And now for my house. Above, is the porch, and some seattle JVs the day we moved in, and the day everyone else piled their luggage into our yard before taking off one respective trains. Above that, is what I see when I sit on my porch, after work, attempting to read but never really being able to stay focused.

There is a lot of joy to living in community. There are dishes and donated bread and the hectic mornings of never being able to brush your teeth when you actually need to, but beyond that there is this process of getting to know other people in a way you've never known anyone else. And through that, getting to know yourself. Learning, maybe for the second or third time, how you want to present yourself and the support you need on a bad day.

Yesterday, in the later afternoon, Henry's daughter came into the office. She was beautiful, and she was tired, and she came to introduce herself. I guess that's when my frustrations started to melt a bit, and I realized the humanity in Henry that I'd pushed away during my last ugly confrontation in him. He's an addict. And in many ways, a bit of a mess, and he has burnt a lot of bridges. But he is a father to two beautiful women, the one in front of me that looked close to my age, and that was enough to stregthen my patience a bit more. I could go home at 5 and potentially not think of him again. Someday he'll leave RCP and who knows if I'll ever see him again. But he'll still have his daughters. And his mother. And all of the people who after all of this time still depend on him, and no matter how much it hurts, are not able to give up on him.

It's strange to see what people remember the most about their lives. Harriet, for example, talked of the oatmeal that her sister hated to eat. Even years afterward. "It was all we had, you know. That and cornmeal." We waited for her to be checked in at the clinic, and she told me of her family, her father who died and her mother who spent all of the money on alcohol. At ten, and the oldest, oatmeal was all she had to give to her sister, who was four at the time. She must have been too young to understand, she said. And I guess there are somethings that you can just never make sense of, no matter how old you are, or how long its been.