Several of you have asked about my birthday post, in particular the third photo, so I thought an explanation was due. No, Mrs. Choi, the script was not written on skin (though that’s my favorite guess and perhaps the grossest guess, too). We found the date scrawled on the ceiling of our hallway after my brother and a friend tore down some very old, very gold, very crusty wallpaper. I don’t know what happened on December 6, 1940, that warranted the notation on the plaster ceiling but I love imagining what Lincoln, and the rest of the world, may have been like during that time. The day that will live in infamy occurred only one year and one day later and forever changed the makeup of our society. Whose initials are recorded in our hallway? We don’t know. But the date is a familiar one, to some degree. Thirty-seven years later I was born in a very different part of the country. And 61 years and two days later, Jeremy and I moved our first home.

In case you were wondering, our house was built in 1915. The Prairie Box is elderly and beautiful.