Today marks exactly five years since my Dad and I arrived in Arizona, having picked up two households, a fully equipped garage, three vehicles and a mini-bookstore, and moved the entire sheeeebang 1,700 miles from the Chicago area.  I was going to post a couple of photographs-- the first house we rented, the first house Wes and I bought, the first dog we adopted.  And therein lies the ache: I have never been the most diligent of photograph filers, so I found myself going through pictures (because the envelopes were undated and untidily stored) that for the most part only made me sad.  Images of Lily in the first house Wes and I owned, taken on the first day she arrived from Oregon.  A shot of my great-grandparents' headstone, in the cemetery where I spread my mother's ashes (because she said as a child, her time with them was the happiest of her life).  A box of non-pictures-- Christmas, Easter and birthday cards from my Mom, my Grandmother, and my Aunt, all now gone to whatever waits in the Great Beyond.  Pictures of our beautiful New Orleans, taken at a convention before Katrina and the failure of the levees.  A photograph of my friend David Gemmell, taken at a convention dinner, another of my former boss and friend, David Kayner.  Not the memories I was actually wanting to record, but they are a big part of my life and so here they are.

There have been disappointments, losses, changes, and lots of hard work.  But there have been joys and gains and new dreams, too.  So while Arizona is not the paradise I thought it would be, it has been exactly what I, or anyone, should have expected:

It's been life.