Are We At the Halfway Point?

What a halfway point. My mother and I were cracking up at a Facebook post someone wrote and shared, called “Dear Diary 2020 edition”.  It covered the overview of each month, from January (Australian bush fires, impeachment trials, Iran) to April (Covid-19 crisis + murder hornets- where did they even go??) to May (METH-GATORS- Florida WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING DOWN THERE?) to now, when people wear masks everywhere and no one is quite sure when a casual handshake will be appropriate again.

Being in quarantine for even a short time gives you so much time to think and being in quarantine for several months gives you even more time alone with your immediate family and your thoughts. This can set a dangerous precedent. I could spend this post typing all the things I am grateful for, and there are many. But, frankly, at this point in the summer, I’m over it. I go through waves of emotion every day- anger, sadness, grief at what isn’t happening right now.  There are a lot of happy moments in there too- I stepped away from my full-time position two years ago to spend more time with my family, and now that has been intensified a thousand-fold. I’ve gotten almost everything unpacked from our move last fall. And I have a chance to really look at how we live our lives and what we want to change, and what we want to keep the same. I bumped up my running, and while my hair hasn’t been trimmed it is the longest it’s been in like ten years. So there’s that.

It’s also brought me back to this blog. I’ve spent a lot of years not really working on this blog. It originally started back in the mid-2000s when I moved to New York and wanted to share anecdotes of living there as a Southerner. If you go back in the archives you’ll find stories of me being hit by a cab, ripped off by some kid who claimed to work on Broadway, and lost in weird places in the Village. It moved me back to North Carolina, saw me through graduate school, getting new jobs, and eventually starting a family. I’ve always been a writer, since elementary school. Yet I’ve consistently shied away from publishing about 95% of what I write. Heard that’s true of…every author. John Grisham, do you even sleep? More importantly, how much coffee do you drink?

So here I am taking a stab at it once again. Over the past 8 years, I’ve taken an interest in renovations, and did a small kitchen renovation in my first home, and a pretty big one several years ago. When we moved last fall into a home that we would not be renovating, it felt foreign to me. Almost like living someone else’s life. I had tons of questions and no one to ask them to, like where did you store your drinking glasses since your upper cabinets are like 8” across? Which brought me to shelter magazines, Instagram and home design blogs, allowing me to see what other people were doing. I’m so grateful to live in a time that gives us access to so many people’s homes. Looking at how other people live help me understand my own choices, and also get new ideas on how to decorate, renovate, and settle into a home.  Never have homes been more important than they are right now and understanding how to best use your space is key to really loving where you live.

I grabbed an Instagram handle for the blog- Art of Good Intention, and even a shopping handle for small things that I’ve collected along the way, AOGIhome.  I’m going to attempt to blog myself on a more regular basis (shout out to all the mothers who make it happen so much more often even with little people demanding other things), and hope you’ll follow along as I continue to make our house a home, and to grapple with all the things that are thrown our way. Flying snakes. Did you HEAR ABOUT THE FLYING SNAKES??