New Favorite

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen this one in progress...it's my brand-new favorite. This home is in Virginia, but looking at it makes me think so much of my home, of Spanish moss and petit fours, and all the precious and tragic things that go along with childhood. I grew up in a town called Fairhope, Alabama. It's a small town...simple and sweet...nestled in the crooks of Mobile Bay, walloped by hurricanes, and forever buried in my heart.  It's prettiest, I think, right after dusk descends on the bay, when the gaslights glow and cast shadows on the sidewalks.

I miss the living by the water.

When I was little, the beaches of south Alabama were bigger and wilder. We used to wade out into the narrow pass where the Gulf filtered into the lagoon, at night, with flashlights, and spear flounder on long, sharpened sticks. The lagoon is brackish and filled with catfish and alligators, which frightened the life out of me in the best way. Once, my uncle Michael cut the front claw off an alligator and placed it in the mailbox to scare the postman. A framed picture of that alligator foot sticking out of that yellow mailbox sat proudly in my grandmother's home for a long time, and haunts me still to this day.

I get so sad when I think about how far away Manley and I live from where we grew up. I think it's strange and sad that, in this modern world, folks live so far from their families. There's a disconnect there that jars me. And yet here we are, happily settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where we will most likely stay forever and ever. But you know what? It feels good to be from somewhere.

Have lovely weeks, my dear friends! Halfway through October already? Inconceivable.