This morning I woke slowly, and then rolled over to poke Richard. “Happy One Year in our house!” I said cheerfully. He mumbled something back, not quite awake yet, and then “oh yeah.”

There are times when it feels as if we have been here longer, just as there are times when it startles me that it has already been a year since we moved in. After one year we have finally managed to get everything unpacked, although the task of organizing promises to stretch for some time into the future. There are dozens of projects just waiting for us to garner our enthusiasm, and dollars in order to complete. For example, while Richard managed to get the house into the landscaping program and map out the dimensions of the lot, we haven’t even begun to start trying to lay out the back yard. We’ve got a lot of ideas, but it’s been a year now and the only headway done on the property was to put in the hedge bushes and the arbor. My hope is that in a year or two, the hedge bushes will be high enough to hide the fact that the backyard is still unfinished, and it’s a brighter and friendlier fence than the usual high wooden ones everyone around here has.

We have been here long enough now to have seen the leaves fall from the tiny, spindly trees in the front yard, and then watched them burst into brilliant white flowers before returning to leafy green. The tiny bushes next to the front porch are covered with pale pink flowers, and the Mexican poppies which are rapidly taking over one part of the yard (and unfortunately choking out all the ferns) are finally starting to open their buds, providing a small patch of soft pink against the dark green of their foliage. The bushes that line the driveway have sprouted tall and thin, an odd mix of rust and green colors in their leaves, and the star jasmine vines that line the division between our yard and the neighbors’ have grown long, tentative arms that occasionally put forth tiny white blooms.

Sometimes I go back through the pictures we took during those long five months of building, back when it seemed my every waking hour not consumed with work for the Big Fish, was filled with questions still to be answered for the house and wedding. We occasionally bounce a short list of things back and forth to each other; things we’d change if we ever build this house again. But all of those things are minor, really not worth fussing over. This is our house, our beautiful home. One year down; the rest of our lives to go.