Butterfly Mind

Category: At home

sunbeam heart

April 9th, 2026

Our windows are closed, but I still hear the birds twittering in the dark before the sun rises. Spring is here! My heart radiates when I wake to the sound of birdsong after months of cold silence.

I wish it were warm enough to open the house and let the fresh air in. Soon. Maybe even this afternoon. Definitely tomorrow.

Right now it’s barely above freezing, though. I sit on the love seat in sweatpants and a hoodie. If it were light out, I’d sit in the chair by the window. That seat sat vacant most of the winter, but now that the grass is a lush emerald carpet, and new ruby growth sprouts on the rose bushes, and now that I’ve filled the bird baths for blue jays and sparrows and doves to splash around in, I find myself sitting by the window once again during the light of day. I especially like to sit there in the late afternoon, after work. That’s usually when the birds like to duck in the bath and shake the water off their wings, over and over again.

This past weekend, I filled our flower baskets, so now I can watch those from the chair by the window, too. Out front I bought fresh coconut liners for the narrow baskets that hang from the railing on the stair landings. I filled them with fresh soil and stuffed them full of variegated vinca vine, purple kale, and tangerine violas whose delicate petals quiver in the mountain breezes.

On the back porch, I planted another narrow basket with garnet snapdragons and yellow pansies with wine dark centers, and I filled a hanging basket with as many velvety burgundy pansies as I could pack in it, along with vinca vines that will hopefully cascade gracefully over the sides when they get big enough.

I sit at the table by the sliding glass door at lunch and watch the flowers. They reach for the sun and flutter when the air moves. Birds land in the hanging basket and pull coconut fibers for their nests.

The world outside is so fresh and tender right now. Sky blue, spring green. New leaves are young and chartreuse and unmarred. Dew glitters like diamonds on blades of grass.
No internet

March 25th, 2026

I ache all over. I hunch like a little old lady when I walk, my feet throb, and my hands have stiffened into claws. But the flower beds are mulched!

Friday, before my first work meeting of the day, I heard the rumble of the dump truck as it lumbered down our street. The mulch men unloaded a giant pile of shredded bark in our driveway and another at the top of the hill out back. It was a glorious sunny day under a bright blue sky, and I crossed my fingers that the clear weather would last through the weekend.

And it did. All day Saturday, all day Sunday, I cut back dead stems, raked leaves, pruned forsythia, dug up weeds, and mulched.

When I came in Sunday, exhausted, with more than half the mulch still left to spread, and after my husband had finished his weekend project of disassembling the toilet and sink to paint our bathroom, we discovered our internet was down. We did all the normal troubleshooting (eg. unplugged the modem and plugged it back in again) and checked for outages in the area before, against my better judgment, I started live chatting with Xfinity through the app.

Forty-five minutes later, having made no progress and getting more and more agitated, all the cool serenity from my garden bliss evaporating in the heat of fighting with technology, I said you know what, I just don’t care enough to spend my time doing this. I want to relax and read my book and eat dinner and get up in the morning and go out in the garden again.

I told the rep I’d call back during business hours. I am so happy I’m off work this week so that I could do that, because it turns out, they need to come out to our house, and the earliest appointment they had was Wednesday. Today. If I hadn’t been on vacation, this would have been supremely irritating since I work from home and cannot work without an internet connection.

Now, on our fourth day without internet, I’ve got time to deal with it. The mulch piles are gone, the lawn is mowed, the bird baths are out and filled with fresh water, the bird feeders filled with fresh seed. The Xfinity tech is coming this morning, when it’s too chilly to be out in the garden anyway, and then I’m off to the nursery to see what plants are available this early to fill my flower boxes with.
Ergonomics are no joke

February 17th, 2026

As much as I love fires in the fireplace, I think I’m ready for winter to be over. I don’t want to be in my office, with its cold blue walls, down in the cold basement.

Instead of standing on my anti-fatigue mat at my perfect height desk, or sitting in my perfectly adjusted desk chair, with all of my arm and shoulder and hip bends at exactly the right angles, I’ve been cross-legged on the couch, on the love seat, in the armchair by the window, where the room is warm and welcoming. I’ve been at the kitchen table. I took my laptop stand, portable keyboard, and portable trackpad into our son’s room, plugged in a lamp, and sat at his desk all last week, in the exact version of the chair I have down in my office, except that his desk is a different height and isn’t adjustable. But his room is cozy, and I’d rather be there than in my office.

At the end of last week, I had to lie down at lunch because I had a visual migraine. I’ve had these on occasion in the past, usually pain-free, mostly when I was going through menopause, but I hadn’t gotten one in a while. And this one came with pain. As did the one I got the next day, and the next, and the next. My husband rubbed my head for me one night to help relieve the pain, and as he worked his way up from my shoulders to my neck to my temples, I realized how much tension I had deep beneath my left shoulder blade (from reading or typing on the couch) and up the sides and back of my neck (from scrunching my shoulders at my son’s desk).

Reluctantly, I went back down to my office yesterday. I lit a candle and turned on the space heater, but that’s not enough to transform it to a snug space. The heat is stuffy and localized, and I’m over my office’s current vibe: it’s too electric and colorful. I want to tone it down. I’m going to have to repaint and redecorate to make it a place I want to be. Warmth and fresh air would be nice, too.
Now we wait

January 23rd, 2026

Over the holidays, when I worked most days and my team encouraged me to take time off, I promised them and myself that I’d take a day off in January instead. Today is that day.

Today is also a day that an epic winter storm is bearing down on us, though you’d never know from the sunny sky. For my day off, I’d planned to swim at 7am instead of 5:30, and then to toodle around our tiny downtown. Get some coffee. Walk to the book store. Then go home and relax on the new love seat with a book, or maybe, if I’m lucky, thanks to our son who gave me a subscription for Christmas, with the latest issue of The New Yorker if it lands in our mailbox today. I hope I have it in hand when the weather arrives.

And I did all of those morning things. I just inserted a few other things as well. Like find all of our power banks and charge them. Dust off the camp stove, test if it still works, buy fuel. Stock up on cat food, bring in firewood, wash and dry clothes, grind coffee (I still need to do this one). Marvel at the line out the door at the hardware store for snow shovels, salt, and generators. Consider what’s sold out at the grocery store: water, tortilla chips, yogurt. Hope we have enough food and firewood if we lose power, and our whole region loses power, and we have to go several days with high temperatures in the teens and no heat or range or oven or hot water.

It’s strange knowing this storm is coming and then also just going about my regular day. It’s so pretty out! I added a couple of walking stops on my little morning jaunt from the coffee shop to the book store. Our CEO gave us homework this week to go to a museum. At first I thought, We don’t have a museum in town. How will I do this?

Then I remembered the performing arts center sometimes has exhibits, and there’s a historic house in town that’s been converted into a local history museum that sometimes has art.

After I drank my coffee with the paper — an actual newspaper! I pick them up sometimes now after reading Beth Macy’s Paper Girl — I bundled up and began my walk to the other side of town where the book store is. I stopped in the performing arts center, but it was between exhibits, so I just appreciated the architecture for a few minutes, and the airy space full of light.

Next I stopped at the Alexander Black House. I’ve passed this building at least a thousand times in the however many years we’ve lived here.

14. That’s how many years.

Anyway, this house is unusual for this town — the architecture is unlike anything else here — and at least half of those thousand times that I’ve passed it, I’ve thought, I wonder what it’s like in there? Well today I found out because I went in.

Alexander Black House

Inside, a local high school exhibited artwork — photographs, block prints, paintings — and I loved putting the pieces together of “They must have had an assignment about eyes” and seeing the different interpretations from these creative minds.

My favorite part of the museum was a room restored to look like it would have in the early 1900s when it was lived in. Look at the wallpaper! I just love it. Someone should bring wallpaper back.

Wallpaper, dado rail, and wainscoting

Now I’m back home with a blanket on my lap, a hot cup of orange tea, and the sun shining through the window. Our forecast has gone from a prediction of 2 feet of snow to now just 4-9 inches, but of snow, sleet, and ice. The latter will be heavy and treacherous. We don’t need to drive, thankfully, but the weight of ice is bad news for downed power lines.

I want to bring in just a little more firewood, then cover the woodpile with a tarp. I’m hoping all these preparations won’t been necessary. It’s really not fun to lose electricity in subarctic temperatures. My favorite part of every day in winter is climbing into our warm bed after turning on our heated mattress pad. It’s so luxurious to preheat the sheets! We can’t do that without power. We can pull camp mattresses and sleeping bags next to the fireplace though.

Daily writing prompt
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
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Open space

January 16th, 2026

My husband and I decided to pare back in 2026. Belongings can begin to feel burdensome after a while. They need to be maintained. They need to be dusted. They need to be moved out of the way when so many have accumulated that they pile up. The more you have, the more space you need to store them all in.

Last weekend, after both kids drove away to go back to college, we systematically went through the house to decide: pitch, keep, or store for a later decision? We started with our clothes. I made hard decisions to throw out clothes that were worn so hard they were threadbare. I made easy decisions to throw out clothes I’ve worn once or twice in the past year. We filled two or three garbage bags, some for donation, some for the dump.

Then we moved to linens. We had blankets and sheets, pillows and towels stored in multiple closets around the house. We dumped them all on the bedroom floor and sorted. We filled half a dozen more garbage bags.

We pulled all of our kitchen stuff out, which was also scattered around the house because our kitchen is small and we store infrequently used equipment downstairs. We went through the junk drawers and our hobby supplies. We filled bins for donation.

I wondered, on many occasions, why do we have this set up this way? The stick blender’s motor housing was in a drawer, while the cup and the blender arm were in a cupboard. The firewood is across the room from the fireplace instead of next to it.

We’ve cleared space, and our house feels like it’s breathing clean air. Like the corners have been scrubbed and sparkle. When I reach in the cupboard for a coffee cup, I can pull one out without without worrying about toppling a stack.

We moved art around, including a painting Santa brought me this year that Brian and the kids consulted him on. We moved a painting into the living room that had looked flat on its previous wall but has come to life in the changing light of its new place. We moved furniture around so that the dining room no longer encroaches on the living room.

I thought this paring back would take months, and I was not looking forward to it. But last weekend, we agreed that if we could get through the decluttering, then this weekend we could go shopping to refresh our living spaces. I am eager to replace the raggedy old towels we threw out. I have been dreaming of new furniture for our living room for a long time, of comfy places for more than one person to be able to lie down and read at the same time. When we agreed we could shop this weekend if we got through the decluttering last weekend, I was very motivated.

Now the work week is almost done. We’re going to a cello recital tonight, and then tomorrow, we shop! I cannot wait to put a love seat by the fireplace, move the bookshelves to open up the corners, and bring the firewood to its rightful place by the hearth.

Daily writing prompt
Where can you reduce clutter in your life?
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Time to slow down

December 12th, 2025

I’ve been traveling a lot the past few weeks — Albuquerque for my cousin’s wedding, Ireland for a leadership meetup for work, New York City for fun with my husband, and Spain for our operations team meetup. The travel was exciting, but I’m glad to finally be home. With the sniffles, but home.

I’ve felt frazzled over the past few weeks with all of the travel, Thanksgiving, both kids’ birthdays, lots of new stuff at work, and Christmas on the way. My brain has been working overtime and I haven’t had the creative energy to write or blog. I feel that frazzle easing a bit now as I move some things to the completed column.

White lights twinkle on our Christmas tree and front porch rail. Snow glitters on the ground. We’ve brought the holiday decorations out of storage, and steam rises from a reindeer coffee mug by my side. Our daughter is asleep in her bed here at home. She drove up yesterday from Florida, her third semester of college complete, and opened birthday presents at 9:30 last night after starting the day with an exam then driving 10 hours. Her birthday was Wednesday, and it was the first time in her life we haven’t been with her for it. She had a fun day with friends in St. Augustine, so it’s not a sad thing. Just weird. For us.

One cat lays on my lapboard, snuggled against my belly with her chin resting on my forearm as I type; the other lays on the seat cushion behind me. We had a fire last night, and this morning I’m warm in my soft sweatshirt, sweatpants, and thick wool socks. I am cozy. I can feel my body relaxing into the beauty of winter and Christmas. With one of our babies here at home and the other on his way in a few days, my heart feels peace.