Remains of the Day

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

New Year Refresh and Recharge

It may be a cliché to think of January as a time of fresh starts and new beginnings, but I'm okay with that, because I like the idea of taking time to reflect over the last year and look ahead to the next one, to recommit myself to big plans and goals, to reset my feet on the path that I want them to be taking, when they may have wandered off onto trails of less resistance or have even stopped altogether and settled at a resting spot.

I began the month with giving myself a word (or in this case words) of the year: pay attention. Last year my word was intention, and it had so little influence on how I went about 2022 that I didn't even remember what it was by the year's end. I figured that in order to understand better what I want my intentions to be in each day and action and scenario, I should maybe start with paying attention to what I do with my time and why, to how I feel, and to what's going on around me in the natural world and among the humans I'm in contact with.

Also this month, with my creativity group, I made a vision board. It has a lot of warm coral-orange-pinky colors and a lot of flight and upward movement and words like creativity, vitality, and joy. It's meant to serve as a reminder to bring those qualities to my writing and my daily living, to pay attention to those things. And I made lists--lists of projects big and small, for writing, art, crafts, travel, and life; lists of all the things I want to incorporate into my days: writing, art, exercise, professional development.

January began with a feeling of expansiveness. I didn't have much on the calendar, and the early days of the month felt long and luxurious with plenty of time in them to accommodate anything I could dream up. I thought I could accomplish everything on those daily lists. But, as it usually does, time often got away from me. I'd get to the end of my day with several boxes left unchecked. That's the trouble with an expansive feeling--everything expands to fill it. I didn't do any professional development, but I did luxuriate in reading two very long books, I didn't do any of the illustrations for Book #2, but I did knit a hat (which I need to re-knit because I cast on the wrong number of stitches), I didn't take up pilates, but I did more nature journaling than I've done in a long time.

Whether due to poor time management or my eyes being bigger than my stomach (metaphorically) or just getting plain tired before I got to everything, I had to let some of those list items go. But I stuck to the most important ones for me: writing every day on a novel (more on that next month), doing a short yoga routine every weekday morning, taking a long walk (or snowshoe) on our trail, jotting a quick recap of the day in my 5-year journal. On a day-to-day basis, I tended to focus on the the things I didn't get done and the time I wasted, but looking back, I'm happy with what I did get done.

As January nears its end, that expansive feeling is beginning to contract, as appointments appear on my calendar and I my focus turns away from reading big fat books and writing a novel just for fun and more toward work I need to do for or in conjunction with others. It's part of the natural rhythm of our days and months and years--expand, contract, expand, contract. And having spent a month exploring and luxuriating in expansiveness, I feel rested and ready to move into a time with more deadlines and obligations.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Book Stack ~ December 2022

A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

Every year when I get to my final Book Stack post of the year, I contemplate whether I should continue with these posts into the new year or not. After all, the blog is dead as a format, right? But this is also the only way I track what I read (I've tried a reading journal in the past, and I'm just not that into it, and I don't really like Goodreads, not least because it's part of the Evil Empire, and I don't care to note the date on which I start a book or how long it took to read), but I've kept up with a monthly reads blog post for X years now, and I know from flipping back through the 2022 posts that I read 86 books last year. Which is neither here nor there, but it's a fun fact. So will I keep going in 2023? We'll see. In the meantime, here are December's reads, starting from the bottom of the stack.

Nonfiction

There's an unwritten rule in Maine that if you own a camp (which means a vacation house on a lake, no matter how humble or luxurious), you must have, somewhere on the shelves of that camp (and if it's rustic, the shelves will be horizontal 2x4s of the open wall bays) a copy of We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich. In the book, Rich chronicled her experience of moving to an extremely remote spot of western Maine in the 1930s, where the only access to the Outside is by lake (boat in summer, over the ice in winter, and not at all during freeze-up and break-up). It's a funny and lighthearted book that makes even the most grueling physical labor involved in surviving, let alone keeping house and raising a family, under such circumstances sound like a lark. After reading Rich's biography in November, I ordered used copies of some of her other books (when the three arrived, each with a turquoise hard cover, devoid of dust jacket, E asked me if I'd bought "one of those sets" of books--you know, the old ones with matching covers that you can, apparently, order as decorative elements irrespective of their contents). One of these, Innocence Under the Elms, which I read in December, recount's Rich's childhood, growing up in Bridgeport, MA, where her parents ran the local newspaper. Nothing much of consequence happens in the book, but Rich's writing is so wonderful in its subtle humor and deep perception and her childhood so unusual--both compared to anything anyone alive has experienced (she was born in 1903) and compared to her contemporaries because of her family's occupation, social status, and politics--that it's a delightful, entertaining read.

Fiction

I pulled Stitches in Time by Barbara Michaels (which I just read three years ago and again three years before that) off the shelf in early December with the intention of giving it to a friend who I knew would love a book about a haunted quilt (because I mean, come on, who wouldn't?). But then I decided to read the first chapter, as practice for a book coaching lesson on first chapters. And then I kept reading. Since it takes place around the holidays (it may be the only holiday-themed Barbara Michaels book, but I'm not sure and I'm determined to find out), it was a perfect read for December. Because as Dickens taught us, Christmas time is prime ghost time.

As I was reading Stitches, I remembered that Michaels had another vintage-clothing themed book, Shattered Silk, which I couldn't find on my shelves, so I ordered a copy of that. It takes place in the midst of a hot Washington summer, so wasn't as seasonal, and the source of trouble was human-caused, so no ghosts. But it turns out that some of the tangental characters in Stitches are the central characters in Silk, so it was fun to go back and read about where they'd come from (like an origin story prequel), although it wasn't as fun without the ghosts.

After reading those two books, I had to go back and reread (after ordering a copy--I can't believe I didn't already own this one) Ammie, Come Home, one of Michaels's first books. Ammie, like Stitches, is a delightfully creepy ghost story, although it's the house that's haunted and not a quilt. Two of the central characters of that story appear very tangentially in Silk and come back with a bigger role in Stitches. The three books are considered the Georgetown Trilogy, although they were probably not planned that way, having been published in 1968 (Ammie), 1986 (Silk), and 1996 (Stitches).

In December I also read "Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris, which I always make time to do while sipping eggnog beside the Christmas tree.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Transition Time

Over this holiday season, I've been conscious of experiencing many lasts as I contemplate the twins heading off to college next year--the last time I'll slip an ornament, a clementine, and chocolate into each shoe hastily placed before the wood stove on St. Nicholas Eve, the last time we'll trek into the woods as a family to find the perfect Christmas tree, the last time we'll fashion a Yule log menorah from a piece of firewood and invite friends over for latkes and dreidel. While all three kids will likely come home for some period of time around Christmas for many years to come, we'll no doubt let go of most of the small celebrations I've built in over the years to extend the holiday season, dissipate some of the anticipatory build-up of pressure around one big day of greed and gluttony, and focus on non-consumeristic, non-obligatory, non-performative ways of enjoying this time of year. Some of those rites have already gone by the wayside: the boys outgrew the Christmas Book Countdown years ago; they lost interest in the 12 Days of Christmas calendar a while back; and this year I had a book event on the Solstice, so we didn't have our traditional hike and small fire by the river.

It's a funny thing about parenting, how we anticipate, make note of, and remember each first--first clap, first word, first time riding a bike without training wheels--but lasts slip by without notice. Sometimes we don't even realize it was a last until weeks or months or years have passed. When was the last time he said 'vigenar" or "skabetti"? When was the last time I tied his shoes for him? When was the last time I could pick him up? So being aware of lasts as they happen is a strange feeling. It's tinged with both nostalgia and relief--nostalgia for the sweet time in my kids' lives when the holidays were full of magic and relief that I will soon be freed of the effort of keeping that magic alive.

People have been asking me for a while now if it isn't going to be hard to let my youngest two kids go when they head off to college next year, if I dread facing the empty nest. Of course I'll miss my kids, and I'm sure people mean well, but I have to admit to taking umbrage at the question. First, this was the goal of the whole project: to raise competent humans who can launch themselves out of the nest and live their own lives. I'm thrilled for them, and excited to see what this next phase brings. Second, the idea that something essential will be missing from my life with my kids away fails to account for the immense amount of self-sacrifice and physical and emotional labor I put into raising them or consider that maybe I'm exhausted by the effort and due for a break. Finally, the question implies that I *am* my kids, that I don't have an identity outside of "mother" and won't have a raison d'être once they're gone. So forgive me if I respond with a glib statement about being well shot of them as I dust my hands together.

While the time when I get to (more) fully inhabit myself as an individual human being is months in the future, I've been getting a preview of what it will be like to extract myself from the mother identity this week as I've begun recording my dreams and goals for 2023 and beyond. I still have to account for them and their not inconsiderable needs over the next nine months of getting them into and off to college, but after that there's a bit of a blank slate. Thinking about extracting me from them feels a bit like trying to take off a snug jacket with the zipper jammed in the up position. For so many years my goals have had to be either expanded to encompass a family or truncated by the limitations imposed by family life. I'm not sure I even know how to dream big anymore, or what my life will look and feel like next September. I had thought, at one time, that I'd drop the twins off at college and then keep on driving, west in a camper van, to explore deserts and mountains and rivers. But as the time draws nearer, I see that's not an entirely realistic plan. For one thing, I don't even have a camper van.

2023 will be punctuated, no doubt, by many lasts, many moments of nostalgia and relief, as all three of my kids make big steps toward being their own adult selves. For me, I hope it will be marked by a few firsts, as I fiddle that jammed zipper loose, try new things, and learn to inhabit the post-mom me.

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child."

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

I Did It! 2022 Edition

For the past nine years, I've tracked my annual accomplishments via an annual I Did It! list, originally inspired by writer Lisa Romeo. Previous posts can be found here: 2021 (Apocalypse Year 2) 2020 (Apocalypse Year 1), 2019 (including decade-in-review), 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. Let's jump right into 2022's I Did Its! Shall we?

Writing I Did Its!

My first book--Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail--was published, hurrah hurrah!

To all those people who say that publishing a book doesn't change your life, I say pppppbbbbttttsssttt! Almost nothing could be better, except maybe holding your newborn baby in your arms--I don't know, it's been a while since I did that ;-). Anyway, Oh, happy publication day and month and year!

Book Publicity Activities in 2022:

17 public book readings, signings, or author talks (some live, some virtual)
1 book club appearance
1 video interview
1 podcast interview
4 print interviews

(See all past and future events here and read/watch/listen to interviews and recorded events here.)

I also did some more revision on Book Two, which I mention having completed drafting in last year's I Did It! post, and I decided to illustrate it (I was wavering for a bit) and began work on those illustrations, basically, teaching myself how to draw in pen. I'm still a bit wishy-washy on how I feel about the results so far, but I'm making progress. I also drafted a book proposal for Book Two, which I haven't sent out, due to working on getting enough illustrations done to my satisfaction first.

I began Book Three, meaning I outlined it and began the research, which is really just a LOT of reading. I've also drafted a very sketchy intro and part of Chapter 1. It's a book I've been dreaming of putting together for nearly two decades, so I'm excited to finally be making progress.

I started the year with a plan to focus on writing short pieces (essays, stories, etc.), since I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of a big book project while working on promotion of Uphill Both Ways, but obviously I overcame that block and ended up working on two book projects after all. My plan was to write one short piece a week, in addition to a flash piece on this blog ("Flash Friday"). That did not exactly come to pass, but in a file labeled "2022 Short Works," there are 15 documents, 11 of them complete pieces. In addition, I wrote 5 "Flash Friday" posts, for a total of 20 partial or complete short works, or just shy of two per month (and one of those "short" works is nearly 10,000 words).

This practice probably led to an improved submission and publication rate over last year:

Submissions: 16 (double last year's rate)
Acceptances: 3
Rejections: 8
Publications: 9 (so much better!). They are:

"100 Words of Writing Advice" Literary Mama blog, January 2022

"From the Editor" Literary Mama, May/June 2022
"Stay Together, Learn the Flowers, Go Light" The Art of Everyone, May 2022

"Alligator Pear" Stonecrop Review, June 2022
"River Revival: Clean Water Act 50th Anniversary" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
"10 of Maine's Best Lakes to Visit" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
"Citizen Scientists Key to Maine's Clean Lakes" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
"Five Hundred Miles" Deep Wild, July 2022 (reprint)
"'Mother Brain' delves into the science of how our brains are rewired by parenthood" Maine Sunday Telegram, October 2022

(As always, the submission/acceptance/rejection/publication numbers don't add up due to carry over from year to year, not everything published having gone through a normal submission process, etc.)

Other Writing I Did Its!

11 Newsletters (so far)
44 Blog Posts (including this one)
I continued working as Literary Reflections editor and senior editor at Literary Mama
The writing group I started in 2021 (Maine Writers and Knitters) got together in person about three times and once over zoom, including one fantastic field trip to a local historic author's residence/museum
I applied for two grants (and was rejected for both)
I completed just over half of a (self-paced) book coach training program
I gave a presentation and taught a workshop at my grad school alma mater
I taught a nature writing workshop to two different groups

Travel and Adventure I Did Its!

I spent 10 days in Mexico (and didn't write about it much here on the blog; but I have an extraordinarily long essay about the trip that's in my rejections pile).
We went on our annual family camping trip
C and I went on a 2-day backpacking trip, kid-free
C and I spent a weekend in Bar Harbor for alumni weekend, also kid-free
I took some small trips on kayak and on foot here and there

It took me a minute to remember that I went on a BIG trip at the beginning of the year, which tells me I'm either ungrateful or I need to go on big trips more frequently. I definitely need to work harder to make adventure a priority. And keep a list!

Arts and Crafts I Did Its!

My focus was on writing more than making, and my sewing machine spent most of the year tucked away on a side table under a dust cover. But I got some things done:

Finished knitting the gigantic poncho I started early in the pandemic
Made some tiny shoes and knitted a tiny sweater (and deciphered an Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern!) for my niece, who was born in September
Knitted a runner hat for Z (and then the weather was warm through cross-country season, so he never had an occasion to wear it, officially, but he has worn it some since the weather has gotten cold)
Made a new duvet for C's and my bed
Made a fleece skirt, plus two more for gifts
Made a silly little (and totally impractical) bird feeder, just for fun

Household I Did Its!

Deep-cleaned the kitchen in anticipation of Thanksgiving and houseguests
Cleaned and organized drawers and cabinets in the bathrooms--long overdue
Moved several boxes of books and bags of clothes to the used bookstore and consignment shop, respectively
Finally made inroads on cleaning the basement (the perennial to-do list item, which I claimed to have done last year--the inroads part--but this year I really made some progress)
Tried to be more systematic about menu planning and shopping so that figuring out what to have for dinner every night isn't such a chore; this doesn't make me excited about cooking dinner any more than I was before, but it makes it slightly less stressful
Worked on maintaining my houseplants in a healthier, less neglected state than usual (battling some pests like scale and spider mites), even moving a few from the sunroom to the living room to enjoy them more (and because they seemed to want warmer weather conditions)
Expanded my pollinator garden, fed it a few rounds of duck mulch, and largely stayed on top of the weeds

Nature I Did Its!

Bird-Watching: 132 checklists and 114 species for the year (in eBird) as well as several new species sightings in Mexico (around 25)
Did a little butterfly and dragonfly wildflower watching
Taught a nature writing workshop to 3 different groups
Made 25 nature journal entries
Continued to serve on board of Maine Master Naturalist Program and helped organize their conference

All-in-all a pretty good year (can't really complain when you've published a book)! It's occurred to me, for the first time after ten years of these posts, unbelievably, that in planning my goals from this year, I can think about what I want this post to look like next December and reverse engineer it so that I aim for what I'll have wanted to accomplish. For instance, I want to see more travel and adventure in my life, so I can set a goal of X number of hikes/kayaks per week or month and X of overnight trips and X real big expeditions. And then make it happen!

Friday, December 16, 2022

Book Stack ~ November 2022

A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

Looks like November was a light month for reading. Part of the that was Thanksgiving and all of the preparations thereunto. Part of it was that I labored over books that I am not enjoying and did not finish (yet). I have a hard time admitting to defeat on a book and affirmatively quitting it (although I'm pretty good at letting it gather dust on my nightstand with a bookmark at the halfway point). Both are books I *really* wanted to love but do not, not even a little bit. And that bums me out. I also am slowly making my way through another longish book that is a little heavy going (in terms of subject matter), so I need to spread it out among a lot of light reading, which is what I've got here.

Fiction

Starting from the bottom of the pile, I read The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley, which I only picked up because Elizabeth Peters wrote the introduction and one of the stories. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. Most of the stories take place in Ancient Egypt, and I'd liken them to fantasy in terms of building a world so dissimilar to our own. I didn't think I'd be able to suspend my disbelief in Sherlock-Holmes-types carrying out crime investigations in the time of the pharaohs, but I got swept right in from the beginning through 500-odd pages.

My other reads for the month were also mysteries: Deborah Crombie's A Bitter Feast, which takes place at an English country house (one of the best settings for murder and mayhem), in contemporary times with a whole cast of Scotland Yard detectives who are supposed to be on holiday but instead find themselves swept up in the murder of a famous but down-on-his-luck chef. I found it very entertaining. The other was Murder is in the Air by Frances Brody, starring her private investigator from the between-the-wars years, Kate Shackleton. This one takes place in and around a brewery. I've ready one other Brody mystery, and I've enjoyed them both.

Nonfiction

For a project I'm working on I read Alice Arlen's biography of Louise Dickinson Rich, She Took to the Woods. [Full disclosure: I have not *quite* finished reading the excerpts of Rich's writing that appear at the back of the book, b/c I got so interested I purchased several of the (out-of-print) books themselves.] I'll write more about Rich and her writing in the future, but I'll say that this peek behind the scenes is fascinating. I was especially interested in how, in her diary she was forthright about how she and her family were nearly *starving* for much of the time in their early years at Forest Lodge, but her writing in We Took to the Woods turns that desperation into funny anecdotes about how to cook creatively to stretch meager supplies (blamed on the difficulties of getting food into their remote cabin in the spring and fall when the lake was neither frozen nor navigable by boat).

Friday, December 9, 2022

Finish It Friday ~ Cookie Monster Skirt

Although as an adult I identify most strongly with Oscar the Grouch, due to my penchant for a certain fuzzy lime green fleece vest, a period in college when I spent time digging through the trash (as part of a study of solid waste, mind you), and my general personality, when I was very small, I went through a Cookie Monster phase, wherein I had a stuffed Cookie Monster that rattled when you shook it and a pair of Cookie Monster footie pajamas that I loved because not only was there an image of the monster embroidered on the chest, but they were made of fabric with extra long, nappy blue fuzz. Also, of course, me like cookies.

So when I was tidying up in the basement last week in an effort to access our holiday decorations and ran across a length of midnight blue fabric with a thick, fuzzy pile on one side and a soft fleece on the other, I knew I needed to revisit my Cookie Monster days, but with a cozy skirt instead of pajamas. I followed the same general method I used for these and these fleece skirts that I made a couple of years ago; that is, I started with a pattern and then went off on my own tangent.

For this one, I made a yoga-style waistband, because the blue wasn't long enough for a skirt in and of itself, and because then I didn't have to mess with elastic. I was paranoid about making the waistband too tight and ended up leaving it too loose, which I think is the exact same mistake I made last time. I did not give it pockets, either, but I can add one later if I decide it needs one. I also flat-felled the side seems, which, together with the waistband, which appears the same on both sides, makes the skirt basically reversible, if I ever want the soft fleece on the outside and the pile on the inside, except that the hem will be rather obvious inside-out (but who cares?).

I forgot what a fast, satisfying project these skirts are, so I think, in the interest of clearing out some more basement clutter, I'll zip out a few more.

Thursday, December 1, 2022

One Final Paddle

Here in Maine, we've had a mild fall, and all through September and October, when we'd come to the end of a stellar day of sun and warm weather, I'd say, "We should have gone kayaking!" But somehow the thought would never come to me earlier in the day, when there was time to make it happen. Then on the first Monday of November, I worked outside on the picnic table, moving from sun to shade as the sun climbed higher and the day got warmer. I'd planned to go grocery shopping in the afternoon, after the boys got home from school with my car. But by lunchtime the thermometer topped 75 degrees!

I knew there wouldn't be many more days like that, so I threw on capris and a t-shirt, tossed my kayak in the pickup truck, and headed to water. There's a pond that's close enough, and small enough, that a trip there is about an hour, door to door, including a lazy circumnavigation complete with bird watching. I could kayak the loop and still get home in plenty of time to do the far less interesting task of shopping.

The water was a little lower than the last time I'd paddled, after a dry summer and fall, making the launch point next to the outlet a little steeper, but it was still doable solo, with no fear of tipping in. It was a different pond than it is in May, June, or July. The cattails and grasses on the shore were dry and blond, the laurel and willow shrubs branchy and leafless. No turtles slid off shoreside logs into the dark, tannic water. No bass splashed. The sphagnum bog at the far end was quiet, without the calls of red-winged blackbirds or song sparrows. But it was still a lovely pond, peaceful and wild when I turned my back to the road and the handful of houses on the roadside shore.

I made my circuit and when I returned to the put-in point, I realized that the steeper bank would also make getting out of the boat a bit more challenging. Though the water was shallow, I really did not want to dump into the water, when I was there by myself (and with my phone in my pocket), so I hoisted myself out with extra more vigor. I made it to dry land with no problem, but the boat, pushed backward by the force of my exit, drifted off in the other direction, paddle across the coaming, bowline nonexistent.

The water was cold but not that cold, and the air was still in the low 70s. Still, I didn't feel like swimming. I steeled myself for that possibility, tossing binoculars and phone onto high, dry ground. Fortunately, the boat bounced into reeds across the outlet channel and came back in my direction, coming to rest in reeds only a few feet from shore, so I only had to wade up to my knees to fetch it. Not exactly a life-and-death situation, but it made for an exciting finish to the last kayak trip of the year.

Now the boats are hung up for the winter, and the weather has turned to more normal November fare--frosty mornings, a winter chill in the air. And I am thankful for late season sun and a final trip on the water.