All Posts

Wisconsin's state motto is a single word: Forward. Adopted in 1851, it was meant to capture something about the state's character — progressive, purposeful, eyes ahead. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I didn't understand it until I left and gained a different perspective. And now I'm choosing it, deliberately, as the place where True North Community will take root. That choice deserves some explanation. For a long time, geography was a variable I kept deliberately open for True N

There's a small reed basket on my shelf. It's not perfect — the weave is uneven in places, and the rim required some improvisation because the instructions ran out before the basket did. I made it last summer with a friend, on one of the afternoons I used to host that I called Crafternoons. We bought a kit, spread everything out on the table, and quickly realized the instructions were more aspirational than instructional. We had to set aside our perfectionist tendencies, read

The last few posts have been heavy. Necessarily so, given what life has thrown at me lately, and I need to go someplace else for a while. Architecture it is. My daydreams about True North have ranged from new construction on rural acreage to adaptive reuse of urban buildings. True North is never far from my mind, so sometimes the flashes come from seemingly nowhere — triggered by nothing in particular other than things that cross my path as part of any given Tuesday. The poss

There's a particular kind of aloneness that doesn't come from being alone. It comes from reaching out — deliberately, vulnerably, specifically — and finding out that the person on the other end has somewhere else to be. I've been living inside that loneliness for the past two weeks. My mother died. I've been managing her critical care in the hospital, starting the process of settling her estate, advocating for her partner, navigating a web of government agencies and legal pro

There's a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from using something you made with your own hands. Not bought, not hired out — made. You feel it every time you use it, and it never quite goes away. That's what I'm imagining when I picture the True North sauna. Not the finished product exactly — though I'm getting there — but the day we build it. A couple of fall Saturdays, maybe, when the air has that first real bite and the leaves are still hanging on. Some of us swingi

In the summer of 2021, I was trying to buy a house. The market was unhinged — bidding wars, offers due in 48 hours, inspection contingencies waived as a matter of survival. I was exhausted and increasingly discouraged, and one evening I said as much to a friend. She didn't offer sympathy or strategy. She asked me a question: "Have you found your clarifying question?" I hadn't. I'd been evaluating every listing against a loose checklist — bedrooms, square footage, commute, pri

My marriage ended in my forties. I packed up the pieces of a life I'd built with someone else — the ones that were wholly mine — and moved to Chicago to start over. I thought the hard part was the divorce, losing not just the marriage but my identity as one half of something. It wasn't. The hard part was also finding a new dentist. A new mechanic. A vet I could trust for my dog. A salon where someone actually knew what to do with my hair. A grocery store where I knew where ev

The homemade BBQ sauce has been simmering since two o'clock. The smell wafts down the path between the houses — something with molasses, chipotles, a hit of vinegar that was sharp but has mellowed — and by four, three different women have wandered into the common house kitchen on the pretext of needing something else entirely. The cook isn't fooled. She hands each of them a spoon, watches their faces. “How’s it taste?” The woman who's been gardening all afternoon, still wear

Years ago, when I was first learning how to be seen in interviews — to stand out, to signal something true about myself beyond the tidy chronology of a resume — I read a piece of advice that stopped me in my tracks. When asked the endlessly predictable question, tell me about yourself, don't recite your accomplishments. They already know those. Tell them who you are behind the titles and the dates. Tell them what you believe. My answer came without hesitation. It came from Ma

I'll be honest with you: this is not the first post I imagined writing. I pictured something energizing. A post full of happy marketing-speak — stock photos of radiant women in linen, arms flung wide in a sun-drenched meadow. Copy that promised community, connection, and your most authentic life — available now, in three easy steps. Instead, I'm writing this on a Friday evening, alone, at the end of a week that took me apart one piece at a time. The True North land search hit