The thing about blogging is that, when you write at all about your life, you have to decide what, and how much, to share – because it’s impossible to write about your entire life (and even if it was possible, I for one wouldn’t want to).  It’s a delicate balance that – if done wrong – can result in the blog coming across as either whiny (if the blogger errs on the side of sharing all the warts of life) or too perfectly curated (if the blogger is on the more private end of the spectrum).  I personally don’t like reading crabby blog posts, so I tend to err on the keeping it positive side.  Mostly, that’s been good – it’s encouraged me to look for the best in every situation.  But it has resulted in me keeping quiet about a Very Big Life Thing for awhile now.

Three years ago, we packed up our northern Virginia lives and moved seven hours, and several states, north to Buffalo, New York.  The main reason for our move was that Steve had a wonderful professional opportunity – one of those “crazy to turn it down” chances.  Even knowing that it was a golden opportunity for his career, we agonized over the decision.  We’d lived in the DC area for a decade and we had long considered northern Virginia our real home.  It was the place we’d planned to plant roots and raise our family; the idea of leaving was almost impossible to imagine.  We wrote pro/con lists, debated endlessly, and ultimately decided that the professional opportunity for Steve was simply too good, and we had to go.  We sold our beautiful house in Mount Vernon, packed our belongings and headed north on a new adventure.  And even though I firmly believed that we were making the right decision – I still believe that – my heart broke the day I turned my car north and left Virginia, and it’s never quite mended.

We settled into Buffalo and set about making it our new home.  We found places to hike, fun family activities, and new favorite cafes.  We spent time with our families – both of which were geographically closer as a result of the move.  We bought a house and planned to stay there for a long time.  Most importantly, we welcomed a new family member when Nugget was born.

But no matter how hard we tried – and we tried really hard – my heart still longed to be at home.  I reached my tipping point in January of 2015, after an awful day at work – all of my homesickness and sadness bubbled to the surface and I tearfully told Steve, over pizzas at Elm Street Bakery, that I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I wanted to go home.

We tabled the conversation for awhile, because we were just about two months away from welcoming Nugget to the world, we still weren’t unpacked in our new house, and it was all just too overwhelming.  I pushed my homesickness down – again – and decided to see if I could wait it out.  Nugget was born and we had a magical summer at home together, soaking up sun and exploring the best that WNY has to offer (which is a lot – don’t get me wrong; Buffalo is a great town and we like it here).  We made a trip to D.C. on our way to the Outer Banks for a summer vacation with my side of the family and tortured ourselves with visits to friends and places that we had missed so much that even seeing them again was painful.  I cried as we pulled out of Alexandria and headed north – again.  And at the end of the summer, I told Steve – nope, it’s just not working.

The more we talked about it, the more we felt we needed a change. I won’t speak for Steve, other than to say that he was feeling as homesick for northern Virginia as I was. We spent the fall debating options.  Moving back to the D.C. area was our first choice, but it wasn’t the only possibility we considered.  We briefly explored a West Coast move after I was contacted out of the blue with a possible professional opportunity in Seattle.  (That was never really an option – just a pipe dream we kicked around for about thirty seconds.)  More seriously, we talked about Denver.  We liked the idea of living near my brother and sister-in-law, and we thought Denver might hold some interesting professional opportunities.  We made a trip out there, mostly to spend Thanksgiving with Dan and Danielle, but also to scout the city for a possible move.  I met with an attorney while we were out there, and we checked out neighborhoods in case we ended up there.  When we got back from our Thanksgiving trip, we started sending resumes both south to D.C. and west to Denver, and we agreed that wherever the first job offer came from, that would be our move.

I started to get bites almost immediately, and between January and March I made four trips to D.C. for job interviews.  Meanwhile, we took our first step toward a move, putting our house on the market (which we would have done anyway; it wasn’t a good fit for us), selling it quickly and moving into a townhouse on a six month lease while we figured out the next step.  By Memorial Day, I had a fairly good idea that a lead I had was going to work out, and I was cautiously optimistic that a move home was in the near future.  Still, I was shocked when I got a call (on June 1st, only a day or so after we got back from our cross-state trip) from another firm – not the one I was expecting – telling me that I could expect an offer package within the next few days.  I was incredibly surprised, because I’d thought my interviews there had gone well, but it had been almost a month since I’d last heard from them and I’d moved on to what I considered a more promising lead (a small boutique firm where a good friend of mine worked).  I now had to wrap my mind around the concept that I’d be going to work for a firm that was on my short list of dream firms, in a job that I had barely imagined I would actually get when I first tossed off a resume and cover letter over the winter.

I made one final quick trip down to D.C. and found us housing, but even as we checked items off our pre-move to do list, I was reluctant to share the secret that we’d soon be moving home – because it was a dream come true, and I was afraid it would all turn out to be just a dream.  We landed a fabulous rental that is near all of our old favorite places, I accepted the offer package and cleared conflicts and reference check, and we lined up movers and told our current employers we were headed home – and yet, it didn’t seem real.  To be honest, it still doesn’t.

For three years, I’ve yearned for northern Virginia.  I’ve watched from afar as friends have welcomed new babies to their families – babies I should have been there to rock and hold from their earliest days in the world.  I read the Parish Life from our old church every week without fail and followed the search for a new pastor.  I decorated our home with art pieces from the Torpedo Factory and festooned our Christmas tree with reminders of Mount Vernon.  I longed for our beautiful house, our overgrown green backyard, and our quiet street with friendly faces waving from all of the front porches and stoops as I made my way home from a run.  I’ve enjoyed my time in Buffalo, and I will always have a place set aside in my heart for this windy town on the shores of the great Lake Erie.  But, as a wise colleague told me when I broke the news of the move, my heart is longing to be at home.  And a week from today, we will be driving south to start the rest of our lives in the town where we belong – the home our hearts never left.

These days, it seems like more and more often we are having outbreaks of violence and tragedy and heartbreak, and sometimes I barely recognize my country.  Last week we were buffeted, this way and that, by the news – first two more police shootings of men of color, and all the questions.  So many questions.  Why does this keep happening?  What is broken in our law enforcement system that allows this?  Where is the oversight?  My heart broke for the families of those two men.

And then there was Dallas.  And more news that is so hard to watch and to read about and to understand.  The heartbreak – more heartbreak – for more families, compounded by a sickening sense that our gun laws are out of control, our justice system is out of control, and our country is broken.

I don’t normally write about national tragedies on this blog.  Mostly, that’s because this is not a news blog or a current events blog or a legal blog.  But it’s also because I always seem to find myself silent after big national tragedies – not knowing quite what to say, feeling that everyone else is better than I am at expressing their feelings on these events, feeling that I have nothing to add or that my thoughts might be unwelcome because I can try to understand but I can’t really live many of these situations, so I will never know.

Still, what is that saying?  Evil triumphs when people stay silent?  (Something like that.)  I think we have come to a watershed moment where we all have to speak up for what is right and true, and we have to shout down the voices of hate with a stronger message of love and tolerance and kindness.

Most of all, though, we have to listen.

I can’t live the experience of a person of color, who is profiled and prejudged based on his skin color.

I can’t step inside the shoes of the mother who has to teach her son how to interact with police so he won’t get shot.  My son is white, so he will probably never be summarily shot by police (it does happen, but it’s far more rare than in communities of color) and he won’t be profiled because of his skin color.  I don’t have that worry, and I can’t imagine what that’s like.

But I can listen.  I can acknowledge that I have had advantages and opportunities that others don’t get, and that the reason is my skin color, and that this is unfair.  I can work to fix that by advocating for diversity and inclusion in all organizations of which I am a part, and I try to do that.  These are things that might be hard to say and to hear, but I have to say them.  And when people want to tell me about their different experiences, I want to listen and I must hear.

And while I can’t ever say “I understand,” because I don’t and can’t, I can relate.  I don’t know what it is to worry about my son being shot by police, but I already am worrying about teaching my daughter exit strategies and how to protect herself and get herself out of dangerous situations that she might find herself in by virtue of being female.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to be targeted and harassed by racists using an ostensibly neutral hashtag like #AllLivesMatter because I have not lived that experience.  But I know how demeaned I felt by #NotAllMen.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to fear the police because of my skin color.  But I do know that I often fear them too, because I fear unfamiliar men, and these unfamiliar men have guns.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to feel the desperation of a community that has lost man after man after man to senseless and unjustifiable violence.  But I know what it is to feel desperate and small after seeing yet another rapist escape with a slap on the wrist (and a report of his athletic achievements), while another woman’s life is ruined forever.  So I am listening.

I hate the violence that we have seen over the past week; this country is unrecognizable.  And I am so, so sad for the families that have lost loved ones this week – all of them.  If we are to move forward and create something better out of this national tragedy, which I hope we can, we must listen.

So talk to me.

(Boring end note: the opinions in this post are my own and do not represent my employer.  Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice.  Respectful comments are welcome, but any comments that are disrespectful to any individual or group, in my sole judgment, will be deleted.)

It’s no secret that I’ve appointed myself the Family Memory Keeper for my little unit of four.  One of my favorite tasks as a mom, wife, and family member, is preserving and keeping our family memories.  I love to research options for the best way to showcase our adventures and travels, and even those memories that seem small and everyday now, but that I know will mean more to me than anything just a few years down the road – the little footprints from Nugget’s first Valentine’s Day, for instance, or the first picture Peanut drew of me (I was shaped like a lima bean).

There are certain memory-preserving techniques that I return to over and over again.  My beloved Shutterfly books, for instance – I keep a running list of works in progress and books I want to make.  (Right now I’m working on Nugget’s first year book and a family yearbook for 2005-07.)  And my gallery wall – I don’t have one at the moment, but I can’t wait to hang it back up in our next place, whenever and wherever that happens to be, and one of my first items of business will be to update the snaps in there with another order from Social Print Studio.  And then there are the meaningful souvenirs I bring back from our travels – everything from a new original art piece to a handful of perfectly formed seashells.  Seeking out those things, and deciding how best to display them to make our home a really personal showplace for our family culture, gives me such joy.

But while I love my memory-keeping and memory-preserving duties, there’s a time of year that I inevitably find myself taking a step back from preserving, and turning my attention to doing.  Because after all, you have to create the memories you are going to preserve.  For me, summer is the season of doing.

Don’t get me wrong – we make memories all year round.  Picking apples and pumpkins in the fall, hiking through snow-sprinkled forests on crisp winter days, listening for the first birdcalls of spring… And I don’t take summer entirely off from memory-keeping tasks, either.  I blog our adventures all year, and I always have Shutterfly projects on the go – at least a few.  But I’m much less likely to be sitting before my computer, working up a big family album, or dreaming of new memory-keeping projects, during the summer months.

No, in summer I want to be out and about.  I want to be doing things all day – running, hiking, kayaking, splashing with my kids in the community pool, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire on the beach.  I want to stop browsing TripAdvisor and actually go on a trip.  I want to fill up my camera roll with pictures of hot sunny days that I know will warm me up when the skies start to darken and the chilly autumn rains begin to fall.

In order to keep memories, we have to make them.  Summer’s a good time for doing that.  It’s the season for doing.

Do you have a season when you take a step back from memory-keeping, and focus on making memories?