Words of Explanation

on burdens shared

Good morning friends.

I have been feeling the growing need in recent weeks to offer a word of explanation—even apology—for the sporadic nature of my publication schedule here in recent months.

When I first started finding my voice on this platform, I vowed to nurture the routine of it; the weekly rhythm I once enjoyed of wrangling my thoughts into coherent sentences and offering them up for public consumption. I have found it true for writing, as with so many things, that the routine of it is foundational to building any kind of success, however we might define ‘success’.

But you might have noticed that in recent months that routine has vaporized for me. I might have offered vague explanations or mealy-mouthed promises to try harder or to do better.

As much as I want that to be true, and as much as I do intend to re-establish the rhythm that right now eludes me, I also feel I can now come clean and offer a more transparent glimpse into the current status and machinations behind the current chaotic management style at Reflector INC (or is it Nafziger Publications?).

Photo by Luke Heibert on Unsplash

The truth of the matter is this: My family and I will be moving back to Ohio within the coming month or six weeks. The past number of weeks and months have been filled with feverish activity related to these plans, as we’ve been getting our current house ready for the market, helping our kids navigate the transition, telling friends and family, securing details related to employment, and searching as we can for housing back in our old stomping grounds.

It’s been a lot to handle, which is why this “Reflector” project has taken a momentary back seat. I do plan a return to normalcy sometime this fall, but it’s unclear exactly when.

I finally feel free to share in this space because I just recently informed my current employer that I’ll be resigning (and I lived to tell the tale!). At least one of my beloved hospice coworkers is a subscriber, and so I wanted to be judicious about how she found out.

So now that cat’s out of the bag.

You might be wondering why we’re moving, what we’ll be doing, and where we’re at in the process. I could probably turn any one of those questions into a whole newsletter (and I just might, eventually). Suffice it to say for now, we miss our former home more than we anticipated that we would. We miss Ohio.

We invested 15+ years of our lives in the people and communities that we served and loved there, and at the end of the day, it makes sense that we’ve been, in a way, sort of grieving that loss since we moved here 3 years ago.

We once thought that a return to Virginia-our college home, where we first established our life together-would be a homecoming of sorts. We always spoke of Harrisonburg as “home”, and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else if we were to move from Holmes county.

But the truth is, we are different people now than we were 18 years ago. We have different priorities, different commitments, different responsibilities. Our roots still draw from Ohio soil, but it took a move for us to see that.

So in a nutshell, we meet this bittersweet moment with a mixture of emotions and thoughts-but mostly exhaustion. We’ve accepted an offer on our house here and we’ve got a big part of employment figured out there; but our biggest present need is housing. If any of you have leads on a 3+ bedroom house where our family could thrive (preferably where we could raise some chickens, preferably in Wayne county this time around)-please do let me know.

Thank you for being part of our lives in this way! I do hope to return to my weekly posting schedule by September at the latest.

I hope you all have a great week!