here we are! who are you?

i am emily.  i live on cape cod with my boyfriend (soon to be husband), who we'll call mike, and my dog pippa.  she is my dog, not his.
 we live in a teeny tiny little itty bitty 380 square foot apartment in chatham, where i have a garden (that i call huge and my sister ruby laughs when i say that) and mike has a shop in the basement.  he does carpentry, and he spends a lot of time down there building wonderful things for me.  our apartment does not feel as small as it really is because we have maximized our space and minimized our possessions.  mike proved his handy self and screwed a beautiful piece of plywood onto the lid of a storage bin, which now sits in front of a lovely futon that was here when we moved in, where it serves as our coffee table, and a place to store our sheets and blankets.  some day he will build a rustic chest, using the screwed on plywood as the final piece for the lid, to replace the storage bin, but as of right now, we have too many projects for that one to rate.  the storage bin works just fine for us.
tomorrow when i get up, if the rain has stopped by then, i will go out into my huge garden and plant the first thing to be planted there, garlic.  woohoo! i will plant it about 2 inches deep in the sunniest spot in the whole garden, because it is the thing that i care about most that i am planning on growing.  i will hopefully be able to harvest the garlic next summer, maybe around august.  i think.  the only other meaningful thing that i am planning on growing are sunflowers.  next summer, mike and i are planning on getting married.  we have been engaged for three years now (exactly three years on christmas eve) so it is about damn time that we tied the knot.  we (by we i mean me and my sister ruby, my mother, a couple of my aunts and a handful of cousins, not me and mike) are growing the sunflowers for the fabulous event.

now is when i tell about a tragedy that occurred this past july, because there are so many times so far when i have almost written about it, but the timing has been off thus far.  my sister sophie, who was my best friend, roommate, role model, and much much more than i can say with words, was hit by a car and killed on the spot before my very eyes.  this event has shaped my life in ways that were and are unexpected and painful, yet it has inspired growth in my spirit and my emotional self.  if someone were to approach me with the option, give back all of your new personal development and in return you get to spend one more moment with sophie, i would in a heart beat.  unfortunately, this is what i'm stuck with, i'll never get that option, it's what i've got.
we had to move out of our old house and find a new smaller apartment because sophie died.  the garlic that i am going to plant in my garden was planted last season by sophie, so if i keep planting it season after season, i will always have sophie's garlic.  we are going to grow our own sunflowers because sophie was supposed to be the one to grow them for our wedding, so now the job has fallen to us.  every piece of my life has been affected by her death so my stories usually begin with that night.  this is where the new me begins.