It’s been a year to the day that my mother died and what a year it has been! In many ways I feel like, had Mom lived, that her depression would’ve been so much more severe for seeing how much our country has devolved and how things are only getting worse. She was SO looking forward to watching “that bastard” lose this last election and… well… here we are.  “Egg prices”, retirement savings evaporating, recession looming, the president himself saying my spouse “isn’t real” and is an abomination, internment camps and deportations, our planet on fire, and her entire generation not really giving a shit or, at the very least, not accepting their intrinsic role in it all. So, yeah, good times… you didn’t miss much Mom, except for a lot of heart ache. I did go for a good long walk today though and tried focusing on things that I thought you would like and would make you happy. Maybe you saw them?

In addition to everything above (and more), it’s been a challenging year in general. Getting my Dad’s affairs buttoned up and ironing out the financial mess Mom put the two of them in was, to put it mildly, a slog. It opened up a ton of past emotional wounds and created some new ones to boot. But, after a lot of work, he’s in a really great place now, relocated up north near my brother Tim and his family in Vermont. His living situation is much more affordable, his neighbors are more his age and at the same financial stage in their lives. He has had a host of health issues since we moved him up there but, he appears to be on the mend. Fingers crossed!

Contrary to everything I’ve written so far, not everything has been a challenge or awful though. We are finally moving forward on adding an accessory dwelling unit to our property in Durham! We attempted to do this right before the pandemic hit and that got thwarted for obvious reasons. It’s been good to give it another go, provided the tariffs don’t thwart us again. We’ll be demolishing the back building and doing a completely new construction for it. We are both super excited for this as it’s the first step in the next chapter in our lives. We plan to move out of the main house, renting that out while using the new ADU as a home base where we can get our sea legs as new landlords. Once we get the flow of that down, we’ll start looking at land elsewhere and AirBnB the ADU so that we have a home base in Durham for the foreseeable future.

I’ll end on an additional happy note. Mel and I got out to the Eno for a short 3 mile hike to enjoy the woods, the river, and the great weather that has slid into North Carolina this week. It was glorious, productive, and it made us super grateful for all the good that is around us currently.

Tad and Mel sitting side by side enjoy a view of the Eno River outside of Durham NC