So You Wanna Be An Airbnb Superhost will help guide novice hosts to superhost status with some of my hard-won wisdom from years of hosting Airbnbs in Louisville and Detroit.

If you’ve thought about opening up your home to travelers but don’t know where to start, come on over!

I know why everyone tells you to get another dog when you lose one. It’s not a replacement. It’s not anything like a replacement. It’s that your heart has all this love it’s been giving and getting every day and when the dog you love and who loves you goes away, your heart just can’t keep beating without that flow, that cascade of love in and out. We are a two-dog family. That’s it. I fear losing our first buddy, Truffle, now in a way I didn’t understand before. My heart stops every time I open the door until I see him prancing to the door to say hello, his little tail ticking from side to side. And I love him endlessly. But we are a two-dog family and when our good girl left us, we were incomplete.

I won’t tell the whole horrible story of the inhuman woman from the sled dog rescue that rejected us and blamed us for our own dog’s death because the pain that night was maybe worse even than anything that came before it. I will tell you though, of something beautiful that came of it. I laid out my shredded heart to my friends online in hope that they could help me put it back together, and they did, coming through with fury and anger at the woman, and love and support for us, and more. One friend, a farmer we’ve known for some years, told me about her puppies. Her own good girl had escaped one night in early spring and came home with a surprise: she was bearing a litter of puppies. One month to the day before we lost Alba, they came, a dozen of them.”I would love for you to have one of her puppies,” our friend said that horrible night. And knowing full well what would happen if we went “to look,” we did just that the next day. It was over as soon as I stepped into the pen and all those sweet, warm, furry, wriggly little puppies started to tumble over my feet. I sat down in the dirt and let them crawl over me, licking and nibbling and pawing and refilling my heart that had been pummeled down to nothing. I picked up one who seemed solemn and soulful and handed him to Brian. He looked up at Brian and his tail began to wag. We had a new dog.

We brought Cassius “Cash” Thunderpaws home that Friday night, after a ridiculous supply run to the pet store, and looked at him and each other and grinned like fools, like we hadn’t even dreamed of doing since the bottom had fallen out of our world.

He’s not our good girl. He’s not a replacement. He’s 9 pounds — 15 now — of fast growing Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd puppy love who burrows his head against our chests when we carry him up and down the stairs and enchants us with his green puppy dog eyes. He trusts us and looks to us to care for him and nibbles too hard and already sometimes does what he’s told, to our utter delight, and sometimes goes pee on the floor, which is our own fault for not knowing his signals. We’ve had him 10 days and we know what he loves (brushing, a puzzle feeder, rolling in the grass, his crate) and what he fears (stairs, rain, not much else that we can see). We already can’t imagine life without him.

And on his third night home I had the dream I’d longed for. I saw Alba. She was across a park from me, quite far, and I knew she was dying. She was lying down, but raised her head when she saw me, and got up and ran across the grass to me. I ran too, and when I got to her I got to feel her fur, put my hands on her sweet face, look her in the eyes, and tell her she was my good girl. I was sobbing, but this was the good-bye I didn’t get to have, the good-bye I so desperately needed. Then a puppy’s plaintive cry woke me up and she was gone. But he was here.

My girl, my good, good girl. The piece missing from my heart, the empty place in my soul, the shattering emptiness in this house, the place on the couch still covered with her blanket where sometimes I would let her curl up next to me even though we didn’t really want to let her on the furniture, they’re all so desperately empty without my good girl. My missy, my sweet, ferociously protective, beautiful girl Alba. I still don’t know how she can just not be here, how a creature of such joy and love can simply vanish. They called us from the pet crematory yesterday. “Alba is ready for you to pick her up,” they said. Like she were just at the vet or the groomer. Our girl was ready to come home. We took her there in a blanket Saturday night, wrapped up with her favorite toy tucked inside. I rode in the back seat with her, just like when we brought her home from her first house, from the family that showed us the closet where they locked this beautiful puppy for 15 hours a day while they were at work. “It’s a walk-in closet,” they said, proudly. This four month old wiggly fluffball peed on me on the way home, and again when we brought her into the house to meet her new brother, our little buddy Truffle. We took her to the farmer’s market where she went straight for a table to hide. Our sweet girl was so scared. She was scared of new people, of thunder, of fireworks. But oh, was she was brave. She would go anywhere if she was with us. If anyone looked at me wrong or approached the car or the front door she went berserk. She would get in trouble for it but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t let anything happen to her people. Not on her watch. But now I had to leave her at this place. This strange, undignified corrugated metal building next to a railroad track where we pulled the car to a garage door and a quiet man dressed in white rolled a metal cart draped in a red blanket to where Brian held our girl in her own blanket, the blanket she’d been lying on for days or weeks, in her corner of the living room, sick when we didn’t know it. The sun was setting, and the air was gold. This was the time of day she could be outside. Our sled dog, our snow princess her godmother called her, didn’t like the heat of the day. She was never meant for hot Kentucky. She should have lived somewhere she could play in the snow all the time, burying her face in the cold white stuff and flinging it around. This man wheeled our girl away from us, to a place I couldn’t go with her. I had to leave my sweet girl in this place where they would turn her to ashes, her beautiful white fur that was just at the growing out stage of perfect fluff, white fur that I’ve touched so many times my hands clench now with wanting to feel it again. I didn’t dare touch her before she left, only the blanket. I lay on the floor where we found her, where she’d laid down by the front door to wait for us and gone to sleep and didn’t wake up. I curled up on the floor and stroked the blanket that hid her, because I couldn’t touch her with the life all gone from her. Alba was light and love and I couldn’t touch what remained. I had to remember the real her, the girl that loved me so, the girl who would come to me from another room if I so much as looked at her. The girl who would wait at the top of the stairs for me to leave bed if her poppa got up first. How could I leave her in this place when she wouldn’t leave me, ever? Except she did. She waited until we were not at home, till we slipped quietly out the back door so we wouldn’t rile up the dogs but I think and hope and pray that I whispered goodbye as they came into the kitchen, ‘bye buddies, be good,’ like I always said, which was shorthand for I love you. I can’t remember. I still can’t remember touching her that last day. I had to have. I touched her, pet her, rubbed her ears, buried my face in her fur, thwacked her solid belly that was thinner at the end, I touched her so many times a day it was like breathing. I can’t remember breathing. I can’t remember the last time I touched her. I had to let her go into that place without knowing when I touched her last, told her momma loved her. The door closed and we stood in the parking lot, dumb. What do we do? How do we get in the car and drive home to a house without her? Where her collar and bowls and bed and food and toys and all the signs of this life wait but the life is not. How do we wait for the minutes and hours and days to pass, to dull the relentless pain of opening the back door and our girl not barreling at us? She should have knocked Truffle over as she always does to get to us, to me, to tell me how glad she was that I was home, that her momma was here. We had pizza. We were going to have a family night in with bad TV and the buddies in the nice, cool room with us, and I was so happy and my heart was so full I knew it couldn’t last. And then we opened the door and Truffle came and there was silence other than our voices calling frantically, echoing in the too-still house, already knowing she wouldn’t come. Nothing would keep her from us. I can’t think about the moment we saw her and the way I fell and screamed because if I screamed no enough it wouldn’t be true, she would be asleep, or her poppa could revive her because it just wasn’t possible. I try to stop the thought when it comes and think of my girl climbing into my lap even though she was far too big to do that. Once in a while I let her pretend she was a lap dog and nothing made her happier.

They called yesterday to tell us Alba was ready for us to come get her. We drove there, wondering how many other hearts were breaking in the cars driving next to us on the highway. This time we went into the main entrance. It smelled overpoweringly of scented candle. Alba wouldn’t like that. Her sense of smell is so strong that she found Truffle when he escaped. I couldn’t look at the young woman with the forced compassionate smile. “Are you here for Al-ba?” she asked, pronouncing it wrong like nearly everyone does. “She’s here.” A brown paper gift bag decorated with paw prints sat on a table. That couldn’t be right. Alba can’t be in a bag. Alba is larger than life. She can’t be contained. Her spirit couldn’t be contained in a body that failed her, and she couldn’t be contained in a silly bag with a gift tag on it. But there was a box and a clay piece with her pawprint and silly block letters like a child’s toy spelling A L B A 2016 as if I would forget and tacky heart and dog bone embellishments. And pieces of white paper with her pawprints, some smudged like she was running. And a clear plastic bag with pieces of her fur. Her fur that we battled for eight years with trips to the groomer and special brushes that she hated, and with brooms and vacuums and the Roomba that so intrigued her. That fur we tried so long to banish from home and clothes and car that I wanted now to hold in my hands.

Stilted conversation with the woman. What a job this is. Leave, carrying this bag that is supposed to be my girl. I put it in my lap. My missy gets to ride up front with me like she always wanted to, like she only got to do one time, on a dark, snowy night on back roads in Michigan when she somehow clambered up there and I let her stay and laughed at how ridiculous to have this big 70 pound oh so fluffy dog trying to sit in my lap as her poppa tried to be stern but couldn’t, because look how happy she was.

I didn’t really sleep the night she left us. As much as I wanted to sleep and escape the pain I knew when I awoke there would be a moment where I would think it was a nightmare and be relieved and then I would remember. And I couldn’t do that. The next night, 24 aching, hollow hours that echoed with the missing sounds of our girl later, we slept in the tv room on the foldout bed because we couldn’t sleep in the room where she should have been. I cried myself to sleep like I hadn’t since the time I was supposed to get married and the guy broke up with me over the phone after the wedding invitations were mailed. Except this was worse, because he wasn’t meant for me and I learned that later, but Alba was meant for me. She was my shadow, my protector, my companion, my friend. She saw my soul and loved me for it and asked nothing but to be loved in return.

I woke in the morning to the soft light filtering in through our many light-combating window treatments. The bed was soft, the sheets and blanket white. I felt peaceful. Sad, but able to breathe without the ragged, tearing pain that hadn’t left since Alba left. I didn’t say anything to my sleeping husband. At lunchtime when he came home because we need to be together, to keep each other upright, I told him, feeling a little sheepish. I did too, he said. Everything was soft and white and I felt at peace.

We named Alba after the part of Italy where they grow truffles because we’re silly like that. But in ancient languages it means white and it means dawn. I think she came with the light at dawn to comfort us. She never liked to see her family sad. Alba was with us for nearly eight years, years that saw heartache and strife and worry and illness, and she was always there to comfort us. To protect her, because she got so upset to see me upset, I could shake off whatever awful feelings were cloaking me, at least enough to tell her that momma’s ok, don’t be sad. I think she came with the light to tell us it would be ok. That she knew we loved her, even though we were so far from perfect. She loved us as we were, as only a good dog can, and showed us how to love each other and ourselves.

I ache with missing that love now, that unending, overflowing, undeserved pure love. I don’t know how to put one foot in front of another without my good girl at my side or waiting for me. I don’t know how to retreat from the horrors of the world without that goodness to take solace in. I don’t know how to go on without my good girl. I read comforting things. She will come back to me in spirit, I hear. I’ll see signs from her. I’ll feel her come rushing back into my heart. I’ll remember the love and the grief will fade, I hear. I want to believe all of those things.

They called yesterday to tell us Alba was ready to come home. We brought our good girl home, and lit a candle in our room on the fireplace mantle next to the little carved box that is supposed to be her, arranged her pawprints and her tags I’d been carrying in my pocket or in my hands the past three days, and pictures of her in the snow and with us. I put my hand on her pawprint, standing at the fireplace she slept next to, my feet on the place on the floor where she should lay, the place I would stop every night to pet her or maybe curl up with her for a minute and rest my head in that fur. She’s a good girl, I told her. Momma loves her good girl.

You may tell yourself / this is not my beautiful house

Buying a house because I fell in love with it may not be the best reason to be sitting in my living room surrounded by boxes this morning. But there’s no rational reason to be trading in our perfectly serviceable little cottage we’ve called home for 10 years for a house so vast we’ll lose each other and the dogs in it, so old that the bricklayers laying the 75,000 bricks that make up its bulk had scarcely lost sight of the Civil War behind them as they worked, and so bewitching that it was a done deal the moment we set foot into the foyer.

Buyers are liars, I’ve heard tell, and our realtor can attest to that, as we started out eyeing little shotgun houses we could fix and sell. Emboldened by our Detroit adventures and surprised by the value of houses selling in our Germantown neighborhood (thank you guy across the street who paid an eye popping price for that x-small house) we thought we’d take on a project in our own town where going to work on the house didn’t mean a 400 mile drive, and we have resources and know people.  But somewhere along the way Brian found a rambling brick behemoth in Old Louisville possessing what had to be the country’s most wildly ugly kitchen — along with 11 foot ceilings, eight fireplaces, pocket doors, the original staircase, and the potential to rent the garage apartment and maybe even a third floor suite (both of which, I might add, are barely any smaller than our current home), therefore kicking in on what would be a pretty significant bump in mortgage. But all that’s just math (albeit math that keeps me up at night plotting my freelance work and wondering how our utility bill will compare to that of a frugal elderly lady who surely wore sweaters and never turned up the heat).

We stepped in that first afternoon and craned our necks to look up and around and a grin split my face as  I knew we were home. Golden light poured in the great front windows casting rainbows from the stained glass across the hardwood floors. Never mind that said windows were painted shut. I wanted never to leave. This could be ours. How could that be?  I never considered a life in such a house. Until I dreamed of the abandoned mansions in our Detroit neighborhood that is, it was a life maybe on a parallel track to ours somewhere in the world of what might have been. But standing in that foyer that late fall afternoon those tracks swerved over and locked into place over our own.  I could see us here. Not just in an ‘oh, I can imagine us living here’ way. I could see us here like this house had been there all along waiting for the day when this chapter would start, when a couple nomads would find their way home.

I can understand the appeal of new houses with their warranties and their certainties and their roofs that don’t need an immediate replacement, and I’ve seen the joy homeowners feel when they create and build the house of their dreams. I grew up in a family of builders. But new houses, they hold no mysteries. I’ve wound through their newly hewn bones and seen them from the inside out. The smell of fresh lumber is a ticket to my childhood spent exploring jobsites.  It’s a magic of its own kind to see a house stand where once there was nothing, thanks to the work of my dad’s own hands, but as for where I want to live, that’s not my magic. My magic is in the not knowing.

Whose hands built this house? Did their daughter come play as this corner plot of land south of the city on the Ohio River gave way to a stately brick home? What jokes did the craftsmen tell as they worked on the details that would still shine a century and a quarter later? Who was there on that very different moving day when horse and carriage brought a family’s worldly goods to fill the house, making it a home? What did they cook and read and drink and talk about? Why did they leave, and what secrets did they leave in the fabric of the house? There is nothing in this world if we don’t have wonder, and the same urge that compels me to criss-cross the globe pulls me into an old house whose bones echo with an unknown history.

We’ve never bought a house for love. For that matter we’ve only bought two. Our first, where we live now, we chose because it’s what we could afford and it was cute. It’s the place we’ve come home to from our jaunts around the world, the place that’s seen us grow from an unsure young couple to (somewhat) wiser and experienced grown-ups who have learned the heartbreaking speed at which time vanishes and that when you know what you want, you have to make it happen. But for me, it’s just been four walls. I’ve never had a connection with the structure. The Detroit house we bought because it was the first and only one we saw in a yearlong search that met our needs. We’ve made the building ours in a way our home has never been, through nearly two years of grinding labor and worry and adventure and dreams and failings and successes. But we bought the building for its intact plumbing and its replacement windows — not terribly romantic.

There are people who invest in real estate. They see profit potential and analyze risk, and, I don’t know, do math and use budgeting software. I suppose we’re investing, in that we plan to make an income.  But that couldn’t be further from the reason we’re doing this. We’re doing it because when a house tells you you’re home, you listen.

Now that have a house in Detroit that won’t be paid for for a few years our international travel is on hiatus. I don’t begrudge Detroit, but as we roll into this time of year my inner travel clock says it’s time to hit the road. The best I can do to appease that urge is to reminisce about Thanksgivings past. Here, then, is a recounting of five Thanksgivings across the globe.

2008: Quebec

I recall a the fairytale kind of snowy night that’s enough to make me want to pack up and head for northern climes. We ate in a candle-lit, snug little restaurant in the old city as snow danced down the street, then went outside where I turned up my head to let the flakes fall into my face.

What was our Thanksgiving feast? I dimly recall risotto, and in fact, my flickr archives tell me this is so, with vegetables and taleggio cheese, along with a warm goat cheese salad.

This Budvar is for me.

2009: Amsterdam and Prague

We grabbed a quick lunch at the counter of a sandwich shop in Amsterdam on a long layover en route to Prague. What I remember more than whatever I ate was my new coat; I’d somehow managed to forget my coat on a winter trip to Eastern Europe, so I dashed into H&M to buy a new one.

By dinner we were settled into our “boutique hostel” in Prague. We stationed ourselves at the on-site bar, ordered pizza, and drank beers. I had never liked beer, but ahead of this trip I taught myself to drink it specifically so I could enjoy it in Czech and Slovakia.

2010: Bangkok, Tokyo and Minneapolis

We spent this Thanksgiving crossing the international dateline en route home, so the day started with a very early wake-up call in Bangkok and ended with snacks (probably Nutella) in a Delta Sky Club at the Minneapolis airport as the snow swirled outside.

Our trip home included a layover at the Tokyo airport just long enough to swoop into the Delta lounge for sushi. And let me tell you, this wasn’t the airport sushi you find in food courts elsewhere. It was sushi, and good. Good enough that I kept going back for more and forgot to pay attention to the departures board until we heard our flight announced — our flight at a gate that was far enough from where I sat stuffing my face that we had to do the old sprint through the terminal.

Homeward bound on a 36-hour Thanksgiving day.

2011: Paris

Ahh, Paris. We started the day with a visit to a macaron workshop, then made our way to lunch at the brasserie at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. This was my first experience being hosted as media, and it was straight out of a dream (except in dreams you don’t get full and can keep eating all the glorious food).

We started with pink champagne and devoted a long afternoon to the meal to come, a meal that included cascades of truffles, a tableside preparation of exquisite steak tartare, and dessert showered with — I kid you not — gold flakes.

We had dinner a few hours later, after I walked the breadth of the city under the pale November sun, but I don’t recall a thing about it. The Plaza has a way of eclipsing anything in its shadow.

 2012: HaLong Bay, Vietnam

This was bad. Brian dined alone while I slept down in our little berth aboard a junk, a traditional boat we took out for an overnight cruise.

I’d started feeling off the day before in Hanoi, but still ventured out on a street food tour, gamely trying everything — including fried wormcakes. The worms plagued my nightmares that night, my stomach roiling all night. The next day, Thanksgiving, I faced a long, bumpy ride to the coast, and could manage no more than a few bites of rice at lunch. I rallied for a kayaking expedition out in the surreal water, but by early evening subsided to bed where the gentle rocking lulled me to sleep. Brian took his Thanksgiving dinner in the dining room on his own.

2013: Bali to Bangkok

Thanksgiving began with the bountiful buffet at our posh hotel where I was staying on assignment. We gorged on exotic fruits and unknowable Indonesian specialties before heading for the airport. This year was Brian’s turn for stomach woes. I plied him with Coke (the cure-all during travels) and by the time we landed to the familiar, wonderful smell of Bangkok (exhaust, steaming rice, galangal, and a je ne sais quoi I’d recognize if you set me down blindfolded) we were both ready for one of the great pleasures of the city – a sweet iced coffee.

Dinner was at the hotel where we were being hosted, the inimitable Mandarin Oriental. We took the sweet little teak boat across the Chao Prayha to the Oriental’s restaurant where we took seats outside under the white light-draped trees and laughed at the boisterous party boats plying the river, the city of angels spread out before us. The tasting menu was surely delightful, but the true feast is Bangkok itself, so I remember not a thing.

What was missing in all these Thanksgivings? Yup, the Lions.

Every year the Detroit Lions play a Thanksgiving game, so Brian fights the time zone and sundry other barriers to try to watch — or at least hear the score from — the game. This year won’t find us 10,000 miles from the action. Instead we’ll be set up just where he wants to be: with TV trays bearing turkey and stuffing, the game on television. And I think that sounds just about right.