Who else has been watching the Olympics this week? We’re not watching as much as we have in the past, but I’m trying to get in a little viewing every day. I’ve been most excited by Alysa Liu’s gold medal performance, so I printed out one of the pictures making the rounds and taped it to my computer shelf. It’s a fabulous reminder to inject joy into every little effort that I make here at my desk (and everywhere!).
This week has been busy but we’ve done our best to find ways to keep it as cozy as possible. The snow has helped! We had snow on Tuesday, Friday night, and Saturday. And we’re expecting more tonight!
Home:
We had a fabulous week of school. Bronwyn and I did a lot of early morning baking to make sure we had delicious snacks for our afternoon teas (the blueberry muffins were the most successful with the kids, but I really loved the cottage pudding cake. That quick coffee cake was a total dud.), studied the Plague and the Hundred Years’ War, did lots of math, studied sentence subjects and actions, and imagined what our kingdoms would be like if each of us were king or queen. Lots of laughing at that idea. And so much more!
We have been reading aloud Impossible Creatures and it is fabulous. It’s full of mythological creatures (Bryce is explaining them, he is something of an expert) and Old English words that we’re looking up. I’m enjoying our time with this one and most importantly, they are too.
Other than the structure of school, I have been busy writing, reading, and have done some knitting since we last chatted. I have been working on my intro post to Substack that I’d like to publish on Wednesday, as well as the first essay that I’m planning to publish the following Wednesday. So that has kept me busy and focused in challenging ways that I welcome.
Knitting:
Can we talk about how much love knitting is getting at this year’s Olympics? It makes sense because it tends to be where I put most of my nervous energy and these elite athletes must be rattling with it. It’s the perfect activity to turn to while waiting to compete and hanging out in the Olympic village. My husband keeps showing me all of the knitting pictures and videos that he comes across and it’s been a lot of fun. I love this injection of knitting culture!
I haven’t knitted as much as I’ve wanted this week and don’t really have much progress to show you. But I can share how I’ve been tracking my knitting for the last few months. I started in October when I was trying to motivate myself to finish my Lettuce Mint sweater and gave myself a goal of 4 rows each day. I wanted to keep up with that progress to make sure I was reaching those goals, so I started using the monthly spread in my planner. Here’s what I have in February so far:
We have one more week left in February and my goal is to knit at least a little bit every day. I’ll let you know how it goes next weekend!
Reading:
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
(Amazon | Bookshop.org)
“I found the adage of time healing all wounds to be false. Grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.”
Jesmyn Ward has long been one of my favorite authors and I jumped on the opportunity when the audio of Men We Reaped was available on Libby. In this memoir, Ward explores her grief and how she makes sense of losing five young men in her life in quick succession, working backwards from the most recent loss to the loss of her little brother. Woven throughout the stories of these young men is a perfect snapshot of her childhood in Mississippi and growing up on the Gulf Coast that felt so familiar to me. The tall pine trees, the never-ending humidity, and even the way her parents disciplined her and her siblings. She was extremely vulnerable in this book and I saw her work in a whole new light, which is the inspiration for the first real substack essay I’m working on.
I don’t always write down quotes from audiobooks because the process is so tedious: pause, rewind, pause, rewind, scribble, scribble, scribble. But I didn’t want to return this without jotting down a few powerful passages. She is a fantastic writer.
Even though I borrowed this audiobook through the library, I decided to order my own copy. And I will be ordering everything else that Ward publishes from here on out. She has a book of essays coming out in May, On Witness and Respair (Amazon | Bookshop.org) and I’ve preordered it. Let’s read it together?
Minor Black Figues by Brandon Taylor
(Amazon | Bookshop.org)
“How to paint life as a black[*] person, with black people, not black figures, people, and not have… all this stuff attached.” p 258
Minor Black Figures was full of art of all kinds: taking in visual art, listening to music, discussing artists. In some ways, I felt like it was in conversation with The Book of Records and Katabasis: highly intellectual and full of ideas that required the reader to pick them apart and look at all of their pieces to understand what the author meant to convey.
This is a novel set in post-COVID NYC about Wyeth, a young Black artist from the south cobbling together a life in the city. He feels like a failure as an artist because no one really gets his work: he is trying to capture the unsayable (p 349). His aim is to paint pictures of Black people in everyday situations without the attached assumption that he was trying to say something political, rather than simply capturing a beautiful moment like white artists have the luxury of doing.
There is a touching love story with another young man, Keating, an ex-priest grappling with his long-held beliefs about compassion and what it means to be a good person. There’s even a trip to a Japanese stationery store to find the perfect notebook and a special kind of chalk with his friend who is a physicist. Brandon Taylor focused on the mundane and was able to bring these characters to life and I connected with Wyeth profoundly throughout this story.
This was my first Brandon Taylor but it won’t be my last! He has a Substack that I mostly skim, but will now enjoy even more thanks to reading this.
Currently reading:
📖 Restoration by Ave Barrera: a creepy translated titled based on the story of Bluebeard. It’s deliciously dark so far!
🎧 The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy: trying this one on audio and I’m making some good progress. The characters are so good!
🐌 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: still making good progress, about 85% through it. Still loving it!!
🐌 The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison: yes, I started a second slow & steady. I was worried this would be difficult and it is, but not as hard as I thought it would be. One essay at a time makes it much more approachable.
Next week is school vacation week! So who knows what life will bring. I’m not making any real plans except to get that substack published on Wednesday, read as much as I can, and knit just a little bit every day. I’m sure there will be quite a bit of baking, cooking, and cleaning too. There’s a lot of snow in the forecast for the week, so that will help it feel like a real February vacation!
Whatever the week brings you, I hope you find time to do things that recharge your battery. Take good care.
*Normally I would capitalize B in these situations (Black person, Black people, Black figure, etc), but Brandon Taylor chose to use the lower case b throughout his novel. I am certain he did it on purpose because Wyeth wanted to be seen for his artistry as an individual, so I fought the urge to use capital Bs here and transcribed it faithfully to the text.
The Cozy Burrow 
A vacation week sounds like perfection right now. I have been itching to get outside and putter in the garden, but it is just too soggy currently. However, the delight of delights, my snowdrops began blooming yesterday. My heart was so full looking at those tiny, delicate, tenacious little plants! Nature seems to be helping to ease me out of my deep winter mode… and that feels almost intentional this year. I am grateful to be noticing the tiny things (especially in a world with all sorts of big awful things.) I did not have Brandon Taylor on my radar, but this book sounds like one I need to read. I am off to see if my library has a copy!
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The snow, the baking, reading, and knitting all sound wonderful to me! I have looked up Men We Reaped and also Brandon Taylor’s Substack. Have a good weekend. I look forward to reading your Substack!
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