Though you wouldn’t know it from Tyler’s hair (pristine), we haven’t stopped moving much. In keeping with forward motion, our uniform has also reached new heights. This week we got upgraded by our very own Karrah, who made our entire staff (super nice!) masks, complete with a pocket for filters, in an assortment of patterns and colors that would put Easter eggs themselves to shame (and you can challenge us on that, because we’ve assembled a basket of delights for Easter that will include a DIY dye kit made from vegetables, spices, and fruit! Passover too, more below). And a mask can be a little claustrophobic at first, but when it’s bespoke and you top the look with black rubber gloves and some newly-formed delicate pre wrinkles around the brow furrow, it’s something. Designer-esque. Like if Bottega Veneta did ninja. We thought we ought not to miss an opportune selfie and once taken, heck said we! How good we look in our Pandemic-Chic! And we’ll take the small wins where we can, fine lines be damned. Other new grooves we’re carving include late dinners at home, more consistent than ever before. We eat every night at our own table (built by Tyler himself out of spectacular redwood and Japanese joinery), and it’s a habit we’ve never had the chance to form before now. Each night that ritual is hewn into our life and feels like the truest definition of family; it is a beacon of light and the most nourishing reward at the end of the long days (cookie dough is also involved, a less-nourishing but equally indulgent reward of its own kind). Last night we told stories about the time Drew was kidnapped in Mexico, and the time I called the cops on myself (weed cake), and the time I—proudly not ironically—told a stranger how excellent Tyler is at air drums and that I, too, aspire to become great like him (both of which I still back entirely), only to learn hours later I was speaking with the actual, tenured drummer of Nine Inch Nails (!); there was also the time I told Colin Ferrell (to his face), that True Detective S2 was a venerable pile of steaming trash (dumpster fire was my chosen turn of phrase). He’s since forgiven me (Colin, not Tyler)…After the stories, Tyler flees from the dinner table to the bedroom without a goodnight and it’s then that I must take on his half-sleeping alter ego to get him to take his vitamins; it’s a duel in which I will never taste triumph, except in the hilarity of his deliriously-crafted arguments which escape his own memory by next day. These are the all-true stories we enjoy with the last of the wine at night, stories much more enjoyable in their tellings than in the living of their narratives. Maybe that’s like the one we’re weaving currently? A little uncomfortable now but fortification for later, to tell down the road after another completed cycle of life getting fat and then contracting again. We’ll see. A friend and a mentor of mine wrote a new book and gave me an advanced copy as a gift the other day. Details on that another time, but inside the cover he wrote me a modest note, it said: thanks for all the support and for keeping the light on. Such a simple bundle of words and ones that knocked me with a force full and rich. keeping the light on. So plain, but so crucial. That’s what our stories are, and that’s what the moments we sneak away to read for hours on end have become, and so, too, our newly-minted family dinners at home—little flames that keep flickering for our own warmth and comfort. So we offer the same to you: for the small wins and the big loves, for the opportunity to feed and the privilege that you’ve continued to grant us, thank you for all the support and for keeping the light on.