Some modest northern lights from my place last Monday night on MLK day. 1/19/26.

Dear Friends,

Happy 2026 Everyone!

Note: I have a rather long introductory letter this month, so if you want to skip ahead past my ramblings to the content, feel free to scroll on to the other sections! This month I discuss one of my most fun projects, my custom painted staircases, and one of my favorite under-appreciate plants, the ancient and humble snakeskin liverwort, that grows in the splash zones around the waterfalls. Otherwise, read on for my reflections and a recap of 2025!

Unbridled Joy. The other day, I woke from a dream with this phrase in my head. In my dream, I was telling someone nostalgically about a night in Paris I had in my twenties (that really happened, not a dream!) in which my friend and I went out in the Latin Quarter. It was during a World Cup, and the French men’s team had just won a game. People who were out watching the game that had just ended were celebrating, and so the general energy was palpably buoyant. We met some men at a bar who told us about another bar that was more fun, and it turned out to be a small dance club that was packed with people. I am not much of a partier or bar-hopper or dance club person, I rarely enjoy being in dense crowds with very loud music. But this night, this place, this moment, was somehow absolutely perfect, and I turned myself over completely to the moment. Dancing with one friend and a lot of strangers in this tiny crowded Parisian club was one of the most magical and fun nights of my life.

When I woke from this nostalgic dream of remembering this real night, this phrase “unbridled joy” was bouncing around in my mind. When was the last time that I felt that way? Perhaps it has been awhile since I have let loose with such abandon, but there are regular moments where I experience a gentle swelling up of joy within my heart. Sometimes, I feel guilty when I feel happy. As a culture, we can struggle with allowing ourselves to accept joy as an appropriate emotion within the context of dark and difficult times.

Which brings me to my point. I think it is vitally important to not suppress joy. I think about the concept of “Black Joy” spoken and written about by many black activists, a movement that celebrates Black joy, beauty and resilience as a form of resistance and healing. It is about celebrating black artistry, achievement, and culture, not just focusing on trauma and pain. I love this concept that joy can be a form of resistance. Creativity, gratitude, and happiness can keep us going while we face obstacles. When I started this newsletter, I never thought I would start every newsletter talking about politics. But it is hard not to acknowledge the elephant in the room, as our national (and international) news continues to barrage us with tragedies, injustices, instability, and fear. So, all I want to say before I go on to my actual newsletter, is to remind you to embrace any possible moment to experience and celebrate unbridled joy, and don’t waste a moment of emotional energy feeling guilty about it. Feel all the other emotions too, but don’t suppress moments of joy, for joy is what will sustain us. Yesterday morning, my mom sent me this amazing video of protestors in Minnesota making decorated sleds, and it literally made me laugh and cry at the same time. I am so proud of all of the resistance that we are seeing from Americans, and that, when possible, it can be filled with joy. We need these reminders, especially this weekend, as more heartbreaking tragedies roll in.

Ok, off my soap-box and on to my newsletter. 

Before sitting down and writing all that, I meant to write a recap of 2025 as part of my newsletter. It always seems too slow to me, being in it, almost every day. Tiny, incremental progress. So it helps me to look at the entire year to see the progress we have actually made.

What I share on the newsletters is never in synch with what is happening at the moment, because I am compressing many months of work on a single theme into a newsletter report.  What I have shared here is still mostly from 2024. The beginning of 2025 started with much of the interior of my side of the house getting its finished surfaces in place: the tile and other flooring, the painted walls, the trim, the cabinets. So 2025 was all about doing major work on the guest side of the house, starting from the studs, and squeezing in time to do a lot of finishing touches on my side (like appliances, light fixtures, shelving, furnishing and moving in) and into the place. On the guest side, we began with installing insulation and the vapor barrier, the covering all the surfaces. Ceilings, drywall, painting, flooring, trim, cabinets… room by room, square foot by square foot. This time around I knew a lot more and was more useful to the process.

This time around we admitted defeat and got some help with the drywalling, hiring a crew to install and spackle drywall all at once in several of the rooms, leaving the closets, bathroom, and basement for us to do later. There were some gaps in our productivity in 2025, as my dad recovered from knee surgery, came back to help, then left to do some paying work projects. I also had to take some breaks, as I did an entire mural project with a high school, keep up with my teaching work, and did various demanding commissions. (Here is a little video of FB and Insta I made of my personal and professional life of 2025, with one glimpse of my most ambitious tile project yet in it!) As 2025 came to a close, we are working on the guest bathroom and the guest basement, but all of the other rooms are very nearly done. The challenge now is that we have no unfinished rooms to use as “the shop” so we have to dance around and try not to destroy finished spaces as we work in them, moving boards and using power tools. Every time we mishandle a board and ding up a finished wall I cringe! We do our best though, and there will be a final stage of going around and patching up and repainting the occasional dent and scratch and mark on the walls. I kept the color schemes simpler on the guest side, so at least there are not so many different paint colors needed for final repairs!

So, what this all means is, despite all the interruptions in 2025 we did the vast majority of interior finish work on the whole guest side of the house. This also means that 2026 should be the year we FINISH the house! Of course, Sirona Falls will be a lifelong project, but I hope to start being able to actually use the space to host art classes and vacationers, which will be huge. For all four years of this project, people have asked me “when will you be done?” And I finally can answer “this year!” though I can’t project a specific month yet. Summer? Fall? Who knows! Everything always takes longer than you think and we have a lot of final inspections to pass, including the ADA inspection. Yikes! Hope we got everything right to the quarter inch! We also have exterior landscaping to do in the spring to tidy things up and do some grass and wildflower seeding, so this spring will be probably one more total mud season on the grounds.  

I will keep you all posted as in each newsletter I catch us up to the present, until I am able to settle on a realistic opening date when the house has passed all its inspections and the grounds will not be a total mud-pit! At that point, I want to host a soft opening/open house/celebratory party of some kind and you are all invited!

Stay warm and safe and cozy through this big storm and cold spell! I am as prepared as a can be and excited to ride it out and see my first big snowstorm here. Wish me luck! So far, about 8 inches of snow by 11 am.

If you read the newsletter and have thoughts or reflections or want to share how you are faring in the storm, drop me a note! I am just hanging out and shoveling every two hours!

Love,

Elody

1/22/26. A walk on the edge of the very frozen lake in single digit temps last week.

Above: Designing, painting and installing stair risers.

Feature Project: Staircases!

I think I have always wanted to do a fun painted staircase, but after we designed and began to build the house, it become so apparent that the stairs would be so very prominent. The moment you step inside either front door, my side and guest side, a staircase rises directly in front of you. What an opportunity for decoration, especially because I could paint the risers before installing them rather than while lying uncomfortably on the stairs in an existing house. So, I planned way in advance and went all out on my two main staircases to the upstairs on both sides. Then, when preparing the basement stair treads and risers, I couldn’t help myself, so I added some casual simple color design to those as well.

First, the Rainbow Staircase. I wanted something really flashy, colorful and fun to greet you when you stepped into my house, and it is also the pathway to lead you up into my art studio, so I felt I “had permission” to make it as “artsy” as I wanted. I spent way too much time designing many different designs, and some of you may recall even voting on designs that I posted to social media. I ultimately settled on one and then went about executing it. I made the design with solid white lines in between each color so that I could apply tape just once, do all the painting, and peal all the tape away to reveal nice clean edges. The trick to getting clean edges from tape is twofold. The first, use high quality tape! (Tip: “Frogtape” brand delicate surface tape is my personal favorite.) The second is to “seal” the tape with a layer of paint that matches what is underneath (or clear paint works too). Then, the tiny bits of paint that leak underneath the tape are invisible, and the dried paint makes a good seal preventing any more paint from going under the edges. So I did a second coat of white paint after applying the tape. Then, two coats of each color in each section in my carefully planned color pattern. Below are some pictures of the process and final result!

TIMELAPSE VIDEOS: Here is a video of the rainbow stair on FB and Insta!

Above: laying out the tape, painting the “seal coat” on top of the tape, mixing the colors, painting the design, and removing the tape. Below: the finished stair risers installed!

Second, the Guest Staircase. This I actually planned and painted first, but was installed much later. It was much more work than the rainbow pattern, but not nearly as challenging as that window trim project. I tried to learn my lesson and keep it simple, but the best I can say is that I kept it simpler! I wanted to use it to celebrate a lot more of the special wildlife in the area, and I also wanted it to feel a little bit like decorative blue and white tiles. So I did it with a lighter blue and darker blue outlines, with each stair having decorative patterns and a feature animal. I came up with three different versions of the pattern and also alternated between mammals, birds, and “other” (fish, amphibians, insects). So yes, I am saying I planned out exactly what would be on every single stair and in what order before I began.

The from bottom stair to top stair, the animals featured are: American Woodcock, Red Squirrel, Great Blue Heron, Brook trout, Black Bear, Wood Duck, Tiger Swallowtail, White-Tailed Deer, Belted Kingfisher, Eastern Box Turtle, Red Fox, Winter Wren, Eastern Spotted Newt (Red Eft) and Common Raven.

TIMELAPSE VIDEOS: Here is a video of this staircase on FB and Insta.

Above: Painting the stair patterns and the animals. Notice in the top row of images, my one major mistake in maintaining my patterns, and fixing it! I considered leaving it ;) Below: the finished and installed stairs in the in-progress entry area of the guest side, I somehow do not have any super nice and actually tidy photos of this area.

Lastly, the Basement Staircases. So, I had to prime and paint these risers anyway, so I couldn’t bring myself to just do a single solid color. For my basement, I did a partial rainbow, from blue to purple to magenta to red to orange, and painted the stairwell walls a vivid orange. I am in the process of painting the stair risers of the guest side right now. I chose to do a pattern that was a casual version of one of the alternative options for my studio stairs, but instead of rainbow colors I am using some greens based on the green wall and trim colors in a few of my rooms in the guest house. We will see how it comes out ultimately, but below is a picture of how it looks now!

Above: Basement stairs! My side on left and in-progress guest basement stairs on right.

Superhero of the Month - Me? And Gary!

This custom painted stair-riser thing was really all me and my madness, but every single stair riser AND tread were hand made and installed by my dad. The two main stairs have cherry treads, and the basement treads are pine. I varnished the treads and primed the risers, and then of course went totally nuts planning and painting the risers. I finished the risers with two coats of exterior varnish to hopefully protect them from all of the toe-kicks that they will endure in the years to come! This section is getting a bit redundant now that I have featured all the main players, I may need to change the theme?

Above: Snakeskin Liverwort with a wee moth on 7/4/25.

Nature Spotlight: Snakeskin Liverwort (Conocephalum conicum)

The Snakeskin Liverwort is an incredible little plant that I have only ever seen in the splash zone of waterfalls. In fact, other than my place, I have only noticed it around the waterfalls at Ricketts Glen State Park. Liverworts are an ancient plant lineage of non-vascular plants, related to and often mistaken for mosses (both mosses and liverworts are bryophytes). They get the name snakeskin from their reptilian scale texture, and liverwort because of both a liver-like shape to some leaves in the liverwort family and a historical medicinal use for treating liver problems.

Liverworts are the closest living analogs to the first plants that arrived on land, almost half a billion years ago. These primitive plants lack water-transporting stems or roots structures to control water loss. Instead, they absorb moisture and needed nutrients directly through surface tissues. They can grow without soil directly on the rocks, attaching themselves with tiny hairlike structures called rhizoids. This physiological simplicity, while limiting in dry habitats, is advantageous in consistently wet conditions where vascular plants might succumb to root rot.

I love them because they are subtle and mysterious, encouraging us to get down on our knees and look closely, bringing our faces within a few inches of the dripping rocks along the sides of the waterfalls to enjoy a whole wonderland of lush green bryophyte species. They stay green all year, even when encased in ice as they are now in these subfreezing temperatures, pictured below. Learn more about this genus of liverworts here.

Above: Snakeskin Liverwort encased in frost and ice on 1/24/26. Below: a veritable carpet of liverwort on 7/4/25 growing on the rocks between the waterfalls.

Above: the falls on 1/24/26. I wonder what it will look like after “snowmageddon” and another week of very cold temperatures!

Sirona Falls