quarter-life crisis

this week marked the one year anniversary of our being in this house. pretty uneventful if you're a normal person living a normal person's life. Neither Landon or I have spent an entire year without having to move since we left our hometowns for college. wow, that's....7 or 8 years now. and since we've been married, we've lived in colorado springs on 2 seperate occasions for 9 months at a time and we lived in kenya for 11 months, (not to mention the months inbetween these stints where we lived pretty much everywhere) so this place takes the cake!

well, so we've been here a year now. my bookshelf is where i placed it when we unloaded the truck and decided that the bookshelf would go "here". and so is every other piece of furniture. we've made a few donations when it comes to getting rid of our stuff. we've had the opportunity to go through EVERYTHING about once a year to get rid of things. i find myself itching to purge. i'm sitting on the couch in the evenings trying to enjoy some reading and i find myself looking around thinking, "that, that, that, that, that..." i want to get rid of it all! books, desks, couches, lamps, stereo, picture frames, candles, dresser - all of it! and i have no idea why. i want to tear down the nasty wallpaper in our kitchen and i want to buy artwork for our bedroom wall. i actually bought a big jug of hand soap to refill our current bottles - i don't think i've had soap last me long enough to want to reuse the bottle and refill it before!

i want a tattoo. and i know exactly what i want. and it's huge. and i want my nose pierced again. today landon and i were talking about getting me a motorcycle. with myself itching for some drastic changes, a friend asked me if i was pregnant - SO not pregnant, and i wonder.....am i going through a quarterlife crisis?

we're talking more seriously about moving to kenya again eventually. and i've decided that if we do ever get to adopt daniel, that we would adopt his brother too. and i think on daniel and life in kenya again quite a lot.

i can't wait for our vacation in colorado. i have a hard time concentrating on much else. and i just can't wait to have a break, not even so much from the midwest, but just from my life here.

and today i was driving and thinking about how beautiful the trees are right now. and i realize that i always think the trees are beautiful. and then i thought how strange that the best thing about living here is also the worst thing. the worst thing about living in illinois is that it is flat and humid - no mountains for mountain beauty, mountain activities, and mountain people. yet, my favorite thing about here are the things that i cannot find in colorado: the TREES - so many varieties, so lush. the trees are so beautiful in the winter silhouetted against a gray sky or covered partly by snow. they smell amazing in the autumn and are such beautiful colors. right now they are so thick i forget where the watertown is on the horizon, and they are old and glorious as they tower over every road and yard and riverbend. colorado doesn't have trees such as these. and i also love the river here.

the river is the sourch of LIFE for us here. if it were not for the river and the flooded lands that surround it, we would live in a wall-to-wall town with no free space. the river is beautiful and it's woods and trails provide places for our great joy here! colorado does not even have one river such as ours: colorado's rivers are roaring white glacier water that is beautiful and clear and freezing. nothing smooth and calm enough to walk across in your chaco's with water up to your waist.

so the very flat and humid land that has me sometimes suffocating provides the landscape for the things that i love most about our little gurnee. it was really really revolutionary for me to realize this today. i am grateful for that. maybe i should enjoy our next year here, as this place holds beauty that i cannot find even in my most favorite place on earth.