Strange Seasons

Lilacs in October and the comfort of winter darkness

Dec 04, 2024

Well, hello; it’s been a while since I sent out a newsletter. The room I imagined would magically enter my days with the onset of fall never arrived, and here I am, early-December, trying to find my footing yet again with my creative work.

It is no secret that creative work requires space, ample amounts; the kind most parents will be quick to admit they don’t have. And yet, we find our ways. Last winter, I had created a lovely routine, but as the busy season for my photography business began last May, I really struggled to find time for my writing. So here I am again, re-establishing rhythms and dusting off my writing muscles.

Today, I dip my toe back into sharing my words with an essay I began working on in October. I also have some updates about my subscriptions and a sale on my website! I’ll start with the announcements. Thank you for being here.

Subscription Changes

I have decided to pause all paid subscriptions for the time being as I reimagine what this space will look like (and catch up on a few months worth of missed essays). I am so grateful to all the people who have offered their financial contributions to support my time here, and may at some point offer this again.

For now, I don’t feel like I have the room in my work schedule to approach this as a paid venture, so it feels best for me to remove the paywall and continue sharing my writing. My hope is to get back into a more consistent routine here.

For now, everything I write will be made available to all subscribers, including my archived posts. If you’d like to financially support my writing, please consider buying a copy of my book, Lake Letters.

Holiday Sale

All of the products on my website, including my book and remaining poem prints are 15% off through this Friday! You can apply the coupon code “happy15” at checkout.

Strange Seasons

I was so alarmed to see lilacs blooming all around the village this October.

In October, the neighbors' lilac bush flowered pale lavender blooms atop tall twigs that were otherwise bare, the leaves having already dropped. In my garden, the irises pushed up new growth alongside still-flowering marigolds and cosmos. It was a strange season, with May growth at the end of October and seventy-degree air coaxing us all into a state of confusion over where and when we were.

That same month marked five years of my being a mother, as my oldest turned five midway through October. It felt both like a huge milestone and the most ordinary moment, a continuation of a life we built together over the 1,825 days that came before. My child, now wildly different from the tiny infant we drove home from the hospital on a sunny afternoon five years ago, is also seemingly exactly the same as he was yesterday. And yet, I know a year from now, a thousand daily shifts will make who he is now seem so different from who he will become. How do I keep track of all the slow change that is difficult to witness in real time, yet reveals itself so poignantly when remembering where we started? Especially now, as the touchpoints I used to consider in nature are changing, too?

The steadiness of our family routines grounds me, even as the backdrop against which they happen shifts. As the light receded this fall and we moved toward the winter months, our family returned to after-dinner walks in the dark. Bundled in winter gear, we walk a loop around the neighborhood, carrying the toddler in our arms or a sled while our oldest tromps through the snow carrying a flashlight. We go up the hill, weaving through the woods, and race down the old fire road as we have every year since our son was an infant, and I carried him in a pack close to my chest.

Five years of this, these cold walks in the early dark. Five years of growing a garden alongside my babies. The first year we grew a garden, we lost the tomatoes in mid-September to an early frost. This year, we were picking them well into November, plucking them from the plants as the sun set before dinner.

So much of my understanding of self these past few years has been in witnessing nature's rhythms and finding my place within them. But now, the flowers bloom a second spring in late October, and I am undone by time. Maybe we are all losing our rhythms. Maybe I have lost my fulcrum in the calendar alongside the trees, flowers, and birds. But then the light continues to shift as it always has, summer's 10 pm twilight giving way to an earlier sunset in the fall and, finally, the 5 pm sunset I have learned to love in early December. Darkness settles in, and somehow, I can see a little better.

There is a thread tying all this together, though I am still grasping for its ends. But I see the possibility of life bursting out of darkness: these long winter nights, the carrots I pull from our garden, out of the dirt and into light. I feel the rumblings of creation even as winter descends and I wonder what comes next. I am compelled to continue making, both the dinner that must be placed on our table each night and the words I sometimes struggle to get on the page. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “The purpose of activism and art, or at least mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers…” and so I continue to notice when the flowers bloom and how that is changing and I notice what my children are growing into and I notice the ways I am still emerging, too.

The tenderness of motherhood has remained throughout these five years, something I wear as proudly and cautiously as the scar marking the place where my children were pulled from my body. As I look to the beginning and remember where it all started, a tiny infant on my chest as I became a mother, the pervasive softness I now carry feels like such a meaningful change. Here, in the darkness, I continue to call attention to the tender act of being alive and caring for others, because nothing feels more important than honoring this side of our humanity. For all the worlds we destroy, for all we consume, we are still cultivating togetherness, still planting seeds to grow in all seasons, even the wrong ones.