Winter's End, Friends, Soldiers, Keepers, and Link Love
Some goodness for your Sunday
This time last year most of the river was iced in except the deep waters in front of our house and one Sunday Nate and I watched three swans dive and eat and play all day. It was a lovely day, despite the cold, a respite in the longest winter.
We have five days in the next ten forecasted to be in the 60s and I can see the swans out in the middle of the river now, at the widest part hundreds of feet from the house, still diving and eating and playing. Normally our snowdrops and crocuses don’t break through until mid-March, but it looks like we’ll see some new growth in a few days. I am ready for it.
You know those last few weeks of winter (or summer, if you live somewhere like Texas where August and September feel like February and March up here), where you can almost taste the coming shoulder season, but it’s not there yet, and every day just feels longer than the last? This is what this season of life feels like right now.
Yesterday, Nate and I spent the day scrubbing and sorting and sweeping from every corner of The Little River Cottage and by the end of the day I felt near to tears. The sun was that warm golden color of late afternoon, streaming straight in the sunroom through the kitchen and shining on the furthest wall of the living room and I felt (not for the first time) a pang of homesickness for this home we’ve loved and are planning to leave. I remember a day just last summer when leaving her was unthinkable to us, and now it will soon be a reality (How soon? We don’t know. Could be March. Could be June. Could be September.). I don’t want to borrow tomorrow’s sorrow, but I’m terribly bad at mourning after the fact and have learned to leave space for the mourning that comes before.
It feels strange to be thinking of leaving this home, these forests and mountains and lakes, when so much of The Understory was written within and about them. On podcasts and interviews I will be talking about what I have learned and loved, even as I leave. I chuckled to myself this week, though, when I remembered the last chapter of the book is called Here is Movement. I thought it was just about finding newness amidst so much death, but it turns out it was so much more.
Let’s have some link love, shall we?
