Ailana’s Journal: Part 1—2026-07-03 (Patreon)

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GOOD MORNING by Ailana Geven Keller

Today is the observed Independence Day holiday in the U.S. Call it the Fourth of July…

Our plan is relatively simple today. We’re about 80 miles from St. Louis, where we’ll spend tonight and Saturday. Between us and St. Louis are some cool places to stop, take notes, and take pictures.

We’ll make a brief stop in Sullivan. We’ll make a longer stop midday at Meramec Caverns. I’ll check in from there.

Missouri has a Route 66 State Park that we’ll visit before we push on to St. Louis. I’ll let you know where we end up once we get there and decide.

One thing we’re going to do on Saturday is grab some St. Louis scenery images for Jason and Geoni’s stock photo catalogs. We sort of had a meeting to follow up on what Josh mentioned.

Yesterday he said, “It’s a cumulative effect, though. Each image in the catalog has the potential to draw income for a long time.”

The operative idea was “cumulative effect.” To that end, we are…you know…going to accumulate.

It won’t be a huge, elaborate photo shoot—just the RV, the Highlander, and some of the AGI group posing at St. Louis landmarks.

That’s it for now. Hope you’re having a great Friday! See you soon.

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MERAMEC CAVERNS by Ailana Geven Keller

So, as I do, I hit up the “sources that be” for some information about Meramec Caverns. First, I’ll tell you what I think.

Wow!

Or, to quote Kel, this place is fire!

It’s actually a geological wonder.

You walk down into the earth, and it’s as if the world above simply disappears. The air turns cooler, every sound changes, and suddenly there are walls and ceilings shaped by water doing the same tiny thing over and over for longer than my brain can comfortably imagine.

There are formations hanging above you, rising from beneath you, and folding around the cavern walls like frozen waterfalls. Some are delicate. Some are enormous. Some look like they belong in a cathedral designed by somebody with a very dramatic imagination.

And then there are the lights.

I know the lights are there to help us see what would otherwise be hidden in darkness, but the colors make the whole place feel almost otherworldly—blue spilling across one wall, red and gold washing over another, and green glowing from somewhere farther down the passage.

I kept stopping to stare, which is not ideal when everyone behind you is also trying to use the stairs.

Still, this is one of those places where stopping feels required. You need a minute to take in the fact that nature built all of this without asking anyone’s permission.

I’ll wrap up by saying that Clay wants us all to “gather ‘round” and have a chat when we get to Route 66 State Park. It might be time to reveal what all that whispering has been about.

I’ll let you know when I check in tonight, so watch for that one! See you soon.

GOOD NIGHT by Ailana Geven Keller

We are not in St. Louis. We’re actually at Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park in East St. Louis, Illinois. You can’t argue with this view!

As I said earlier, Clay wanted to have a meeting. In true Clay-and-Sasha style, they started it dramatically.

“So,” Clay said as we all sat around a picnic table, “Sasha and I are going to move.”

Jaws hung open. Eyes bulged.

Josh, being Josh, went into matter-of-fact mode. “Well, I’m sure there are a lot of details to be worked out. What’s the plan?”

“Back up,” Micah said. “Moving? We just got everything set up with the factory, and I feel like we’ve got a great working arrangement.”

Sasha pulled us all off the ledge. “None of that changes. We’re moving across the street.”

After my conversation with Emily’s caseworker, Clay and Sasha began weighing options. The goal was to have Emily living in the same home as Jason and me.

Cutting a hole to create a stairway came pretty far down the list of solutions. Moving the office to the ground floor, moving Micah and Jasmine to the third, and then combining the condo and office into a single two-bedroom unit seemed like a major remodel Sasha did not want to manage.

“We found the house across the street on Zillow—you know, the one you can see from your bedroom? It was new on the market. We made an offer on July 1. They accepted. Your dad inspected it for us, and we close on the 9th.”

Currently, AGI Creative Group, LLC, owns the second floor of the Whiting Street building. Jason and I own the first and third floors, and the Ryans and the Everetts lease their two-bedroom units from AGI. Essentially, we’ll do some paperwork and trade deeds, so to speak.

AGI takes ownership of our units; we take ownership of the one Clay and Sasha currently lease. Everyone was excited about what this means. It will make being responsible for Emily a lot easier. My only concern is entirely tongue-in-cheek.

I overheard Emily tell Kel, “This means we can spend more time together without going up and down stairs. We’ll have two houses to hang out in!”

Not sure I’m ready for this!

AFTERTHOUGHTS by Ailana Geven Keller

Now that I’ve had a little time to sit with Clay and Sasha’s news, I think I understand what is actually changing.

And it’s more than where everybody sleeps.

The paperwork part is fairly simple—at least when I say it quickly and leave all the complicated words to the lawyers, accountants, title people, and whoever else gets paid to understand this stuff.

Clay and Sasha are buying the house across the street. Once they move, the two-bedroom, two-bath unit they currently lease from AGI will become available. AGI will take ownership of the units Jason and I currently own, and Jason and I will take ownership of that one.

There will be deeds, signatures, values that have to balance, and probably several conversations where I nod as if I completely understand what someone just explained.

But the practical result is this:

Jason, Emily, and I will live together on the second floor of the Whiting Street property. The same floor where we have the office, where Micah and Jasmine’s efficiency unit is, and where Josh, Geoni, and Kel lease the other two-bedroom, two-bath unit.

Jason, Emily, and I will live together in one home. Not in the same building.

Not one floor away from each other.

Not close enough that we can get there quickly.

In the same home.

I’ve been imagining what that will mean in all the ordinary parts of a day.

Emily getting up and wandering into the kitchen while I’m making coffee. Maybe she’ll eat breakfast with us. Maybe she’ll say she isn’t hungry, then steal half of whatever Jason made. Maybe she’ll sit at the table with her MacBook open and answer questions with little noises until she has been awake long enough to form actual words.

We’ll all leave from the same place.

She’ll come back through the same door.

We’ll be in and out all day, and there won’t have to be a plan every time she wants to find me. She won’t have to go downstairs, upstairs, across a landing, or send a text asking where I am.

She can just walk into the room.

That sounds like such a small thing.

It isn’t.

Right now, we’re responsible for Emily, and we’re close to her. We see her constantly. We know where she is, and she knows where we are.

Still, there is a difference between being nearby and sharing a home.

Sharing a home means hearing somebody moving around before you see them. It means knowing which cabinet they open too loudly. It means discovering that they never replace the toilet paper roll, leave cups in strange places, or somehow use every clean towel in the house before anyone else notices there was a shortage.

It means learning the rhythm of another person.

I think that may be what Emily needs most.

Not a program.

Not a temporary arrangement that constantly reminds her adults are deciding what happens next.

A rhythm.

Breakfast. Schoolwork. Coming and going. Dinner. Somebody asking how her day went and waiting around long enough to get the real answer instead of the first one.

And goodnight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about goodnight.

Right now, goodnight can feel like the end of a visit. Even though she is staying with us, there is still movement involved. A door. A stairway. A little separation that says, this is your space and this is ours.

In the new place, goodnight can be slower and more normal.

It can happen in the hallway.

It can be, “Sleep well,” followed ten minutes later by Emily appearing in the doorway because she remembered one more thing she wanted to tell me.

It can be Jason checking that the front door is locked while she gets water.

It can be me saying goodnight, then hearing her laugh at something on her phone from the next room.

It can be ordinary.

I’m learning that ordinary is not the absence of something important. Sometimes ordinary is the important thing.

Of course, a two-bedroom, two-bath unit with three people also means we will discover exactly how much space three people can occupy when they all decide to be in the kitchen at once.

It means more groceries. More dishes. More towels. More mysterious cups.

And more laundry.

One washer. One dryer. Three people.

I’m already preparing myself emotionally for the moment when I need something from the dryer and discover that Emily has placed one shirt in there and started a full cycle.

Or when she says she has nothing clean to wear while standing beside a laundry basket containing what appears to be every item of clothing she owns.

I know this because I was once a teenager.

I also know what it feels like to take care of yourself more than a kid should have to.

Dad loved me. He cared so much that he worked extra shifts to make ends meet, which sometimes meant I was left to manage on my own. I knew why he was gone. He was working for us, even when working for us meant he could not always be there with me.

Emily learned to fend for herself for the opposite reason.

Melinda did not leave her alone because she was sacrificing to provide something better. She left Emily to manage herself because Emily was useful when Melinda wanted something—money, control, or another plan that benefited Melinda. The foot-picture scheme is the ugliest example, but I doubt it was the only time Emily learned that she needed to solve her own problems because the adult in the room was not going to solve them for her.

The reasons could not be more different, but I recognize what came out of it.

When you spend enough time depending on yourself, you become capable. You keep track of things because nobody else will. You make plans. You stay organized. You learn how to get through a day without waiting for someone to tell you what comes next.

Independence can look impressive from the outside.

Sometimes it is simply what happens when a child discovers that being prepared feels safer than needing help

I would like the record to show that I was an extremely organized and responsible teenager.

Dad may remember that differently.

Still, even the laundry makes me smile when I think about it.

It means her things will be mixed in with ours.

Her shampoo will be in one of the bathrooms. Her snacks will be in the kitchen. Her shoes will probably appear in a place where someone trips over them. Her schedule will become part of our schedule without us having to work so hard to make that happen.

She will not be the girl staying in another part of the building whom we are taking care of.

She will be Emily, living at home with us.

I don’t want to pretend a housing change fixes everything. It doesn’t erase what happened before she came to South Padre Island. It doesn’t answer every legal question or guarantee that every day will be easy.

It does give us a better place to do the work.

And maybe it gives Emily more room to stop feeling like she has to be careful about how much of our lives she occupies.

I want her to occupy our lives.

I want her to know she can walk into the kitchen hungry, interrupt a conversation, complain about something unimportant, ask Jason for help, tell me a story that takes twenty minutes longer than necessary, and use too many towels.

I want her to belong loudly.

Jason and I have been building a life together. Until now, I think part of me imagined that life as something the two of us would create and then make space inside for other people when they needed us.

This feels different.

This feels like Emily is becoming part of how that life is built.

The three of us will wake up under the same roof. We’ll move through the same rooms. We’ll annoy one another, help one another, laugh at things nobody outside the house would understand, and eventually develop routines we cannot imagine yet.

It won’t always be graceful.

It will probably be crowded sometimes.

The washer and dryer may become contested territory.

But when I imagine Jason in the kitchen, Emily coming down the hall, and me standing there realizing they are both home with me…

Yes.

This is better.

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