:: WINTER ::

Dear friends,

It’s January, cold here in Vermont, the snow and roads and driveways ice-coated. I am reading and watching and ingesting the horrifying news out of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and I am trying to share resources and help, in any way, from afar, and I am feeling admiration and awe for those cities, who have lived through so much, and are a model of what organizing and community and love look like, not in the abstract, but on streets and in neighborhoods and in schools.

Meanwhile, my son is on day four of a high fever (Influenza A), and I am moving, like a ghost-mother, in and out of his fever-room, in my ghost-mother mask, ferrying fluids and Tylenol and honey and soup. I am trying to keep my son safe, just as all of you out on the streets are trying to keep your neighbors safe, and it’s a lot, isn’t it, to be the ones trying to keep fellow beings alive, in a world where not everyone seems to want the same?

During times like these, I keep reminding myself, it’s important to nourish ourselves however we can, and so here are some things that are offering faith and respite:

1. On my flights home from California this weekend (where I was teaching for eleven days), I read Lily King’s Heart the Lover, and my goodness, it deserves all the praise.

2. After twelve days of travel, I am beyond happy to return to my wood stove, my kitchen, my cats and dog, my children, my bed. My colleague Edwin calls me a “French Green Witch,” and I am elated by this designation.

3. TV: in particular, the Norwegian dramedy Pernille, and my re-watching of the French dramedy Call My Agent. I have a genre.

4. The story “Kim’s Game” by Sadia Shepard, which the author reads on the most recent episode of The Writer’s Voice. What an original and beautiful piece.

I think it’s also important (essential!) to build and imagine and create new things, while so much falls apart around us. In that spirit, I am working on transforming my grandparents’ farmhouse, located up the road from me, into a writing retreat space. It’s a very special house, full of wood and windows. More details to come as this evolves.

And I am imagining other ways of investing my creativity and intellect and time into my local community. I’ve been traveling for work (literally and figuratively) for a long time now, and it feels to me that it is time to re-invest in the soil where I live and am from.

I’d love to hear, in the comments, what’s nourishing you, and what you're imagining or building. Let’s keep our people safe and fill the world with good new things.

Robin