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The Stadium Was Never the Point

A walk to see a football stadium in Fulham turns into an unplanned discovery of Fulham Palace, a moated garden, and a centuries-old church on the Thames.

Years ago, our family rented a flat near the Parsons Green tube station in Fulham. Staying in a neighborhood instead of a hotel lets you pretend, briefly, that you live there. You find your restaurants, your coffee shop, and your preferred route home. Once you find them, you defend them like property.

We had a full kitchen and a Waitrose a block away, but we mostly ate out anyway because that is what you do when you are pretending to be a local. We had dinner one night at the Brown Cow, partly because we had heard Prince Harry occasionally socialized there, back before things got complicated. A couple of mornings, we walked to a small breakfast spot called Kafeinn (breakfast pictured above). It has since rebranded itself as the Hive. The sign changed, but thankfully the atmosphere and food did not.

Whenever I return to London, I try to find time to walk through that neighborhood again and, if possible, have breakfast at the Hive. That was how this particular walk began.

I was back in London several years later, this time running a study abroad program. I had an idea rattling around for a new course built around the business of football. The English football pyramid would provide the structure, with the Premier League at the top and the increasingly precarious tiers below it. The class would meet in January, during the season, so students could watch the business they were studying unfold in real time.

We had already toured Stamford Bridge as part of a course on Brexit. Standing inside Chelsea’s ground had advanced the idea further than any syllabus meeting ever could. Craven Cottage sits only about two miles away, close enough that you could walk between two Premier League grounds in less than an hour. I wanted to see another stadium and understand how clubs that close geographically could remain so different in identity, history, and culture.

On a free day, I took the tube to Parsons Green and stopped for breakfast at the Hive. After breakfast, I started walking toward Craven Cottage. I had no real plan beyond reaching the stadium. At that point, the stadium was still the point.

Fulham Road was busy, loud, and full of motor coaches and traffic that did not care whether a tourist was trying to get his bearings. It was not the kind of city walking I usually seek out. There was no room to hear my own thoughts over the noise, so I put my head down and kept moving, assuming the destination would make up for the ugliness of getting there.

About half a mile into the walk, the road gave way to green. I did not know it at the time, but I had reached Moat Gardens, a narrow strip of parkland beside what remains of the old moat surrounding the Fulham Palace estate. The traffic noise dropped away almost immediately. One moment I was dodging buses, and the next I was beneath the trees, with the Thames somewhere nearby but not yet visible. London works its magic this way.

A little farther in, there was a dog park tucked into the green space, where dogs ran loose and off leash, doing one of the things dogs in a big city rarely get to do. I stopped to watch them for a while. I usually do. The stadium was not going anywhere.

The path carried me farther from Fulham Road and down Bishop’s Park Road, past a row of tennis courts where people were playing through the drizzle. It was January, cool and gray, the kind of day that would be considered bad weather almost anywhere else. In London, it was apparently still tennis weather.

As I approached Bishop’s Park, I was planning to turn toward Craven Cottage. Then I noticed something to my left, and the plan stopped mattering. It was Fulham Palace.

I walked through the gate and into a Tudor courtyard that was quiet and almost completely empty. Craven Cottage could wait. There were no tour groups, no lines, and no crowd gathered around someone holding a flag in the air. The gate was simply open, as if the palace had stopped trying to be found and decided to let itself be discovered.

The Bishops of London had been connected to this place since around the year 704. Queen Elizabeth I was entertained there with a lavish banquet in 1601. According to the story, two thieves stole her silver salt cellar during the festivities before being caught, which is either a cautionary tale or the most 1601 thing that has ever happened.

Standing there alone, it was difficult to reconcile that history with how quiet the palace felt. There were timber beams, worn stone, and the sound of my own footsteps. It did not feel like a museum piece sealed behind glass. It felt like a building that had outlasted nearly everything expected of it and had made peace with that.

The entire time I was there, I wished my wife were with me. She was not in London on that trip, but I knew immediately that she would love the quiet, the courtyard, the Tudor architecture, and the weight of its age. She visited on her own a couple of years later and came back agreeing that I had been right, which does not happen nearly often enough for me to leave it out of the story.

Eventually, I remembered the reason for the walk, left the palace, and continued toward Craven Cottage. I had come to see a football stadium, after all, and you cannot design a course around the business of football by spending the entire day wandering through a bishop’s palace.

I walked around the outside of the ground, past the away end and along its neighborhood side. Craven Cottage looked slightly out of place there, squeezed between the neighborhood and the river. I saw a couple of people who looked like players go into the stadium, but otherwise the place was quiet.

A football stadium on a non-match day is mostly a large, quiet building. There was no crowd, no chanting, no match, and none of the energy that turns concrete and seats into something more important. After Fulham Palace, the stadium never had much of a chance. I had come to see it, and I had seen it.

Having accomplished the mission, it was time to head back to the hotel. I chose the path beside the Thames instead of returning along Fulham Road. The river moved slowly, going nowhere in a hurry, and I let the walk slow down with it.

I passed through Bishop’s Park and returned to the palace grounds, this time walking through the walled garden. Its old gateway was still standing, apparently unbothered by the centuries. It was winter, so the garden was not in full bloom, but winter in London is different from winter back home on the plains. The grass remained green, and a few flowers had held on against the season.

The garden opened almost directly into the churchyard of All Saints. The church caught me off guard in much the same way the palace had, which by then should no longer have surprised me.

I walked through the churchyard and then went inside. The site dates to the Middle Ages, and the tower survives from the 1400s, although much of the present church was rebuilt during the nineteenth century. Pieces of the older church remain inside, incorporated into the newer walls and stonework, as if the building could not quite bring itself to let go of what it had been.

Eleven Bishops of London are buried in the church or the surrounding churchyard. They once lived in the palace next door and, unlike the rest of us, never had to commute.

My relationship with religion is complicated, but old churches in England get to me every time. What I feel inside them is something closer to spiritual than religious. Maybe it comes from the accumulated weight of all the people who stood in that same quiet over hundreds of years. They came seeking comfort, forgiveness, answers, or perhaps simply a little peace. Whatever brought them there, it had nothing to do with tourism and certainly nothing to do with a football stadium.

When I left the church, I knew Putney Bridge station was somewhere nearby. I wandered until I found it, got on the tube, and headed back toward the hotel.

I had set out that morning to see a football stadium as research for a class I expected to teach. I finished building the course, complete with the English football pyramid as its spine, but I never taught it. I left academia not long afterward, and the Business of Football is probably still sitting on an old hard drive, complete and unused, which is where some of our best-laid plans end up.

I still think about the course occasionally, but I think more often about the walk.

I went looking for Craven Cottage and found a moated garden, an empty Tudor courtyard, and a medieval church tied to generations of people who had called that stretch of the Thames home. I am sure I took photographs that day, although I cannot find them now. Some walks do not need the proof.

That is the thing about walking through a city like London. You can choose the destination, study the route, and convince yourself that you know why you are going. What you cannot plan is what will make you stop, turn left, and forget the plan entirely.

The stadium was never really the point.

Still Walking: What Focus Looks Like When Everything Else Changes

Summer meant the move. Fall means looking forward. Through both, one six-year streak — and one dog at the door — never stopped.

Earlier this week, the sun set at 8:00 PM. It won’t happen again until late April. From here, the days get shorter, the temperatures fall, and eventually the leaves do, too.

Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of summer here in the upper Midwest, and every year it seems to ask the same question: what was this season actually about? This summer, the answer was easy. The move.

It took the whole season and most of my attention. Preparing the old house, sorting through decades of our stuff and generations of family stuff, selling the house, moving, closing, learning a new neighborhood, and figuring out where the coffee maker goes. For a few months, everything else waited its turn.

Fall feels different. It turns the attention forward again, toward what comes next instead of what just got finished. New goals, new routines, winter coming, and the work of looking ahead instead of simply settling in.

Through both seasons, though, one thing never cared what I was focused on. Ginger doesn’t understand summer or fall, moves or goals. She just knows that 6 AM means walk.

She looks at me, then at the door. Back at me, then back at the door, tail wagging the whole time, as if she’s asking nicely. Then comes the stretch, front paws forward, rear end in the air, and the message changes: I’m not giving you a choice. You must walk today. If not for yourself, for me.

So we walk, now on a new path complete with strategically timed neighborhood sprinklers trying to take us out. It is not the walk we had before, but it is close enough, and most mornings, close enough is the whole point. For Ginger, there are new smells, new fire hydrants, and new trees. For me, there is the same thing there has been every day for more than six years: 10,000 steps.

Two thousand three hundred seventy-nine days, and counting. The focus keeps moving, from the move behind me to whatever comes next, but the streak doesn’t. It is just there underneath it all, the same way Ginger is at the door every morning, whether I’m thinking about a moving truck, a new goal, or nothing much at all. And we’re still walking, trying to enjoy the last moments of summer and the beginning of fall.

Looking Forward

Friday, the sale closed.

Last week I told you the house had taken over my life and my cortisol. This week it finally let go. The signatures are done, the keys have changed hands, and the place where we lived for twenty-two years belongs to someone else now.

The new owners are wonderful people. My wife and I met them, and there was something familiar about where they stood. They are at roughly the same stage of life we were in when we built the place, standing at the beginning of a story that now belongs to them. I handed the keys to a house I know by heart to people who are about to learn it the way we did.

I keep thinking about another house. The one I grew up in sold thirty-five years ago to a family that still lives there. By any measure that matters, it is their house, and it has been for a long time. But my boyhood dog is buried in that yard.

You can sell the house. You cannot sell what you left in the ground.

Somewhere beneath thirty-five years of someone else’s life, a small part of that place is still mine. I suppose that is what I handed the new owners without telling them. Not only a house, but a claim they may feel someday too.

My wife and I talked briefly about what the closing felt like. For her, it was relief. Relief from the last two months and, if I am honest, relief from the whole year. We should have seen 2026 coming.

The fire alarm went off less than five hours into it. At five in the morning in London, the two of us scrambled down thirteen flights of stairs because we had wanted a room with a view. The price of the view was the climb down. We laughed about it on the sidewalk. We were not laughing by February.

My own reaction to the closing was harder to name. Relief was in there, but so was sadness, along with a few other things for which I still do not have good words. That is the strange arithmetic of selling a house you loved. You can be glad it is over and sorry it is over in the same breath. Both are true, and neither cancels the other.

The best part of the sale is what it finally makes room for. For most of this summer, I have been looking backward at old photographs, boxes of memories, and essays that all seem to begin with the word “remember.” It was time, but it is done now. The house is closed, and for the first time in a long while, I find myself wanting to look ahead.

Looking ahead, however, requires something to look toward. That is where the journal comes in.

I have kept one, off and on, for years. It went quiet after I was injured in a fall, and truthfully, it stayed quiet because this blog became the place where I did my thinking. If you have been reading, you have been reading my journal, though not all of it. There are parts of these stories I leave out on purpose. Some things are meant to remain private, and a journal knows the difference between what you tell people and what you tell only yourself.

Like everything else, the journal made the move. Unpacking it seemed like a good time to revisit what I had written at the beginning of the year and take another look at the goals I set shortly after the fire alarm.

I remembered making the list. What I had forgotten was what was on it.

There were seven goals, written in my own handwriting during the early days of 2026. I wrote them during a lull that winter, when we allowed ourselves to believe the worst of the year had passed. It had not. It was only warming up. But I did not know that yet, so I did what hopeful people do in a moment of calm. I made a list.

Reading it now, months later, felt like opening my own report card. Some of it made me wince. Some of it made me smile. A few entries made me wonder who, exactly, I thought I was in January.

Three of the seven are done. The big one, the goal that has taken over this blog for weeks, was to sell the house and find a new one. Checked, as of Friday. Two others are also complete, although they were admittedly low-hanging fruit, the kind of goals you put on a list partly because you already know you can reach them. I am not going to pretend they count for much, but a checkmark is still a checkmark.

Two more goals remain largely untouched. There is still time, although the calendar and I may have different opinions about how much. Then there is golf.

One of my goals was to get better at it. After the fall, I was not sure golf was going to be on the table at all this year, so the fact that I have played is its own small victory. I even worked on my putting, and my putting has improved. The rest of my game, however, has aged. Note to self for next year’s list: Make sure your goals are realistic.

And then there is the one I do not joke about, at least not entirely.

I want to lose weight.

That is not a new goal in my life. If I am honest, it has been a goal for most of my life. But five years ago, I got serious. I set a goal weight, and when the weight came off faster than I expected, I moved the number down.

When I reached the adjusted number, I kept going and said ten more. When I reached that, I said ten more again. That time I lost eight, not ten. Those last two pounds became the finish line I kept chasing. If people would stop bringing cupcakes to work, I might have caught them.

Then came a career change, a more structured and sedentary life, and some of the weight returned. For the most part, I have kept it within a range I can live with. It just is not as easy as it used to be, and the finish line is a little farther away than it was.

So 2026 was going to be the year. I even attached a nice dream to it. Wouldn’t it be something, I thought, to get down to my high school weight in time for my 40th class reunion this fall?

That is not going to happen, but not because of the weight. My son invited me to play golf that weekend, and I would rather look forward than back. The reunion is a room full of who we used to be. A round of golf with my son is who I get to be now. That was not a hard choice.

The weight goal is still on the list, and I intend to keep chasing those last two pounds. Here is what I know, and why I am not writing this as a confession: I have done this before. I know exactly how it works when it works.

When I lost the weight five years ago, I did one small thing every morning. I reminded myself of the number. Not with shame and not with a lecture. I simply looked at where I was headed before the rest of the day could talk me out of it. The mornings I did that, I made progress. The mornings I skipped it, I drifted.

The reminder was not magic. It was just attention. And attention, it turns out, is the whole game.

That is the real reason I am telling you any of this. The list had been sitting in the journal since January, waiting to be read. Now it has been. Three goals are done, two are barely underway, golf remains golf, and one still matters enough that I am willing to tell you about it.

The value was never entirely in the checkmarks. It was in picking up the book and asking the question out loud: What am I actually working toward?

So here is what I am going to do with the rest of 2026. Every morning, I am going to look at the list. Not to grade myself or turn breakfast into a performance review. I only want to make sure that, on any given day, I am working toward at least one of the things I said mattered.

That is the whole method. It worked when I lost the weight, and it stopped working when I stopped looking. A goal you do not look at is just a wish you wrote down once.

Before long, I imagine I will need some new lines on the page. I want to find time this fall to set a few fresh goals, some to close out 2026 and others to carry into 2027. That is the part I am making my peace with. The work is never really finished.

You reach a goal, or you do not. Either way, morning comes and asks you the same question again.

I spent the summer looking back at the photographs, the boxes, and the house that belongs to someone else now. I do not regret a minute of it. But the boxes are unpacked. The keys have been handed over. The journal is back on the shelf where I can reach it.

And every morning, I am going to reach for it.

Long Week

I’m sorry there’s no real post this week.

Life got hectic. We were getting the old house ready for its final send-off, and like it usually goes, not much went according to plan. The one thing that did go up on schedule was my stress level… higher than a Georgia pine.

I’ve got some thoughts written down for next week and I’ll start building on those. For now I need to decompress and get my cortisol back where my doctor would like it.

So to my readers: I’ll find you. Enjoy the weekend off.

And as you can see, Ginger is handling the move quite well. Not pouting at all.

I Thought I’d Handled It

* I apologize in advance is this one rambles a bit.

We bought the new house last Friday. It’s been ours for a week. We’d known for months we were going, but Friday made it real the way planning never does. It didn’t feel like paperwork. It felt like the old house had already become someone else’s.

The old house is mostly empty now. We’re selling what won’t fit in the new place, an antique dining set, some artwork, a couple of beds, a treadmill. I’ve been carrying the personal things over myself, trip by trip, because I don’t trust anyone else with them. Each load leaves the rooms a little more hollow, until they echo. Out on the driveway, the concrete still holds the faint mark where the boys once crouched down and tried to scratch their initials into it before it set. Inside, the dining room is unchanged, the one that held every holiday and birthday we ever ran. We built this house in 2004 for the life we ended up living in it. I thought I’d already made my peace with leaving it.

A few weeks ago I wrote the goodbye. I published it, a whole essay about learning to let go. I’d found George Howe Colt’s book about his family’s old place, and it handed me the words and the story I needed. I closed by saying the house had done its job and it was somebody else’s turn now. I meant every line of it.

Then Friday came, and I learned that writing the goodbye and living it are two different things. I’d said the words. I hadn’t done the leaving. It’s like being a Vikings fan. Even when you know how the season’s going to end, you’re still upset when it does.

Except this time we won. We sold the house. We bought another, and we’re mostly moved in now. I should be celebrating. But I’ve stood in this spot before, in a different room, and I know how I get. The knowledge was never the problem. I can see the line between discipline and drift without having to think about it. The signs are always right in front of me. And I stumble anyway. That’s the thing that needs forgiving. Nobody has to forgive you for what you didn’t know. The hard forgiveness is for the days you knew better and did it anyway.

I learned that a few years ago, when I lost the weight. Just over a month in, Christmas arrived, with a table that doesn’t take no for an answer. I could blame the cheese. I could blame the second helping of stuffing and turkey. I’ve long had my suspicions about the oyster stew. Whatever the cause, I stepped on the scale three days later and I’d gained eight pounds. Eight, in three days. I was devastated in the specific way you can only be devastated by a number you watched yourself earn.

Then I forgave myself, and it wasn’t hard, because it was Christmas. I dusted off, got back to the program, and most of that eight pounds turned out to be water. It came off almost as fast as it went on. The devastation had been real and the damage had not. I’d forgiven myself for something that mostly fixed itself while I wasn’t looking.

The slow one is harder. There’s no Christmas to point at, no single table to blame. It comes in quietly, a cheesecake here, an extra serving there, a few too many of the foods I know better than to eat. Nothing about any one night feels like a stumble, and that’s the trick of it. Then the clothes told me. The workout shorts first, then the t-shirt, both tighter than they had any business being. There’s a sting in that, because those are the clothes I put on to do the disciplined thing, and they were the ones that turned me in. I stepped on the scale, and I didn’t like the number. No water weight waiting to hand it back this time. Just the slow arithmetic of a body carrying weight I’d already lost once and let quietly return. I thought I’d handled it. I’d handled it the way I handled the house, which is to say I decided it was done and never noticed that deciding only gets you partway there.

That’s what I keep relearning. Forgiveness isn’t a single act. It’s something you do again. You forgive yourself, you correct course, and then some morning you find you have to do it all over. The morning the clothes are tight. The afternoon the empty house catches you off guard. You forgive the version of you who let the weight drift back, and the version who thought a published goodbye meant the leaving was done.

So this weekend my wife and I are going to dinner, and we’ll open the bottle of Veuve that’s been waiting in the fridge longer than I can remember, on an occasion I kept forgetting to give it. Selling a house after 22 years is reason enough. So is buying another. The bottle’s waited long enough.

The house is empty now except for what’s staying. We hand over the keys next week, and I still won’t be all the way done leaving it, because leaving, like forgiving, isn’t something you finish in one motion. I already know how it goes. When I go back to my hometown I drive past the places I used to live, on purpose or out of habit, I’ve never been sure which. I’ll do the same with this one. Some evening I’ll find myself on the street without meaning to be, slow down as I pass, and leave it one more time. I decided to let go months ago. Now I’m still doing it, a little more each day, until my life catches up to what I already said. That’s the hardest part. Not that it hurts, but that you have to keep doing it until it’s true.

The Path That Isn’t on the Map

What do you do when there are no directions, no signs, and no map? If you’re lucky, you go anyway. Some of the best days of my life started with no idea where I was going or how I would get back. You climb a hill that doesn’t tell you its name. You come around a ridge into a valley that stops your breath, and you stand in it not knowing a single thing you’re looking at. The names come later, at home, at a desk, with a map finally open. So does the meaning. I learned that on a day in the Pentland Hills, about twenty miles south of Edinburgh, in the summer of 2022.

It was a transition summer. One life was closing and another was about to begin. My years in academia were ending, and the work I do now in trust and financial services was still a few weeks off, sitting out there like weather I couldn’t see. Being between jobs is a little like trying to jump across a creek. You run and you jump and you pray you jumped far enough to make it to the other side. I knew where I was supposed to land. I just didn’t know if it was the right spot, or whether I should have jumped at all. Which is how I found myself in Edinburgh, a long way from any of it, with a few free days and no agenda.

My wife wanted to walk, and I wanted to walk with her. There are famous walks in Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat rising right out of the city, and we could have done the sensible thing. Instead, the concierge told us to get in a cab, ride south to a place called the Pentland Hills, and just start walking. We had no idea what to expect, no idea where we were going, and no idea how we would get back. So we got in the cab.

The driver left us at a car park I would only later learn was called Threipmuir Reservoir. We followed the signs to the water, mostly because the signs said it was there and we could see it. These would be the last signs I remember seeing. We walked along the reservoir, and then around it, and eventually we looked up and there was a hill. A big one. There was a path up it, narrow and jagged, the kind that makes you suspect you don’t quite belong on it, but there were runners on it, several of them, moving up and along the slope with that easy purpose that tells you a thing is possible. They were the only sign we had, so we followed where they went and started up.

As we climbed, I found myself waiting for a feeling I already knew. Growing up in the Black Hills, I hiked a lot, though I hiked the way a kid hikes, aiming for the destination and not thinking much about the path. Mount Baldy, Little Devils Tower, Hippie Hole. Most of all, Harney Peak, which we would climb a few times each season. I first knew it as Harney Peak, and it was Harney Peak every time I climbed it. They call it Black Elk Peak now, renamed to honor the Lakota holy man.

When you reached that summit, you knew you were somewhere. You stood at the highest place for miles and looked down as the hills rolled away toward the plains. There was a destination, a summit, and a reward for getting there. So as I worked my way up that rocky Scottish path, some part of me was hoping for another Harney Peak. I expected the same bargain. Do the climbing and eventually the world would open beneath you.

What I got instead was better. The climb was hard, but the good kind of hard, the kind that empties your head while it works your legs. Whatever I had carried into that summer got quieter somewhere on the slope. I would find out later that the hill was called Black Hill, and of all the names it could have had, it was that one. I had spent my childhood among hills that carried the name, and here I was an ocean away, climbing another one without knowing it.

There was no sign announcing Black Hill. I learned the name later, tracing our route on a map, and when I saw it, I sat with it for a while. There was something about discovering that name afterward, at that particular moment in my life, that stayed with me. Some circles you don’t notice you’re walking until you’ve already closed them.

The path wrapped around the southern edge of Black Hill, and then the whole world opened. I came around that edge and looked east toward Scald Law, the highest of these hills, and it took my breath away. I had already fallen for Scotland by then, and for the Pentlands, but this was something else. This was not the Harney Peak feeling, the summit that looks down and flattens the world beneath you. This was almost the opposite.

The valley fell away green and folded and enormous, hill giving way to hill, the light doing what light does in that country, always moving. I had come up looking for a view that looked down on everything, and what I found looked out, and across, and into. I stood there and did not need anything to be different than it was, which, if you think about it, is as close to happiness as most of us ever get.

We came down the south edge into the valley below Scald Law and found another path, and this one didn’t test us. It ran north between the slopes, Black Hill on one side and Scald Law on the other, then Carnethy Hill, then Turnhouse. We passed two more reservoirs, each with a few people fishing, patient at the edge of the water. The air was clean in a way that felt like it was doing something for you. You could hear sheep and birds, and not much else. The climb was behind us now, and this was the long, easy after, the way the good stretches of a life sometimes feel when you’re finally not fighting anything.

Eventually we stumbled onto a rustic pub called the Flotterstone Inn. We had a couple of drinks, and I don’t know that a beer has ever tasted more earned. There was still one small problem. We had spent the day walking farther and farther from where the cab had dropped us, and we still had no idea how we were going to get home. Then, outside the pub, we found a bus sign.

I keep coming back to that small detail. There had been no signs on the walk telling us the names of the hills. Black Hill, Scald Law, Carnethy, Turnhouse. We had walked among all of them blind and would learn their names later. Yet there at the end was a sign telling us exactly when the bus would come. Maybe that’s about as much direction as we usually get. Not an explanation and certainly not a map of everything ahead. Just enough to keep going. A few runners disappearing up a hill, a path under your feet, and eventually a bus at the end to carry you home. The rest you learn later.

When I sat down to write this, I pulled up the official trail map because I wanted to retrace that day and make sure I remembered it correctly. That was when I found one more thing. The path my wife and I walked that day, up and around Black Hill, isn’t really on it. It isn’t one of the routes they tell you to take. We had wandered onto something unmarked, drawn up a hill by a handful of runners and a feeling, and it made all the difference.

The name of this blog is two words of Scottish Gaelic. Sireadh Toileachas. Seek happiness. I didn’t choose the language by accident, although I didn’t understand when I chose it how much of my own seeking would trace back to a country I keep returning to. I found some of it that day on a hill I couldn’t name, on a path that wasn’t on the map, in the summer when everything was about to change.

I knew where the new job was. I knew when it started, and I knew where I was supposed to land. What I couldn’t know was whether I had chosen the right path to get there. Four years later, I still think about that walk, but not because I eventually learned the names of the hills or because I managed to reconstruct our route on a map. Maybe it is precisely the opposite.

The path wasn’t on the map, and we took it anyway. I think there are stretches of life that work much the same way. We go looking for signs that this is the right job, the right move, the right time, the right path, and most of the time we don’t find them. You pick a direction, start walking, and hope there will be enough along the way to keep you moving.

Sometimes there is. Sometimes there are runners ahead of you, a valley on the other side of the hill, a pub when your legs are tired, and a bus when it’s finally time to go home. You don’t know what any of it means while you’re walking through it. The names come later. Sometimes the meaning does, too. And I have come to think that has always been the deal.

The System Before It Had a Name

It’s been a busy week. Moving. Work. Life. I don’t have as much time to write as I would like to. But the wanting to write hasn’t gone anywhere.

Last week I told you about Mr. Winter, and I spent most of that thanking him for what he did with that saxophone, a small office, and three years of weekly lessons. But the saxophone was never really the point, and I think I’ve known that for a long time without ever saying it out loud. What he gave me in that room wasn’t music. It was a way to walk up to something too big to take in all at once and not turn around.

The first time I remember it showing up again was in constitutional law, during college. The course was taught by another of the people who leave a mark on you, my pre-law advisor back then and, later, once I started teaching myself, a mentor all over again. Like every good teacher, he took us where we were and expected us to become something more. The reading was heavy and the volume was heavier, and there were nights it looked like a wall with no door in it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing Mr. Winter had taught me without ever putting a name to it. I worked at it a little each day. I didn’t try to understand all of constitutional law by Friday. I just tried to understand a little more than I had the morning before, and then I did that again.

The same lesson followed me into law school, where nearly every course began with more material than it seemed possible to absorb. Contracts, property, civil procedure, torts. Each one had its own language, its own rules, and its own way of making you feel behind before you had even started. There was no way to understand all of it at once, so I stopped trying. I read the next case, learned the next rule, and came back the next day. By then, the method had become familiar, even if I still didn’t understand where it had come from.

The bar exam was more of the same, only bigger. I sat down in front of a body of law that no one could hold in their head all at once, and I pounded at it. Each day I knew a little more than I had the day before. I never felt myself getting ready. There was no afternoon when it all came together and I suddenly knew I would pass. I just kept moving forward a little at a time, and when the results finally came, I found out that all those small mornings had added up to something.

In school, the lesson was easier to see. There was always a syllabus, a test date, or a professor telling you what came next. Life isn’t nearly so organized. It doesn’t divide itself into chapters or tell you when you’ve learned enough to move on. Most of the time, you don’t even recognize the lesson while you’re living it.

The version of it that mattered most, though, started with this blog. A few years ago I took an honest look at where I was, and I knew I wasn’t happy there. I knew what the outcome had to be. I’ve told you the why before and I won’t tell all of it again, because the why was never the hard part. The hard part was smaller than that. All that was left was to start.

So I started. I did one thing on one day, and then I did it again the next day, and again the day after that. I didn’t stand on the scale every morning waiting for something to happen, because nothing happens that way. What happens instead is a slow line you can’t see while you’re on it. You only see it when you turn around.

That’s the part nobody told me. I never felt the progress arrive. I felt the work, and most days the work didn’t feel like much. The change happened quietly, out of sight, while I was busy doing the next small thing. Then I looked back and there it was, sitting in a photograph or a pair of pants or a few thousand mornings of walking, and I realized there was never going to be one dramatic moment. There were only ordinary days that accumulated into a different life.

Over the years I’ve read a lot of people who put names and systems around the same idea, that nothing real changes all at once. James Clear writes about habits. Tony Robbins talks about decisions followed by action. The Stoics remind us to spend our energy on what we can control and let go of what we can’t. I’ve read them, studied them, underlined them, and tried to apply what they taught. It took me a long time to realize they weren’t introducing me to a new way of thinking. They were giving language to something I’d already learned decades earlier in a little office with a saxophone. Mr. Winter had already shown me the system. He just never called it one. Decide who you want to become, then act on it, even if the action is small, because deciding and acting are the only two things you ever actually control. Everything else, how fast the change comes, whether anyone notices, what the world does while you’re busy showing up, was never yours to manage in the first place.

It’s why I’m still deciding to sit down every Saturday morning and make the next one. The time is shorter now, but the method hasn’t changed. A little at a time is the only way I’ve ever built anything worth keeping. Mr. Winter never talked about habits or discipline or Stoicism. He just kept pointing at the next measure and saying, “Again.” It took me most of a life, and more than a few books, to understand that he wasn’t only teaching me the saxophone. He was teaching me how to live.

From Worst to First, and Beyond

A last-chair saxophone player’s slow climb to first chair, and the band director who never let contempt into the room. A long-overdue than you

We are downsizing, and my wife has asked me to do a bit more of the sorting than I’d prefer. That’s how I ended up on the floor of a closet with a box of photographs across my lap, the kind of box you mean to go through quickly and never do. Many of them were from high school. There were pictures of family and friends, but a surprising number were from band. We were standing on football fields, sitting on buses, and wearing uniforms I’d forgotten we ever wore. The faces of the people I spent those years beside were all there, and looking at them made me think about the man who’d stood behind nearly all of it.

Mr. Winter was one of the most influential people in my life. I hadn’t thought about him in a while. Once I did, I couldn’t stop.

I came to band the way many children come to things. I wanted to belong before I fully understood what I was joining. My sister was already in high school, and one of her best friends played saxophone. The band at our high school had been good for years. People came to football games as much for the band as for the team, and more than a few left after halftime, once the show they’d come to see was over. It was a program with a reputation, and even as a child I understood that being part of it meant something.

It wasn’t just the locals who thought so. While I was in the band, it received the Sudler Flag, an award recognizing the finest high school bands in the country, and ours was the first in the state to earn it. The honor reflected what the program had built long before I arrived, but I was there when it came, and that felt special. It was exactly the kind of thing a child wants to be part of, even before he understands the work required to belong there.

What captured my imagination most, however, was the traveling. Every third year, the band went somewhere significant for a competition or a tour. My sister’s friend had gone to Europe, which seemed impossibly glamorous to a fifth grader growing up where I did. The band would later become the first from our state to march in the Rose Bowl parade, and during my sophomore year we were scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., for the Cherry Blossom Festival. I didn’t know any of those destinations when I chose the saxophone. I knew only that if I joined and stayed long enough, I’d eventually get on that bus and go somewhere that felt much larger than the world I knew.

So I chose the saxophone and imagined the rest would follow. I’d become part of something great, take the trip, and collect the kind of experience that seemed to belong to older and more interesting people.

The problem was that I didn’t enjoy band, at least not in junior high. I didn’t like to practice, it didn’t come naturally to me, and as a result I wasn’t very good. It was a reliable formula. I avoided the work, remained bad at the thing, and then used being bad as further justification for avoiding the work. Junior high is difficult enough on a child’s confidence. Your body is changing without consulting you, and whatever certainty you possessed a few years earlier quietly disappears. Practicing at home, where someone might hear me, wasn’t something I wanted to do.

It didn’t help that my father was both a perfectionist and a genuinely gifted musician. The person most likely to hear me could also hear exactly what I was doing wrong. So I didn’t practice, and because I didn’t practice, I remained at or near last chair for most of those years. There is no hiding a thing like that. The seating chart announces it for you.

By the end of junior high, I’d developed a plan. I’d stay in band through my sophomore year, take the major trip, and then quit. The band was going to Washington, D.C., and I’d already endured too many uncomfortable years to walk away before the reward. In my mind, the arrangement was settled. I’d hang on long enough to see Washington and then put the saxophone away for good. The trip had always been the goal. Band was simply the price of admission.

None of this was a plan I shared with anyone. So when I went to my parents, sooner than my own schedule called for, and told them I wanted to quit outright, I wasn’t really asking. I knew what they’d say. It was the kind of thing teenagers do, rattling a door to see whether it’s still locked. It was.

My father believed in what music education could do for a person, and he wasn’t prepared to let me leave simply because I was frustrated. He was a surgeon, and surgeons aren’t inclined to reopen a decision once they’ve closed it. I resented the rule at the time, but he was right. Had he allowed me to quit when I wanted to, the story would have ended there, somewhere near the bottom of a junior high seating chart.

My mother was different. She looked for another solution, and the solution she found was private lessons. Somehow, my parents persuaded Mr. Winter to teach me. He didn’t take many students, but once a week for the next three years, he took me.

I’ve never known exactly why he agreed. Perhaps he saw something in me, although there wasn’t much evidence available at the time. Perhaps it was simply a little extra money on the side. Years later, after I became a teacher myself, I came to think there was another explanation. Good teachers don’t reserve their effort for the students who make teaching easy. They work with the student sitting in front of them and try to move that person forward. Mr. Winter had done that for the students who came before me, and he’d do it for those who came after, because that was the kind of teacher he was.

His house wasn’t far from the school, an ordinary home with a black trumpet standing near the entrance. The trumpet was his instrument. The saxophone, unfortunately for both of us, was mine. The lessons took place in a small office where we warmed up with scales in different keys and then worked through whatever the band was rehearsing. I’d play a passage, and he’d interrupt. A missed note, a rhythm I’d gotten wrong, or a phrase that bore only a passing resemblance to the music on the page, and we’d stop.

He figured out fairly early that I learned by ear. If I heard something played correctly, I could usually imitate it. He’d pick up the trumpet, play the phrase, and have me play it back to him. Sometimes he made me count the rhythm aloud, which felt childish but worked. He could become frustrated. I could see that. But he never once let contempt into that room. He corrected me without humiliating me. He didn’t get angry, and he didn’t make me feel small, which wasn’t always how correction felt at home.

Don’t mistake his patience for softness. In that small office, and later in the band room, he pushed me harder than I’d have pushed myself. He was demanding, structured, and occasionally intimidating. Some people thought he bordered on authoritarian. I eventually came to believe there was an important difference between an authoritarian and a disciplinarian. An authoritarian pushes for control so that the person in charge remains at the center. A disciplinarian pushes the group, and every person within it, toward excellence.

With Mr. Winter, it was never about him. It was about us. He believed that through discipline, hard work, and consistency we could become great, and he ran the room like a man who meant it. He demanded excellence, and we wanted to give it to him. I wanted to be excellent, and I think most of the others did too.

I remember him telling us once that we needed to be at the practice field by five o’clock. He let that sit for a moment, and then he explained what he actually meant. If you arrived at five, you were late. If you arrived at four fifty-five, you were also late. You were expected to plan for the unexpected, the flat tire, the fender bender, the train that might hold up traffic, whatever might keep you from where you needed to be. To this day, when I have somewhere to be, I arrive fifteen to twenty minutes early. He wasn’t really teaching us about punctuality. He was teaching us that showing up late let down everyone else who had already arrived on time.

Even when we were certain we’d improved, he found the small thing still wrong. The spacing was off in the marching formation. The trumpets were too loud in the jazz band. Someone had missed an entrance. The clarinets needed to give more. Everything was held together by structure, and all of us were accountable to it. There was no false praise in that room. If he told you something was good, it was good, which is exactly why it mattered so much when, on the rare night we truly put everything together, he’d tell us the performance had given him goosebumps. He wasn’t a man who traded casually in that kind of praise, so it meant the world. You worked an entire season hoping to hear one sentence like that. I understand now that he tended to say it in the day or two before a concert or a competition, which meant it was less a report on what had already happened than his way of telling us we were ready.

I don’t know exactly when the lessons began to work. There was no single morning when I woke up able to play. The improvement arrived quietly. Through the challenge system, I’d sit across from the player ahead of me, and we’d compete for the chair. I began to move up, one seat at a time. I moved out of last chair, climbed through the ranks, and eventually moved out of the lowest band.

One of those moves meant more than the others. Throughout junior high and the beginning of high school, I’d played the second part, the harmony, which never made much sense to my ear. I wanted the melody, the line the song seemed to be built around. When I finally won my way onto a first part, it felt like more than another chair. It was the difference between singing lead in a rock band and standing in the back with the other harmonizers. I was carrying the tune now.

As I moved upward, something happened that mattered more than the seating chart. I gained confidence. For the first time, I began to enjoy not merely belonging to the band, which was all I’d originally wanted, but the music itself. I enjoyed reading it, interpreting it, and performing it. The thing I’d spent years avoiding became something I looked forward to.

I started practicing. The high school had small practice rooms, and that was where I did most of it. At home, I learned to find times when the critical ears were elsewhere. I was finally doing what my father had always hoped I’d do, but I was no longer doing it because he expected it. I was doing it because I wanted to improve.

The trip to Washington came during my sophomore year. For years, it had been the finish line. I’d planned to endure band long enough to take the trip and then quit. By the time we returned, however, I no longer wanted to leave. The lessons had changed the bargain. They had taken something I was merely surviving and turned it into one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Sometime during my junior year, I made the permanent jump from the junior varsity band, the concert band, to the varsity, the symphonic band. Make no mistake, symphonic was the A-team, the place you wanted to be. The move came with a small indignity. Climbing into a stronger band meant returning near the bottom, which put me back on the second part again. This time it didn’t bother me. I’d stopped keeping score of first parts and second parts and started caring about the music. I trusted that if I continued to work, the climb would come.

By my senior year, I reached first chair. I’d gone from worst to first, although I’d never describe myself as an outstanding musician. I was good, and I felt good about what I could do. Somewhere along the way, I’d come to love all of it: the band, my friends, the performances, the trips, the music, and the life that surrounded it. That was the real distance traveled, farther than the chairs could measure.

That same year, Mr. Winter gave me another responsibility I hadn’t seen coming. Before each concert selection, I stood in front of the audience and explained what they were about to hear. He wrote out the introductions and made me rehearse them until they were right, the same way he made me practice everything else. The boy who’d spent years hoping no one was listening was now the person he placed in front of the audience to speak.

After graduation, I thought about playing in college but decided against it. I didn’t believe I had enough ability to justify the time it would require while keeping my grades where they needed to be, so I let it go. I still have the saxophone. During the current purge, I’ve considered selling it so that another child might get from it what I eventually did, later than I should have, but not too late.

College led to law school, and through both I found myself relying on lessons Mr. Winter had taught me without ever intending them to apply beyond the band room. I learned the discipline required to work toward a goal, the value of preparation and repetition, and the importance of refusing to settle for work that was merely adequate. Nearly a decade after I graduated from high school, his influence was still shaping what I did every day, which is probably why running into him in a hallway in Madison, right after I argued my first case before the state Supreme Court, felt like something closing a circle.

The court was holding a traveling session that year, hearing cases in a college theater with members of the public seated in the audience. I was nervous. When the argument ended and I walked into the hallway, Mr. Winter was standing there.

He told me he was in town to fish and had seen that the court was holding a session, so he decided to come. I don’t think he drove to Madison specifically to see me. I suspect he noticed my name and decided to stay, which is somehow the better version of the story.

We spoke for only a minute. He told me I’d done a good job, and then he said something I’ve remembered ever since. You were always a good speaker, he told me. He was right. Years before I stood in a courtroom, he’d placed me in front of concert audiences and made me practice speaking until I could do it well. Like a good teacher, he’d recognized something in me and pushed me to develop it long before I understood that was what he was doing.

We talked briefly about where life had taken us. He said it was good to see me, and then we went our separate ways. That was approximately thirty years ago, and I believe it was the last time I saw him.

I cherished those three years in that band as much as almost anything else in my life. I’m still in touch with a few of the people who stood on those fields and stages beside me, though I’ve lost touch with most of them. A fortieth reunion is coming this fall. I don’t know yet if I’ll go. But if I knew Mr. Winter would be there, I’d give serious consideration to making the three hundred fifty mile drive to see him.

Mr. Winter is still alive. He’s in his nineties now and, as far as I know, still lives in the same house with the small office where I sat across from him all those years ago. I can’t repay him for what he gave me. I’ve tried to carry the lessons forward, applying them to my own life and passing them along when I later stood in front of students of my own. What I never did was thank him the way he deserved to be thanked.

Perhaps he’ll read this. Perhaps someone back home who still knows him will see it and place it in front of him. I hope so, because this is the thank you I should have given him a long time ago. Thank you for taking on a student who wasn’t very good and didn’t yet care enough to become better. Thank you for demanding more without making me feel small. Thank you for seeing something in me before I knew it was there. Thank you for turning an experience I intended to abandon into one of the defining experiences of my life.

It began with a box of photographs and all those faces from band. Mr. Winter appeared in only one of them, and even there he was just a figure in the background. But he was in every picture, all the same.

The 8.3 Miles We Keep Walking

Someone I was dating in college made me watch a movie I had no interest in seeing. Somewhere in Time. I went along with it the way you go along with things in college, more interested in the company than the film. Then Christopher Reeve fell in love with a photograph, Rachmaninoff started playing, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a man traveling back through decades for a woman he’d never met, I stopped being polite about watching it and started actually watching it.

The hotel looked like something from another century, which it was. I didn’t know its name yet, but I knew I wanted to stand inside it someday.

Not long afterward, I bought some cologne, and four mugs came free with the purchase, each printed with a different historic hotel. I couldn’t tell you the other three today, but I still have the fourth. The print has faded from years of dishwasher cycles and daily use, but it still says Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

That mug’s made every move I’ve made since. It went with me through law school, to Pierre, to Canton, to Sioux Falls, and then to another house in Sioux Falls. Almost forty years have passed, and it’s never once been left behind.

Years later, my wife and I were trying to decide where to go on our honeymoon. I suggested Mackinac Island. When I explained why, she told me she’d seen the same movie. Not a similar movie. The same movie, with the same hotel and the same Rachmaninoff. Neither of us knew anyone else who’d watched it, so we booked the trip.

The day we first crossed over was cloudy, late May, with fog low enough to swallow the island whole. Standing on the shore in Mackinaw City, I couldn’t tell which direction to look because there was nothing out there to see yet. Then the ferry pulled away from the dock, and somewhere in the middle of the strait, the fog thinned enough to let the island through.

Fort Mackinac appeared first, high on the bluff. Then came Grand Hotel, long and white and exactly like the movie, except it wasn’t a movie anymore. It was real, and we were finally close enough to walk to it.

We stepped off the ferry into the combined smell of horse manure and fudge, which isn’t something anyone warns you about but is something you never forget. We didn’t know which way to walk. There were signs pointing travelers toward Grand Hotel, but half a mile feels different when you’re new somewhere and don’t quite trust the directions.

We kept walking and waiting for the hotel to appear the way it had from the ferry. It took longer than it should have for a half mile covered on foot at a reasonable pace. Excitement does that. It stretches distance instead of shortening it.

Grand Hotel has a dress code for dinner, including a jacket and tie for men after six, and walking into its dining room for the first time was its own kind of time travel. Some men wore sport coats, while others wore tuxedos. Women arrived in evening gowns, and the entire room had a formality that’s difficult to find anywhere else now. Nobody seemed uncomfortable with it. It felt like the natural way to end a day on an island where nothing else moves very fast either.

My wife loves to dance. After that first year, we signed up for lessons so we could actually do it properly, the foxtrot, the waltz, the jitterbug. She took to all of it. I took to it the way a man takes to something his wife loves more than he does, which is to say I learned the steps and stopped complaining about them. We still dance when we’re there, though not every night anymore. Some nights one of us is simply too tired, and we’ve reached the age where we admit it.

That first trip belonged entirely to discovery. We splurged on a bottle of French wine with dinner one night, the kind of extravagance that felt enormous to two people just starting out. We walked more than either of us had walked in years, enough that my legs ached in a way they never had before, but every mile felt worth the ache. The island made us feel as though we’d discovered something no one else knew about. That feeling remained even with a hundred other honeymooners making the same discovery a few feet away.

The boys came a few years later, and with them came a different kind of walking. The first time we covered the full 8.3 miles around the island, we did it on bicycles. Our older son was ten and pedaling behind us on a bike with no gears. He was working three times as hard as we were to cover the same ground, and somewhere along the shoreline road, he began narrating the injustice of it out loud. I couldn’t tell you whether he was whining or simply providing an accurate report of his circumstances. It was probably a little of both.

The perimeter loop was only part of the walking we did during those family trips. We walked to the Woods, not for the restaurant but for the duck pin bowling alley next door. We walked downtown for fudge and whatever souvenir had become that trip’s obsession. We walked to the fort and actually toured it, including the reenactors, cannon fire, and entire production, which is exactly the sort of thing my wife and I tend to skip when it’s just the two of us. On ambitious days, we walked to British Landing on the far side of the island. It was about as far as small legs could go before turning back made more sense than pushing forward.

The shape of the day depended on the weekend. Memorial Day, when we first visited, had very little scheduled around it. We’d begin with an enormous breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and spend the rest of the day working it off. Lunch was wherever we happened to find ourselves. Then came a nap, because you can’t dance all night without one, followed by dinner, dressed properly, and dancing afterward. Labor Day eventually became our favorite. Mornings belonged to walking, while midday brought a cookout and jazz concert. Then came the nap, dinner, and dancing. It had the same bones as our first Memorial Day trip, only now there was usually a saxophone playing somewhere in the background.

The weather never signed on to any of it. We’ve packed for one season and lived through three, worn sweatshirts in the morning, rain gear by noon, and shorts by late afternoon, sometimes all in the same day. You learn to bring everything and expect to use it.

That kind of day, replayed with small variations, is what comes to mind when people mention books I’ve never actually read. I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve read enough reviews and commentary to understand the idea, and several people whose judgment I respect consider it one of the greatest books ever written. I don’t know whether I’ll ever actually read it. But if I ever tried to write a book in that style, following people through the ordinary events of a single day, my day would take place on Mackinac Island. It would begin with breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and move through the paths, the fort, the horses, the fudge shops, and whatever lunch presented itself. There would be a nap in the afternoon, dinner after six, and music somewhere in the evening. Nothing extraordinary would have to happen, because on Mackinac Island the day itself would be enough.

Earning that kind of day on foot, though, took years. For a long time, walking the full 8.3 miles in one stretch seemed excessive when a bicycle could cover the same ground in a third of the time. It wasn’t until we were older that walking became the point rather than the obstacle. The perimeter is flat, paved, and wide enough to walk beside each other, but the interior is different. Paths climb toward the cemetery, the fort, Sugarloaf, the natural arch, and the governor’s summer residence. Some narrow into dirt trails just wide enough for one person. Others open into gravel roads where we can walk side by side again. Five minutes from the shoreline, the island becomes a completely different place.

The Woods has changed too. It was once where we took two tired boys to go bowling. Now it’s a quiet place where the two of us walk for dinner. The fort is still there, but we no longer feel compelled to tour it. Downtown still smells like fudge and horses, although we’re less likely to come home with a souvenir. The island has remained much the same, but we’re the ones who have changed. The walking that once seemed like something to endure has become one of the reasons we return.

Our last two trips came after Covid and after Grand Hotel changed hands, sold by the family that had owned it for nearly a century. There have been updates, some we like and some we don’t, but the bones of the place remain the same ones we fell in love with from a ferry deck in the fog. We stopped booking the basic room somewhere along the way. On one trip, we upgraded to a suite so magnificent that it remains one of the nicest rooms either of us has ever stayed in. Another trip put us in the Teddy Roosevelt room, and I’ll leave you to imagine what that involved. No two rooms at Grand Hotel are decorated alike. That may be the whole point of the place. We can walk the same 8.3 miles a dozen times and never have the same day twice, and sleep in a different room on every visit and never run out of ways to see the same hotel again.

The far end of the island is where it gets quiet. Most people never make it out there, and if you time it right, early enough or late enough, you can stand at the north shore and have the whole thing to yourselves. The water stretches north toward Canada, and there’s nothing to hear but the wind and the water against the rocks. We stood there on our last trip, the two of us, not saying much.

I don’t know what my wife thinks about when we stand there. I’ve never asked. I think about the Ojibwe who crossed this water long before there was a hotel or a fort or a fudge shop, the early travelers in canoes making the same crossing we made on a ferry, looking at the same strait we were looking at. Twenty-five years of marriage and I still can’t tell you what’s going through her head at that railing. That’s not a complaint. It might be the reason we keep coming back.

When we first started coming to the island, we were some of the youngest people staying at the hotel. The crowd has always skewed older, and back then we noticed it. We don’t notice it the same way now, because we’ve become it. The clientele never really changed. We did. These days I find myself watching the young couples, the ones on their honeymoons, and hoping a few of them are falling for the place the way we did, so that someday they’ll be the older ones standing at the north shore, wondering where the years went.

In a few weeks, we’ll move into a new home, and the faded Grand Hotel mug will make the move with us, just as it’s made every move since the mid-1980s. It’ll be wrapped in paper, placed in another box, and carried into another kitchen. The hotel on its side is harder to see than it once was, but it’s still there, holding the memory of a movie, a honeymoon, two boys, many trips, and all the miles we’ve walked together.

The House Did Its Job

For many years, I have loved going to bookstores. The new releases. Certain topics. The sale rack. The ritual of browsing without knowing what you will find. It was probably around 2007 when I was in one of those bookstores and a title caught me: The Big House.

I pulled it off the shelf thinking it was about Michigan Stadium, about the Wolverines, about the kind of place that holds a region’s memory and sells overpriced sweatshirts to people who should know better. I don’t know why I thought that. The jacket made clear I was wrong almost immediately. It was George Howe Colt’s memoir about his family’s summer home on Cape Cod, the house his great-grandfather built in 1903, the Atkinson house, the place that held five generations before the family finally decided to sell it.

Even though the book was about something completely unexpected, something I ordinarily wouldn’t have picked up, I bought it anyway. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the book I needed.

What I didn’t know then was why I needed it. I had left houses before. College houses. Rental houses. Temporary places where you owned a few dishes, a bad couch, and the confidence of someone who did not yet understand compound interest. But the first real house I lost was the one I grew up in, and I didn’t choose to lose it.

My parents built that house from the ground up, the same way our family would later build a cabin and, eventually, the same way my wife and I would build our own dream house. I watched it go from a foundation and framing to something we actually lived in. I got a say in it too, or at least the kind of say a kid gets. I picked my carpet. I picked a football mural wallpaper for my room, the kind that seemed like the most important decision of my young life at the time. It was mine before I understood what that meant, and it stayed mine right up until it wasn’t.

That understanding arrived all at once. I learned around Christmas of my senior year in college that my parents were leaving Rapid City. My dad got a job that required a move, three hundred and sixty miles away. My parents would sell the house I had grown up in. When I came home for Easter, it had already sold. I walked through it knowing I would never see it this way again. It was the house where most of my memories lived, or at least where I thought they lived then. I had never been through losing a place like that before, and deep down I was afraid the memories might disappear with it.

Something did die with that sale, or at least it felt that way at the time. My dad had always had a house to go back to, and he took us with him. I assumed I would have the same thing to give my own kids someday, that I could walk them through the house I grew up in the way my dad had walked me through his. I didn’t know yet that a homebase isn’t something someone simply hands you. You build it, and eventually you lose it. My grandparents lived in the same house for over fifty years. I understand now how rare that actually is. What died with the sale wasn’t the house. It was that assumption. It was, in a way, my youth.

Graduation was on a Sunday. That night, I moved out of my college house and drove to my parents’ new house. A couple of days later, my parents arrived with everything else from the childhood home. My dad would die in that house years later, but it was never home to me. It was the place where the furniture landed after the life had already happened somewhere else.

I never got to pack my own things. I never got a final walkthrough alone. I never got to say goodbye the way I wanted to say goodbye. It wasn’t cruel. It was life. My parents were doing what needed doing, and I was old enough to understand that, but not old enough to know what to do with the ache of it.

That is how it happens sometimes. People come and go. They die. They move away. Houses sell. The world doesn’t pause so you can stand in an empty bedroom and negotiate with the wallpaper. You don’t always get the closure you think you’re owed.

What I got instead was everything my parents couldn’t let go of. My parents were raised during the Depression. Their parents lived it. Nobody in that lineage looked at a coffee can full of screws and thought, “Well, that has served its purpose.” A few months after my dad died, I bought my first house and acquired many of my parents’ things, especially the kind of things you need when you are starting out in a home of your own. Furniture. Dishes. Tools. The practical leftovers of a life already lived, now put to work for a life just beginning.

Six months later, my grandmother died, my mother’s mother, and I inherited some of hers as well. Less than a year after my dad died, my mother downsized to a small two-bedroom condo and gave me the practical Midwestern version of estate planning: come get it or it’s getting thrown away. That was when the books came. The voracious reader’s library. His slides and eight-millimeter movies. His tools and his father’s name tag from Firestone, which I still have. Artwork and furniture and knickknacks. Dishes and silverware. A Vikings helmet lamp. A trumpet lamp. Complete sets of nails and screws and bolts that I would never use.

Even my fifth grade spelling book came along.

It all traveled from the childhood home to my parents’ new home, then to my house in Canton, then to my first marital home, and finally to the dream house. I moved it from one location to another, rarely using it the way it was meant to be used. Deep down, I believed that holding onto their things would keep them alive. If I let the objects go, I feared I would lose them all over again.

When my wife and I got married, there were tense moments. She said no, not everything comes with us. My fifth grade spelling book had to go. But I got to keep the report on the platypus, because a man has to draw the line somewhere.

My wife was not so much happy with the purge as she tolerated the settlement. She was practical. She saw boxes. I saw my father’s hands, my mother’s handwriting, and my grandparents’ stubborn Depression-era refusal to throw away anything that might someday be useful to someone, somewhere.

I tried to explain to my wife what it was like to lose a parent. Both of hers were living then and are living still. Mine have been gone for most of our married life. That wasn’t her fault, of course. It was just one of those uneven facts marriage has to absorb. She could sympathize, but she could not yet know the strange arithmetic of grief, how a useless object can feel heavier than it is because it seems to contain a person you are not ready to lose again.

So she did what practical spouses have done since the beginning of time. She shoved my stuff into a closet so she didn’t have to look at it and waited for me to become a little less ridiculous.

Over the years, I did get better, although not quickly enough to be confused with personal growth in real time. About five or six years ago, I finally admitted another purge was necessary. Not a gentle Saturday afternoon of sorting. Not three tasteful donation boxes and a cup of coffee. I rented a full-size construction dumpster and gave myself about ten days.

I gave some of it away. I sold some of it. Most of it, if I am being honest, was junk that needed to go. I moved fast. I made decisions. I threw things away before memory could hire a lawyer and file an appeal.

That purge helped. It made the house lighter. It made me lighter too, although I probably wouldn’t have said it that way at the time. But it didn’t solve everything, because by then the collection had stopped being just theirs.

Over time, my wife and I added our own layers. Wedding gifts. Baby furniture. School projects. Sports equipment. Christmas decorations. Books of our own. Photos. Framed art. The boys’ trophies, toys, drawings, games, blankets, stuffed animals, and mysterious plastic things that apparently mattered deeply for six weeks in 2009 and then became permanent residents of the basement. The house became part grandparents, part parents, part us. It held four generations of memory, some of it beautiful, some of it useful, and some of it waiting patiently in a storage room for a purpose that was never coming.

That is what made the purging harder. We weren’t just deciding what to keep from my parents. We were deciding what to keep from everyone. Every box seemed to ask the same question in a different voice: Is this still part of the story, or is it just something we have been carrying because no one wanted to be the one to let it go?

Long before that final purging started, though, there was another house that taught me the same lesson the hard way. The cabin arrived when I was about twelve and remained in the family until I was in my mid-forties. We built it from scratch, another place meant to hold us. We skied. We snowmobiled. We did things there that I won’t itemize here, mostly because my parents are gone and I still prefer not to disappoint them retroactively. My dad had his first heart attack there shoveling snow. After that, we got a phone.

We gathered there sometimes for Christmas, often for New Year’s. College friends came. Law school friends came. I lived there one summer. The cabin became more than a structure in the Black Hills. It became the place I went when I needed to remember who I had been before life got complicated.

I brought my future wife there while we were dating. It was a test, although I doubt I admitted that out loud at the time. She needed to love the cabin, maybe not as much as I did, but at least a little. I tried to explain how important it was to me and how important the Black Hills were to me. She came from the plains, so naturally I called her a flatlander, because romance has many languages and mine apparently included mild geographic condescension.

She passed. She understood what the cabin meant, or at least understood that I needed it to mean something. We got married in the Black Hills, and we spent our first night together as husband and wife at the cabin. It wasn’t the first time she had been there, but it was the first time as my wife. I now shared the one place I had always felt at peace with the person I had chosen to spend my life with.

We went back often. We walked and hiked in the Black Hills. We took our kids there from the start. They loved it, except for the time my oldest hit a tree skiing and cracked his skull, which is the sort of family memory that starts as trauma and slowly becomes a story everyone somehow gets to tell at dinner. There was also a Christmas Eve when we drove to a small Episcopal church in Lead and experienced one of the most intimate and spiritual services I have ever been part of. The cabin was still the one place where everything felt right.

But the geography had shifted. When I was young, the cabin was only an hour away. It was a natural gathering place, close enough to be refuge rather than project. As I got older, as my own life expanded, five or six hours became the new distance. Every holiday and school break required a pilgrimage. What had been a refuge began to feel like an obligation. When my parents passed the cabin to me and my sister, and then eventually to me alone, I understood that I could not hold it the way they had.

Before we sold it, the cabin frequently appeared in my dreams. The dreams were not subtle. I would be there again, walking through rooms, looking for something, trying to keep the place intact. Sometimes, in the dreams, we had built additions. Other times, there were secret rooms I had somehow forgotten, or we had made modifications that changed the place without changing what it was. It was bigger, stranger, and not quite real, but it was still the cabin. I understood even then that the dreams were the part of me that could not let go.

Then I read Colt’s book. A family held a century-old summer home on Cape Cod through five generations and finally decided to sell it. The book understood the weight of that kind of place. It understood the guilt, the inheritance, the obligation, and the quiet relief that can come when a family finally admits that love and ownership are not the same thing.

It wasn’t quite the same attachment I see in my professional life, the kind a farmer feels for land that’s been in the family for generations. But it was an attachment. Different scale, same root.

Something in that story gave me permission. We sold the cabin. The dreams stopped. The letting go was real.

That lesson mattered because, by then, my wife and I had already built the next place we would someday have to release. In 2004, we decided to build our own house. We had gone to countless open houses looking for something that would work for our family, and nothing did. We hired an architect friend who listened to what we wanted. We found the builder. We found a lot in a new neighborhood. We extended ourselves beyond what we probably should have because we believed it was worth it.

It was a farmhouse with a Grand Hotel-inspired porch, modeled after the porch at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, where we honeymooned after our wedding in the Black Hills. Each boy helped design his room. My wife had her space. I had mine. We built the house to fit us, not the other way around.

Christmas mornings happened there. Birthdays happened there. We gathered around the dining room table for dinners that mattered and around the kitchen counter for most of the meals that made up actual life. Both of our boys graduated from high school while living in that house. We took prom pictures there, everyone dressed up and pretending not to be nervous while parents took too many photos. My mother’s ashes spent a night there before we took her to Rapid City for burial. The boys had friends over and made noise in the basement. The house filled with the sound of boys becoming men.

But we always understood, at least in theory, what the house was for. We built it to hold a family while that family grew. We built it for bedrooms full of laundry, backpacks in the wrong places, friends in the basement, shoes by the door, and the daily racket of raising children. We didn’t build it as a museum. We didn’t build it as a monument. We built it for a chapter.

When our youngest left for college, we came home to rooms that were too empty, too quiet, and too big. We did some remodeling. The house remained the gathering point during holidays and school breaks, and for a while that was enough. But my wife and I had always talked about moving once the boys were gone. The house had done what we built it to do, even if admitting that felt like betrayal.

Four months ago, my wife and I looked at each other and said it was time. We got serious about fixing things, cleaning things, sorting things, and facing all the things we had carefully placed in closets so we could pretend they didn’t exist. We talked with a realtor. He gave us the comps. Then came the work no one puts in the real estate brochure: decluttering, painting, repairing, deciding, and standing in the garage wondering how two people had acquired enough stuff to provision a small expedition.

In the middle of that work, I found a stack of letters. My parents had written them to each other years before they married, back when they were dating and living in separate cities. I held them for a moment. I knew what the younger version of me would have done. He would have kept them without thinking. He would have placed them in a box, moved them three more times, and told himself he was preserving something sacred.

I resisted the urge to read them. They weren’t mine to read. Whatever my mother held onto them for, whatever reason she had for keeping them all those years, that reason had nothing to do with me.

I threw them away.

That wasn’t what made us decide to sell the house. We had already made that decision. But it felt like confirmation. My parents’ love for each other didn’t live in a stack of paper. It lived in the fact that I existed, that they built a life together, and that everything after those letters became the actual story. Keeping them wouldn’t have preserved their marriage. It would have given me one more box to carry.

And then, last week, the decision became real. The realtor came at 1:30. We sat at the kitchen counter, the same counter where we had eaten most of our family meals over twenty-two years, saving the dining room for special occasions, and we went through the paperwork like it was any other Tuesday. He asked if we were ready. My wife and I looked at each other and said yes.

The house had never looked better, which felt like its own strange joke. Twenty-two years of raising boys, and somehow the place looked its best on the day we decided to let it go.

The photographer showed up within the hour. She moved room to room while I stood in the kitchen not quite knowing what to do with my hands. The realtor left at 3:00. By 3:30, a text came through: a showing scheduled shortly after five. By 3:45, another text came, another showing shortly after six.

We couldn’t be there for it, so we did what we do. We grabbed Ginger and drove to the brew pub, the one we always end up at on Halloween, and ordered a couple of beers while trying to act like people who weren’t waiting on the biggest phone call of the year. Another text came in about a third showing. We stayed for three hours, longer than we meant to, because leaving felt like admitting something.

We got home. Not long after, the phone buzzed. We had an offer. Five hours. The house we built to raise a family in took less time to sell than it takes to watch a Vikings game go sideways in overtime.

Once we signed the purchase agreement, the work shifted immediately. We had done some preliminary looking already and had a basic idea of what we wanted next. Our realtor sent us fifty-six more choices. My wife and I went through every one of them, built a scorecard, made checklists, and narrowed the list to three we wanted to see in person.

But we already knew. A week after we sold our house, we made an offer on another one.

It won’t have room for all our stuff. That’s fine. We will make new memories there instead of trying to force the old ones into every closet and drawer. There will still be enough room for the boys to visit, even if it’s smaller than what they grew up in. My dad grew up with four siblings in a house that would make this one look enormous. You can fit a lot of people into a house when the people matter more than the square footage.

The letters are gone. The spelling book is gone. Most of the nails and bolts and knickknacks are gone too. What remains is what matters: my wife, the boys, Ginger, and thirty years of memories that never really lived in a box or a drawer or an attic in the first place.

My wife keeps asking me which things I want to keep. For a long time, that question would have sent me into a spiral. Now I tell her the truth: it doesn’t matter anymore. We keep what we need to keep. We throw away what we need to throw away. We give away or sell the rest. It’s not indifference. It’s the opposite of indifference. It’s finally understanding what the things were never able to hold in the first place.

I am sure I will be emotional over the next few weeks as we say goodbye to this house room by room and closet by closet. But I have been through this before. I know now, in a way I didn’t know at twenty-two, that leaving doesn’t mean losing. The memories come with me because they never needed the house’s permission in the first place.

Most of what I write is for me. It helps me think through things I haven’t fully worked out yet, and if someone else reads it and takes something away, that’s a bonus I don’t take for granted. But this one is different. This one I hope my boys read.

To my boys, if you ever read this: the house is gone, but you are not. Christmas morning still happened. Your friends still laughed in that basement. Your mother and I still watched you grow from boys into men inside those rooms. A sold sign cannot change that. A deed cannot erase it. A key can be handed to someone else, but a childhood cannot.

You can sell a house. You cannot sell a family. We are still us. We will always be us.

Colt taught me that in a bookstore in 2007, before I understood why I needed to know it. The cabin taught me again when the dreams finally stopped. Now, with boxes half packed and a new front door waiting, I know it one more time.

The house did its job. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

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