After a Year

It’s been exactly a year today since that first Honey Baked ham sandwich in our new home, together, as husband and wife. It’s been a wonderful, scary and eventful journey.

Life is beautiful anywhere you make it that way! We have meandered through challenges and happy moments, through lows and highs, through losses and gains. But most of all, I think we have learned that no matter what the outside world will give us, we have each other and with a positive attitude, patience, understanding and love we can get through everything.

After a year, I still miss NC. Maybe more than when I left. I miss my friends, and I miss just the warm (literally and figuratively) culture of The South. I miss the food. And the sweet, sweet wine. As a general observation, Utah has not been as warm and friendly as I was used to before. We love to travel, though, and Utah is located at the perfect crossroads of beauty and wonder, so we have taken to the roads or the skies, when the small town we live in becomes too tight. We’re grateful to have a beautiful home to come to after each trip.

People are not very friendly here, especially to strangers, and we stick out as a sore thumb, for our social drinking, lack of kids and the fact that we don't open our doors to strangers (read: missionaries). But we’re grateful for the few friends we do have and for the times they share with us over birthdays, holidays and just tired, slow Saturdays, after a long week. We also like the weather, the mountains, the streams, the beautiful cities of Park City, Salt Lake, even Heber and Midway. We love the columbines and the desert plants. And the birds! Oh, the beautiful multicolored birds!

We have learned to tame our soil and actually planted some roots this year! We have built a fence – to make better neighbors, you know. We have shoveled snow and mowed grass. We have taken care of what’s ours. We have decorated our home together. We have celebrated Thanksgiving, and Christmas and Easter in our new home. We’re a true family now, you could say.

It’s been a great year! I don’t think we’ll have many years as full of this first one, but we will keep it interesting, I am sure. We’re still, in a lot of ways, learning the culture around us, and trying to make not just our address a home, but the larger world of our town and county.

I am speaking for both of us, I think, when I say that we don’t know what the future might bring, and we might not even make Utah our “forever” home, the home state where we’re going to retire in, or be buried in, but in the meantime, we’re making it a cozy getaway, a welcome refuge at the end of the day, a nice place to come to after a long journey. Hopefully. We’re ready for more ham sandwiches and sweet California wines in our humble abode, which had us with open arms a year ago today.