The last two years in a nutshell: we moved to Seattle. Or, it became more painful to stay the same than to change.
I started out 2024 with a renewed sense of vigor. I left my tech job the previous October, took a little bit of time off to recoup and was ready to jump into what was next. I started the year with a six-part business plan that included things like bottling my peach jalapeño hot sauce commercially and growing a flower farm. I was on fire.
I did grow the flower farm. We transformed my very large garden area into an incredible micro flower farm with over 30 beds and extensive basalt gravel pathways. I started hundreds and hundreds of seeds and created the garden of my dreams. It was pure magic and the hardest work you could imagine. I sold bouquets around town and got to create so much beauty. I also started a houseplant and gift shop that lived in long-term popups in a couple of different locations and gave me the opportunity to do a few commercial houseplant installations. It was all so fun. And also only moderately well-received.
By late spring of 2024, while growing flowers and watering so very many plants, I got really sick. I was fighting an inexplicable tonsil infection (not strep) that just wouldn’t go away. Four awful rounds of antibiotics later, I was having a last-minute tonsillectomy which was incredibly painful and took forever to recover from. This wasn’t the end of my antibiotic journey. By October I had taken a total of 7 rounds of antibiotics, the final round being a treatment for C. diff which had been caused by all of the other antibiotics. I was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. It was awful. I didn’t even get to make a single bottle of hot sauce. My body did not hold up in 2024 and I spent as much time laying on the couch as I didn’t. It was discouraging and excruciating and went on and on and on.
Days after I recovered from C. diff, Josh and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary with a trip to London and Paris. We stayed a week in each city and fell completely in love. There truly is nothing like spending time in Europe. Those ancient cities hold such magic and mystery and belonging. We were both enamored and can’t wait until we can go back.
Two significant moments occurred in 2024 that set the trajectory of our future. The first was when we were attending a late-summer concert in Grand Junction during which I came to the realization that I was trying to shove myself down the throat of a community that had long ago rejected me. I tried and tried to make that city in my own image and it just didn’t want to be what I wanted it to be. It is a place that doesn’t hold my values or want what I had to offer it. (Why I decided to pour more of myself into that place by building my flower farm and business, I still don’t quite have answers for. Keeping Josh in a place he hated for such a long time will be something that I regret for a long, long time.)
The second was sitting in our flat in London with the window wide open to the crisp October evening listening to the people on the street below, completely in love with the city, the culture, the people, the joy, the food, the climate. It was then that I decided it was beyond time that we love where we live.
We arrived home to devastating election results, fell into a bit of a depression, and started making our plans to leave.
Our criteria for where to live were this:
a city
a place that was not hot
walkable
somewhere with lots of things to do
by the water
LA was close to the top of our list but it was on fire and it felt like it wasn’t the time to move there and take a house that a resident could otherwise occupy. So in February 2025, we flew to Seattle for 10 days to figure out if it might be the place for us. I’ve always been enamored with the Pacific Northwest, so it wasn’t a hard sell for me and I was convinced I wanted Seattle within a couple of days. Josh decided on the very last day before we flew back to Colorado.
We spent the next two months working day and night on the remaining house projects on our mid century house, making it perfect to put on the market. (Boy, was it perfect!) And then we entered house-selling purgatory.
I shut down my business and closed out all of my products, focusing full time on moving us. The house went on the market in May and we closed in September. We had 32 showings and, in the waiting, things got very, very dark for me. I’ve had to wait for a lot of things in my life and this period was one of the most excruciating I’ve ever been through. It felt like I was offering my one final act of creativity, a place that I poured my heart and soul into, to Grand Junction and, once again, Grand Junction did not want or appreciate it. (Incidentally, it was a couple from Denver that bought our house.)
But then after months and months of waiting, everything finally happened. We closed on our house on August 11th, selling it for more than double what we paid for it. (Thank you, dear Mid Century house.) We flew to Seattle that same day and put an offer on a house two days later.
I had been very, very sad to leave our beautiful little acre and truth be told, that house is what kept my feet planted in Grand Junction for so long. After Covid and a chronic illness, it was the only place in the world that felt safe to me. We put so much into that house and had never intended to sell it, even if we wouldn’t always live there. But by the time we pulled away with all of our belongings in tow, I had done my grieving and was completely ready to let it go. Goodbye to the house that grew our kids and our marriage and so many, many flowers. How lucky we were to live there, to make it what it was always meant to be, to love it like that house deserved to be loved and for it to love us in return. So very lucky.
Seattle welcomed us with open arms. I literally pulled into our driveway for the first time and a neighbor was walking by and welcomed me to the neighborhood. The first words I heard in my new city were “welcome.” Our tiny 900 sq ft house has been a fun challenge to solve. With every little improvement, every little tweak to our storage solutions, every new leaf on my thriving houseplants, it feels more and more like home. I couldn’t be more grateful to be here. I can’t wait to grow flowers here. This city is incredible and so, so beautiful. So often I get a glimpse of the Salish Sea, the Space Needle, the tall, tall trees, everything green, the shining lights up on a hill and I am overwhelmed with knee-buckling gratitude for this new start.
I still have a lot of processing to do to understand why I kept us in a place that so clearly didn’t want us, where we’ve, perhaps, never belonged. Josh’s patience with me was remarkable and I’ll be forever grateful that he let me have my process, however drawn out and painful it was. I think I have some work to do around staying too long: in jobs, in relationships, in cities. At least I can say I tried everything I could to make it work.
We celebrated our first Christmas here in Seattle. For the first time ever it was just the two of us. We flew to Colorado a few days later to celebrate with the kids and Eden’s twins. We are so thankful for direct flights, making travel so much easier. It’s hard being away from them, but with them living on the other side of Colorado, we were away from them anyway. And it’s so fun having them come visit.
Everything is still new. We’re still finding our way around. We can’t wait to make friends. I need to figure out what’s next for my career. Some days it’s hard, but I’m always, always grateful for this chance to make everything new. It didn’t feel brave–it felt raw and clumsy–but I think maybe it was. I am so grateful that we took the leap and changed everything to find what we really want. We only have this one wild and precious life. And all things can always, always be made new.
Happy New Year.
I’ve been writing my year in review for 20 years! You can see them all here.
