My wife and I bought the house we're living in almost exactly one year ago. We closed (finished all the paperwork) on January 31, 2020. Started packing on February 1. And moved in February 2nd.

Anticipating all the get-togethers we'd host in the new place, with all that extra yard space.

During the move, I cut my head, bad enough to think I might need stitches. I drove the twenty minutes to the nearest Urgent Care clinic, only to be turned away. It was Super Bowl weekend, you see, and everyone was getting in to see the doc before the game started. I could wait two to three hours, or I could go home. I chose to go home, and resume moving (suitably bandaged, of course).

No masks. No fear of other people. No hesitancy in going out for fear of catching something.

Three weeks later, having finally decided where the furniture would go, we held a house-warming party. Invited friends from all over town, got a taco truck to cater lunch, filled half a dozen metal troughs with ice and beer. We thought it'd be maybe a few hours, ended up lasting all afternoon and into the night. I made a toast for the late-night crowd using Stone's Vertical Epic re-release to talk about every significant year in our two-decades-long marriage. We had a blast.

It was the last party any of us have been to since then.

We've been lucky this year. Neither of us has caught Covid-19. We've both been able to work from home, from this home, during the pandemic. My wife took over the third (guest) bedroom as her office, a bedroom we didn't have at the old place. We had a garage big enough to hold all the boxes for all the deliveries we started getting. We had a kitchen big enough for us to start cooking all of our own meals. A yard just big enough for our pups to go out and get some exercise, since they couldn't go to the park anymore.

I feel fortunate and grateful, and a large part of it is due to this house. So thank you, house, for being there for us.

For not having any roof leaks, other than the small one in the garage that we won't talk about.

For being insulated enough so that we can both be on Zoom calls in different rooms and not hear each other.

For not having any weird smells.

For being rock-solid enough to keep on trucking with your older appliances and bathroom fixtures, and yet flexible enough to accept upgrades when we could get them done (safely).

For having lots of sun for the pups to lay in (they really do seem to be solar-powered).

For being well-ventilated enough when we needed you to be, and tightly sealed when we needed that, too.

For being just big enough for the two of us, but not so big that we couldn't keep you clean (and thanks for understanding when we felt a little too overwhelmed to scrub the bathtub that other week).

But most of all, thanks for being ready for us. And for our company, in the short time period when we could have it. I hope we can have some more company, too, in the near future.

Got 1,224 words written so far this week.

Those are spread out over different projects. I added a little to the novel, started drafting several new essays, and decided to go back and edit a short story from last year.

The story was easy for me to write, but it's been hard to edit. It's quite personal, pulling something from my childhood and turning it into a horror story. It's the first story I've written about where I grew up, and as such is hard for me to see any other way than how I've written it.

So it's taken me counts on fingers about six months to digest some beta reader feedback I got on it, and figure out what the story needs.

And I think I do, now. I can see a hole in the story, a gap in the POV character's motivations that I tried to paper over with his personal flaws.

That might work for me, or for someone who also grew up in the kind of town I did, but it doesn't work for communicating that character's perspective to everyone else. That's a failure on my part, a failure of craft, and -- hopefully -- it's one I can fix.

What about you? Have you ever had a story -- or a novel -- that you simply couldn't edit into shape until after a lot of time (and maybe some leveling up in your writing skills) had passed?