Dollar Tree Millionaire

On birthday money, plastic Halloween cups, and the richest person I know

Holden got $20 from my aunt for his birthday a few weeks back. For three days, he asked me to take him to the Dollar Tree.

Three. Days.

Apparently, $20 cannot simply sit in the possession of an eight-year-old. It develops an expiration date.

I finally relented.

Naturally, we went to the toy aisle first.

Then we wandered around the store looking at random things. Then we went back to the toy aisle, because apparently the inventory may have changed dramatically in the three minutes since our first visit.

Eventually, we wandered over to the seasonal stuff. I picked up a four-pack of plastic Halloween cups and looked at them for the new house.

“Do you want me to get that for you, Mom?”

I looked at him.

“Yes. Thanks. That’s nice of you.”

“You’re welcome. How much is it?”

“A dollar.”

He considered this.

“Oh. That’s a good deal for a dollar.”

And just like that, the eight-year-old who had spent three days lobbying for access to his birthday money was apparently now my financial advisor.

Then he started looking around.

“Do you see any other cups you need?”

A few seconds later: “Do you need any of these lotions or anything for the new house?”

Then: “Let me know if you need anything. I have so much money.”

He had twenty dollars. Twenty dollars, and suddenly he was prepared to bankroll the household.

I laughed, because of course I did.

But underneath the ridiculousness of Holden believing he had recently acquired generational wealth was something so completely him that it almost hurt.

He had waited three days to go spend his birthday money. It was his.

He could buy toys. Candy. Some completely inexplicable Dollar Tree object that would be abandoned in his bedroom by Thursday.

And still, while we were walking through that store, he was thinking about me.

About our house.

About whether I needed cups.

Or lotion.

Or apparently anything else his vast financial empire could provide.

That is Holden.

He gives things away constantly. Food. Toys. Money. Affection. Compliments. Whatever he has, his instinct is to share it.

There is no calculation behind it. No pause to figure out whether giving something away means there will be less for him. He just sees someone he loves and thinks, Do you need anything?

I have known adults with considerably more than twenty dollars who have never learned how to do that.

Holden has always seemed to operate from the assumption that if he has something, there is probably enough of it to go around.

On the second day of third grade, he brought gemstones to his teacher, simply because she didn't have any and he has a whole collection.

He once started taking custom orders at school for 3D prints and somehow ended up making something for nearly everyone in his class, whether they were his friends or not. He even included the teacher. This was especially ambitious considering Holden does not own a 3D printer. Caleb does, which apparently made him the unpaid manufacturing department.

That generosity follows him outside the classroom, too.

At the book fair last year, he used some of his leftover money to help another kid buy a book. Then he bought pens for a friend and for his brother.

The other night, I watched him offer one of his chicken wings to my dad. This may not sound like a significant act of generosity until you understand that Holden loves chicken wings with the intensity most people reserve for their children.

Sometimes, though, that instinct to give people something extends beyond things.

Last year one afternoon, he came out of school at pickup visibly upset. A kid he had already been having trouble with had been making fun of him again.

As he told me what happened, he said something that broke my heart.

He had been trying to be nice to the kid anyway. He had handed him something, some little thing he thought the kid might like, because he hoped maybe kindness would make the kid like him.

The kid ripped it up.

I remember picturing that scene and feeling almost sick. Holden, still trying to offer something good to someone who had already hurt him, and this other child destroying it in front of him.

There are moments when his softness scares me a little.

Because kindness does not always get rewarded. Sometimes you give someone your chicken wing and they appreciate it. Sometimes you give someone your kindness and they use it against you. He does not really know that yet.

Or maybe he does, a little, and keeps offering it anyway.

Either way, his first instinct is almost always the same: What do I have that I can give you?

Eventually, he did buy things for himself at the dollar store. A toy car. Two building kits. Very reasonable purchases for a newly wealthy eight-year-old.

When we got home, he had six dollars left. I told him to keep it somewhere safe. He pondered it.

“I need a wallet,” he declared.

“That’s a good idea. I’ll order you one.”

“I’ll give you the money for it when you do.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve got it.”

“But I know you’re saving money for the new house.”

And there it was again.

Six dollars left, and he was still thinking about what I needed.

He had already offered to buy me cups. He had wandered around Dollar Tree asking whether I needed lotion or anything else for the house. And now, he was offering what remained of his birthday money because he was worried that buying him a wallet might interfere with my savings.

He is eight.

He does not understand mortgages or closing costs or any of the thousand little expenses involved in buying a house. He just knows I am saving money for our home.

I don’t think he understands how much I have thought about that money, or how many numbers have followed me through this entire process. He doesn’t know what I have calculated and recalculated, what I have worried about spending, or how many times I have wondered whether I can really pull all of this off.

What he understands is much simpler: there is a house we are trying to make ours, Mom is saving money for it, and he wants to help however he can.

So, naturally, his six dollars should pay for his wallet and mine should stay in the bank.

By the end of the day, he had spent most of his birthday money on himself, exactly as he should have. But the thing I kept thinking about was the dollar he had spent on me.

I came home with four plastic Halloween cups purchased by a tiny benefactor who had recently come into money.

They cost him one dollar.

They are probably worth approximately one dollar.

But I already know I will keep them far longer than any reasonable person should.

Because someday he will be older. Twenty dollars will not feel like a fortune. Buying his mother plastic cups will probably not feel like an exciting use of his money.

But right now, he is eight years old, unimaginably wealthy, and walking through Dollar Tree asking me what else I need.

I hope some part of him stays that rich forever.

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Nonstop to Nowhere (Modern Courtship)

On pilots, premature weekend plans, and the fastest relationship I never had

September 2026 · Somewhere between "hello sexy lady" and an entire imaginary long weekend

MODERN COURTSHIP · THE SERIES

True stories from dating apps, awkward encounters, and the absurdities of modern dating.

I matched with an Australian pilot on Facebook Dating. His opening message was, “Hello sexy lady.”

So naturally, I was suspicious immediately. Not alarmed. Just skeptical. There is a particular kind of man who arrives in a conversation already acting as though the two of you have history, and this one came in at cruising altitude.

Within a few messages, he asked where I had been hiding all this time. Then he called me babe. Then he asked for my number because texting would be easier. Then he asked if I had WhatsApp.

Of course he did.

By then, I was already fairly certain he would disappear by the next day. He was too smooth, too familiar, too much too quickly. I did not think I had stumbled into an international love story. I did, however, think I had stumbled into something extremely entertaining.

So I kept answering.

A few minutes after we moved to text, he opened with, “Hello girlfriend.” We had known each other for approximately the length of a commercial break.

Then he asked if I missed him.

“For sure! Been a rough few minutes since we last spoke,” I told him.

He sent a giant heart emoji.

This was going beautifully.

He told me he lived near Philadelphia, had flown into Rochester the night before, and could come see me anytime.

“I’ll come pick you up and steal you away.”

Again, I was not swooning. I was mostly fascinated by the confidence of a man who had known me for fifteen minutes and was already speaking as though we had a joint calendar.

We talked about dating for a while. He announced that physical attraction was probably the most important thing to him. I told him attraction mattered, obviously, but communication and a sense of humor mattered a lot to me too.

This difference in priorities would ultimately prove irrelevant, since we were apparently already several dates into a relationship that had existed for less than an hour. I did, at least, confirm one thing: he really was a pilot. I looked him up using his phone number, and that part checked out.

So the man was real. The relationship was where things got fictional.

At one point, he described himself as “too spicy and too fast.” That was probably the most accurate thing he said all night.

Then he asked: “So when do I get to have you in my arms?”

I asked if he had been in Rochester for work. Yes, he said, but because he was a pilot, it would be easy for him to come see me. He could fly in on his days off.

I told him most of my free time was on weekends because that was when my kids were with their dad.

He immediately had a plan: “Hmm let’s plan for a weekend then.”

Okay.

Then: “Friday night to Monday morning!!”

I stared at my phone.

Friday to Monday.

This man had not yet spent one single minute physically in my presence, and apparently we had skipped dinner and gone directly to a three-night stay.

“Friday to Monday?! 😂 You haven’t met me yet. Let’s see if you survive a first date first. You may think I’m weird.”

He was undeterred.

At one point, he gave me a checklist of what he wanted in a woman, which was apparently mostly variations on "be hot."

“That is… quite the checklist,” I told him. “Good thing you’re being evaluated too.”

He informed me that he was “the most beautiful man in Philly.”

Good to know.

By this point, we were no longer having anything resembling a normal dating conversation. We were participating in some kind of speed-run relationship simulation, and I was sticking around largely because I wanted to see how much further he could get before bedtime.

Eventually, he sent me a video from the cockpit while heading to Roanoke.

Again: actual pilot.

He asked if I was going to sleep.

I said yes.

“Oh so by the time I reach the hotel you’ll be asleep.”

We had now reached the stage of our relationship where my bedtime was apparently relevant to his hotel arrival.

We had still never met.

The whole thing was so absurd that I never believed any of it. Not the “babe.” Not the “girlfriend.” Not the idea that this stranger was actually preparing to fly into town and spend Friday through Monday with me.

I already knew how this story ended. I was not wondering whether he would disappear. I was mostly wondering whether he would make it to morning.

So I went to sleep.

And the next day:

Nothing.

No pilot.

No “hello girlfriend.”

No discussion of Friday night.

Absolutely no Monday morning.

Our entire relationship had managed to go from hello sexy lady to a three-night weekend and back to complete strangers in less time than it takes to book a flight.

Turns out the only nonstop service he was offering was straight from “girlfriend” to gone.

Actual screenshots

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The Grief Inside of Good

On endings, beginnings, and the grief that can live beside joy

Lately, almost everything in my life has been moving in the direction I wanted.

I got a promotion. I bought a house. I am building a life that feels more stable, more independent, more mine. This is what I wanted.

And still, there is grief in it.

That surprised me.

I think I expected good change to feel clean. Relief. Excitement. Pride. Maybe a little fear, because change is change, but mostly forward motion.

I did not expect to look at the life I was leaving and feel sad.

Not because I want it back. That is an important distinction.

I do not want to undo the divorce. I do not want to move backward professionally. I do not want to give up the house. I do not want to return to the version of myself who was waiting for someone else to help decide what came next.

But there are pieces of those old lives I still have to lose. And apparently, knowing you are ready to lose something does not mean you stop grieving it.

For the last two years, my parents’ house has been crowded. Too crowded, sometimes. Holden and I have shared a bedroom. My things have lived in places that were never really meant for them. There has been too much noise, too little privacy, and not enough room for all of us to fully spread out.

I have wanted my own house for a long time. My own bedroom. My own kitchen. My own routines. My own space.

And now that I am getting it, I keep noticing all the things that will disappear with the inconvenience.

The sound of someone else moving around in the living room. My dad being nearby. My mom knowing what the boys are doing without me having to explain it. Holden sleeping across the room. The strange little ecosystem we built because none of us had much choice.

I am leaving because I am ready.

I am still leaving something.

That is the part I did not expect.

I think good change has a way of making the old life look different right before you leave it. Things that irritated you become details. Things you complained about become familiar. Things you were desperate to escape suddenly become the things you know by heart.

That has happened with work too.

I wanted the promotion. I needed the change. I knew I had outgrown the job I was in, and I knew I wanted more responsibility, more money, more movement. But leaving still meant walking away from routines I knew, people I saw every day, and a version of myself that had finally figured out how to do that job well.

There was grief in that, too. Not because it was right to stay, but because leaving something familiar always asks you to give up the comfort of knowing exactly where you fit.

And now there is the town.

The place where I grew up. The place where my boys have grown up too. The roads I can drive without thinking. The stores, schools, parks, houses, shortcuts, and landmarks that have formed the background of our lives for years.

I am not moving across the country. I know that. But I am still leaving the place that has always been home.

That feels bigger than I expected.

There is something strange about choosing a new home while realizing that the old one was not just a house. It was geography. Familiarity. History. The place where nearly every version of me has existed.

And now I am leaving that, too.

Soon, I will have exactly what I wanted. There will be more space. More quiet. More privacy. I will decide what goes where. I will turn the lights off when I want. I will play music when I feel like it. I will buy the dishes and the garbage cans and the ridiculous little things that make a house ours.

And I am excited. Really excited.

But excitement and grief are apparently capable of occupying the same room. And that feels unfair somehow.

I thought grief belonged to bad things. Endings you did not choose. People you lost. Lives that were taken from you. I did not understand that you can grieve a life you are choosing to leave.

You can grieve something and still know you have outgrown it. You can miss something and still know you do not belong there anymore. You can look forward to what is next and still turn around for one last look.

Maybe that is what change actually asks of us.

Not to stop loving what was. Not to pretend the old life meant nothing just because the new one fits better. Just to carry some of it with us.

I think that is what I am doing now.

I am carrying the years that were messy and cramped and temporary. The jobs I outgrew. The streets I knew by heart. The house that never quite fit us. The years when the boys were younger. The years when I did not yet know where we would end up. I am carrying the version of me who was still scared. Still waiting. Still trying.

She is not coming with me in exactly the same form.

But she got me here.

Maybe that is why the grief feels strange. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is being taken from me. I am not losing the life I wanted. I am finally getting it.

But every beginning still closes something behind it.

And sometimes, you can be ready for what comes next but still ache for what came before.

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The Life I Made

On independence, uncertainty, and building what came next

Soon, my boys and I are going to move into our house.

I keep saying things like that lately. Our house. The boys’ rooms. Our backyard. Our kitchen. Normal words. Words people say every day without thinking much about them.

But sometimes I hear myself say them and realize what they mean.

I did this.

Not alone. I have had help, and plenty of it. My parents have given the boys and me a place to land for years. There have been people who encouraged me, answered questions, drove beside me, helped me figure things out. But the decisions that brought us here were mine.

That is still strange for me to say.

For a long time after my marriage ended, most of my life felt reactive. Something happened, and I figured out what to do next. There were custody schedules to understand. Bills that still needed to be paid. A career that no longer fit quite the way it once had. Debt. Savings. Insurance. School forms. Appointments. Decisions that used to belong to two adults and suddenly belonged to me.

I did not feel particularly independent.

I felt responsible.

There is a difference. Independence sounds confident. Intentional. Maybe even glamorous.

Responsibility looks more like sitting at a kitchen table with a calculator, wondering whether something fits into the budget. It looks like checking your bank account again even though you checked it three hours ago. It looks like filling out forms you do not completely understand and calling someone to ask what box you are supposed to check. It looks like making a decision and then immediately wondering whether you made the wrong one.

I did a lot of that.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. I stopped merely figuring out what came next. I started deciding what I wanted next.

I changed jobs.

Then I changed jobs again.

I worked on my finances. I paid things down. I saved money. I watched my credit improve. I learned how much everything costs and how quickly a perfectly reasonable budget can be destroyed by something stupid. I made spreadsheets. So many spreadsheets. I made plans and changed them and recalculated them and made new ones.

I learned that being the person in charge does not necessarily mean feeling like the person in charge. Sometimes it just means everyone is waiting for your answer.

And I started giving one.

Not always confidently. Not always quickly. Probably not always correctly. But I gave one.

That may be one of the biggest changes in me.

For years, I was used to imagining adulthood as something built with another person. There would be two incomes. Two opinions. Two names attached to the big decisions. Even after my marriage ended, I think part of me continued to picture the next version of my life that way. Eventually, someone else would arrive. Then we would build.

Instead, I started building before anyone arrived.

That was not some declaration of fierce independence. I did not wake up one morning, dramatically announce that I needed no one, and march into the future. I was scared.

I still am.

I just kept making decisions anyway.

The biggest one became the house.

Buying a home by myself had lived in the category of things I wanted but was not entirely convinced I could actually do. But I decided to try. There was the application. The paperwork. The income calculations. The numbers. The certificate. And suddenly the hypothetical life I had been imagining came with an actual dollar amount attached to it.

So I started driving. Town after town across all of Western New York. The boys in the car. My phone giving directions. Me calculating commute times, taxes, payments, repairs, and whether I could picture us living on another unfamiliar street.

I walked through houses that briefly became possible futures. I made offers. I lost them. I made another one. I lost that too.

There were moments when the whole process felt absurd. I would let myself imagine bedrooms and kitchens and where the Christmas tree might go, only to find out that someone else had imagined harder or offered more money.

Then I would open another listing. Get back in the car. Drive again.

Eventually, we walked into North Street. And something about it felt different. The kitchen. The old phone on the wall. The hardwood upstairs. The deck. The bedrooms. The odd little details that made it feel less like a listing and more like a place where I could see us.

I wanted it.

That was terrifying, too. Wanting something means accepting that you might not get it. But I made the offer anyway.

And this time, they said yes.

That was not the end of the fear. If anything, buying a house has introduced entirely new categories of things to worry about. Inspections. Repairs. Insurance. Taxes. Sewer bills. Garbage tags. Boilers. Outlets. Closing costs. Things I did not know existed six months ago and now apparently have opinions about.

But underneath all of that anxiety is something else.

Recognition.

The house is something I can point to. That is why it affects me so much. It is physical evidence of years of decisions that rarely felt important while I was making them. The job applications. The budgets. The money I did not spend. The debt I paid. The savings account I kept adding to. The houses I lost. The offers I made anyway. The times I had no idea whether I was doing the right thing but understood that doing nothing was a decision too.

All of it led somewhere.

Soon, I am going to unlock the front door of a house I bought. My boys are going to walk inside. Caleb will almost certainly start determining where every piece of technology belongs. Holden will probably declare ownership of something within thirty seconds. There will be shoes in the wrong place and somebody shouting to me from another room. There will be groceries to carry in and laundry to do and mornings when we are late. There will be Christmases and birthdays and sick days and completely unremarkable Tuesdays.

There will be bills. A lot of bills.

And there will be a life there.

Our life.

The difference now is that I no longer see that life as something that simply happened after the one I lost. I see the choices that made it possible.

I see the woman who kept going to work and saving and calculating and trying again. I see the person who learned how to make decisions without waiting for somebody else to make them with her. I see all the moments when I thought I was merely getting through something.

I was building.

That is the part I did not understand while it was happening.

I thought rebuilding my life would eventually lead to some dramatic moment when everything felt settled and I would finally know I had made it to the other side. Instead, it happened gradually.

One decision. Then another. Then another. Until eventually there was a job I chose, money I saved, a house under contract, two boys planning their rooms, a future that no longer felt theoretical.

This is not the life I expected. It is not the life I spent years trying to get back to. It is the life I made.

Not perfectly. Not fearlessly. Not without help. But deliberately.

And soon, when I unlock that door and the three of us walk inside, I will not be stepping into the life that replaced the one I lost.

I will be stepping into the one I built.

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The Pizza Lottery (One Minute Memoir)

A Memoir on Surprise Bags, Parking-Lot Reveals, and Five-Dollar Victories

Setting: July 2026 — Somewhere between bargain hunting and winning dinner

A Facebook friend posted about an app called Too Good To Go.

The idea was simple: restaurants and stores could sell food they had left at the end of the day instead of throwing it away. You paid a few dollars for a “surprise bag,” showed up during the pickup window, and found out what you got.

This immediately appealed to me. Mostly because I like surprises. So I downloaded the app and started checking what was available near us.

The answer was: not much. Some places had pickup times late at night, right before closing. Others gave you a thirty-minute window that somehow managed to be the exact thirty minutes I would never be available. Then one evening, I spotted a deal from the Pizza Hut in the next town over. The surprise bag was $4.99, and pickup started at six with a generously large pickup window.

Finally.

I had no idea what we would get. A few leftover slices? Some breadsticks? A pizza nobody had picked up? Whatever. For five bucks, Holden and I were willing to gamble. We got in the car and headed over.

When we arrived, I told them we were there for a Too Good To Go order.

“It’s not ready yet.”

This confused me. Wasn’t the entire point that this was food they already had? Apparently, our leftovers were still being prepared.

So Holden and I sat down at one of the tables to wait.

And waited.

He got increasingly impatient and started entertaining himself with the cheap table decorations while several other people walked in and announced that they, too, were there for Too Good To Go. Suddenly, this was less of a bargain pickup and more of a secret pizza club.

Eventually, they called my name.

We grabbed the boxes, headed straight for the car, and immediately opened them because obviously we were not driving all the way home without knowing what we had won.

A freshly made pepperoni pizza and a fresh order of breadsticks (Caleb’s favorite).

For $4.99.

Holden and I stared at our haul like we had just pulled off something illegal. We drove home ridiculously pleased with ourselves, carrying an entire dinner that had cost less than most fast-food meals.

The next week, we did it again.

Same exact haul.

For $4.99.

Frankly, it felt irresponsible not to.

This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.

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The Boring Parts

On trash tags, internet service, and the life becoming real

I expected the meaningful parts of buying a house to be obvious. The accepted offer. The inspection. The moment I walked into the kitchen and thought, This is supposed to be ours.

I did not expect to feel something while researching garbage bags. And yet, lately, that is where this new life keeps showing up for me: in the most boring possible details.

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to figure out how garbage pickup works in LeRoy. Not exactly the stuff of homeownership dreams. I discovered there are bag tags that you purchase from the store and each one goes on a 30-gallon bag. When it's time for garbage pickup, you place your bag(s) at the curb, and that's it. No monthly charge like I'm used to. However, because I am me, this system immediately sent me into a series of questions about what kind of outdoor garbage can I should buy, whether a 30-gallon flex bag would fit properly inside a square can, and whether I was supposed to put my household garbage into smaller bags first and then transfer everything into the tagged one.

This is apparently who I am now: a woman with opinions about municipal trash systems.

Then there was the internet. I wanted Greenlight. Of course I did. So I started checking coverage. Greenlight. Empire. Frontier. Plans. Speeds. Prices. Whether this specific house on this specific street could get the internet service I wanted.

Then I found out I would have a sewer bill.

I have never had a sewer bill. Add that to the list of things no one puts on the inspirational Pinterest board about buying a house after divorce.

There are so many things I have spent years imagining about having a home again. I imagined bedrooms for the boys. A place for my books. A kitchen that would belong to us. A deck out back. A yard. Hardwood floors. A dining room. The possibility of turning one of the bedrooms into a library because I might actually have a room to spare.

I imagined walking through the door and knowing I did not have to leave. I imagined the emotional parts.

I did not imagine researching where to buy garbage tags. Or comparing silverware sets. Or dish sets. Or drinking glasses.

But lately, I have been doing all of that, too.

I have been looking at plates and bowls and forks and glasses and towels and kitchen tools, all the things that somehow have to exist before a house can really function as a home. None of it feels dramatic when you look at it one thing at a time. It is silverware. It is plates. It is cups.

But they are not really random purchases.

They are the forks the boys will use to eat ramen. The plates we will stack in our cabinets. The glasses we will reach for without thinking. The things that will slowly stop feeling new because they will become part of our everyday life.

I had not thought about how emotional it could be to choose something as boring as silverware.

But maybe that is the point. Because lately, I am not just imagining a house anymore. I am preparing to live there.

I have looked up the library. I have searched for the closest McDonald’s, because apparently some things are nonnegotiable. I am figuring out where I will grocery shop.

I want to know which restaurants are good. Which places we will try first. Which takeout place will eventually know our order. Where we will go when nobody wants to cook. Where I will stop on the way home because we are somehow out of food again.

I am beginning to learn the map of a place that has never been mine before.

That part feels especially strange.

I have lived in the same town my entire life. I do not have to think about where things are here. I know which roads connect to which roads. I know where to get groceries and where to pick up dinner and how long it takes to get almost anywhere. I know the shortcuts without thinking about them.

There is a familiarity that comes from spending your whole life in one place. Eventually, you stop noticing how much you know.

Now I am starting over somewhere else. Not far away. But new.

A new town. A new grocery store. A new library. New restaurants. A new route home from work. A new place to pick up prescriptions and buy birthday cards and run out for ramen. A new McDonald’s handing me the Diet Coke I will inevitably order far too often.

There is something unexpectedly emotional about all of it.

Not because I have always dreamed of learning LeRoy’s garbage system. I have not.

But because you do not research these things for a life you are only fantasizing about. You research them for a life you are preparing to live.

That is what feels different now.

For so long, home was hypothetical. I looked at listings. I calculated taxes. I checked commute times. I walked through houses and tried to picture us inside them. I imagined where furniture might go and whether the boys would like their rooms and whether a kitchen could become ours. Then I would leave.

Sometimes I would make an offer. Sometimes I would picture an entire future there... and then someone else would get it.

So I learned, at least a little, not to get too far ahead of myself.

But now there is an accepted offer. There has been an inspection. People are talking about appraisals and mortgage commitments and closing.

And somehow the thing making it feel most real is not any of that.

It is realizing I need to figure out where people in LeRoy buy their groceries. It is discovering how the village handles trash. It is wondering whether the internet will be fast enough. It is looking up the library because soon it will be our library. It is searching the distance to McDonald’s because soon there will be a particular road I take when we want fries and another Diet Coke.

It is choosing the dishes we will eat from and the glasses that will sit in our cabinets.

These things feel mundane because they are mundane.

That is exactly what makes them matter.

A fantasy is made of big moments. A life is made of all the things that come after them.

Garbage going to the curb. Dinner picked up on the way home. A library book due tomorrow. A grocery list stuck somewhere in the kitchen. Blasting our music on the Echo. Someone asking whether the internet is down. Leaving. Coming back. Unlocking the same front door every time.

For so long, this life existed in pieces I could picture. A kitchen. Bedrooms. Books on shelves. The boys running through the house. Now I am learning the garbage rules and comparing internet plans and figuring out where we will buy groceries. I am choosing forks and plates and glasses for ordinary dinners that have not happened yet. It is not a fantasy anymore.

It is becoming our life. And for the first time in a long time, I am not waiting for that life to begin.

I am stepping inside it.

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