An End to February

Friends, for once I am not writing to you from my Cozy Burrow. I’m actually finishing this post in a hotel room. My 42nd birthday was earlier this month and Matthew got me a night away! I’m staying at The Common Man Inn and Spa in Plymouth and it is a dream come true. This is my first night away from home since I was in the hospital giving birth to Bronwyn in 2018 and man, I’ve been ready for a break! So despite begging him to cancel the reservation because I felt so terrible about shirking my responsibilities, I am very happy to be settled at the desk in this little room this morning.

Today’s post is an update on our February vacation week fun, a snapshot of my knitting progress, and some thoughts about the books I finished this week. This week’s books felt like they were all in conversations with one another (yes, even Anna Karenina) – I love it when that happens.

---

Home

---

We have survived February vacation (so far)! There have been snowy days: this picture was taken last Sunday morning out the front door and I couldn’t ignore the sunrise’s effects on the top of those evergreen trees. And there have been sunny days, so there’s been some melting around the edges but there’s still several feet of snow on the ground. I’ll try to keep updating this picture as the season progresses so you can watch our mud puddles grow. Joy.

We’ve done a lot of playing, inside and out, this week. We baked chocolate chip cookies on Monday but we’ve all figured out ways to entertain ourselves without too much trouble. I somehow managed to get a bit of reading done, which is outlined in more detail a little further down in this post. I have nothing to complain about!

I haven’t, however, gotten much school planning done this week so I’ll start next week on my back foot. That’s okay – we’ve developed an easy rhythm that makes it easy to start with very little prep and that gives me an opportunity to build up as we go. So it’s still true: I have nothing to complain about!

---

Knitting

---

My goal for the week was to knit a little bit everyday but that didn’t happen. I managed to finish one sock and start the second in the pair, but that’s about it. I decided to bring them with me at the last minute but so far, haven’t knitted anything while being here. No matter: I’m still halfway to a new pair of socks!

---

Reading

Restoration by Ave Barrera
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“I was pleased. I’d reconnected with my delight in repairing what was broken, recovering old things from abandonment, burnishing time.” p 49

Restoration is dark and cinematic; it kept me on the edge of my seat and returning to my book at every opportunity to pick through the clues Barrera left her reader. There are multiple narrators and sometimes it was difficult to know who was talking, which was by design.

Our main narrator is a young woman in Mexico. I don’t want to use her name because that is part of the puzzle of this book. She’s studying Art History and plans to become a renovator. Her boyfriend Zuri asks her to restore his recently deceased uncle’s (Eligio) home that hasn’t been lived in for at least 30 years: a beautiful three story mansion beaten down by the years but with so much potential. Zuri tells her that she can do anything to the house but she may not enter one room. Sound familiar? Yes, this book is a Bluebeard retelling.

Woven throughout this story is narration from Gertrudis, Eligio’s wife, from the mid-twentieth century. She grew up poor in a village and feels like a princess when Eligio chooses her as his wife. But with time, she becomes disillusioned as Eligio’s true self begins to show.

Despite how dark it is, I enjoyed putting all of the pieces of this story together. If you like books written for all of your senses and are okay with uncertain reading, then this is a fun choice.

---

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” p 1

It was impossible to choose a quote so I went with the most well-known: the opening sentence.

I finished Anna Karenina this week! I enjoyed almost all of my time with this novel – except the last 30 or so pages. I was most struck by how minor of a character Anna was throughout the novel and how unlikable I found her, despite going in with the best intentions of cheering her on. I think there was quite a bit of sexism at play here on Tolstoy’s part and I’m still spending time with my notebook, picking apart relationships and the various fates of the characters. There’s a lot to uncover and think about and I’m most certainly going to reread this at some point.

I know I’m in the minority by being finding the discussions of Russian politics and the philosophies of work fascinating. I tried to guess who would have sided with the Bolsheviks or the nobility, despite it being published 40 years before the Romanovs were murdered and the Bolsheviks took power. This book felt like a primer piece on what set up that takeover and made me want to retake my sociology classes on social movements. (College is wasted on the young!!)

I enjoyed reading this with Sarah and being able to text about some of the frustrating moments in this book!

---

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“But who could trust that a memory was really your own when certain stories are repeated so much within a family that everyone takes ownership of them?” 11:15

The Wilderness is a novel about friendship. We follow five young Black women across two decades and back and forth across America, all through their ups and downs. Through new relationships, breakups, the loss of loved ones, new jobs, new businesses, babies, everything that life throws at us. I was in awe of their enduring friendships. I’ve always struggled to be a consistent friend and have wanted what these women found in each other.

Flournoy touched on so many social issues we’re tackling: class disparities, racial injustice, the effects of a police state, the cost of housing, family estrangement, the impact of social media. The book was so thoughtful and could be picked apart with endless discussions between friends. This would be a fantastic book club choice because I think everyone could identify with something this book attempted to cover.

The only downside to this book was listening on audio. At times I struggled to know which character was speaking, even with the use of multiple narrators. I’m not sure if that would have been easier on paper? Either way, I managed to figure it all out and enjoyed this story.

---

Corregidora by Gayl Jones
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“My great grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget.” p 7

How have I not heard about Gayl Jones until now?! This book was published in 1975 and was raw and courageous. It’s mostly set in the late 1940s and is about Ursa, a young Black woman in Kentucky. Her last name came from the Portuguese slave owner who fathered both her grandmother and her mother. Early in the novel, Ursa is attacked by her husband and is no longer able to bear children, despite her family’s constant reminder that it’s her duty to remember and pass on their stories. Without those stories, there’s no evidence of what happened to so many women who were enslaved.

The main theme I kept returning to was the generational trauma passed through families who were enslaved. That trauma weighs so heavily on the following generations and is a constant companion. This was the perfect way to end Black History Month and I’ll be looking for more Gayl Jones to read throughout the rest of the year.

---

---

And that’s a snapshot of my week! My stay in this hotel room has been wonderful. I didn’t get as much sleep as I thought but got far more rest than I anticipated, so I’ll consider that a big win. Breakfast is in just over an hour so I’m going to stay at this little desk until then with my books and notebooks. It will give me a nice chunk of time to work on the Substack post that I’m planning to publish on Wednesday.

I hope you find some time to recharge your batteries this week. Take good care.