First Date, Wild Animals (Modern Courtship)

On first dates, bison saliva, and an entirely one-sided affection for emus

September 2026 · Somewhere between lunch and being assaulted by wildlife

MODERN COURTSHIP · THE SERIES

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

I had always wanted to go to Hidden Valley Animal Adventure.

It was one of those places I had known about for years but somehow never made it to, a safari park where you drive your own car through acres of roaming animals, buy a bucket of food, and let things like bison and alpacas wander right up to your window.

Apparently, this sounded fun to me.

So when I was making plans for a first date with a man who lived far enough away that we decided to meet somewhere in the middle, I started Googling things to do near our chosen lunch spot. Hidden Valley came up.

Perfect.

I had wanted to go for years. We needed something to do besides eat lunch and stare at each other across a table. He was game. This seemed like an excellent first-date idea.

It was, in fact, an excellent first-date idea. Just perhaps not for the reasons I had anticipated.

After a perfectly normal lunch, we headed over to begin our adventure. It was quite an operation. We drove up to where you purchase tickets, signed some sort of waiver, then bought a bucket of animal food and drove through the gates in his car. Almost immediately, we were surrounded by bison.

Not a bison.

Bison. Plural.

A herd of enormous, lumbering creatures crowded around the car and stood directly in the road, apparently operating under the assumption that we had arrived specifically to feed them.

They were correct.

I rolled down my window.

My date did not.

This would prove to be one of the smarter decisions made that afternoon.

One particularly aggressive bison shoved its enormous head into my open window and discovered the bucket of food in my hands. I tried to give it some but the bison had a different understanding of portion control. It went for essentially the entire bucket.

I tried to pull it away because there were other animals to feed. This felt reasonable to me. We had purchased one bucket for the entire safari, and I believed strongly in equitable distribution.

The bison did not.

It was also much stronger than I was.

Within seconds, it had eaten an offensive percentage of our food, and my hand was covered in bison slobber. My date remained safely on his side of the car with his window closed. I was beginning to understand why.

Unfortunately, feeding the bison did not make the bison leave. They stayed in the road.

One began rubbing its head against the hood of the car. Another managed to scratch the car with its horn. At some point, one of the enormous creatures bumped into us hard enough that we could feel the car shake.

This was his car.

It had also been my idea to come here.

First dates are already awkward enough without having to sit beside a man you’ve barely met while a wild animal damages his vehicle. It gets considerably more awkward when the man beside you seems significantly less delighted by the whole experience than you are.

I was beginning to suspect I had chosen poorly when I suggested this place. But eventually, the herd released us.

Next came the alpacas. I love alpacas.

One walked over to my window, and I fed it without incident. It was gentle. It was adorable. It did not attempt to steal the entire bucket or damage the car. This restored my confidence around animals far more than it should have.

We continued through the park. There were more enormous horned animals. There were Highland cow babies, who were considerably cuter. There were emus wandering around. Eventually, we made it through the drive with his car still intact, although it was now absolutely covered in mud and had acquired at least one souvenir from a bison horn.

We also had tickets to the petting zoo.

There were goats. Camels we couldn’t touch. Kangaroos lounging around, also unavailable for touching.

And then I saw the emus.

I have always liked emus. I don’t know why. They’re enormous, strange-looking birds with ridiculous legs and the general appearance of something evolution started making and then got distracted halfway through. Naturally, I wanted to pet one.

I walked over to the fence. An emu walked over too. This felt promising. I slowly held out my hand toward its head. For one beautiful second, I believed I was about to have a meaningful connection with an emu.

The emu bit me.

Not hard enough to do any real damage. Just hard enough to make its position on our relationship perfectly clear.

After years of wanting to visit Hidden Valley, I had finally made it there. I had been robbed by a bison. My hand had been covered in slobber. My date’s car had been scratched with a horn and covered in mud. We had been temporarily held hostage by several thousand pounds of livestock.

And an emu I had admired on sight had responded to my affection with violence.

It was certainly not the first date I had pictured when I suggested we spend the afternoon feeding animals. But it was considerably more memorable than lunch.

And I learned something important that day. Sometimes an animal walks toward you because it likes you. Sometimes it walks toward you because you have food.

And sometimes it walks toward you because you have very helpfully placed your hand within biting distance.

Actual photos I took

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The Phone on the Wall

On old houses, inherited lives, and deciding what gets to stay

“Look!” Holden said when we first walked into the kitchen while touring the house on North Street. “They have one of those old phones.”

There is, in fact, a phone attached to the wall in the kitchen.

An actual phone.

Not a decorative vintage phone someone found at an antique store and mounted there for character. Not a reproduction designed to make a new kitchen look old. A real, wired telephone from an era when people stood in kitchens twisting cords around their fingers while they talked.

It is still there.

Decades passed. The people who lived there grew older. Their children grew up. The world moved on to cordless phones, flip phones, smartphones, and tiny computers we carry around all day because apparently none of us should ever be unreachable again.

And somehow, the phone stayed on the wall.

Of course Holden noticed it. To him, it was practically an artifact. Something from a different time, strange enough to point out immediately. To me, it made me wonder how many conversations had happened there.

Who answered it?

Who called?

Did teenagers stretch the cord as far as it would go so they could whisper around the corner? Did someone stand there getting good news? Bad news? Did a mother talk to one of her kids while making dinner? Did somebody ever slam the receiver down dramatically?

I have no idea.

It is just an old phone.

But old houses make you think about things like that.

A new house begins with you. An old one has already been somebody else’s. And this house had a lot of somebody elses. Six kids grew up there.

By the time we walked through it, they were grown, but their lives were still everywhere. The rooms were filled with furniture. Coats hung where coats had probably been hanging for years. Shirts were still there. Closets and corners and surfaces carried the ordinary remnants of people who had spent a long time calling this place home.

It did not feel empty.

It felt lived in.

There was so much old beautiful furniture still in place that it was sometimes difficult to imagine what the rooms would look like empty. But I also liked that about it. The house was not pretending to be a blank slate for me.

It had already been a family home.

There had already been birthdays here. Christmas mornings. Ordinary Wednesdays. Arguments. Dinners. Sick days. Six kids running up the stairs. Laundry being carried back down them. Someone choosing the carpet. Someone planting something in the yard. Someone standing in that kitchen and deciding exactly where the phone should go.

Long before I stood there imagining our life, someone else had already built one. I think there is something important about honoring that.

This house was theirs first.

It does not become more ours by pretending that it wasn’t. If anything, I like knowing that it was loved before us. I like knowing that other children grew up in these rooms before mine ever will. That another family filled the house so completely that even after the kids were grown, traces of them were still there.

Later, my real estate agent sent me the deed.

It was dated 1964, typed on a typewriter in that unmistakable old-fashioned format, with uneven letters and formal language from another era altogether. I do not know why, exactly, but seeing it hit me. Suddenly, the history of the house was tangible.

This had once been someone else’s beginning, too.

I thought about the words from the listing: “Cherished for over 60 years, this lovely village home has been the site of many happy memories.” I had read that before. I had thought it was lovely then. But with that old deed in front of me, I understood it differently. Somehow, seeing those two things together made the handoff feel real.

This had been someone else's home for decades. A place where children grew up, where ordinary days accumulated into years, where memories became attached to rooms and walls and routines.

And now, after all that time, it was finally being let go.

There was something unexpectedly sad about that.

Because for us, this house is a beginning. For someone else, it is the closing of a chapter that lasted most of a lifetime.

I think that is why it feels like such an honor and a privilege to be the family on the other side of that handoff. We are not just buying walls and floors and rooms. We are receiving a place that mattered deeply before we ever knew it existed.

That old piece of paper once marked the beginning of their life here. Soon, a new one will mark the beginning of ours.

And now, we get to become the next layer.

That is strange to think about.

For most of this year, I have been trying to start over. New job. New routines. New possibilities. A new home. I think I imagined starting over as something clean. Blank. Untouched. A fresh page waiting for me to decide what belonged on it. 

Instead, I fell in love with an old house.

One with hardwood floors hiding beneath carpet in places. A boiler instead of a furnace. A refrigerator tucked into its own little alcove. A yard and a deck and rooms that have already lived several lives before I ever stepped inside them.

And a useless phone attached to the kitchen wall.

Apparently starting over does not always mean starting from nothing. Sometimes it means walking into something that already has a history and deciding what happens next.

That idea feels familiar.

There are plenty of things I have carried forward from older versions of my life. Some were worth keeping. Some needed repairs. Some stopped working years ago and I kept them around anyway. Ideas about what a family was supposed to look like. Relationships I held onto after they had stopped being good for me. Versions of myself I thought I was obligated to remain because they had once made sense.

This year has involved a lot of looking at what is already there and asking a question that sounds deceptively simple: Does this still belong in my life?

Sometimes the answer has been no, even when letting go hurt. Sometimes the answer has been yes, even if it no longer looks the way it once did.

And sometimes the answer has apparently been: this is completely obsolete, serves virtually no purpose, and yet I kind of love it.

I don’t know what I am going to do with the phone.

Maybe I’ll take it down.

Maybe I’ll eventually redo the kitchen and there will be no sensible reason for it to remain.

Or maybe I will leave it there. I like the idea that not everything has to be erased just because someone new has arrived.

Once this house becomes ours, we won’t be beginning its story.

We will be joining it.

The boys will leave backpacks somewhere they are not supposed to. I’ll play music while I’m making dinner. Someone will complain that there is nothing to eat while standing three feet away from an entire refrigerator. There will be holidays and homework and ordinary Tuesday nights. We will argue and laugh and run late and lose things.

Slowly, the house will begin collecting evidence of us. Our pictures. Our furniture. Our noises. Our routines. Our stories.

And one day, maybe the old phone on the wall will stop looking like something left behind by the people who lived there before us. Maybe it will simply become one of the strange little things that has always been in our kitchen.

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The Candy Divide (One Minute Memoir)

A Memoir on Halloween Traditions, Chocolate Negotiations, and Two Very Different Boys

Setting: October 2026 — A cold and windy night, somewhere between inflatable costumes and Halloween candy

Every year, my mom and I take the boys to our town’s Halloween party and trunk-or-treat. This year, Caleb went as an inflatable Garfield, and Holden went as a giant inflatable dinosaur.

It was cold. It was windy. And apparently, inflatable costumes are not particularly well suited to either of those conditions.

Holden’s battery pack kept coming loose, causing his dinosaur to deflate at inconvenient intervals. One minute he was a towering orange reptile. The next, he was a small boy surrounded by an unreasonable amount of fabric.

Caleb, meanwhile, eventually decided he had spent enough time being Garfield. About halfway through the festivities, he took off the head and deflated the rest of the costume. Apparently, there is only so much time an eleven-year-old is willing to spend inside an enormous orange cat.

After an evening of battling the wind, malfunctioning dinosaur equipment, and Garfield’s early retirement, we finally headed home with our Halloween candy.

And that was when the boys demonstrated, in the span of about thirty seconds, exactly how different they are.

Caleb has never been a particularly big chocolate fan. So when we got home, I figured I might as well ask.

“Caleb, since you don’t like chocolate, can I have some of yours?”

He considered this.

“Well… I do kind of like chocolate. It’s not my favorite, but I’ll eat it.”

Of course he would.

This is Caleb. He is not especially interested in giving away something that belongs to him, even if that something is a candy he doesn’t particularly enjoy.

Before I could negotiate further, Holden, who had overheard the conversation, immediately spoke up.

“Mom, do you want some of my chocolate? Have as much as you want. Have it!”

I hadn’t even asked him.

And that is Holden.

The same boy who will offer you half his food, give away something he loves, or insist you take something simply because he thinks it might make you happy.

Caleb, meanwhile, had made a perfectly reasonable case for retaining ownership of his chocolate.

Neither response surprised me in the slightest.

These boys have been different from the beginning. Caleb is thoughtful, analytical, and fiercely protective of what belongs to him. Holden leads with his heart, often giving things away before he has even considered whether he might want them himself.

Same Halloween party. Same cold night. Same bags of candy. One boy explaining why he needed to keep his chocolate. The other practically begging me to take his.

And somehow, in one tiny exchange over Halloween candy, there they were.

Exactly who they’ve always been.

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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Turn It Up

On music, making noise, and the ordinary freedoms I forgot I missed

The other day, I thought about something I haven’t thought about in years.

A Bluetooth speaker in the bathroom.

When I still owned my first house, I had one sitting in there all the time. I would turn on music while I showered, while I did my hair, while I got ready for work. I sang along. Loudly, probably badly. I never thought much about it. It was just something I did in my house.

We had an Echo in the living room, too, per Caleb’s request. On weekends, I would put music on while I cleaned or did laundry or wandered around doing all the small things that fill up a Saturday.

Caleb was little then. A toddler. He had songs he liked. Songs he would recognize as soon as they came on. Songs that somehow became part of that particular version of our life.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in a very long time because I don’t do it anymore.

Living with my parents has given me a place to land, but it is still someone else’s house. There are other people on the other side of the bathroom wall. Someone might be watching television in the next room. Someone might be sleeping. Someone might simply not want to listen to whatever song I have decided needs to be performed at full volume before eight in the morning.

So somewhere along the way, I stopped. I shower. I get ready. I move through the house quietly.

It wasn’t a sacrifice I ever consciously made. There was no dramatic moment when I packed up a speaker and thought, Well, I guess this part of my life is over.

It just... disappeared.

That is the strange thing about losing your own space. Sometimes you don’t notice everything you have given up until you start imagining getting it back.

For months, I have thought about the obvious things that come with having a home again: bedrooms for the boys, a kitchen that belongs to us, a place for my books, a backyard, a dining room, a deck out back, a door I can close at night and know that everything on the other side of it is ours.

I have thought about furniture and dishes and towels and internet providers and garbage cans and all the hundreds of things required to build a household from almost nothing.

I had not thought about the music.

And then, once I did, I started thinking about all the other little things.

I used to buy candles just because I liked the way they smelled. I would light them in the evening, or plug in a wax warmer and let the whole house smell like something unnecessary and expensive. I don’t really do that anymore.

I used to stretch out on my own couch in the living room and watch whatever I wanted, for as long as I wanted, without feeling like I was occupying the main room of someone else’s house.

I used to go to bed in a T-shirt and no pants because I could walk from my bedroom to the bathroom without considering who I might run into.

That one feels particularly important.

None of these things sound like reasons to buy a house. They are not the things you put on a mortgage application. No one asks whether you qualify for thirty-three years of wax melts and pants-free sleeping.

But maybe this is what I have been missing more than I realized.

Not just privacy.

Permission.

Permission to light the candle. Turn up the music. Take over the couch. Walk around half-dressed. Leave something exactly where I put it because the space belongs to me.

The freedom to stop thinking about how I am existing inside someone else’s home.

And now that this house will soon become ours, I keep picturing the smallest things.

A speaker in the bathroom. Music playing while I stand under the shower. An Echo somewhere downstairs on a Saturday morning. The boys wandering in and out. Chores getting done. Someone complaining about my song choice. Someone else asking me to play theirs next.

Candles burning. Wax melting. A blanket on the couch. Me watching something terrible on television because nobody else gets a vote.

Ordinary things. Our things. Our noise.

And maybe that is one of the things I am most excited to get back.

Not just a house. Not just privacy.

The ability to exist without constantly measuring how much space I am taking up.

To turn something on without wondering if it is too loud. To stretch out on the couch without wondering if someone else wanted the room. To light something because I like the smell. To walk down the hallway in a T-shirt and underwear without staging an emergency evacuation plan.

To sing without remembering there are other people listening.

To make noise in my own life again.

Someday soon, I am going to put a speaker in that bathroom. I am going to turn on a song I love, stand under the shower, and sing along.

No one else will know that anything important is happening.

I will.

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The USDA Diaries (2): The Number Wasn't Really the Number

The Number Wasn’t Really the Number

On property taxes, moving price limits, and learning what my $262,740 preapproval actually meant

THE USDA DIARIES · PART TWO

New to the series? Read Part One: Applying for a USDA Direct Home Loan.

When I received my USDA Certificate of Eligibility, essentially my preapproval, there was one number on it that mattered more than any other:

$262,740.

I looked at that number and interpreted it in what seemed like the most logical possible way. I could buy a house that cost up to $262,740.

This was incorrect.

Not completely incorrect. But incorrect enough that within a few weeks I would have a spreadsheet, a working knowledge of property taxes in approximately half of Western New York, and the ability to look at a Zillow listing and immediately determine whether its tax bill was about to ruin my day.

Because with my USDA Direct loan, I quickly learned that the price of the house was only part of the equation.

The Fine Print on $262,740

My Certificate of Eligibility was based on assumptions. USDA had calculated that $262,740 maximum using estimated annual property taxes of $4,000 and homeowners insurance of about $900.

At first, I barely paid attention to that part. I was looking at the big number.

But USDA wasn't simply deciding how much money it was willing to lend me. It was determining how much total monthly housing expense I could afford. Principal and interest were part of that. So were property taxes and homeowners insurance.

Which meant that if the taxes on a house were higher than the amount USDA had assumed, more of my allowable monthly housing payment had to go toward taxes. And there was less left for the mortgage itself.

Suddenly, $262,740 was not really $262,740. It was $262,740 if I found a house with taxes around $4,000.

That last part turned out to matter quite a lot.

Welcome to House Hunting in New York

Property taxes vary wildly from one house to another here. I could find two houses listed for roughly the same price, only to discover that one had annual taxes of $4,000 and the other was pushing $7,000.

Under my USDA approval, those were not remotely equivalent houses.

As the taxes climbed, my maximum loan amount fell.

With taxes around $4,000, I could potentially use essentially my full $262,740 approval. Around $4,500, my rough maximum dropped to about $249,000. At $5,000, it was closer to $235,000. At $5,500, around $221,000. And by the time taxes reached $7,000, my estimated maximum was only around $179,000.

Same income. Same credit. Same borrower.

A difference of roughly $3,000 a year in property taxes could reduce the amount I could borrow by more than $80,000.

That was the moment Zillow became significantly more complicated.

A $240,000 House Could Be Cheaper Than a $210,000 House

This was probably the strangest adjustment for me.

I had always thought of a house's list price as the quickest way to determine whether I could afford it. If House A cost $210,000 and House B cost $240,000, obviously House A was the more affordable house.

Except now, not necessarily.

If the $210,000 house had very high property taxes and the $240,000 house had relatively low ones, USDA's calculation could make the more expensive house easier for me to qualify for.

So I stopped looking at listings in the normal order. Price. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Square footage. Cute porch.

Instead, somewhere very near the top became:

Taxes?

There were houses I could eliminate almost immediately without ever walking through the front door. Not because the asking price was too high, but because the taxes were. And there were more expensive houses I could consider specifically because their taxes were low enough to leave room in USDA's calculation for a larger mortgage.

It was deeply counterintuitive until I understood what USDA was actually calculating.

Samantha (USDA Specialist) Became My Calculator

Once I started seriously considering houses, I could send the property information to my USDA specialist, Samantha, and she could calculate my actual maximum loan amount for that particular house. That was enormously helpful because my spreadsheet (more below) was useful for screening, but it was never the official answer.

One house I considered in Hilton is a good example. It was listed for $189,900, with annual property taxes of about $4,754. When Samantha ran the actual numbers using those taxes and estimated homeowners insurance, my maximum loan amount for that property was approximately $241,500. Not $262,740.

Nothing about my financial situation had changed. USDA hadn't reduced my overall eligibility. The house simply had higher taxes than the assumptions used to calculate my original certificate.

And because we were house hunting in a competitive market where homes could sell substantially above list price, knowing that property-specific ceiling mattered. A house listed at $189,900 might technically fit my budget, but if bidding pushed it toward $250,000, the list price became irrelevant very quickly.

I needed to know where my ceiling was for that house.

Naturally, I Made a Spreadsheet

I did not want to email Samantha every time Zillow showed me a house with a front porch. There are limits to what another human being should have to endure.

So once she had run several examples for me, I started tracking the relationship between taxes and my maximum loan amount. It wasn't an official USDA calculator, and I never treated it as one. It was simply a screening tool.

My rough numbers looked something like this:

Annual Property Taxes	Approximate Maximum Loan
$4,000	$262,740
$4,250	$255,700
$4,500	$248,700
$4,750	$241,700
$5,000	$234,700
$5,250	$227,700
$5,500	$220,700
$5,750	$213,700
$6,000	$206,700
$6,250	$199,700
$6,500	$192,700
$7,000	$178,700
$7,500	$164,700

These were estimates based on the information USDA had given me and were specific to my financial situation. They were not universal USDA loan limits. But they were incredibly useful.

If I found a house listed for $235,000 with $6,000 in taxes, I knew before getting emotionally attached to the kitchen that it probably wasn't going to work. If I found one for $245,000 with taxes closer to $4,000, it might.

The spreadsheet saved me from wasting time on houses that were mathematically impossible and helped me recognize houses that were possibilities even when their asking prices initially made me nervous.

The Certificate Wasn’t Wrong

This is the distinction I wish I had understood immediately. My $262,740 Certificate of Eligibility wasn't misleading, and USDA hadn't given me an approval that disappeared as soon as I started shopping.

The number was based on a set of assumptions.

The actual house eventually had to fit inside those assumptions, or the calculation had to be adjusted to account for the house's real expenses. Once I understood that, the whole thing made much more sense.

My preapproval was not really saying:

You may buy any eligible house that costs $262,740 or less.

It was closer to:

Based on your finances and these estimated housing expenses, this is the maximum mortgage your budget could support. Now we need to see what the expenses are on the house you actually choose.

That is a much less exciting sentence to receive in a preapproval letter.

It is also much more accurate.

The Number Became a Moving Target

By the time I had been house hunting for a while, I stopped thinking of myself as preapproved for exactly $262,740. I was preapproved within a range that changed with the property. Every new listing had its own math.

How much are the taxes? What would insurance cost? What does that leave for principal and interest? How high could I actually go on this particular house?

It added another layer to an already complicated housing search, but eventually it became automatic. I would open a listing, look at the price, scroll down to the taxes, and mentally compare the two.

Sometimes a house that looked affordable wasn't. Sometimes a house that looked too expensive wasn't. And sometimes I would find a perfectly nice house, see the tax bill, close Zillow, and wish it well.

Because $262,740 was the number.

Except when it wasn't.

Because when it came to USDA Direct, there was no single number. There was only the number for that house.

I'm documenting my personal experience with the USDA Section 502 Direct Loan Program in New York in 2026. This is not financial, lending, or legal advice. Program rules, income limits, funding availability, payment assistance, processing times, and individual circumstances can change. Always verify current requirements directly with USDA Rural Development.

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The Shape Of Us

On family, traditions, and the places we belong

No one assigned seats at our dinner table. We just have them.

My dad sits at one end. Caleb sits at the other, closest to the outlet, because of course he does. There is almost always a laptop involved, and apparently dinner is no reason to risk falling below an acceptable battery percentage. My mom sits across from me and Holden. Holden sits beside me. Technically.

In reality, his chair somehow migrates closer to mine every single night until our elbows start colliding and I have to push him back toward his own place.

No one ever sat us down and decided any of this. It just happened. Over time, we found our spots.

This is the shape of us.

For the last couple of years, the five of us have lived on top of one another in a house that was never really meant to hold us all this way. My parents. Me. The boys. Bedrooms have been shared. Things have been stored wherever they fit. Privacy has become a relative concept. Dinner happens around the same table, in the same seats, night after night.

My mom usually cooks. Sometimes my dad grills, and Holden usually wants to help. There is often garlic bread because the kids love it, although this does not prevent them from complaining about whatever else is on the plate and then asking if they can have ramen instead.

Caleb will eat steak as often as anyone is willing to provide it. He sprinkles on a truly unreasonable amount of salt and will literally lick the plate clean.

Holden spends dinner asking everyone if he can try their food, even if he has eaten the exact same thing approximately seventy times before. Then, when he likes something, there is no subtlety about it.

He is all in.

He makes sounds. His eyes close. Butter drips down his chin. Barbecue sauce somehow ends up on his cheeks, his hands, and occasionally in places that seem physically impossible. Then he wipes those hands directly on his clothes despite years of being informed that his shirt is not, in fact, a napkin.

We watch him eat and laugh because there is really nothing else to do.

The boys always ask for ginger ale.

Always.

Some nights, dessert becomes part of the ritual too. Holden and I make brownies, or I throw pre-shaped cookie dough onto a tray so we can have warm cookies after dinner. We pass the plate around and negotiate over the last one.

For a while, I would sometimes bring Crumbl home from work, and we would all taste that week’s flavors and rank them like our opinions carried actual authority.

None of these things ever felt important enough to call traditions while they were happening.

They were just... things we did.

But that is probably how traditions begin.

Quietly. Accidentally. Repeated often enough that one day you realize they belong to a specific version of your life.

Some nights, dinner is terrible.

Someone is tired. Someone is complaining about the food. Someone gets snippy. The kids argue. An adult gets irritated. There are evenings when all five of us would probably be happier eating silently in separate rooms.

But there are other nights when we just laugh.

We have discussed 3D-printing concepts at that table. Holden has told wildly exaggerated stories about school. We have asked Caleb questions like who his favorite teacher is or what his favorite subject is, only to get the same offended response every time.

“Ugh! Why do you always have to ask me that?”

Caleb does not like choosing favorites. Apparently this is an unreasonable burden we continue placing on him.

These are the conversations that fill the space between bites. Nothing profound. Nothing anyone would think to write down while it is happening.

And soon, this arrangement is going to change.

That is one of the strangest things about buying the house. I have spent so much time thinking about what we are moving toward that I sometimes forget there is also something we are moving away from.

There will be a new table. New chairs. A different room. The boys and I will probably develop new assigned seats without ever assigning them. Caleb will almost certainly locate the nearest outlet. Holden will probably still inch his chair toward mine until I remind him that I need room to use my own arms.

Some things survive a change of address. But my parents will not be sitting across from us every night. My dad will not be at the other end. My mom will not be across from me.

And that is different.

For a long time, I thought of this living arrangement as temporary. Something we were doing until I could get somewhere else. Until I saved enough. Until I found the house. Until the next part started.

And it was temporary.

But temporary does not mean insignificant.

We built routines here. The boys grew here. We laughed here. We annoyed each other here. We learned exactly how close five people can live before everyone starts longing for a door they can close.

And somehow, without anyone deciding it, we became this little unit around the table.

This shape.

I think that is what I will miss.

Not necessarily the crowded house. Not the lack of privacy. Not sharing a bedroom with an eight-year-old and his glowing jellyfish.

But the automatic things.

Knowing where everyone will sit. Knowing who will reach for what. Knowing that Holden will be too close. Knowing Caleb will probably have something plugged in. Knowing someone will ask for ginger ale. Knowing there is a decent chance Holden will leave the table wearing part of his dinner.

The ordinary choreography of people who have eaten enough meals together that nobody has to think about where they belong.

Soon, the boys and I will have a new table. A new house. A new version of normal.

And I am ready for it. I really am.

But I think there will be nights when I look around that new table and remember exactly where everyone used to sit. My dad at one end. Caleb at the other. My mom across from me. Holden pressed too close at my side.

And me, right there in the middle.

This was the shape of us.

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