When I stood at the back window this morning, I saw a snowflake drift in a slow zig-zag, down to the ground. A flurry more followed.
Tomorrow is the first day of spring.
I usually take a gardening vacation when the equinox arrives. I take the week that contains the first day of spring to make seed bread, cut back all the dry, brown perennial stems, prune roses and forsythia, rejuvenate the flower baskets with new coconut liners and fresh pansies, and spread about four tons of mulch.
Back in January, I put time off for March 20-24 in my work calendar. As the dates approached, and as I watched the forecast, I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t prep. I didn’t order mulch. It was going to be too wintry for me to feel excited about gardening.
Last Monday, I decided that despite this being the week of the equinox, it was not the week I was to garden. Even though one of the tulips I planted last October is blooming — my first bulbs! — I pushed my vacation until March 27. Instead of going out in the garden tomorrow on the first day of spring, I will sign on to work. It’ll be warm on Thursday and Friday. Maybe I can get some stuff done in the evenings now that the time has changed.
Next week, though. Next week I’m off. I’ll cut back grasses, trim branches, rake debris, and spread a dozen cubic yards of mulch. I hope it will be warm enough to sit in the sun and admire my work.
I traveled to Istanbul last week to meet with my team from work, and as my friend Gracie would say, I was Turkish delighted. The city’s history stretches back almost 1700 years, its population is twice that of New York City, and the city straddles two continents: we stayed on the European side of the city, and we were able to hop on a ferry to take a day trip to Asia. The city is full of riches: ancient history, architecture, culture, food, cats*. It stimulated every sense, at all times.
Mosaic and tile at Istanbul Archaeology MuseumDoor to tile building at Istanbul Archaeology MuseumTurkish tea setsAt the Grand BazaarLamp shop at the Grand BazaarCat 7 of 492Turkish DelightAt the Grand BazaarTurkish Breakfast, first courseLeaving Europe to go to AsiaLeaving the Europe side, about to cross the Bosphorous. Our Airbnb was near the tower on the left (Galata Tower).Our team walked an hour on the Asia side of Istanbul to find this cat statue.In the antique districtSidewalk backgammonAt the ferry dock on the Europe sideGraffiti at the pier; we walked by this wall each time we crossed the Golden Horn (an inlet of the Bosphorous River) to get to the Grand Bazaar and mosquesKitty outside my favorite coffee shopBooks and Coffee. I liked their coffee best.The view from our Airbnb: the Golden Horn waterway, Hagia Sofia mosque (maybe? maybe not — there were many mosques), and our resident seagull who squawked at us all day while we worked.
*The cats in Istanbul might have been my favorite part. See Kedi, a documentary with lots of beautiful footage of the city and its kitties. Also, our day trip to Asia included lunch at Ciya, featured in season 5 episode 2 of Chef’s Table. The food was phenomenal, but it’s not in this post; I was too busy eating to get any photos.
I received a shipment of ink yesterday — a bottle of Diamine Holly to get me through winter, and a small vial of Sherwood Forest. The first is an elegant holiday green with a hint of shimmer in it, and the latter is an earthier green, like fir or spruce needles. Both inks remind me of evergreens, which I need very much when the garden is brown.
I’m taking today off of work. Other than the solstice, today is the only day I’m taking off for the Christmas season, so I want to take advantage of it to do as little as possible. I was on my feet, mostly in the kitchen, for 12 hours on my other day off for the holidays. It was worth it — our yule feast was delicious — but today I plan to do the opposite of what I did on Wednesday. Today, I plan to put my feet up, relax, and do stuff I want to do. Like clean all my fountain pens, which I did this morning, now that I’ve got this pretty new ink.
I might play with my camera some if I feel like it; last night, with time finally free to caper, I used my little tripod to photograph Tootsie in the light of the Christmas tree. The light was low, and I wanted to use my tripod and play with slow shutter speeds, using my phone as a camera remote, and testing different setting combinations in the dimly lit room. I never did get a great focus on her eyes, but I can keep trying. I forget I have practice subjects in the cats, and that when I want to play with my camera, I can photograph them.
Tootsie at Christmas
But mostly today I want to read. In February, my team is meeting up in Istanbul for work, and I know next to nothing about Turkey or Istanbul, except that I know I’ll like the food (kebabs! pastries with pistachios! falafel!), and that the setting of one of my favorite fantasy series is modeled on the land and city-scapes of the Byzantine empire. The two books comprise the Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay; the main character is a mosaicist, and the setting is rich and textured and gorgeous, and I want to read it again before my trip.
First, though, I will read real-world fiction by one of Istanbul’s celebrated novelists, Elif Shafak. She’s written several books, and I’ve selected The Bastard of Istanbul to start with. I love to learn a place through its fiction, and Shafak has put together a whole list of titles for anyone who wants to read their way through Istanbul. From that list, I learned there’s a hotel in Istanbul that’s the last stop on the Orient Express, and was where Agatha Christie would stay when she visited Istanbul (Hemingway would also stay there). Apparently the hotel is near our Airbnbs. So now I want to read some Agatha Christie as well, which I wanted to do anyway thanks to my friend Zandy who recently finished reading Christie’s entire ouevre and blogged comically about her experience in A year of murder, and also because I loved Knives Out, and I can’t wait to watch Glass Onion, and the director of those two films is of course inspired by Agatha Christie. I’ll need to ask Zandy if Christie set anything in Istanbul I should read.
The wind swooshes down the chimney and rattles the flue. Tootsie cleans herself, calm and unhurried, while trees shake and snowflakes swirl outside. I’m going to slide some brocolli into the oven and read my book while I wait for it to roast.
Most of the religious holidays on the calendar mean little to me. We celebrate the Christian holidays primarily as tradition and to spend time with each other as a family, but none of us are actually Christian. My spiritual inclinations tend more towards paganism; Easter isn’t meaningful to me because of the resurrection of Christ, it’s meaningful to me because of the resurrection of the earth. I do love how the date of Easter is determined — it takes place on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox — and to me Easter means the rebirth of life: it means green emerging from the ground again, it means snowdrops and daffodils, and creatures blinking back out into the sun. But instead of celebrating Easter, I celebrate the equinox. I usually make seed bread, and I try to time my annual gardening vacation around it.
I love the spring equinox, it is a joyous time of the year. So much life reemerging! But my favorite holiday to celebrate is the winter solstice. The winter solstice is the shortest day, and the longest night. Where I live, the sun rises at 7:32 am on the solstice this year, and sets at 5:07: we’ve got nine hours and 35 minutes of daylight.
What I love about the solstice is that after weeks of lamenting the short days that just kept getting shorter, after weeks of late sunrises and early sunsets, on this day we can rejoice that the shortening of days is over. The sun is born! The days begin to lengthen again. The sun rises earlier, the sun sets later. The solstice means more light is coming.
I took today off of work to celebrate. I refilled the bird feeders, brought in more firewood for the bitter cold front that’s supposed to arrive on Friday, bought fresh bagels for the kids, and am preparing a solstice feast.
In fact, the real reason I’m writing this blog post is to document the menu so I can remember it in future years: Bakewell tart, homemade applesauce, crescent rolls (some baked with brie and jam), Caramelized Onion and Butternut Squash Roast (with pecans instead of chestnuts), and a winter solstice salad (with almonds and goat cheese instead of walnuts and feta). I love the combinations of autumn vegetables like caramelized onions and butternut squash, winter fruits like blood oranges and pomegranate, and nuts and cheeses for this meal. The kids probably won’t care about the salad or the butternut squash dish, but they’ll love the plain rolls, the applesauce, and the tart. I also made a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies this morning, so they can eat cookies if they don’t like anything else.
I’ve made the applesauce and it’s cooling on the counter. Now I’ll go for a run under the sunny, blue, solstice sky. I’ll bake the tart this afternoon before going back into the kitchen this evening to make the rest.
Last night I built a fire in the fireplace. Our wood this year isn’t as seasoned as previous loads have been, and it sometimes takes some coaxing to get it lit. Last night’s fire required constant tending, which was fine once I understood that and realized I couldn’t put my feet up with a cat on my lap and read.
Instead, after dinner, I put myself at the mouth of the fireplace and just… sat. I felt the heat on my face. I listened to the hiss and whine of steam escaping the wood, to the crackles and pops, to the whipping of flames like sails. I smelled the char of burned wood, and the campfire smell of smoke, and our cat’s breath as she purred on my lap (she found my lap again after I moved from the chair to the floor). At one point I laid my notebook on the hearth and wrote. I wrote about the fire and I don’t remember what else.
After I wrote, I sat some more. I watched the flames dance and the embers flare. I blew on them to see them glow brighter. I watched smoke and ash curl up the chimney.
As I felt the heat on my cheeks, and listened to the hiss and crackle and pop, and watched the flickering orange, I felt awe and contentedness.
I wanted to hold on to that.
I considered getting out my camera to try to capture fire in a photograph; I’ve never succeeded at that before, not well. But then what? A photograph wouldn’t give me the feeling I feel when I sit by the fire and do nothing; the act of photographing would remove me from my enjoyment of just sitting and being.
In that moment, I realized that the problem with being present in the present — with not thinking about some other place and time other than right here and right now — is that the present is ephemeral. The past is anchored in memories, the future is something we can create in our minds and keep visiting. The present though, it’s only real for a blip. That feeling we get when we’re in the presence of beauty, we feel a deep contentedness, and we’re struck with wonder and awe, we know it won’t last. And so we try to capture it and possess it, while the secret is to enjoy it while it’s happening and resist the urge to grasp it tight.
Three hours in the morning is not enough time to do all the things I want to do before my workday begins. For the past 29 days, I’ve published a post on my blog every day; today will be the 30th. It’s satisfying to publish here, it makes me feel like I’ve done something.
The problem is that if I blog, I don’t journal. Three hours before work seems like a lot of time, but once I’ve fed the cats, done a short bodyweight workout, meditated, emptied the dishwasher, watered Christmas trees, made coffee, eaten breakfast, and cleaned my breakfast dishes, I’ve got about 30 minutes before it’s light enough to go for a run and get me home in time to shower and start work by 8. I can easily journal and take care of a few bibs and bobs for myself in that 30 minutes. Or I can blog. I can’t do both.
These past 30 days, I’ve opted to blog. I’m starting to miss my private journaling though. I pulled out one of my fountain pens yesterday to write a check, and I couldn’t get it flowing; the nib was clotted with dry ink. I pulled out a second, and a third. All had the same problem. This makes me sad.
I either need to restructure my days to fit in both blogging and journaling, or I have to pick between the two. I haven’t decided yet which direction to go.
Butterfly Mind 