I’ve been through hell, and it shows.

This last year has absolutely gutted me six ways to Sunday, the devastation having more than taken its toll on my being.

AND NEVERTHELESS, SHE PERSISTED.

I made salt dough spiced with turmeric for the kids to craft with on Friday morning, since we’d already been out playing in the snow for over and hour and it was barely half past nine in the morning. Our first ever snow day, and Western North Carolina gave us her best performance. Beautiful, soft, crunchy flakes of snow fell continuously for close to 40 hours, and it was breathtaking.

It was also incredibly lonely.

Little by little, I have come to reconcile the depth of this sorrow of mine. It’s no small thing to lose a pregnancy, that event alone would have been plenty to grieve. But for me, midterm miscarriage was merely the beginning of an avalanche of heartbreak so profound, I’m just barely beginning to cautiously confront the magnitude of the void that underscores every single one of my days. Some are better than others, but not one has passed without me realizing how shockingly altered my reality actually is, how drastically different each part of my world has become since discovering a baby had died in my belly.

Gradual, and then sudden. But also sudden, and then gradual. Some shifts were massive and instantaneous, others minor and rather slow, and still more were all of the above.

On the first day of 2017, we were still living in our quirky hillside home near the harbor. Six months had passed since learning of our loss, but the real unsettling had only just begun. It was clear that we were facing a tremendous transition, and while I was aware enough of the looming change to write about it, I could never have anticipated how utterly foreign the future would actually be.

The operative word being future.

This is not where my story ends. This is simply where a new chapter begins.

While I may still be a little reluctant to herald the arrival of yet another plot twist, I can admit that I’m definitely curious to see how this narrative unfolds.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how committed I will be to the process of documentation. However, when I look back at the beginning of what would ultimately become “The San Diego Years”, and all that has transpired since that sun-drenched summer, I can’t help but wish I had taken the time to preserve more of those moments, if only so that I would have a more accurate archive through which to dig when I’m feeling especially nostalgic.

Like, for instance, on snow days.