Today is Claire Helme day! June 22nd! Happy 37th to my lover and Paramore! Claire, This last year has been rough on us both. We had been fighting a whole lot more, but the other night I wrote down this thought, “The pain we have been going through is the pain that comes with birth.” We are birthing a new life here in Napa, and it’s not supposed to be easy. This thing we are doing is supposed to be hard. I think we knew that, but we’ve both been surprised at just how hard things can be, while also feeling so damned easy. Moving feels a lot like building a house on quicksand, and that quicksand under our feet feels like I’m mixing too many metaphors. Since we sat down and REALLY talked about all of our fights and what’s fueling them, things have gotten so much better. The ground has started to feel so much more solid again. We feel connected once again. Before that talk, I had been looking for signs that we’re on the right path here in this place. I found that sign this last week when you frantically called me out onto the patio to see something fantastic! I was annoyed when I wandered away from whatever project I had been “working” on, but was so happy and surprised by what you had to show me. I can’t stop thinking about it. There it was, the plant that we had dropped on the hotel parking lot ground in Reno, Nevada. The planter shattered and we assumed the Spider plant was dead forever. Still, you listened to me when I wanted to replant the plant and see what would happen. I wanted to mix the dirt from our old life with our new life. I had faith in that plant. I had faith in us. And then the damned thing died anyway. It was dead, dead, dead. And then we were fighting, fighting, fighting. Nothing was going right in this new life and we were both so incredibly frustrated. I’ve been thinking a lot about garden metaphors, and when you called me out to the patio, I saw that the plant your mother had given us for our first home together, the one that we killed in Reno, had somehow magically sprung to life once again. I had been looking for a sign that we were on the right path, and once again the universe answered with a metaphor. We chose to come to this place with the clippings of our old lives. We replanted them here and panicked when it didn’t feel like they were growing. We forgot that growing things and life takes time. We forgot that pain comes with rebirth. We forgot how to tend our metaphorical garden. We just need to learn some more damned patience. We have to learn how to plant these seeds, and help them grow. And sometimes, we have to just plant the plant and then ignore it, only to be surprised months later that it’s not only alive, but looks to be thriving. It’s not as easy as some people make it look, and for us it’s mostly been easy. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to make your own garden grow, and that doesn’t even include all the work to grow that garden, together. Things are not going to just happen overnight for us. We have to till the garden and work to make things go. I’ve been watching more youtube videos late at night about gardening. I’ve been looking for more very real lessons and metaphors on how to continue to grow this life with you here in California. I love you so much and there is no place else I would rather be than on the couch, sipping wine, dancing in the kitchen and watching RuPaul. I can’t wait for us to figure out what we are planting here in Napa, and I can’t wait for us to help it grow.. Together.