The Magic of the Little Yellow House

This October, a year after our wedding, has come with more changes than I can hold in my hands. I remember our wedding in flashes; light and dark in an unending wind spiral. For all intents and purposes, last October saw the whole world fall. And, as the life we had tried so hard to build crumbled around us, just as it was beginning, I desperately grasped onto this invisible hope. Hope that we would survive the vulnerability of barren trees. Hope that there would be a time beyond the deepest sadness I have ever known. 

And now, a year later, I write about the year that's past with a little more clarity--albeit a forever heartache.

We talk about how lucky we are, with a hindsight that shackles our legs to the ground, as if--after the year that tried, in vain, to break us--our mere survival is a victory. We know, now, how to do the hardest things. A team. A pair. A partnership. But we never got that newly-wed phase. We never got to rest our heads, relax our shoulders, and lean into one another. Instead, the year that followed our wedding was full of landmines. 

So much so that the breaking heart I was a year ago would never believe where we are today. In a little yellow house. The happiest house in all the land. 

The magic of the little yellow house is domestic bliss as husband calls it. It's that feeling of being newly-wedded as we unpack unopened wedding gifts, hang photos, and create new routines. It's a second chance at the beginning we always imagined. The little yellow house is my heart living out loud: giving my husband the office where he will do amazing things, building a music room, filling the kitchen with an island and The Weepies. The little yellow house has two staircases and a laundry machine--a deck wide enough for a grill and a little shed large enough to hold a million dreams. This feels like the place it all begins. Where the office can become a nursery, the deck can host parties; where we can dance in the kitchen without fear of bumping into walls.

And so, these changes, an embarrassment of riches, fall through my fingers like the rainbow that greeted us at the Massachusetts border; gift upon gift upon gift. The little yellow house does, in its own way, return to us a beautiful October full of orange-turning trees,  giant stars, and the smell of petrichor so sweet it could bring a city girl to tears. And we begin again. Though we never ended. Again. A full rotation on its axis. Spinning madly on. Right back to October. And onward, now.