The summer solstice is here, and looking back on spring, the hill has been buzzing, blooming, and moving in every direction.

 

The bees have settled in, the wildflowers are starting to turn to seed, and the deer are showing up with tiny spotted babies. 

 

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I realized the hill has been working on me too. I thought I was building a place for tiny lives to rest, but apparently the hill had a few opinions about how I was living mine.

On May 15, I drove to Riverside and came home with 10,000 bees in the back seat, which is not a sentence I ever thought would apply to my life. This photo is from moving day, when I transferred the girls from the little “nuc” starter boxes they grew up in and into their new hive homes.
 

Over the past six weeks, the two colonies have settled in beautifully. I’ve named the queens Seraphina and Celestine, because apparently once you have thousands of bees living on your land, giving their queens dramatic names feels like the reasonable next step.
 

Seraphina reigns over hive one, Celestine over hive two, and I’ve been doing regular inspections to make sure everyone is healthy, settled, and doing what they're supposed to be doing.
 

I spent over a year studying bee medicine and husbandry, took hands-on classes, read everything I could, and still somehow feel like I showed up to the first day of school without a backpack. 

Thankfully, the colonies do not care about my confidence level. They are doing exactly what bees have been doing for millions of years. The queens are laying, the girls are bringing in nectar and pollen, and I am mostly standing nearby trying to look useful. I feel lucky to be an observer of their world and a caretaker of the land they now call home.

Since spring, 486 more tiny lives have come to rest here on the hill, and I do not take that lightly. Every time I scatter ashes, I think about the little life being returned to the land, the person who loved them, and the privilege of being trusted with the final part of their story.

 

I do not always know the details of their lives, but I take a quiet moment to imagine who they may have been to someone: a soulmate, a little shadow, maybe a tiny landlord who ran the whole house.

 

Whatever their story was, I send them back into the land with care, respect, and gratitude.

There have been so many memorable moments on the hill this spring, but nothing beats what happened last week. Like the bobcat sighting around the winter solstice, this was another first for me.

 

I was driving back down from the hill after feeding the bees and tending to the ashes when I startled a doe and her fawn on the road. The doe went left, the baby went right, and my stomach dropped because I thought I had separated them.

 

So I stopped the truck and waited, fully prepared to become emotionally invested in deer family reunification.

 

After about five minutes, the little fawn came bouncing out of the brush and found her mom again. She had this ridiculous pogo-stick gait, just boing, boing, boing-ing down the road, like her legs had only been installed that morning.

 

Six years living here in Temecula, and it was the first time I’ve seen a fawn. It completely made my week.

Two new keepsakes are hanging on the Memory Tree this season: Bella and Ralphie.

 

Bella has her bows. Ralphie has his bone. I lose hours making these, in the best way, because making each one helps someone remember a life that was deeply loved.

 

And if you ever wonder what the Memory Tree is or how it came to be, you can read the story of how Little Whiskers began here.

 

If you would like your pet’s name added to the Memory Tree, whether they rest here or not, you can add a memorial keepsake below.

Tending to Little Whiskers has shown me something I could not ignore anymore.

 

For the past nine years, my life has been on hyperdrive. Three different startups, 10 to 12 hour days, nearly seven days a week, and a nervous system that thought rest was a suspicious foreign concept.

 

I was building growth and scale, but I was also running myself into the ground.

 

I started Little Whiskers around November 2025. This place was meant to be a resting place for tiny lives, but somewhere along the way, I started coming here when I needed rest too. I would walk the hill, check on the land, listen to the quiet, and feel something in me unclench.

 

Over these past few months, it became clear what the hill had been trying to tell me all this time: I do not just want to visit a simpler life, I want to live one.

 

So we put our house up for sale.

 

There is no grand master plan here, unless you count Plan T, as in Plan Trailer, as a plan. Although if the house sells fast, we may be looking at Plan Tent, because we do not actually have a trailer yet.

 

As an Aries, this kind of leap feels perfectly reasonable to me. My Virgo husband, Scott, is handling it about as well as you would expect from someone whose wife just introduced him to a housing plan based mostly on vibes, future chickens, and a trailer we do not own yet.

 

When people ask if he’s okay with it, he says he’s along for the ride and here to watch the show, which is probably why we’ve lasted 24 years already.

 

Will I regret it? Maybe. Indoor plumbing might turn out to be non-negotiable for me. But if simplicity is what I keep craving, then I need to start building it now instead of waiting for the perfect moment to arrive. 

So that is where summer finds us: bees in the hives, wildflowers going to seed, more tiny lives resting on the hill, and our house officially for sale with no real plan except a shared belief that we will probably figure it out.
 

By the time the Fall Equinox arrives, I may be writing this from a trailer. Hopefully with electricity. Possibly with a calm husband who is still not questioning his life choices.