I used to watch my Grandma crochet. She would sit on the couch with a long line of yarn leading up to a crochet hook that bobbed in and out, loop and link, in and out, loop and link. Each loop joined to the next and the next and the next. Arms around each other, holding on. Tiny loops like tiny lives, each person linked to another and another and another.

Last year there were seven funerals in my family. Most were expected, even if they were very unwanted. I’ve thought a lot about people, and lives, and the woven way we are tied together. You kind of have to when you keep going to funerals. In a way, when a death is expected it is like an unraveling, the unavoidable unlooping. It can move slow or fast, the way to temporary loss. But when a death is sudden, unexpected, ripped - there is no way around the gaping hole left behind.

Listening: Arrival of the Birds, Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (finished 28 minutes before it was pulled back on Libby - what an adrenaline rush for a suburban mom)
Working on: 4/50 holiday cards submitted
Cloud spotting: Cirrus
Flowers: Hellebore
Reading: Gentleman in Moscow, Miracle of Mindfulness (again)
Weeks until the flower markets: 2
Writing: a couple lines after being on Instagram for too long, here you go

Listening: The Invisible Life of Addie Larue
Reading: A Gentleman in Moscow, Mary Oliver’s Devotions
Eating: Rice pudding from Snuck Farms - but the kids are onto it. Might need two next week.
Working on: Recalibrating to daylight savings, Minted holiday collection - Merry March!
Watching: Fiddler on the Roof at the Ruth with Lacey. Vaguely remember the opening scene from childhood, but couldn’t figure out why I knew every word to a few songs and hadn’t heard of some of the others. And then I realized - Gilmore Girls! Kirk was Tevye!
Remembering: Our treat basket is dangerously low. Julian called Mike at work to ask if he could get a treat from Mike’s secret stash in our closet. Mike said yes, so I brought the basket down. When I took the lid off and Julian saw it filled with candy he gasped and whispered “that traitor!”

I have been talking about making my own products again for years. Cards, notepads, journals - your basic collection of paper goods a la an etsy store starter pack. The problem is that I am my own boss. And I am very, very lenient with deadlines. There is always something more pressing than a personal project: a Minted challenge, or client work, or family life, or reading about solar powered bird baths or, or, or... it is easy to push the dream down the road a little. Let it stay a floating, cloud shaped thing. You can look at it in the distance and admire it, escape to it when you need a little break. But a dream made solid in reality loses its ethereal edges and becomes apprehensive, uneasy. It can be inspected, appraised, judged. It can crumble. It can fail.

Noticing: Minutes in the desert - stretched.
Collecting: Red sand. Everywhere.
Cloud spotting: Stratocumulus?
Reading: The Overthinker’s Guide to Making Decisions
Listening: God of the Woods, Careless People (oof)

Hi, just checking in.

We’re going with the second definition of “checking in” from our friend Merriam Webster - reporting one’s presence or arrival.

So, here I am. Present. Arrived. 

I started writing here to have a space that I owned. Where algorithms are absent and words aren’t buried in a landslide of content as soon as they are planted onto a page. My writing has been scattered, sporadic - half-written posts and orphaned ideas. Little word weeds. I am starting again, ripping things out, even though I’ve never liked weeding. But I want to come back to this idea that having space, making space, is worth the time.

Time. My four letter word.

Take up your space. The words that have been bobbing around in my head ever since I read them in this post by Annie Blake. They live in the back of my mind and have become a tiny, humming mantra: Take. Up. Your. Space. There are a lot of ways we make ourselves small, forcing a fit into a space that someone else hands to us. We adopt expectations and roles we don’t actually want. We tuck away our thoughts and discard dreams that are too big or too impractical. We let the space around us contract, giving up tiny pieces of who we are as it shrinks. It’s so easy to lose ground in your own life.

It can feel like sleepwalking until you have a defining moment, when a tremor of thought becomes a seismic shift, changing the landscape inside of us.

In an ironic nod to the fact that I am a woman in my thirties, I had a defining moment in Target. I was there in January picking out a baby shower present. It was cold, it was late, and the mood was already grey and meh.

I posted this picture a few years ago with the caption “Sometimes it’s awkward when my Mom asks me how my day was and I tell her I arranged dead leaves into a square. For the internet.”

I was twenty-something with a baby on my hip and a toddler tangled at my feet. The small design studio I had been working for quietly closed its doors the year before. With sporadic projects every couple of months to work on, it had seemed like a good time to maybe pivot to something else. Like so many paper loving designers before me, I had answered the siren song of stationery design and done a stint making custom wedding invitations in college. The timing hadn’t been right (some people are not thrilled when 10,000 envelopes are delivered to campus housing) so I shelved it after a while to focus on freelance work. But it was always in the back of my mind to pick up invitations again at some point.

A couple of months ago I did an AMA on Instagram. Why does it feel so weird to post that question box? Maybe it’s the same feeling when you’re having a party and are terrified no one will show up. I have thrown zero parties for this very reason. Or maybe it’s the assumed self-importance that people find you interesting enough to ask you a question in the first place? If you also have a tendency to overthink things, welcome.