I’m usually celebrating the last of the peonies this time of year with poems and pitcherfuls of these astonishing beauties filling the old porch. Do you ever get over the wonder of a peony? Oliver’s “beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open…eager to be wild and perfect for the moment before they are nothing, forever.” I snipped just this one this year from my neighbor’s yard, its heavy head nearly touching the grass.

The peonies bloom, white and pink.
And inside each, as in a fragrant bowl,
A swarm of tiny beetles have their conversation,
For the flower is given to them as their home.

Mother stands by the peony bed,
Reaches for one bloom, opens its petals,
And looks for a long time into peony lands,
Where one short instant equals a whole year.

Then lets the flower go. And what she thinks
She repeats aloud to the children and herself.
The wind sways the green leaves gently
And speckles of light flick across their faces.

—Czeslaw Milosz, By the Peonies

I miss my porch. Life is all about choices and this was a hard one. I hadn’t really decided how much of it I was going to share. Real life is always an intentional step apart from social media. I think that’s a good thing. I shared earlier that I was living in my “temporary home” during the construction process. Our beloved log cabin is coming down. Restoration was always my dream, but that is neither within my reach financially or possible. Living here now requires more than my pioneering spirit.

The new cabin will stand where this one stood. Our builder had explained how this was the best option as we talked deterioration and instability and foundation and septic and bedrock and driveway and budget. With that information and another winter ahead, my kids asked me this spring where I wanted to live. I tell them, “Here, by the lake.” They are helping to make that possible, doing what their dad didn’t get to do. We make the decisions together now, for these choices are their future too. They’ve become from afar financial planners and designers and construction-process interpreters, encouragers in this process.

We’ll all be together up here in a few weeks, filling all the little spaces we can find, camping, cooking, doing all the lake things. Remembering Dad, Grampa. Our first summer without him. We’ll be stepping up, stepping in to do all those things he did, honoring him with our commitment to each other. We’ll hike around the construction site to get down to the shore, shed tears, catch a vision of our future as a family. It will be different and hard and complicated and wonderful. And every now and then I’ll be reaching into the granary and “drawing out a handful” to share.

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow