Our daughter’s never really had a house of her own.

As she said, “The one I’m in now came with Joe.” And it did. A bachelor when he had it built, he never envisioned five kids living there. He’s twenty-two years older than Brenda, so their sidekicks came along when he was mainly in his fifties.

An inactive Marine, Joe has had a career as an emergency room and intensive care unit nurse. He’s the one everyone calls when they need a “Joe cool” on the scene. And he is.

Because of his hospital experience — things witnessed that most people don’t even carry as a seedling in their head — cool Joe was a nervous wreck when the kids began arriving. He mashed food to a pulp so there would be no choking hazard. Terry and I still laugh at how every other minute he called, “Got a visual on Bubs?”, when the oldest was a toddler.

The house Joe built is in the woods in Alaska. Plenty of outdoor privacy — he can fire his guns. But inside it’s a tight squeeze for a family of seven. So Brenda got the bug when some real estate down the road seemed too good to pass on. They didn’t buy the house — bad plumbing shot down that pipe dream.

However they looked beyond their imagining and found a place on a lake in Kenai. Still close enough to the hospital where Joe is now a retiree on call occasionally — and Brenda, also a nurse, works the surgical floor. I’m hoping they don’t get lost in the home’s square footage.

The water is a front-yard playground. The kids are kayaking and swimming. And pretending to fish. The lake isn’t stocked — and there’s a hefty fine for sneaking any in. The Kenai River’s only four miles — so I’m not feeling too sorry for them.

Brenda — after 17 years in the “bachelor pad” — has only been in the new house two weeks. Every morning she wakes in a dream, she says.

And just yesterday, with Alaska’s all night light, she was wide eyed at 3 a.m., never mind she faced a 12-hour work shift, wondering if she should get up and go sit on the deck and watch her loons. They have a nest a few yards out from shore.

What’s it like to be that excited over something? To be a person who feels enthusiasm in life’s majors and minors — those good gifts that frequent the journey. Enough to want to rise early and seek out loons. Even stoic Joe — the one whose smile you’ll rarely get a visual on, but it does exist — even he is managing to produce some excitement this time around.