And after a year of waiting out this pandemic (I believe it was about March 20, 2020 when I finally got freaked out enough to leave my DC job early last year and hightail it to the mountain), it seems unreal that I could ever be on a plane again, be in my parents’ home again without fear of hurting them, be in Britain again, be at an indoor dinner party or an art museum again… But I might. You might, too.
Read MoreIt seems to be a time of finding writing I never sent where I first intended it to go… old drafts, letters… myself in a time capsule.
Read MoreLet me exist in this place without hesitation.
Read MoreLife seems to be very much about waiting at the moment.
Read More
Need I say it? What a strange, strange time. So many of us are grasping for understanding, for expression, for daily supports to our sanity. I keep feeling I ought to be reading and writing more, but as all of you will know, low-grade stress distracts, and to be honest, doing three meals and day, the dishes, the house-cleaning, the laundry, the firewood, and a bit of work? That’s about all I have capacity for. I thanked my mother recently because I realized I’d never thanked her before for that non-stop labor of a household. I don’t even have children. It still never stops—not if you are eating well and lack a dishwasher and a maid! For me, it’s pleasurable labor, but it takes everything I’ve got some days.
Read MoreAs winter begins to show herself here on the mountain, my mind is suddenly filled with more and more thoughts of my early years in Wales… When I first began to try out a life in the countryside, in an old, cold house, in a place with a true, trying winter… When the man who taught me to build walls also taught me how to exist in those ways, and contentedly. I think, too, of the women who tended to me with hot baths and hot water bottles and hot tea at just the right moments. Many people taught me how to thrive in the place I now live.
Read MoreY’all, I keep hoping I will make a more regular appearance here, but I think part of me always wants it to be perfectly edited and clever, and really, I should just settle for regular. I do want to be in touch, and I always have plenty to say. Sometimes I have so much to say I simply lack energy to pull it together for you in a coherent and loosely cohesive way. Perhaps my standards are too high… at least if I intend to feel I’m in conversation with readers and friends, and that was the entire point.
Anyway, it’s been a very good year in some ways and a very hard one in others.
Read More
London was grey and cool when I finally emerged from the Tube in Islington. I was bleary eyed and not as excited to be here as I was when I arrived in May. (May was such a magical time, full of anticipation and excitement and close friends, and I know I can’t top it this time. But it never helps one’s optimism, either, to have stood in a queue for 2.5 hours or to have a massive duffel bag on my back that I should really be pulling on wheels behind me by now.) Both quickly changed.
Read MoreI meant to have this site up and running long before the book even came out. Surprise: that didn't happen. Life goes like that when you are half-construction beast, buffeted by the weather at every turn, and half-writer, dazed and confused by procedures and contracts, as well as buried in new work you didn't expect.
Read More