If you got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat/I’m just saying I ain’t got nowhere to be

Sometimes, in life, it’s nice just to stop for a minute and take a breath.

That’s how I felt in the spring of 2015. For the preceding two years, everything in my life had been moving at the speed of sound. Graduating from college in April 2013 and moving in with my girlfriend; trying and failing to find a full-time job; striking up a career in freelance writing; proposing to my girlfriend; planning a wedding and juggling all the festivities that come with it – from showers to bachelor/bachelorette parties; actually getting married.

I thought things might ease into a slower pace after the wedding and the honeymoon, but they didn’t. A month after that, my wife was interviewing for a new job, and we ended the summer of 2014 by turning in the keys of our Illinois apartment and moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan to start another new chapter. And shortly after that, my grandpa passed away, throwing my whole extended family into a tailspin that lasted through the holidays.

The whirlwind of changes kept going into the New Year. On the first day of 2015, my wife and I adopted a tiny kitten, the first pet we’d ever shared together. She was (and is) a beautiful little troublemaker and she stole my heart immediately. And then, that winter, we got so sick of living in a cramped apartment that we found a realtor and started shopping the housing market. We closed on our first house in March of that year, and moved in the next month, right as Michigan was bursting into springtime bloom.