December 2019 - February 2020
1. I love to cook
This is a confession: I once thought cooking was a hobby only for women who were trying to become some version of a 1950s housewife. Cooking was a necessity, not something to enjoy (even if I did enjoy it all along.) Well friends, here’s the confession: I love to cook. I love to bake and roast and chop and sautee. I love putting ingredients together and checking the recipe and sometimes not checking the recipe and just hoping it’ll turn out okay. I love that split second before the first taste when I wonder if it’s going to be terrible but it tastes delicious. I love trying new recipes and celebrating when they taste wonderful and laughing when they’re not that great. I love tinkering with food and making it better. I love inviting people over and having them taste the food I’ve made. It’s wonderful and thrilling and I can’t believe I once thought loving it was beneath me.
2. The American Chestnut tree suffered the greatest ecological disaster in known history when a blight fungus killed nearly all adult trees around the turn of the century
Christie Purifoy mentions this briefly in her wonderful book Placemaker, and her mention of it spawned hours of reading about the history of the American Chestnut tree. I’ve never been particularly interested in trees, but something about this disaster (and the fact that I didn’t know about it until this past January) is just so incomprehensibly sad to me. It was such a loss America suffered when this great, useful tree could no longer grow around us.
3. “...perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony”
These days with an almost-one-year-old are wonderful and fun and beautiful and...monotonous. There’s no getting around it. Abigail loves to read the same books over and over, listen to the same song on repeat, and play endless games of putting all the farm animals inside the tiny barn and taking them back out again. My husband shared this quote with me earlier this winter from G K Chesterton: “But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun.; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” It has reframed all that monotony for me.
4. My feelings about my body can be neutral
After I had Abbie, I felt all this pressure to have an opinion about my postpartum body. The two options were I could either hate the way that it looked, the way it felt slightly foreign to me or at least very different. Or I could love it because all the places that look different now are because my body was home to my baby girl for nine months and don’t I love her????
Listen. Kendra Adachi spoke words of life into my soul when she gave me permission to have neutral feelings about my body in this podcast episode. I don’t have to think about it all the time. I don’t have to “love my flaws” because my body is my body and it’s not flawed so much as it’s uniquely mine. I can’t overstate how freeing this has been. I was finally able to put down a weird weight I’ve been carrying around for months. I just don’t feel any strong feelings one way or another toward my postpartum body. It is mine, and it is different, and I have neutral feelings about that.
5. A library card is a game changer
In January I got a library card from my local library and it has been a game changer. It’s only February and I’ve almost topped the number of books I read all last YEAR. Our library (and I guess tons of other libraries too) uses this app called Libby and I can check out ebooks and audiobooks. (WHAT?!) I’ve been checking out and reading ebooks like nobody’s business and loving it. Why did I wait so long to do this?
6. Cream of tartar is what gives snickerdoodles their snappy, tangy taste
I’m still not 100% clear on exactly what cream of tartar is (a byproduct of winemaking, a weak acid, potassium bitartrate...cream of tartar proves that it is, in fact, possible to become even more confused the more you learn about something. See also: foreign policy and calculus.) What I do know is cream of tartar is what gives snickerdoodles that delicious snap, making them more than just a cinnamon-coated sugar cookie. Thank you science.
7. “What gets you there is not pride but mercy”
Elizabeth Gilbert posted some advice for writers on this Instagram post back in August and I saved it. When I went back and read it again, this little line was like a lightning bolt. Here it is in context: “Every writer starts in the same place on Day One: Super excited, and ready for greatness. On Day Two, every writer looks at what she wrote on Day One and hates herself. What separates working writers from non-working writers is that working writers return to their task on Day Three. What gets you there is not pride but mercy. Show yourself forgiveness, for not being good enough. Then keep going."
8. Don’t store bags inside other bags
This is purely practical but one of those subtle changes that ends up making life so much easier. I used to keep bags - reusable shopping bags, purses, overnight bags - all inside the biggest bag I had of their kind. I thought I was being organized but what I was really doing was making life harder for myself every time my hands were full of stuff that needed to go in a bag and I had to fish the one bag I needed from the sea of other bags inside the big bag. (A moment of silence for past me and all my unnecessary bag-related frustration.) Now I just keep them in one location and grab, with ONE HAND, the bag I need when I need it. Amen.
9. Books that were popular a few years ago probably don’t have long holds at the library
Forgive me while I learn the ropes of being a card-carrying library-goer. Thumbing through Best-of lists of years past has been a blast. There were books that didn’t sound interesting to me three years ago, but now I can’t wait to read them. AND they don’t have holds at the library so I can start reading them right now. Glorious day!
10. “Something as simple as touching my own face with moisturizer can lead me toward God or away from Him”
I read Lore Wilbert’s Handle With Care this January and I can’t overstate how much it made me pay attention to touch in my life. This quote is one I think of most often (every morning and evening as I apply moisturizer to my face,) but there are so many passages throughout the book that come to my mind all throughout the day. It’s such a gift to be able to see touch this way - as something that can lead me toward or away from God.
Bonus: I learned the swirl on top of my chai latte at my favorite local coffeeshop is not, in fact, an “M” for Morgan but a “W” for the shop’s name: Winnie’s. I’m embarrassing.