Beautiful Moments: 2022
There is no perfect year, no stretch of months without pain or embarrassment or grief. This year was no exception, but it was particularly wonderful. My word for 2022 was Happen, and I wrote on Instagram in January:
It took a few weeks for that word to land in my brain, saying “I am yours for the year.” And I thought, “No, you’re a very unimpressive word, I’ll keep waiting for something with a bit more magic.”
But then it wouldn’t go away.
Happen.
Both passive and active.
“to take place // to come across by chance”
I have so many plans for this year: things that I want to make happen. And if I’ve learned anything in the last 2 years, it’s to accept the surprises, to keep an eye out for the unexpected. So it seems somehow correct.
Friends, it was correct. Maybe more than any other year, this was the one that made me wish I could keep all the memories. But that’s not how memory works. Memory selects the shiny, the sublime, the emotionally intense; and, as always, this exercise for myself is about the beautiful.
So here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year. (Should you be interested, here is 2021 and here is 2020.)
Without further ado:
The year starts with snow. Well. The year starts with 78ºF and the windows open as we do puzzles and organize the house on New Year’s Day. But then, on the evening before we head back to work: snow. Heavy, wet, magical snow that illuminates the night, reflecting moonlight into the kitchen. We remember that we’re adults who can do whatever we want, so we put our coats on over our pajamas and run outside. We listen and watch as power lines pop in the distance like firecrackers and trees snap beneath the weight of the snow. We go to bed with wet hair and cold toes, and I think to myself, “This is the first beautiful moment of the year.”
In February, I present the concept for a new project to a client. My favorite part of my job is that I get to try to understand people: their priorities, their preferences, their hopes for a space. Seeing the threads of connection between their opinions is a learned skill. Without ever meeting the client (I received a design brief, a rundown of basic personalities at play, and a single project that they liked for reference), I built out a concept that I thought they would love. When I show it to them, they love it. They believe in me, as a designer, nearly immediately. I ride the high of that affirmation for weeks. (I still feel whispers of it now.)
We tear up the bathroom in our guest house, and we spend two months putting it back together. Most of the updates to our house have been foundational - new trim, white paint, better light bulbs - but this time, it’s a makeover. I plan and place orders while Joey builds walls and coordinates plumbing. And on a warm-ish February day, we finally get to paint. We spend hours ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the color as we put it on the wall. I think to myself that it’s fun to make things better with him.
Joey’s sister visits for his birthday in March. We visit our local nursery and then spend the afternoon working in the garden together. Joey sits in the wheelbarrow. Lora plants the creeping thyme and Russian sage. It’s the kind of domestic perfection that always feels like a dream to me — a garden of our own, loved ones visiting, the chill in the shade on an early spring day.
We’re replacing all the windows on our house. The nights are long as Joey repairs the damaged walls around the windows to prepare for trim. But one evening, the weather is too perfect to work after work. So we say, “let’s delay,” and we eat our dinner outside. We don’t speak, not really; we just sit in companionable silence, rest our heads on the backs of the chairs, and gaze into the middle distance as the light fades.
We’ve demolished the office where I was working, so I sit in the guest house and look over the ranunculus beds while I work. I have more flowers than I know what to do with, so I sell them by the bunch to my Instagram followers. As the spring days warm, I hand flowers off to friends and local florists and fill my largest vases with more blooms than I’ve ever seen in one place. I am drowning in petals, and I could die of happiness.
My best friend is getting married. There have been no bachelor/ette parties for the couple yet, so on the night we all arrive in the Bahamas, we converge on a club in the resort. To say it’s not my usual scene would be an understatement, but as I drink and lean into the bass rattling my bones, I think “this is a fun thing to do exactly once.” We dance and scream-sing and laugh, the world blurring at the edges. I regret nothing in the morning.
The wedding is beautiful, but my favorite moment happens before the ceremony. We’re in a rush (there’s always a rush), and in that rush, I find myself helping my best friend into her gown. I tuck the veil into her hair and think of the afternoon six years ago when she did the same for me. The moment passes quickly; there is no photo of it. Soon I stand beside her in the Caribbean sun as she makes her vows. What a gift, to witness each other’s most precious days.
In early May, Joey and I meet my family in the gulf of Alabama for my mom’s birthday. We have arranged for our first family photoshoot in 13 years. As we wait for the photographer, the kids get suddenly and messily sick. The adults scramble to clean them up, alternating between frustration and near-hysterical laughter as we trek to beach restrooms and use the foot sprayers to wash everyone clean the best we can. I can sense the memory forming as it happens, and I know that I’ll chuckle each time I see the photos (I do).
Our little family spends the day on the beach together. It’s the first time the kids have been to the ocean. My nephew wears himself out and naps beneath the umbrella; we move things around to keep him in the shade. My niece is digging holes with Joey, apparently driven by the same urge as every child who has ever visited a beach. Eventually, everyone else heads back indoors, but my sister and I laze on the beach while the sun drops lower: me in the shade with a book, her half-napping in full sunlight.
For what I’m calling our half-and-half anniversary — marking the day on which we have officially been married as long as we dated before marriage — Joey and I are in Mexico City. And here I will catalogue a series of moments: We are walking on shaded streets on the way to get groceries, stopping for me to photograph doors and stoops. We are sitting on a curb in a park eating mango on our anniversary, having ditched the line for the castle. We are at dinner remembering the last twelve years of us, tears in our eyes; we are wondering what this moment looks like from twelve years into the future. We are sick most mornings, and we’ve hewn so poorly to travel guidelines that it really could have been anything. (In a few weeks, we’ll both be diagnosed with a parasite and a persistent case of E. coli. Oops.) We are at a Lucha Libre match, hooting and stomping our feet with the crowd. We are on a rooftop pool by ourselves, making out and basking in the sun and drinking cold-pressed juices (me) and beer (him). We are visiting the same cafe for breakfast for the third time, the one where the barista patiently lets me stumble through our order in Spanish despite her clearly speaking perfect English. We are in the mountains of rural Mexico bathing in hot springs and clambering through a steaming cave. We are. We are. We are. Let whatever is next begin.
The summer passes in a haze of house projects and gastrointestinal recovery: new doors and the trim around them, finishing the study, weeks of antibiotics. I briefly think I’m lapsing into a depressive state only to feel it lift as we finish our projects. I think to myself that I’m lucky to be here: to have arrived at the point where depression feels momentary and situational, where I can trust that I will come back to myself.
The garden was a wreck this year (I refer you to the previous bullet point), but as the heat recedes, I gather bunches of dahlias and roses. They feel like a gift, a kiss goodbye from summer. I have a hard time with endings. But we put the garden to bed, and maybe for the first time, as the cold darkness approaches, I think “Welcome.”
We’re going to the Netherlands, which is a surprise. Joey needs to visit for work, and I can’t let him go without me. When he tells me, I dance around the kitchen, surprising him with my enthusiasm. But I revel in this: we can pack up quickly and take off for a new country. I have attained a quiet competence in travel planning! I can do my job from Europe! I am living my biggest childhood dreams!
Amsterdam in October: cool, quiet, humming with life. We eat a jetlagged lunch at our first Michelin-starred restaurant and debate whether it’s our favorite meal ever. We walk miles and miles. We visit the tulip museum twice and stuff our carry-ons with gifts for our loved ones. As we wander the canals, we say over and over again that we are just so happy to be here, together.
We’re in a row house in The Hague, surrounded by the engineering teams working to bring back the first-ever samples from Mars. Someone planned a wine tasting at one of the ESA engineer’s house, so here we are. As the tasting progresses on empty stomachs, the room gets jolly and loud and overheated. A cork falls into an empty bottle, and someone issues a challenge: remove it without damaging either the cork or the bottle. People hop to their feet, talking physics and friction. I watch, thinking “This is history. These people are working on history.” But tonight, they’re just having dinner. (They succeed.)
In the taxi back to our hotel, Joey’s boss’s boss passes on compliments, says that Joey is impressing people here. In the quiet of our room, Joey tells me that having me here has helped him. I thought I was tagging along for a surprise vacation, but discovering that I help my favorite person be better at his job delights me to the point of tears.
On a warm day in late October, I spend the entire day in my hammock with a book and some snacks. Midway through, Joey returns home unexpectedly early from a climbing trip and joins me. He plops down in a lawn chair, pushes me in the hammock with his foot, and reads quietly by my side.
In December my grandpa dies, and that is not beautiful. It is broken. It is radio silence while my family witnesses the end. It is jagged sobbing in the car on the way back to St. Louis. But what is beautiful is sifting through the photos and sharing memories, the accumulations of a life lived well. It is beautiful to reflect on and mourn a man who was not perfect, but was deeply good. My aunt assembles a singularly perfect flower arrangement of foraged winter greens and root vegetables and tools she retrieved from his shed. That is beautiful, too.
On Christmas morning, my sister and her children tumble in the door for brunch and presents. Afterward, we spend the afternoon baking cookies: we roll and cut and bake and decorate, and they are the ugliest most perfect cookies I’ve ever seen. On a holiday tinged with sadness this year, to me it feels like perfection.
This year, I made it a practice to start getting quick videos alongside photos. Here are 27 seconds of my happiest memories this year:
Just a note: I’m intentionally sharing the soft, lovely memories of 2022. The moments that glint darkly in the saddest part of my heart will stay private for now. With time, some of them will lose their edge; some will remain sharp. They matter just as much, but they aren’t for sharing.
