Beautiful Moments: 2023
This is my fourth year writing an annual review of my most special memories. Every year, the collections have gotten longer; I’m getting getting better at living life with my eyes open for the moments I want to keep forever… Memory is fickle, and we lose so much of our lives — not just the mundane, but the truly sublime as well. These posts are my attempts to hold on.
Beautiful Moments: 2022
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.
Beautiful Moments: 2021
Each year brings good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. I try to hold it all as it comes: soak up the piercing beauty, excavate silver linings, find meaning in the highs and lows of being human. But memory is a finicky thing; it discards what seems like most of our lives, holding onto just a few glimmering moments. So here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year.
Our Backyard, Part 2: Dreams for the Future
To figure out our goals for the landscaping at our house, I started searching for visual inspiration. I’m ignorant enough about gardening and landscaping that I didn’t know the name for my preferred style until I decided to treat this like an interiors projects: gather images of what I love, and then find the thread that connects it all together. It didn’t take too long to find the thread connecting my images: I am super into cottage gardens.
Our Backyard, Part 1: What We’re Working With
Fun fact: I didn’t even want to look at the house we eventually bought. It was over our budget, and the pictures didn’t look spectacular. We’d looked at so many houses in person, and I’d flipped through dozens of other listings online. Why bother with another showing of a house that was out of our budget to begin with? But Joey said we should go. So we scheduled it. We walked through the house, and it was cute. It seemed like the perfect size for the two of us.
Then we stepped out onto the deck.
Beautiful Moments: 2020
It’s wonderful, the way time smooths edges and crystalizes beauty. Every year brings good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. It’s true, the scale on 2020 seems tilted, but there was beauty even here. And memory is a finicky thing; it discards what seems like most of our lives, holding onto just a few glimmering moments. Here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year.