A small dog sits with its back to me, ears lifted like two questions, watching the day through a bright window. Outside, everything is washed in light—soft greens, a pale street, the faint suggestion that the world is continuing without asking us to keep up.
I keep thinking about how dogs practice attention better than we do. Not the frantic kind that chases pings and updates, but the quiet, steady kind. The kind that can sit on a favorite bed and simply stay with what’s there.
“Deep Deep Thoughts” sounds like a joke until you meet a moment that’s too ordinary to be anything but true. A window. A pause. A creature whose whole philosophy is presence.
Sometimes a home teaches the same patience. It holds warmth, collects routines, and turns them into something like memory. In that familiar stillness, you can feel two worlds touch: the inside where you’re safe enough to soften, and the outside where everything keeps moving.
Maybe that’s what the dog is doing—listening to one world press up against another, making sense of it without words.
If you need a thought to carry today, let it be simple: sit for a minute. Look out. Let the light arrive. Let the quiet have its say.
Dinner in Pennsylvania always seems to arrive the way weather does—quietly at first, then all at once. We stepped out into the evening with that small, earned kind of happiness: full plates behind us, a little warmth in our cheeks, and the sense that the night didn’t need to be anything more than what it already was.
I keep thinking about the way places hold you. A restaurant table, a familiar street, the soft clink of silverware and glass—ordinary things that still feel like a marker in time. It’s the same comfort I find in old houses: not perfect, not staged, just lived-in. You can almost hear the room breathing around you.
After dinner we paused for a photo, standing close like we always do when we’re not trying to make a moment out of it. Two patterned shirts, an easy smile, the dark shutters framing us like a memory you can step back into. The window behind us caught a little glow, as if the inside of the building was still holding onto the evening.
I don’t remember every bite, but I remember the steadiness of it—how good it feels to share a meal with someone who makes the world feel a bit brighter and a bit bigger.
Great Dinner in PA with my cutie, tucked away like a small keepsake.
Some evenings feel like they’ve been waiting all day to arrive.
The backyard is still, the kind of stillness that doesn’t ask for silence, just a little attention. Light pours through the trees and settles on the deck rails, turning plain wood into something warmer, almost new. It’s the same yard, the same familiar space, but the hour changes everything—softening edges, stretching shadows, making the ordinary look briefly cared for by the sun.
Boys in the back yard can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it’s noise and motion. Sometimes it’s just being there—sitting down, breathing out, letting the day fall away in small pieces. A chair that holds your weight. A breeze that moves through leaves without much effort. A dog nearby, content and watchful, as if this routine is part of the yard’s foundation.
I like moments like this because they feel unedited. Nothing is being improved or renovated. There’s no big event, no announcement—just a quiet scene that reminds you how much of life is made from repeat places and passing light.
If you stay long enough, the sun slips behind the trees and the yard returns to itself. But for a while, it’s enough to sit on the deck and let the evening do what it does best: make a home feel bigger.
Lunch at Kitchen Kettle Village has a way of slowing the day down. Out on the patio, the tables feel tucked into summer—shade from the trees, the low murmur of people passing by, and that easy kind of light that makes you forget to check the time.
We ended up lingering longer than we planned, letting the afternoon stretch. There’s something comforting about eating outside when the air is warm but not heavy, when a breeze moves through and everything feels a little less urgent. Even a simple lunch tastes better when you can hear the world around you—chairs shifting, glasses clinking, conversations floating in and out like background music.
Kitchen Kettle Village sits in that familiar Pennsylvania rhythm: busy, but gentle. It’s the kind of place that invites wandering after you eat, the kind of place where you can carry a relaxed, full feeling from one shop to the next without needing a reason.
By the time we finished, it didn’t feel like we’d just grabbed lunch. It felt more like we’d paused—just long enough to let the day settle, to be present, and to enjoy a small pocket of summer.
On the first night of the summit we had dinner at Lacroix in Rittenhouse Square. The coursed menu is to die for. By the time we got the the 10th course we were a bit exhausted. Kari jokingly asked for a pillow and they graciously complied! HAHA (sorry I missed the image of the first course)
Some photos hold still the way an old house does—quietly, without asking, until you look back and hear everything again.
This one is from 2008: my little brother, Jared, ready for his senior prom, and me beside him. He’s dressed like the night has somewhere important to go, boutonniere pinned in place, posture straight, smile easy. I’m there in my own version of “formal,” leaning into the moment with that half-serious confidence you only get when you’re young and standing next to someone you’ve known forever.
I can almost feel the air around it: the last-minute checks, the camera coming out, the small pause before the door opens and the evening begins. Prom is supposed to be about the date, the dance, the story you tell later. But what I remember most is this—siblings sharing a frame, the ordinary background of home, and the strange brightness of watching someone you love step into the next part of their life.
Time has a way of changing the colors, softening the edges, and making the simple things feel bigger. A prom suit. A porch. A brother growing up. A snapshot that keeps it all from drifting too far away.
Growing up, summer was hot and winter was cold. Every year, at the same time, it was the same cycle of shoveling snow, getting ready for track, running the garden hose in the back yard, and picking up walnuts. My childhood home, with its stone walls and carpet covered floors, sat still as the years flowed by.
When you grow up, your world appears to be smaller and darker, but with this house it just kept becoming brighter and bigger. The old colors, brown, pink, and blue of the 80s, are replaced with eggshell, yellow, and soft smoke. When you walk into the house, you can see the work my parents have put into the house all these years. The house feels settled, not cluttered from time or laziness, not sterilized from remodels or upgrades.
One of the best traits of an old stone house is how it lives along side you. In the summer, it stays cooler from the night and wind flows leisurely though it. In the winter, the stones hold in the heat and keep the air not too dry and not too damp. You can hear the house living all the time. The boards and the walls creak and groan. Cracks crawl along the plaster, sometimes peaking and sometimes closed.
Ghosts of the past inherit this house. They never haunt it, they have become part of its soul.
The snow is falling, dusting a white powder over the property. The wind whistles and sneaks up my flannel and sweatshirt coat. That same coat has been hanging in the laundry room of the house for as long as I can remember…the coats that my dad, brother, and I have taken out to rake leaves, start fires, and shovel snow over and over again throughout the years. The coat is something I never really remember as being part of the house until I instinctually grab for it, put my hands into the pockets and travel down the back wooden stairs.
Behind the silo, around the barn, I hear the hum of nearby cars and a volunteer fire siren whining into the white and soft ash sky. Now that I sit here writing, I get the image of the whole scene as if it were a Murakami setting. Amongst the faded and mundane, there is a slowly growing feeling, one of mystery or curiosity.
When the field is green and the sun is bright, you can stand quietly and listen, listen to one world push up against another. When I was younger there were farm fields all around the house and everywhere I went. Slowly I watched fields and hillsides stripped and turned into copies of homes. The roads and the places feel less secret, less inviting to travel.
I once walked these fields and ran these woods with bare feet and boredom. In the snow I am content with this melancholy and space.
| Cannot wait to open my xmas gifts! Every year my family codes the gifts for each person with a specified wrapping paper design. This year I am the snowman wrapping paper!
