A small note before we begin. This is a personal podcast. I'm telling these stories as I remember and understand them, from my own life and perspective. When other people wander into them, I'll protect what belongs to them. And while much of this story happens inside a real inn, these are my words — not the official voice of the property, its owners, or anyone else who works here.
All right. Come in. It's already warm.
So. Last week I asked you something. What's a place you thought would fix you — and what happened when it didn't? And then I just… ended the episode. Which — convenient, right? Because I didn't answer it.
I've been chewing on it all week. And the problem is — there isn't one place. There were… a lot of them.
See, I used to be very good at geography. Not actual geography. I still need Google Maps. To get to places I've been. I mean emotional geography. This belief that if I could just get myself to the right place — I'd become the right person. Different town. Different room. Different job. Different state. Different version of Avery. One of them was going to stick. Surely.
And for a long time I confused movement with progress. And honestly? From inside a car, they look identical.
But there's one place that complicates that whole story. Because I left it. And then, years later — I came back. I'm sitting in it right now. Like — right now. This desk. The Frisco Inn on Galena. Frisco, Colorado. Nine thousand feet up. Fifteen rooms. A breakfast room, a spa, a coffee shop. And a front desk that has probably witnessed more of my life than most people have.
And here's the strange thing. People hear my story now and they want to make this place the answer. The inn saved you. Colorado saved you. You found where you belonged. You came home. And it makes a very good story. It does. It's also not true.
This house did not save me. And I think I love it more because it didn't.
Okay. So. The first time I came here was 2023. And I was — different. That's the diplomatic word. We'll go with that one. I was younger. I was trying very hard. I was also very, very good at looking like I was trying very hard. Which — those are not the same thing. Took me a while on that one.
I came here to work. And almost immediately I got fascinated with the machinery of the place. Breakfast. Coffee. Rooms. Guests. Phones. People arriving early, people leaving late, people wanting towels while you're carrying six other things. There were approximately nine million pots. Give or take.
And I remember those early mornings. That strange little window before breakfast, when an inn is technically awake but the guests aren't yet. Lights coming on one room at a time. Coffee starting. The kitchen beginning to smell like something. Someone coming down the stairs way earlier than expected. And then suddenly — the house is awake.
And I loved that. Like, immediately. Didn't know why yet. Something about the rhythm just… made sense to me.
Because an inn is never really one thing, you know? It's hundreds of tiny things happening correctly enough that nobody has to notice them. A coffee cup appears. The fire's already going. The table's been reset. Somebody remembered the dietary restriction. The room's warm. The key works. The person at the desk remembers your name. When hospitality's done beautifully, it almost disappears. You don't see the work. You feel the result. And I got obsessed with that. Still am.
Hang on — the fire's doing the… no, it's fine. It's fine. It doesn't need me.
I got up anyway. You heard that. Keep that in mind, actually. That's going to matter later.
Anyway. Here's the problem. I could understand how to take care of a house before I understood how to take care of myself. And those are two very different skills. They just look similar from a distance. I could notice somebody needed coffee. I could notice a guest had gone quiet. I could notice a crooked chair from across the building. And there were things happening inside me I walked past every single day. Without stopping. Somehow.
That's the thing about being observant. You get incredibly skilled at looking outward. Sometimes because looking inward is… harder. Much harder.
And — okay, I want to stop here for a second. Because I made myself a promise about this show, and I'm going to say it out loud so you can hold me to it. This is not going to turn into a scented candle. You know the genre. Warm voice, fire sounds, a gentle little lesson arriving every four minutes like a shuttle. Very soothing. Not what I owe you. So here's the less decorative version of 2023.
I was good at being watched, and bad at being known. And those two things had gotten tangled somewhere along the way. Being watched felt safer. Because you can control a performance. You can't control what someone sees when they actually look. I could make a dining room full of strangers feel cared for by seven in the morning. And — I want to be fair to myself here — the care was real. And then I'd be a stranger to myself by noon.
That's the thing about hospitality, if you're built a certain way. It's the perfect hiding place. Because it looks exactly like openness. It's warm. It's generous. It faces outward all day long. And nobody — nobody — asks the guy refilling the coffee how he's doing in a way that requires a real answer. You can disappear into service and get thanked for it.
And I'm not saying that's what hospitality is. I'm saying that's what I was using it for. Some of the time. There's a difference between the house and what I was hiding in it.
And eventually that first chapter here ended. Not elegantly. No beautiful final shot, no swelling music, no wise version of me standing outside with my luggage knowing it was all part of the journey. I left.
And I notice — even now, even here — I say "not elegantly" and then I move on. Like a man showing you a locked room on the tour. So. One layer down. Since I promised.
Leaving doesn't feel like a montage. It feels like logistics. It's a car packed badly in the cold. It's telling people a version. It's the specific silence of a hallway you're seeing for the last time while pretending you're not. Nobody hands you music. You just… drive. And somewhere around the second hour the story starts writing itself. The reasons. The justifications. The whole case for the defense. There's always a reason available when you desperately need one.
So I did what I'd done before. I moved.
And look — there's something seductive about a new room. I write about rooms a lot. If you've read Still, by Design., you know this about me. Rooms matter to me. A room gives you this illusion that nothing has happened yet. You put your bag down. Everything's clean. The bed hasn't been slept in. There's no history in the drawers. Nobody in the coffee shop knows your name. Nobody knows what you did last year. Nobody knows what you promised yourself. You get to introduce yourself from scratch. Hi. I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. This is who I am. And if you say it with enough confidence — sometimes even you buy it.
So I went to other rooms. Other states. Other versions of myself. Montana. Georgia. Massachusetts. Colorado. Back across the country. Back again. Hotel rooms. Bedrooms. Temporary places. Some I unpacked completely. Some I never bothered.
And there were stretches where I truly believed it. This is it. This is the reset. This is the place where everything finally goes quiet.
And then eventually… there I was again. Same narrator. Same mind. Same Avery. Different ceiling.
And that was the flaw in the whole theory, right there. I kept changing the room. I kept bringing the occupant.
There's a line from Still, by Design. that's followed me out of the book. "Healing isn't found in grand gestures, but in the stillness between them." And when I wrote that, I understood it as a writer. I'm not sure I understood it as a person yet. Because grand gestures are intoxicating. Leaving is a grand gesture. Starting over is a grand gesture. Moving across the country — grand gesture. Announcing that this time will be different? Very grand.
Stillness is so much less impressive. Stillness asks you to wake up tomorrow in the same place. And then the next day. And the next. Stillness takes the novelty away. And once the novelty's gone — you meet yourself.
I think that's part of what the book was trying to tell me while I was writing it. Which sounds unbearably writerly, I know. But books do that. Sometimes you write the thing you know. Sometimes you write the thing you're about to know. And you can't tell which one it is until later. Still became a book about care. About attention. About the difference between rescuing somebody and being present with them. About what happens when you stop trying to force a life into its proper shape and just — stay with it. I could hand that wisdom to characters. Me? I needed a little longer.
Okay. This is the part of the show where I refuse to be profound for a few minutes. Because a podcast, like a breakfast, needs something on the plate that isn't feelings. So — a recipe. The scones. People ask about the scones. And I'm at altitude, so if you're at sea level I'll flag what to change, because altitude is the entire personality of this kitchen.
Two cups of flour. Quarter cup of sugar. Half a teaspoon of salt. Two and a quarter teaspoons of baking powder. And that number matters — at nine thousand feet, the usual tablespoon puffs your scones up fast and then drops them flat. Like a resolution made in January. Sea level? Go ahead. Full tablespoon. Live your life.
Half a cup of butter. Cold. Actually cold — not "I took it out while the oven preheated" cold. Cut it into the flour till the whole bowl looks like gravel with ambitions. Then a cup of heavy cream. Up here, a splash more — the air is thirsty and it will drink your dough if you let it. Stir till it just barely holds together.
And this is the important part. You're going to want to keep going. Don't. Stop sooner than you think. A scone is not bread. It doesn't want your effort. It wants your restraint.
Fold the dough over itself twice. Twice — not twelve times, I see you. Pat it into a circle about an inch thick. Cut eight wedges. Brush the tops with cream. Scatter coarse sugar over them like you mean it. Four twenty-five. Thirteen to fifteen minutes — till the tops go gold and the kitchen changes its mind about the morning. Sea level, four hundred, give it a minute or two longer.
Currants if you want them. Orange zest if it's Sunday.
And here's why the recipe belongs in this episode. And it's not just because I promised myself the show would have snacks. You cannot grand-gesture a scone. There's no dramatic version of it. There's cold butter, a light hand, and getting up at five thirty tomorrow to do it again.
Everything I was saying about stillness, about staying — a scone is that whole argument, in food form. It's a promise kept at seven in the morning. And it only means something because it gets kept again the next day. Also it's delicious. Not everything has to be a metaphor.
Then — July 2025. I came back to Frisco. My mother and my sister were with me. And I walked back into this building. The same building. And that's important. Because returning is different from arriving. When you arrive somewhere new, you get anonymity. When you return somewhere old — the place has evidence.
There are corners you recognize. Doors your hand remembers opening. A staircase has a sound. The morning light lands in exactly the same place it always did. You can tell yourself you're a completely different person now. The room is under no obligation to agree with you.
And then something happened that made it even stranger. A guest recognized me. From 2023.
Like — think about that for a second. I'd spent all this time traveling through versions of myself. Trying to work out who I'd been, who I was, whether those were even the same person. And another human being just looks at me and essentially says — I remember you. There you are.
There are moments when the past stops being a story you tell yourself. It becomes a witness. Somebody else was there. Somebody else remembers.
And I didn't feel triumphant. I felt… exposed, I think. Because there was no clean break anymore. 2023 Avery and 2025 Avery were standing in the same room. And neither one got to pretend the other hadn't existed.
So I stayed.
Which is the least cinematic part of the story. And probably the most important.
I stayed. I went to work. Woke up early. Made coffee. Checked people in, checked people out. Learned rooms again. Learned guests again. Learned the strange choreography of breakfast again. Learned which sounds belonged to the building and which ones didn't. I started noticing. Really noticing.
And slowly something shifted. The question stopped being — what's this place going to do for me? And became — what can I do for this place? And that question changed almost everything. Because suddenly I wasn't asking the house to hand me an identity. I had work to do. A guest needed something. A room needed something. The coffee needed something. A sentence needed something.
There's real relief in becoming useful. Not indispensable — I don't want to be indispensable, that's a different trap. Useful. Present. Paying attention. Able to say — I see what this needs. Let me help.
And somewhere in there I started writing differently. Building differently. Galena House stopped being just a name I liked and became a way to understand what I was actually doing. Writing. Hospitality. Design. Technology. Publishing. Coffee. All these things that look completely unrelated on paper. And under every single one of them, the same impulse. Pay attention. Find what's already good. Understand why it works. Notice where it hurts. Make it a little better.
I have a sentence for this now. It's about the closest thing I have to a philosophy. I didn't build it. I just am here to enhance it. And — not literally. Obviously I build things. I build an almost concerning number of things.
I mean underneath that. I used to think the job was to invent Avery. Construct him. Fix him. Move him. Upgrade him. Right clothes, right room, right job, right city, right story. And maybe eventually he'd be… convincing.
I don't think that anymore. I think Avery was already there. Messy. Contradictory. Sometimes wonderful. Sometimes exhausting. Usually carrying too many projects. Usually holding coffee. But there. The work was never construction. It was attention.
What belongs? What doesn't? What am I doing because I actually love it — and what am I doing because I want somebody to see me doing it? What keeps returning? What disappears the second nobody's watching? Those are the useful questions. Those ones earn their keep.
And I think that's what stillness finally gave me. Not peace — and I want to be careful there. I do not float around this inn in a permanent state of enlightenment. You should see me when something goes wrong at breakfast. Stillness didn't make life quiet. It made the signal clearer. Different thing. I can hear myself now. More often, anyway.
And since I keep promising you realness — here's what a bad day still looks like. Because I still have them. Staying didn't cancel them.
On a bad day, the old map salesman shows up. That voice that goes — you know, there's a version of you in some other city doing all of this better. And he still makes the pitch. Leaving is still right there. Fully packed. Engine idling. Glad to take me anywhere. The difference — and it's the whole difference — is that now I notice the pitch while it's happening. I can hear it and go — ah. You again. And then I go do the pots. That's it. That's the enlightenment. Noticing, and pots.
And something else happened when I stopped asking this place to save me. I started loving it differently.
Because salvation is an enormous thing to ask of a place. Or a person. Or a relationship, or a career, or a book. Imagine walking into a room and going — okay. Make me whole. No pressure. A room can't do that.
But a room can hold you while you do something difficult. A house can give you routine. A town can give you familiar faces. Work can give your hands somewhere to go. A breakfast table can give you somebody to care for at seven in the morning, when your own thoughts are particularly loud. A book can give you language. A mountain can remind you you're not remotely the biggest thing here. Those things matter. They're just not rescue. Maybe they're better. They're companionship.
Which brings me back to the title. Still, by Design. I named it that because stillness interested me. I understand it differently now.
Still. By design.
Not stuck. Not trapped. Not incapable of leaving. Still because you chose to remain long enough to see what happens next. There's agency in that. There is enormous agency in staying somewhere once you finally understand that you're free to go.
I spent years thinking freedom meant departure. And sometimes it does — there are places we absolutely should leave. Rooms we should never walk back into. Endings that save us precisely because they end. But I had gotten so good at leaving that leaving stopped being freedom. For me — staying became the unfamiliar thing.
So no. I don't say this house saved me. It didn't. The Frisco Inn did not reach down from nine thousand feet and transform Avery into the person talking to you right now. Thank God. Because then I'd spend the rest of my life terrified of losing the building.
What it gave me was somewhere to practice staying. Somewhere to wake up tomorrow. Somewhere to notice. Somewhere to be useful. Somewhere to write. Somewhere to make mistakes without immediately redrawing the entire map. And somewhere, eventually, to figure out — I don't need a place to fix me. I need to be awake enough to live in it.
Oh — and the fire, from earlier. It really didn't need me. I knew that when I got up. Got up anyway. Some things you fix because they're broken. Some things you fix because your hands need somewhere to be.
Knowing the difference. That might be the whole game.
So. That's my answer to last week's question. A place you thought would fix you — and what happened when it didn't. Mine's this one.
And what happened when it didn't? I finally stopped asking it to. Which is probably why I could finally come home.
And before you go — one for you. And I'm done with the soft ones. You can get soft questions anywhere.
What are you still performing? What's the thing you do mostly because it photographs well? And what would you keep doing even if nobody ever found out you did it?
Sit with that second list. That's where you actually live.
People ask me sometimes — do I think a place can change a person?
No. I think a place can give you somewhere to stay long enough to change yourself. And if you're lucky — it keeps the fire going while you do.
I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. This is Galena House Audio. Written and read by Avery Lane Maxwell. Still, by Design. is published by Galena House Publishing.
I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening. This was made at Galena House, in Frisco, Colorado.