The forsythia blooms in bright cascades out back. Daffodils beam in butter yellows. Cherries froth in pastel pinks, and tulip tips emerge from the earth. The grass has come to life again: its green growth waves in the wind. We’re not mid-March yet and it’s already time to mow.
The end of winter is in sight. The spring equinox is this Friday, and my annual gardening vacation begins immediately after. I’ll take a whole week to cut back dead stems from perennials, clear leaf litter, and spread mulch. I called my mulch guy yesterday and left a message; I hope I’m not too late to get it delivered on Friday. If not Friday, then Monday at the latest. It takes a few days to spread it all.
If there are still days left of my vacation after all of that, and if the nursery has anything in stock I can put in the ground or in flower boxes, the reward for my labors in browns will be fresh greens and bright bursts of colors.
I can’t wait. If the weather is nice, I’ll take breaks on the back deck in the sunlight. I’ll eat smoothie bowls while I gaze out over the beds and plan what to plant in the open spaces. I’ll imagine what the garden will look like when the flowers grow in. I’ll need to go down and see the bare ground close up to remind myself what was there before and whether I expect it to come up again. I’ll walk laps among the flower beds, thinking and planning, touching the warm earth. Each day will feel wide open: no schedule on a calendar. Just “spread the mulch” or “run to the nursery.” I love it so much.
In the garden, I lose track of time as told by hands on a watch face. Instead, time is told by the warmth of the sun, the growl in my belly, the reapplication of sunscreen, the length of shadows. The garden is one of the few places where time becomes irrelevant to me.
So far, so good. The snow we thought would dump to our knees is only finger-deep. Sleet ticks against the window as I write. Nobody in the neighborhood has left their houses this morning, and the white outside is pristine. It stretches as far as I can see without tire tracks or footprints. Puffs of steam drift from rooftop ventpipes. Tiny homemade clouds.
The tree limbs are bare: no sodden snow sticks to them. No ice makes them sparkle. Sleet drops at a shallow angle: the wind is barely a breeze, nothing heavy whips in it. All of this is auspicious for us keeping power.
Even if we lose it later today, when the freezing rain sets in, I can sit by the window for light to read physical books. I’m currently making my way through Kafka’s complete stories. I have it in paperback so I can underline, and it’s going much better now that I’ve committed to pause and reflect after everything I read. I’d started these stories last year and other than The Metamorphosis, which really is a spectacular story, everything I read just left me like, huh? I had to text my son after each one: what the heck is going on here? Now that I stop and write, I’m getting a lot more out of the stories. They’re satisfying in that they make me think and question; nothing is tied up in a neat bow. Not a single thing.
In our storm prep, after charging our power banks, I charged my e-reader and my portable book light. So once the sun drops, I can still read a novel even if the power goes out. I downloaded two from the library. We’ve also started building up our bookshelves again, and I’ve got three on the shelf I’m eager to read.
The New Yorker did not arrive yesterday, alas. I had hoped to read it next to the window with my coffee on a snowy Sunday morning. It’s okay. I finished 33 Place Brugmann instead. At first I wasn’t sure about the book. I almost abandoned it, despite it seeming like something I’d really like: a WWII novel told by the residents of an apartment building in occupied Brussels. I had trouble keeping track of the characters at first. But given the leisure of the weekend, I stuck it out, and it paid off. It turned out to be a book about, among other things, the role of art and ideas in civilizations that last. Which I am into.
Now, I’ll read another Kafka story. Yesterday’s was “In the Penal Colony,” which is brutal, and eerily prescient. I would have thought it was written about Hitler and his regime, but it was not. The story predates WWII by 15 years. Today’s story is “The Village Schoolmaster.” There is no telling where this is going to go.
Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
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.
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.
One of my favorite things about winter, besides fires in the fireplace, is going into the sauna to dry off after my morning swim. Sometimes, that’s the reward that gets me out of bed at 5am, when it’s frigid out, to put on a swimsuit and go jump in a cold pool.
This morning, after my swim, I pulled the smooth wooden handle of the sauna door and, as it always does, warm air billowed out as I stepped in. The scent of the wood gets me every time. Every time. It’s warm and spicy as if it’s been baking in the sun. When I step in, everything falls away, and I just stand there and inhale, deeply, smelling the wood that grew in the earth and sun and rain, that scrubbed the air, that made its own food, that stood tall and reached for the sky while making shade and shelter for forest creatures, before I start moving again to towel off. The sauna is cozy, planked entirely with cedar boards — under my feet, above my head, walls, benches — like I’m in a toasty cabin while winter rages outside.
As I breathed the spiced air, as I felt the warmth seep into my skin, as I steeped in the visual pleasure of the wood boards and the cozy warm light, I remembered that wanted to set an intention this year to pay attention to my senses. I want to deepen my experience of being alive.
I promise I’ll stop writing about Zadie Smith soon. It’s just that I’m making my way through her book of essays right now, Dead and Alive, and with nearly every one I read, I fall more in love with her. Whenever I see prompts or ice-breakers like, “If you could hang out with any one famous person, dead or alive, who would it be?”, every person I think of I’m like, but do I really feel connected to that person? What would spending time with them actually be like? Would we have anything to say to each other?
After reading this book, I think it’d be Zadie Smith, even though I’d be super intimidated and fangirly and wouldn’t know what to talk about, and I’d make it all weird and awkward because I’m not her equal. But if I could manage to be cool — maybe we could listen to hip-hop or go dancing to break the ice and then talk — I think she would be super fun to hang out with.
She adores fiction. She adores reading it. She adores writing it. She adores “the way it lies to tell the truth.” And she believes in its ability to truly immerse us in different points of view in a way that social media and the absolute glut of online news sources do not:
[The internet] seems to be a place of diverse views but the deeper truth is it’s all taking place on the identical platforms with identical aesthetics and in the end an identical motive: profit. It’s such a narrow version of ’the real’. I just have to open Mieko Kawakami or Thackeray or Dostoevsky or Bambara and I’m in a completely alternative perspective, unsponsored, uncontrolled, unmediated by anything apart from language. It’s not an important vision of reality because two million people upvoted it. It’s important because I am communing with it and being transformed by it.
I want to read all of these people! Previous to this paragraph, she had referenced several other writers and philosophers I’ve never read in response to a question about her sharp, fresh, and natural style. All I could think was, “Where does she find the time?!”
When I got older and read philosphers like Wittgenstein and Russell and Fanon — or the essays of Virginia Woolf — it occurred to me that there are few thoughts so complex that they can’t be expressed in clear, accessible prose. It’s a discipline.
She makes me want to quit my job and spend all my time reading. I know this is not possible. So the alternative is to keep myself healthy and live a very long life, if for no other reason than to be able to read as much as possible before I die.
Butterfly Mind 