I’m Meredith.

I live along the Gulf Coast of Texas, in a house built in 1959. Pink terrazzo in the entryway, pink velvet curtains in the bedroom, pink countertops in the kitchen, and turquoise accents running through the whole place. Out back there are olive trees and they fill up with hummingbirds. My neighbor, who is in her seventies, came over one day, took one look around and said “oh my God, this is I Love Lucy’s house.” She’s right, and there’s no mistaking it.

I have two dogs, Laguna and Sailor, and honestly, they’re the loves of my life. Laguna just turned twelve. Sailor is not quite six. They’re heelers, which means they shed enough to build a third dog, and they’ve decided every couch in this house belongs to them. I stopped arguing years ago.

For eleven and a half years I worked in destination management. I traveled constantly for work. So much that I used to tell people I hated traveling, which in that industry always got a polite laugh. It became a running joke. The woman in tourism who doesn’t want to go anywhere.

Then 2024 happened. I went in for a routine physical and came out of it with double vision, which turned into scans, then specialists, then more scans, then a couple of procedures I would rather not repeat. There were months in there where I was genuinely frightened. Your own mortality stops being an idea you have opinions about and becomes a thing on your calendar. That part is behind me now. What it left me with is almost no patience for hurrying.

Then last October, I was let go.

A few weeks later I went to New Mexico, to my parents’ vacation home. I had never seen it. Not once. My parents live in the same town I do, they had that place for years, and I never made the trip.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. I traveled for a living, and almost none of it was mine.

So the days look different now.

I wake up around 6:30 without an alarm, and I don’t speak to anyone for the first half hour. I meditate. Then I feed the dogs, make coffee, and call my mom. I walk Laguna and Sailor before eight, because after eight it is genuinely too hot to be outside here, and they know that before I do. I get on the treadmill and put the incline higher than I need to. Then I cook myself an actual breakfast and sit down to eat it.

That last one sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. For years, food was a six shot espresso, a protein shake, girl dinner, or a bowl of popcorn with Milk Duds in it. Sitting down to a real breakfast isn’t a small thing. Some mornings it’s the whole thing.

Then I tend to my plants. I cut whatever is blooming and bring it inside, so the flowers on my coffee table came out of my own yard instead of a store. I sit outside with the dogs several separate times a day for no particular reason. There are paint by numbers everywhere, more of them than I know what to do with at this point, and I am in no hurry to finish any of them.

I built a vision board with my mom. A real one, on poster board, with scissors, for fun. I’m also teaching myself what quantum jumping and manifestation actually mean, and I’ll save you the suspense: it isn’t witchcraft or sorcery.

I’m rehabbing furniture. I’m rehabbing a lawn in the middle of a historic drought, under water restrictions, which is either optimism or stubbornness and I’ve stopped needing to know which.

Admittedly, a lot of my afternoons are just piddling. That’s the point.

I do still work. I consult with destination organizations around the country on strategic planning and organizational readiness, and I’m good at it. I just don’t let it be the whole shape of my life anymore.

This is where I keep the rest of it. The house, the plants, the projects, the things that turned out to be worth having. I’ll say plainly that a slow life is not a color palette. It’s having some power over your own time. Everything here is chosen for a life like that: beautiful, actually usable, and worth having on an ordinary Tuesday.

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Or keep reading. The House is where the terrazzo and the plants and the furniture live. The Rebuild is the rest of it.