Back in June I wrote about how it's okay to disappear from the internet for a while and just exist in the world. Turns out I took my own advice — honestly, that's kind of a rarity for me, but I did.

I've been quiet, and if I'm honest, part of it is that I haven't known which direction to point myself. My camera has been on a break — I didn't even bring it on this trip. I keep telling myself to pick it back up and just play with it, no pressure, no plan, and for a while I kept not doing it. I've been dropping the occasional reel, maybe once a week if that, and we got some footage on the 360 cam this summer that might end up on YouTube eventually. But this morning, without really planning to, I picked the camera up and just wandered the yard taking pictures of fruit and flowers. No pressure, no plan — just play. Exactly like I kept telling myself I wanted to.

And it's not just the camera. My brain has been doing that thing where it throws out wild options like they're serious plans — going back to school at almost 47, becoming an arborist because I love nature even if you never see me out in it. I do love it, though. I get genuinely excited watching hummingbirds come back to the feeder in my yard. I just refilled it earlier while I was writing this — turns out hummingbirds are still traveling through the area.

I think what all of that scattered thinking really is, is searching. Not failure, not being lost — just circling the thing until it comes into focus.

There's also been a heaviness underneath it. We just got back from travel, and coming home always stirs up a little sadness, because traveling reminds me how much I genuinely love it. Layered on top of that is just... the world. If you're paying attention at all right now, there's a lot to carry — injustice, suffering, environmental grief. Heck, last week the world lost Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. It's a lot.

But here's the thing that keeps giving me a flicker of hope: watching a small business owner or a creator get targeted by bad actors, and then watching a community show up around them anyway. Rallying, defending, refusing to let them be run off. It reminds me there are still good people out here, and that community can still win.

Appalachia in Summer

Now let me tell you about the good part.

My husband's mom hosted a family reunion, which meant a trip into the Appalachians — somewhere I'd been once before, briefly, around Christmas. It was beautiful then too, but summer in Appalachia is a completely different kind of beautiful. I failed to get many pics of us and people, but I'll share what I got!

Also, unashamedly, we ate breakfast at Hardee's almost every single morning. Because their Hardee's has a steak breakfast sandwich, and once you know that, there is no going back.

Growing up, my mountains were the Rockies. We'd visit family in Montana and Colorado, and those mountains are sharp and distant — the kind you see from miles away and drive toward for what feels like forever, watching them get bigger the whole time. I was obsessed with them as a kid. I told myself I'd grow up to be a hiker, live in the mountains, the whole thing.

Appalachia doesn't work like that. It doesn't loom at you from a distance; it wraps around you. The last time we were there, we'd driven up from Kentucky in the winter, and I remember telling my husband they looked like big hills. He did not appreciate that comment. He still brings it up. (For the record, I mean zero disrespect to anyone who calls those mountains home — they earned every bit of my awe this time.)

Because this time, in summer, I got it. The green is layered and endless, the mist sits low in the mountains like it belongs there, and everything feels close instead of far away. It's a completely different kind of falling in love with a landscape than the Rockies ever gave me.

The best part, though, wasn't even the scenery. It was his family — his aunts and uncles especially. There's something about sitting around with people who've known your person their whole life, in a place that green and that quiet, that puts a few things back in perspective. Side note: he was a military kid — born there, spent a few years and then summers in Appalachia — but I know he had the heart of Appalachia in him. Funny moment: his mom doesn't have the accent until she's back home — his dad even teased her about it on the trip, and she just laughed. She was born and raised there, so I know it's genuine; I think living all over the country and the world just taught her to tone it down over the years, to make other people comfortable. But the second she's home, it comes right back. It's cute.

I'm still scattered. I still don't have a clean answer for what comes next with the camera, or the schooling thought, or any of it. But I came home from those mountains a little lighter than I left, and some weeks that's the whole win.

I did end up back in the Rockies this summer — I am so lucky, our youngest is going to school there! I'll share that in a future post.

Let's keep it warm at the table and fierce in the fight.