When people ask what I do, the shortest true answer is keeper and storyteller. It sounds like two jobs. For a long time I thought it was.
The keeper
A keeper is not the same as an owner. A keeper is the one who knows which room runs cold, which guest needs five minutes in the warmth before anyone says a word to them, which board you never fix because its creak tells you someone is up. I have done that work at front desks for nine years, in Yellowstone country and in the mountains of Colorado.
What the work teaches you, if you let it, is attention. You learn to read a room the way other people read a page.
The storyteller
The stories started at the desk, in the early mornings, between arrivals. A family who came in almost every Thursday. A woman who handed me her card after a dinner rush and changed the direction of my life with it. You cannot keep a house for long without it handing you stories.
So I began to write them down, and the writing became Elias: a keeper at a house at the foot of a mountain, who notices everyone and has never learned how to be noticed.
Nearly the same work
Here is what I did not expect. Keeping a house and telling a story turn out to be nearly the same work. Both make room. Both decide, carefully, what someone should find when they walk in. Both are mostly invisible when they are done well.
That is the thread through everything at Galena House: the novel Still, by Design., the keeper's book Come In. It's Already Warm., and the podcast, where I read the stories aloud for the end of a long day.
If you keep a house, or a front desk, or a family, they were made for you.