My intent was to honor my husband on this anniversary of his Homegoing. And so I ordered dozens of pumpkin-flavored mini-cakes from Ida’s Cupcake Café.
Ida’s Cupcakes (all photos: Marlys)
My intent was to honor my husband on this anniversary of his Homegoing. And so I ordered dozens of pumpkin-flavored mini-cakes from Ida’s Cupcake Café.
Ida’s Cupcakes (all photos: Marlys)
Mirriam-Webster says this about thrive:
Thrive: verb \ˈthrīv \ 3 : to progress toward or realize a goal despite or because of circumstances.
Thriving doesn’t mean we’ve put closure to something and we no longer allow ourselves to feel sadness or pain in our difficulties.
Rather, it’s taking our story and our memories and our hard places with us and stepping back into life while we still have breath.
Photo by Anton Darius | @theSollers on Unsplash
In The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews sang about some of her favorite things: things like, girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, and snowflakes that stayed on her nose like eyelashes. But she forgot to mention anything about autumn, the best time of the year.
Photo by Tereza Hošková on Unsplash
Confession: The title of this blog is misleading. Because once you’ve been diagnosed with wanderlust—that strong desire or urge to travel and explore—there is no cure.
Photo: lovethispic.com
My husband, Gary, was stubborn tenacious. Diagnosed with late-stage, slow-growing prostate cancer, there was a two-year life expectancy. But Gary stubbornly insisted on living ten years. Ten far-reaching, astonishing years.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
I loved that I was married to a tenacious man.
Armed with a Chai tea and a map of the Fruit Loop, I rambled through beautiful farmland past vineyards and alpaca ranches and warted pumpkins with Mt. Hood standing guard in the near distance.
All photos: Marlys
Today, September 28, is National Good Neighbor Day. This thought from NationalDayCalendar.com:
It is a blessing to have a good neighbor, but it is even a greater thing to BE a good neighbor.
What if we made it our goal to be a good neighbor year-round?
Photo: Pixabay
Today is my husband, Gary’s, birthday. It’s also our wedding anniversary. If cancer had not stolen him from me, we would be celebrating forty-five years of marriage.
In Fredrick Backman’s novella And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, a young boy asks his grandfather a question about his grandmother: “How did you fall in love with her?”
Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash
Speaking from experience, living with less is rather liberating.
When we have too much stuff, then we have to maintain it, and build fences around it, and pay storage fees for it, and we can’t actually park our cars in our garages because of it.
Photo by hannah persson on Unsplash
Copyright © 2025 Marlys Johnson