Part 1: The Magic Year

It’s impossible to pick up this blog where I left off — because I’m not the same person anymore. The woman writing this now has lived a few lifetimes since then. Transformations have happened across the board — big and small — and I’m using my journals to process and make sense of it all.

In the fall of 2022, we made the bittersweet decision to leave Augusta, Georgia — our home for a decade. We had spent our entire twenties there. I moved for a job, and Andy, my boyfriend at the time, followed. We got married, bought our first house, built deep friendships, and brought three children home from the hospital there. We had grown roots — real, tangled roots. I could envision forever there… until I couldn’t.

Our decision to leave was not made lightly. It stemmed from multiple factors: the long ripple of Covid, Andy becoming fully remote, changes at my workplace, and the realization that we needed more resources for our oldest daughter. Plus, we felt an increasing pull to be closer to family. We often visited our families — mine in West Virginia and Andy’s in Ohio — asking ourselves, “Which place feels most like us?”

Ultimately, we landed on Yellow Springs, Ohio, about thirty minutes from Andy’s hometown. To be totally honest, I never pictured us living in Ohio. But one autumn day in 2022, we drove through Yellow Springs, and it felt like stepping into a storybook. The charming storefronts, vibrant murals, and the sense of community made it clear: this place held a kind of magic.

And it truly did.

The porches humming with jazz music, barefoot children running through tall grass, the Kindness Matters signs, the murals, the Hacky Sack players on street corners, the easy authenticity of it all. Both Andy and I felt that rare, electric sense of this must be the place. It sounds careless, maybe, but it wasn’t. It was intuition — something deep and certain that we both felt at the same moment.

That same day, we toured an old downtown house that charmed our socks off. We made an offer, half-expecting the inspection to reveal a thousand hidden issues (it was an old house, after all). Still, we couldn’t shake the feeling that this might be our next chapter. The next morning, we drove back to Georgia. It all felt cinematic — as if the story could tilt in any direction.

Back home, we sold our house and soon discovered we were expecting Caroline. Life became a blur of checklists. Everything started moving fast. The thrill of starting over was intoxicating, but the energy it demanded — especially while pregnant — was enormous. It felt like breaking up with an entire decade of life and the people who had grown up alongside us. Yet I never doubted the decision. I didn’t think, This is wrong. I just knew we were being called somewhere new.

Our first year in Yellow Springs was busy, as those life-changing years tend to be — but it was also beautiful. Caroline was born an hour away from the village, delivered by one of my childhood friends from West Virginia — a full-circle moment if there ever was one.

And let me tell you about the sunflowers. The endless, golden sunflowers.

We filled our weekends with projects — painting, planting, fixing, dreaming. The house began to hum with our ideas. It felt like home in no time. Spending so much time with Andy’s parents was a gift — extra hands, spontaneous date nights, relationships deepening in new ways.

That fall was the first true fall we’d experienced in years — crisp air, glowing trees, all of it. The winter was mild. The kids grew like wildflowers. Before I knew it, kindergarten was over, Caroline was almost one, and we were woven into little social circles — walking everywhere, uncovering the small histories of this mysterious, magnetic village.

None of it was fancy. It was modest, unpretentious — and that charmed me even more....