The Husband is nesting! I had no idea this condition was contagious, but I’m thrilled. He compiled a list of projects to be completed before The Kid arrives and so far has knocked that list out: bookcases in the den, painted walls, furniture assembly, leaf-blowing. There is a fire lit under his ass the likes of which I’ve never seen, but I like it. Last weekend’s activity was organizing the office upstairs. (“The Office,” FYI, is that catch-all room designation for people who haven’t filled their house with children yet and therefore have the luxury of not calling it “The Playroom.” Not to be confused with its other definition, “a show that used to be funny when Steve Carell was on it.) On Sunday, as I burrowed deeper into the oversized chair next to the walls he painted and the bookcases he assembled, TH hauled loads of memorabilia downstairs and laid them at my feet. My task: to go through all of it and determine what needs to be kept. Cue the trip down memory lane.

For the next couple of hours, I pawed through dusty papers and pictures, alternately laughing and crying and gasping as I relived the years from college onward. I gazed upon wedding photos beginning the year after college ended, when bodies were a different shape, hair was a different color, and skin was a different tone (I will pay the price for all that time in the sun). I studied notes from friends in the days before email constituted the bulk of our interactions: birthday cards and encouraging “You were right to dump his ass!” pep talks and apologies for bad behavior (it was refreshing to be reminded that I wasn’t the only one who acted like a selfish jerk on repeated occasions). I read slips of paper containing quotes I had stumbled across and saved, poems that found a home in my soul. I found multiple budgets that I had concocted while living in New York–each with a lower bottom line than the last. I even found a “Plan for Maintaining Friendship” written by an ex-boyfriend from college that had me rolling on the floor (status update: we’re not friends). I found pictures from my first trip to New York, in March of 2002, when The Sis and I took our bad haircuts to visit a friend and I snapped photos of the Chrysler Building from her apartment window, totally blind to the idea that I would one day live in its shadow. The last item I picked up was TH’s first Valentine card to me. That one fell into the “Keep” pile.

My eyes fell to a picture I had taken back then in 2002, before the bottom fell out of my planned life, when I thought I could still hold it all together myself if I tried hard enough. I was clamoring and pushing and sweating my way through each day, not knowing I was headed straight toward failure and all the glorious debris it would entail, on a road that led me into the scene in my hands: a building adjacent to Ground Zero, where my future husband would one day work. I studied it, thinking of all we can’t see and don’t ask for and haven’t planned, and how much there is to be thankful for in what lies outside our vision.