House.
 
Spouse.
 
Living.
 
Architecture.
 
Dream, scheme, encounter, plan, design, start, stop. Refine, construct, tear down, open up and stop. Start, again and give in but never, ever give up. Pay along the way. Play along the way. Cope, care and compromise. Focus on the details daily, but never loose sight of the why of it, the whole of it, its reason for its being. Find and embrace that thing about which everything else spins.
 
Living is a verb. Architecture is a noun.
 
Verbs tell nouns what to do. Nouns give verbs something to do.
 
A house should be a second skin for living in. A spouse should be a second skin for living in.
 
My spouse and I, we're building a house. 
 
We dreamed for years about where our house might be and water kept wetting our dreams and rocks, big ass rocks, would bring foundation to our turrets, give anchor to our eddies. We schemed for years when the place on the water with the big ass rocks found us. We planned around a steel post and beam foundation that some poor marriage started out. We designed, I don't know, maybe at least fifteen plans. Then we started. And we stopped. 
 
It just wouldn't work the way we thought it would. 
 
So we sat on the rocks and we thought and we thought and we argued and we fought. 
 
Refinement is a delicious desert.
 
And then the construction began. 
 
We paid our neighbor to climb into his skidster and dig out from beneath the rusting steel frame and the footings.  We opened it up, found what we really had to work with and we stopped. We needed more head clearance in the basement that will flood and the only way up was to dig deeper down. So we did. 
 
Some thirty six hundred cubic yards of dirt. That's about as much dirt as could fill most houses. The original concrete footings, exposed, we wrapped and we extended in concrete, down. 
 
We started again and we'll never give up.
 
We've been paying for it along the way. We don't want a mortgage. It's hard but we play, too, along the way. We cope because we care.
 
And we compromise. Compromise is the best damn mortar ever invented.
 
Every day we talk about the details, the little things that will make our house a home.
 
The why of it, though, we never lose site of. It is a place of love.
 
A Living Architecture is a work in progress. A Living Marriage is a work in progress. 
 
In the work is found joy.
 
The whole of it, its reason for being, is because we want it to be. We are wanting this home, our home, into being. It is and we are becoming, its and our, reason for being.
 
Find and embrace that thing about which everything else, spins.
 
And win.
 
 
 
Marley
and
Lynn