a house!

We found a new home. A house! Or at least the main floor of it. It's a giant old house close to where we live now but a little farther east. It's half a block to the dog park and it has a yard! I'm not usually prone to exclamation marks, but I guess I'm excited since I've already used two in the first four sentences.

It's the sort of place where I feel like Leila can make memories. We can grow carrots in the back yard and she'll remember the stained glass doors to her bedroom. We can easily walk to New Brighton pool in the summer. There's even a basement we can use. I have designs on tucking a desk away in a corner to write at and I think Tom wants to be able to do whatever is he does with tools down there. I might be getting ahead of myself, but I always thought it would be rad to have a dartboard.

I couldn't face the thought of Christmas alone in this crowded apartment so I was trying to find a cute cabin in the woods somewhere, but now, now I think we'll spend Christmas in our new house, and you're most certainly invited for dinner if you're in town. I'm so excited to put up the white Christmas lights that we had up at our wedding, I'm excited to bake, I'm just plain excited. I'm looking forward to seeing Leila's face as we try to show her how to rip paper off of presents, and Norton's enthusiasm at being so close to his favourite place in the world. I'm excited to meet our upstairs neighbours who have a three year old boy.

This is going to be good, I can feel it.

past-perfect

The other day our friend Chris was talking about how with Leila he has the sense of being part of someone's past. I know what he means. For her, everything is the future. All of what we are doing now will someday make up the tapestry of her childhood, her past.

I imagine her, at seventeen, beautiful and awkward like teenage girls are, sitting in some boy's car talking about her crazy parents and the shit they did when she was young. I imagine there will be stories of camping trips, rides on the backs of motorcycles, a black and white dog called Norton, travel to strange places, and how her parents didn't have cable but did let her watch the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine as many times as she wanted.

And I hope that the me of her memory loves her as much as the one writing this does.