Married.

Hello there. I am writing to you no longer Tracy Bunker, but Tracy O'Neill.

It was a beautiful, tiny, fantastical wedding, both a sobering and an overwhelmingly joyful experience. I'd marry him a hundred times over again.

Now we are settled in an in-progress, one-room cabin, which means that every reality that marriage is came into full focus the minute we were off the honeymoon. No air-conditioning, no running water, no flushing toilets, or stairs to our extremely high front door means that stress is a very real thing in these, the first weeks of forever. Those things are something I of course am used to, but they can be hard to deal with when you are the adult and not the child anymore. The Lord of course has his hand on us, and marriage is nothing if not a challenge to take on the image of Christ every minute of every day, and I am grateful to God that he gave me such an amazing man to face the challenges with.

So for now, life is a cycle of cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, and working part time as a receptionist/secretary at a canoe rental and outfitter at the nearby Buffalo River National Park. Benjamin still works full time at the insurance company, but comes home with a long-suffering smile and tiredly gets to work on getting the house ready for winter, which is something we must prioritize above all else at the moment. Wood stove, insulation, siding, flooring, and stairs are hopefully in the near future. We plan to block off the space under the house with straw bales to block the wind and give Steel a warm place to sleep. All in the Lord's timing, which is never our own, I have learned.

I will post pictures and something more substantially worded sometime soon.

Until then,
Blessings,
Tracy O'Neill