Watermark

We've passed a watermark in our lives: we've been in the Santa Fe house for one year now.

I know. Time seriously flies, right?

So today I'm officially retiring the "Big Move" and "Big Switch" labels. It seems right. That part of our lives is over now. We switched; we moved. We're here now. One year ago on August 14, we pulled our U-Haul truck into this driveway, moved stuff out of the Jeep and into the front seat of the truck. David climbed in and he, Zip and I drove into town to close on the house, just a hair before the 4:30 courthouse cut-off. With house keys in hand, which we pretty much had to wrest out of our dim-witted realtor's hand - it's a long story - we returned to the house, having made only a quick stop for a frozen pizza and beer. We unpacked the bed and ate the pizza watching the sunset.

In commemoration, I took this photo. I spent the evening reading on the patio anyway. I'm so blessed to have this kind of view.

(Um, no - this is still the old point and shoot camera. I'm working on it, okay? I did have this idea that I'd take an anniversary family photo with the new camera on the tripod, but I had significant learning curve still to overcome and David was scruffy and studying and it was hot out and the the animals wouldn't have liked it and, and, and...)

David and I spent a lot of the weekend talking about how our lives have changed in this last year. It's good to have watermarks like this, to measure the high and low tides of our lives. By the end of this week, he will have completed the first of three years of schooling. Completed with flying colors, I should add.

It's another watermark that I have the new camera. Moving here really got me going on photography. I've been throwing all my Santa Fe photos into a "Santa Fe" subfolder under "House" - which is an artifact of moving in. Most of them are named by date. Like a careless banking programmer, however, they're labeled with month and day. Now that I've wrapped the year, I need to sort them into year groupings, to avoid duplication. Fortunately it appears I didn't get it together (read: I spent all my time unpacking) to start taking pictures by date until 9_17.

Gives me a bit of breathing room.

Now we commence the second year, of school, of the new place. I know what to expect from the plants and the weather. We have a pattern to follow now, a high tide line.

That was just the first year of the rest of our lives.