The sinewy twirl of smoke floated off to the side of our backyard firepit, hesitated for a moment and then caught the updrift of heat, carrying it into the open-armed tree branches spanning our patio. Mila sat facing toward the driveway, alert to noises that could signal a need to bark and ward off would-be predators. Elsa, poised with a cocktail in hand was looking at me bemused. “You haven’t heard a word I said.”
It was true, my brain was rocketing around in a chaotic linkage of thoughts. It started with a recollection of the safe we had re-uncovered in the floor of the basement earlier that day. Discovered when we first remodeled the basement in 2005, we gave up trying to open it and covered it with wall-to-wall carpet where it remained hidden until this morning. Now its secrets taunted me. Had the previous owners left in a hurry and abandoned some valuable treasures inside? Maybe there were letters, some coins… a gold bar? Likely it was empty.

But would it be worth it to hire a safe cracker to open it? My mind pivoted to ways I might grind off the hinges and pry open the door. Or maybe I could break up the concrete around it and pull it out of the ground. Perhaps I should just leave it for some future homeowner to discover and wonder, as I had, what was in there. What if there was a key? A photograph. A map? Should I buy an acetylene torch? That will probably set off the smoke detectors. Smoke, fire, Smokey the Bear, look at the smoke spinning off the end of that piece of wood…

I looked up at Elsa. “Sorry, what?”
She sighed, sipped at her drink and looked at the fire. Welcome to 2025.

There were several dominant themes to this past year.
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House projects, obviously. The basement had been our first remodeling project when we bought the house in 2005 and it was time to make a change. The carpet needed to go and after briefly flirting with the idea of wood flooring, we instead opted for polished concrete. We redid the walls with rustic barnwood and changed out the furnace, adding an air conditioner for those now inevitable weeks in the summer that would push temperatures above 95 degrees. The downstairs is now split between a great office space for Elsa and a kick-ass workout room that Elsa uses consistently and Eric uses aspirationally, mostly in his imagination.

In August we rebuilt the deck at the cabin. It only took a long weekend, but it looks and feels so much better.

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On October 1, we ripped out the carpet in the living room. Easy Peasy. And we took out the ceramic tile in the dining room. Not Easy or Peasy. Carpet removal - three hours; Tile removal  - three brutal days with a rotohammer, a grinder, a sander, and shopvac. So messy! So loud! So satisfying!  

But once removed we had a blank slate to install 8-inch wide hardwood floors that spanned the entry, dining room, living room, closet and eventually the master bedroom. Hell yes, we did it ourselves! It really changed/transformed the space in a surprising way. Somehow it all flowed. The dining room table could rotate, the couches could be re-arranged, there was room for a second Holiday tree (Elsa happy dance)!  This was an intense project that took a full month of weekends, but it made us wonder why we waited. What an improvement!

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‍The second theme was, weirdly, “Eric’s hair.” I’m not sure exactly why this has become such a fascination, but my choice in September of 2024 to not shave my head every two months as I had been doing for 30 years, resulted in a great deal of conversation, laughter, and speculation.

Now 16 months into the experiment, I’ve gone from looking clean cut, to looking like Bob Ross, to now a bit like Jim Morrison. There was a brief moment when a couple people observed I looked like Harrison Ford, but that comparison was short lived, and my friends declared that those people were out of their minds. Now I get the “what’s up with your hair?” “oh my god its amazing” “um… are you sure about this?” “when did you become a hippy?” comments on a regular basis. Most recently it was “dude, even hippies cut their hair.” Elsa was an eager accomplice to this experiment, happily buying me “get curly” shampoo, conditioner, and gel.  

Then she surreptitiously photographed me and made “Eric’s Hair” temporary tattoos for distribution to friends and enemies.  I’ve accepted it mostly, but I also now appreciate what a pain in the ass long hair can be.
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A third theme was travel and connection. We took a surprising number of local trips this year. Patzcuaro (Mexico), Mead (CO), Palm Springs, Port Townsand, Spokane, Missoula, Power (MT), Wallowa Lake (twice), the cabin at Mt. Rainer (of course), Copperopolis, Seattle, And each of those trips included lovely visits with friends/family.

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In some cases, the themes combined as when we were handed the keys to a convertible by our friends who own the house in Palm Springs. Top down on a beautiful sunny April afternoon, I suddenly exclaimed to Elsa, “look at my hair, it’s blowing in the wind, that’s never happened before.” She laughed and took a picture. Then we drove to a speakeasy disguised as a laundromat, like you do when you are in Palm Springs.

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A final theme might be called “transitions.” In February after Elsa’s dad had several falls and Emergency Room visits, we were able to get Elsa’s parents moved into a lovely retirement community in Vancouver where they can get daily health care assistance and have access to better hospitals and treatment centers than were available on the coast. This took a lot of Elsa’s time, but having them closer made a difference in her ability to visit and provide assistance when needed.
Workwise, Elsa decided to finish her work at the law firm and instead focus on building her own business that provides fractional operations support to small business owners. She really likes working with entrepreneurs, but since they usually can’t afford a full-time operations person, in this way she can spread the cost across multiple organizations and still provide the knowledge and expertise that an operations eye can bring to a growing organization. She’s excited to get started in 2026.
Eric’s Page Two Partners company transitioned from four owners to two, with the two originators of the Executive Transition Services concept retiring and leaving the reigns in the hands of Eric and his business partner Jani. The end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 were financially dismal, but the company rallied in May and ended the year on a very good footing going into 2026. Their whole business is about helping nonprofits with executive leadership transitions and with the upheaval in nonprofit funding this past year, there has been a lot of need for temporary leadership.

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We can’t finish without mentioning the quirky events. The protests! Yes we wore our frog costumes and joined 45,000 other people in downtown Portland on October 18. We hosted a music concert at our house with the band Wonderlic (a sub-band of Too much Joy). We saw Nick Lowe and Los Straightjackets, Maci Gray, and Colin Hay in concert, and we witnessed our first AI musician/performer in the form of a singer/songwriter robot who opened the set with a dis-resonant cover of “I’ll be watching you” before transitioning to a bizarre thought poem about the singularity. It was dystopian and made me wonder out loud, “what is wrong with us?”  Do we really want AI to write our music?
I suppose in the end, what is wrong is what is right. We are a society in transition, an ever-evolving curling twisting tendril of smoke that dances and moves with the currents. We disperse, we gather. We choke, we illuminate, we dance.

Ours is a species that has only come to dominate the planet over the last 5000 years, really in the last 200 years. Our impact is disruptive and overwhelming. Sometimes it feels like too much. But we keep going because of art and beauty and kindness sprinkled in with hope. There was a moment this year where I took a picture of a dandelion…which I hate because it’s a weed. But it was also really spectacular in its spherical form ready to take flight and spread the dandelion love! In another moment, I noticed a squirrel precariously balanced on the thinnest of branches as he chowed down on a cluster of maple seeds, sending other seeds spinning to the ground. This is prosaic stuff, backyard birdwatching. But it’s also magnificent and reminds us of these seeds we plant that spread new life and new stories in unpredictable places.  Beauty, connectivity, simplicity, and complexity. It fills me with gratitude and joy. Maybe this next year will be even better. I hope so.