’t even like the taste of beer!

By this time, John had a steady girlfriend … Sharon. (They met soon after John and his family moved to the northern St. Louis suburbs before his senior year of high school.) Sharon attended a different in-state college in Kirksville, Missouri.

I dated lots of girls my freshman year … but never for long. I was trying to live up to some ridiculous notion of masculinity that never felt like the true me.

The one exception was Carol. We were close in high school. She was sweet. That relationship lasted into college, but it quickly fizzled. I needed my freedom and time to learn who I would become.

Operating on a protected, fearful level, I remember feeling attracted to many of the cute boys in my classes and at Hatch Hall. But my gay identity and secret desires lived only in my subconscious.

I remember feeling anxious and alone. Constantly.

It would be three years before I would meet Jean at Mizzou. We were both Journalism students. There were sparks between us that developed into love and marriage in 1980 after she graduated.

Underneath it all, the attraction I felt for men grew stronger. But without a healthy avenue for my personal discovery, my depression deepened.

The reality is that from 1975 through 1979–my college years–there was no productive way for me to experiment with my sexuality and date other men. Whatever happened had to come under the cover of darkness.

***

If we live long enough, time, age, mistakes, and transformation … like the constant tumbling of water over rocks … can produce smoother edges and actual wisdom.

In spite of living a closeted, unfulfilled sexual life in my college years, I got a good education at the University of Missouri. I earned my Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1979. It opened many doors for me professionally.

The good news is I eventually found my way personally in my thirties and forties. Tom and I have been together twenty-nine years. I’m proud of the trusting, loving relationship we have created together.

There is irony in all of this. While he was a freshman trying to find his way–at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in August of 1975–I was doing the same a few hundred miles south of him.

We wouldn’t meet until we were thirty-nine … twenty-one years later … but that would also happen in the midwestern humidity of August.

***

Postscript: Next month, Tom will join me on a trip to St. Louis. We will attend my fiftieth high school reunion, where I will reconnect with a few hundred of my Affton High School classmates … the class of ’75 … most of whom I haven’t seen for at least thirty years.

My college roommate–John–and his wife Sharon will also join us. Somehow, over fifty years, five decades and more than half a century–we have sustained our friendship across the miles and supported each other in the important moments.

Raising children … and, in their case, grandchildren. Being there for my mother’s funeral at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in 2013. Coming to Chicago for my marriage to Tom in September 2014.

Each time we see each other (now it’s mostly winter visits here in Arizona), John and I are able to pick up where we left off.

Even though our lives have grown and changed in innumerable ways, we have maintained a mutual sense of love, respect, and continuity.

That’s something I’m proud of.

Remembering and Refreshing

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When Tom and I landed permanently in our Scottsdale condo, it was an odd year.

Odd in a meteorological sense; when we pulled into our carport, it was 112 degrees outside on July 12.

Odd in a traumatic sense; I had suffered a minor heart attack six days before on our 60th birthday.

Odd in a serendipitous sense; the cardiac trauma happened in St. Louis (where I was born) in the middle of our move.

Odd in a numerical sense; it was 2017.

That year, we did our best to settle into our new life. We focused on the most essential items: buying a new air conditioning unit and creating a new healthcare regimen to rehab my heart and restore some sense of normalcy to our lives.

We were two mid-century guys, doing our best to settle into our mid-century condo, happy to have survived a scary personal experience, grateful for the chance to write a new chapter in a space that had been home to Tom’s grandparents (and, in a more limited sense, his parents) years before.

Sadly, by 2017, they were all gone. Even so, we had an important remnant of their lives to keep us grounded. It was our turn to–slowly–make it our own.

Under more normal circumstances (i.e., not enduring a heart attack in the middle of our move), we might have pushed more aggressively to transform our condo. But surviving together superseded remodeling and refreshing.

With time, I regained my strength. Tom and I both began to breathe more easily. When a little thing called Covid arrived in 2020, it prompted us to rethink our space, because–of course–we had more time to stare at our condo walls.

In 2021– it was odd again — we hired a paint crew to turn both bedrooms green and serene. We replaced the carpeting there. Later that year, we remodeled our bathroom.

Now it’s another odd year: 2025. Odd (as well as disturbing) in more ways than I care to enumerate in this essay. Let’s just say it’s the perfect time to wave goodbye to dingy off-white walls and adorn our living room and sunroom with a splash of two new colors.

With all of that as my preamble, I’m in the mood to tease you a little. Guess which two colors on this palette will appear inside our home beginning next week.

When the work is done (and we have replaced the tired grey/blue carpeting in our living room and sun room, too), I think it will feel like we have finally created the Arizona space Tom and I imagined eight years ago in April.

That’s when we put our suburban Chicago home on the market as the daffodils bloomed on another chilly midwestern day.

That’s when we began to pack up our most important possessions in Illinois for a chance to create a new life of unforeseen friends, books, blogs, stories, movies, and memories in the Valley of the Sun.