It’s yet another rainy day here in midsummer Vermont. I hardly visit our garden these days, as all the plants are waiting for their expected hot sunny days before they look happy. But yesterday was hot and sunny and all of us were outside–reading and lolling while the bugs buzzed the sun down. Our favorite ice cream place and local market are still rebuilding after the recent flooding. Many roads are under re-construction, and the work to get back to what was sometimes seems endless. But the you-pick blueberry fields are open, and Lux is planning to make nutella crepes for the family tomorrow. The two older girls are in three weeks of theater camp, they come home tired but humming and dancing every afternoon.

Three recent favorites for you…

a documentary: I really enjoyed The Vast Library of the Female Mind when I got to see it this spring, and now it is available to watch for free on PBS. It is the story of a Ruth Stone, a poet who lived in Vermont. It is tightly edited and full of many wonderful moments: watching her write on the porch with a grandchild sprawled at her feet, her bemusement in picking up a scrap of a poem from the counter, the way her children seem to have inherited a love for the arts from her very fingertips, when she remarks that the mice who ate her poem scraps from her drawers probably said to themselves, “that was a good poem!” The dilapidated old cabin she adores and lives-in serves as contrast her incredibly brilliant mind. And her voice is not to be missed–Vermonters still remember hearing her on the radio waves, reading poems.

a series: I was floored by the beauty of Growing Floret season two (available on many streaming sites, including Max). While Season One seemed to struggle to comprehend Erin and not accidentally make her look crazy (not to mention just getting in her way all the time), this season seemed to really understand her intensity, vision, genius and focus. I loved every episode but in particular the opening one about the aging rose garden connoisseur was amazing.

an audio book: My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore. Beth Moore has been writing devotionals since long before I began attending women’s Bible studies, and they are well known to be a lot of work–pages and pages of Scripture study. I’ve never done one myself, but when I saw she had written a memoir I thought I’d give it a try. The audiobook of her reading with her accent going from Tennesseean to Texan to modern is wonderful, the writing is clever and lively, and the story is wild. Blessed surely, but fraught, broken, bound back up and beautiful. I laughed out loud throughout as I listened, driving up down Michigan’s highways in July, particularly at her wry integration of Southern expressions, most of them gathered from her grandmother. (The audiobook was a free download for me on Hoopla, a library app)

And here are two recent posts from my substack that you might enjoy…

Reading the House of Music: reviewing a fascinating and fun book about a family of seven classical musicians. In this review I remark on KMM’s comment that one can never be too obsessed with their children. My way of understanding this remark is to reflect on how often parents of young children feel driven to court other interests and pursuits, while parents of grown children becomes steadily more focused on their offspring. I am curious if you have any thoughts on this–comments here or in the post or my email.

Feeling Like Both the Rose and the Rain: thoughts after a day of reflection on our last school year.

In her Mother’s newsletter Zinzi mentioned micro-seasons (“What new thing does a particular micro-season hold?”) and I wondered what composed midwinter for me. On the surface it feels exactly like a winter that rolls on interminably, with the darkness by dinner always, and the brusque of cold tight shoulders when walking to the car, always. But upon closer examination…yesterday’s walk outside, the fluffy snow had been blown off and left slippery, incredibly iridescent snow. And behind the house, the thick icicles hung out of our reach, looking like manmade glass waterfalls. This week I brought my handwritten order of six seeds to the co-op, where it will join many other orders and be bundled off to Maine. 20% discount and free shipping—that’s like two free seed packets right there. How often we listen to Ben Cosgrove’s The Trouble with Wilderness right now. How next week Vermont’s master gardener community will begin screening movies online at 10am on Fridays and we’ll hop on zoom and see each other’s dimly lit kitchen shelves in the background, and watch something that will remind us summer is coming and feel transcendent in that way. (The series begins with My Garden of a Thousand Bees, which is free for anyone to watch on PBS.) We’ve been sleeping deeply as a household—finally got through an odd stretch of someone always waking up at night and calling out—and despite the bright sunlight through the window in the morning first thing, I feel tugged back into winter’s sleep.

Right now the most curious blips of getting together pop-up—a drink at the nearly empty pizza place, late night zooms with old friends from my kitchen–staying up too late and drinking together from afar, a quick exchange of favorite recent books over lunch on the floor with our kids at the homeschool co-op. All of them carnations on a rosary beaded with more isolated days.

One of the things I have to note that I adore about this stage of winter is how everyone knows where their winter things are. They know how to get dressed for outside, and they know what they like to wear, and everything, at long last, fits!

I opened last year’s planner, just looking for a spot to make some notes to myself for the upcoming week, and realized I had done no less than three of the exact same things this week last year: made lasagna, visited the dentist, saw a friend to discuss poetry. Had I not looked, I would have seen my week composed by a random assemblage of “and so it was.” But instead I should see them all practically as traditions, given that this is the second year I’m doing them. Feels strange, but also comforting. In my emails, google will suggest text to finish sentences. If I type, “sounds” it suggests in faint, hopeful gray: “good.” While I don’t want my google calendar to do the same thing, I’m tempted by the idea of more cyclical planning in the micro sense. Not just holidays marked on the dot, but also observations, visits, check-ins and ideas allotted times of year, weeks, days.

What are you making for Easter? If you’ve followed me for any amount of time you are probably aware that I really admire and borrow from Jewish traditions throughout the year because they are often richer than strictly Christian traditions. Jewish traditions seem to involve sustenance, symbolism, repetition, and community. This habit could also be influenced by how much I liked The All-of-a-Kind Family series as a girl.

Either way, I was happy to learn this week about Easter/resurrection cookies–meringues made with egg whites, sugar, crushed nuts, a touch of vinegar, ingredients mixed together while reading aloud specific passages from the Bible, then the pan of cookies is placed in a warm oven and opened the next morning. It has all the marks of a lovely tradition. Going to try it on Saturday. This link is to a pdf with all the directions, but you can find lots of images online as well.

Definitely going to make this mustard sauce as well.

Nothing will quite soothe the longings to be back in the enormous ornate church with a choir waiting to sing. The bundles of flowers everywhere you look mixing yellow, white and green; all of the stems leaning toward the congregation in the pews. The rush to get dressed in the morning, managing to find a dress to fit each girl, not bothering to worry about clean hair or fingernails. Waiting to shout hallelujah! together. The electric excitement of children already fueled by morning jelly beans, lining up to see baby animals brought in that morning by a man from outside the city and now waiting in the library just off the sanctuary. And after that, watching as they find even more candy nestled within the nearly neon plastic eggs scattered in the church garden. You, drinking very hot but very bad church coffee, thinking maybe you might only ever dress your children in white, they look so nice.

We went out today and walked across the snow that is still frozen thickly enough to hold you up. Down by the road a stream is frozen on top but fresh melted water gurgles below, bubbles of it looking like puff creatures from a Miyazaki film, slipping underneath the crunchy raft of ice. The girls stomped on the ice layers and brown water emerged mixed with glittering silt that looked exactly like gold dust. Must have been gold dust.

The snow is everywhere so the 100 daffodils Joe planted last fall haven’t even had a chance to feel their soil be sun-kissed yet. No signs of spring flowers at all on our hill. But dinner is later, and the sun feels bright at 5pm, which means a lot. Avocado is our one loyal delicious green in the kitchen, Samin’s avocado slatrix from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat refreshing my memory of uses.

The sap has not been dripping into the buckets tapped onto trees by Joe and the girls (primarily Joan this year) because the temperatures have settled primly below freezing on most days. I called down to the town office to ask about a few things and quizzed the clerk as to whether others were getting much sap. Whether to reassure me or because it was true, she told me she hadn’t heard it was flowing well yet for anyone.

One of my favorite spring things to think about is this passage from Edna Lewis:

I remember when I was very little, our neighbor Mrs. Towles came over one bright afternoon and invited me for tea as she often did. As I walked along the path behind her, we came upon a nest of colored candy Easter eggs. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my five years of life.

The unexpected gift of color, a thoughtful neighbor, a tradition and ritual–so much delight in one passage.

Few people are better on spring than Edna Lewis’s chapters from her A Taste of Country Cooking. She writes about the whole year of meals at Freetown, the community founded by emancipated slaves in Virginia where she was raised. Her writing is precise, firm, and rich with details. The community she describes sounds like heaven.

Just as an example, about coffee she writes…

Coffee also separated people by age. As I said, we children weren’t allowed to drink it and aged aunts, uncles, and grandparents never drank coffee from a cup. That was a waste of time. Every aged person in Freetown drank their coffee from a bowl.

It’s the season when I can scroll through photos of summer on my phone and stare in awe at the colors in our summertime backyard. We get used to the sight of it by July, but looking back, I realize it’s a rolling lawn of green with verdant jungle-like trees lining the edges. The noise of the wind ruffling through the leaves comes back to me, along with the way the air feels when its both damp and warm in the morning.

To experience the same feeling about the current season we’re in, I have only to look at Loré Pemberton‘s illustrations. The warmth, the fading light, the weary affection, the shambled chaos that often doesn’t feel cozy, but can be seen as such, if only you step away from it for a moment. I just love her work! I would love to see some older children’s books revisited by her, like Noisy Village, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, and The Railway Children. Puffin Classics if you’re reading this: call Loré up! Interesting note: Garth Williams, the illustrator for the Laura Ingalls series, was hired to illustrate her first books after they were already bestsellers. I feel lucky to have met the words and the illustrations at the same time.

I found Loré on Instagram, where she is wonderful to follow, but she has many prints, a printable calendar pages, and $1.50 coloring pages available from her shop throughout the year.

PS: This week I published my ninth homeschool newsletter, you can read it right here. If you read one thing this weekend, make it Mary H.K. Choi’s essay about intimacy and sickness in the pandemic.

The brand new shows produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines are available to stream for around $7 a month, please choose the ad-free $3 upgrade for your own precious clarity of mind. Right now only the premier of Floret’s show is available (it is SO good). Almost the whole season of the show about Erin French and her restaurant in Maine, the Lost Kitchen, is available to watch. Both shows have tremendous positive energy, I’m just astounded by them. The producers managed to get to the heart of these woman founders who hustled so studiously after their dreams. And the talent in them! Wow. It’s like they had a sense of the visions and abilities they’d been given, so they pursued them, but no one else around them was really clear on what was happening, or how they’d been caught up in this talent vortex. Pretty amazing to get to watch.

The shows are obviously taking a note from the British Baking Show and have very little worry/scary plot twists throughout. They are beautiful, educational, and calming to watch. The Lost Kitchen episode 2 ends up being a primer in fried chicken and biscuits–what could be better! If you fall in love, Erin’s cookbook is another way to learn from her recipes and perspective.

Highly recommend for your February.