It's been a year...

It is hard to believe that it has been a whole year since the big changes happened for our family. At this time last year, Skywalker was being interviewed for a job. And given an offer. And it was during Christmas Vacation that we came up here to see this windy, snowy little town and sample American Pizza Cafe oreo dessert pizza and tacos from one of the four local taco trucks. When we stayed in the inn that Jeff and I both look at with a measure of fondness every time we drive by. When we tramped through a foot and a half of snow, in and out of apartments, to find a temporary place to put ourselves as we gathered our lives up and... moved on.

I look back on the last year and am so glad we are where we are right now. But I feel a weight of melancholy on me as well... Provo truly is no longer our home. It's where some of our best friends live, where some of the sweetest and most challenging memories are. I still think of Provo as "my city." I think of all that happened to me there as a sort of refiner's fire for my youth, turning me into a real adult. Skywalker, too.

We will be visiting over Christmas break, and I fully expect to have my heart full of some sorrow and some gladness. To see friends again reassures me that friendships last. The tabernacle has been refined as well, by fire, and is going to be a temple.

Things have changed so much in the last year. We've moved. Skywalker has gotten a job of real responsibility, in the venue and atmosphere he has dreamed of, and done well. We've bought a home. We have another baby on the way. We've gotten published. Tragedy has touched some of our friends lives--children lost, marriages lost, spouses lost. A longtime family friend and mentor ended his own life. My grandpa is dying of cancer. Our friends just got some bad news. Or illuminating news... or just news... depends on how you look at it.

The other day, our family drove back from the "city" with a trunkful of groceries and a car full of irritable, weepy children to find several dark hooded people darting around our front door. Seeing our headlights, they immediately fled to a mysterious maroon minivan, leaving a bewildered toddler on our front porch. After several seconds wherein Skywralke and I watched, stifling our laughter, one of them crept from the van, snatched the toddler and ran back. The driver's side door opened, and an ominous figure approached us.
"It was supposed to be a surprise," Brother Hunter said.
We found green and red hearts plastered all over our door. It's good to know that our new neighbors like us--especially the ones we want to like us.

Sometimes I wonder if Heavenly Father is easy on us in our youth (or, easy on some of us, I should say. I know people who have had stunning trials hit them for the entirety of their lives.) What I mean is, life suddenly feels substantial... I feel myself getting older and things feel more real. I have a sense of heaviness--real responsibility. And real things happen. They touch me. Life isn't always nice to us, sometimes it is hard. But life also provides stunning, very real blessings.

I look back on the last year and feel a roil of confusion but also a warmth of gratefulness... that Heavenly Father guides our paths and knows what will make us into the people that we have the potential to become. He knows, in the end, what will make us happiest and what really matters.

And in the end, fear has no place in the gospel. Worry, concern, all of that... sometimes it's productive and we need to heed it, but fear doesn't stand in the face of faith. I'm a grown-up now. I can say that without blushing, without worrying that people might chuckle at me. Not so long ago, I cringed at the thought of calling myself a woman.

I'm a woman, a wife, a mother, and a cultivator of a family. My children, husband and I make up something substantial--something more together than we are apart. Life is happening, faster than I can really comprehend sometimes.

And I'm grateful for all of it.