Things I Love Lately

Favorite books of 2019 – I have thought a lot about this (and I’m asked it a lot).  Think my two favorite books of last year were Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl and The Overstory by Richard Powers. What about you?

Grief is my Side Hustle – This Facebook page gathers the writing of an old friend (by which I mean we have known each other for a long time, though are only recently back in touch) who lost her mother last summer.  She writes gorgeously about the experience of grief and with every post I learn something new.  Highly recommend, whether grief is a part of your day to day life right now or not.

Nothing to See Here – I’m reading Kevin Wilson’s hilarious, genre-bending book right now and it’s every bit as marvelous as everyone says.  So.  Good.

Green-ness – we finally started composting in 2019 and I don’t know why we waited so long.  2020 is going to be my year of reducing plastic.  Once you pay attention, it is everywhere.  I’m horrified.  I’d welcome any suggestions that have worked for you!

What It Means to be a Man – I read Peggy Orenstein’s cover article in the Atlantic with tears in my eyes.  I can’t wait to read her book, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, from which the article is excerpted. There’s so much about this topic that’s complicated, so much that’s new to me, so much that’s vitally important.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

January 2020

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

I think very often of Hurston’s quote.  And, in the last few weeks, even more than usual.

After a series of years that asked questions, 2019 was (at last) a year that offered some answers.  I described 2019 on Instagram as a year “with blessedly rounded edges.”  And it was.  And maybe the lesson was a simple one, one that’s eluded me for 45 years: just let go a little.  Let things come as they may.  Everything, after all, passes.  Both the good and the bad.

I’m grateful that 2019 was a year of relative smoothness, and whose ease offered some answers at last.  I haven’t chosen a word this year, because none has presented itself.  I’m also not a big resolution person.

But I do have Shawn Colvin in my head, right alongside Zora Neale Hurston (remember, years ago, when I wrote about Doctor Seuss and Mark Doty in the same breath?).

Steady On.

That’s what she keeps saying.  So I will.  And I’ll hope for another year that answers questions.  But if it decides to ask them instead, what I know now is I’ll make it through.

 

Happiest holidays 2019

 

Thank you for still being here and reading.  It means more than you know.  See you in 2020!

Things I Love Lately

Why I Wear Five Wedding Rings – I love Margaret Renkl’s piece (her book was one of my favorites of 2019) in the New York Times.  It reminds me of how my mother wears her mother’s and grandmother’s wedding rings, and of how I wore my mother’s when she was in the hospital several years ago.

Our Favorite Books that will Change the Way You Think about Parenthood – I’ve read almost all of the books in Motherwell’s wonderful, thought-provoking list, and have recommended and given many of them too.  Highly recommend.

Over the holiday I read The Overstory (magnificent) and For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World (wonderful).  Highly recommend both.

Two holiday gifts I love to give that support small business owners:

Nicely Noted – this stationery subscription delivers three letterpress cards a month.  I adore it.

Light & Pine desktop calendar – I love these calendars and keep them on my desk.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

 

Thank you

we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Dad died two years ago today.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

I don’t feel sad necessarily, so much as skinless, feeling it all – the bright and the painful, the glory and the hurt, the joy and the sorrow.  There is so much of life that swirls around these last weeks of the year.  That’s always been true, but it’s a more emotional time for me now that it’s inextricably wound together with my memories of Dad’s sudden death two years ago.

I have Merwin’s beautiful words in my head, the same poem a line of which I shared the morning of my last Thanksgiving with my Dad (11/23/2017) and through whose prism I have long viewed Thanksgiving.  I just understand them better now.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
…
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

– W. S. Merwin