It’s been an exciting year.  After celebrating the arrival of 2016 with an adorable pig being lowered from a firetruck crane amidst fireworks and kissing Fayettevillians, Huck started piano lessons, it snowed for a few minutes, and we accidentally fell in love with a house. Thankfully we have a friend-realtor who held our hands and helped us make an offer and set up the house inspection, each success feeling like we’ve made it to another episode of “American Idol.”  Now onto the financing portion, which is as terrifying as Elton John Week.

When movies get too sentimental and mushy, Huck calls them “brown bananas.”  This most recently happened during a Kansas ice day viewing of “Elf” in front of the fireplace with his twin cousins.  Every time Will Ferrell got a sweet look in his eyes Huck got closer and closer to his imminent departure, and as soon as he realized a love story was developing he was outta there. Troy and I took him to see the brownest bananas of them all, our beloved “It’s a Wonderful Life” on the big screen at the Walton Arts Center a few days before Christmas, and I thought he was literally going to die, possibly by my hands.  At one point I found myself hunkered over him whispering very non-wonderful-life threats in my lower-than-normal voice.  One of our favorite scenes in the movie is when the future Mr. and Mrs. Bailey are in front of the old Granville house and Mary says she wants to live in it someday. After 11 homes together in our 23 years of marriage, most of them small apartments, Troy and I are now feeling very mushy at the thought of settling down into our own 320 Sycamore, minus the draft.

The other day I found a piece of paper in Huck’s sloppy handwriting that asked the question: “Was he surprised because $20,000 a year was a lot or a little?”  It took me a minute to realize this was written in the dark during a Mr. Potter scene and shown to Troy in an attempt to understand a complicated financial situation from the 1940s.

We’re related after all!