The temperature’s dropping here as we wait for our annual snow day. We’re supposed to get a couple of inches so our whole area is making plans to pretend we can’t drive anywhere and are stuck at home. I’m super excited. The library even cooperated by providing me with the next book in my mystery series in case I’m forced to sit by the fire and read all day. Yay winter!

The last few days I’ve been thinking about this Chinese proverb: (HT: Lesley )

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”

As soon as I read that, I remembered an older woman I spent time with when I was in my twenties who took a look at my handwriting and my charm-school posture and told me I had some issues with trying to be perfect. Well, yeah. The whole first half of my life could be defined by the word: tension. (I could easily have written that article.)

The good news is that I couldn’t maintain impossible-to-maintain-standards. Eventually I just got tired and started figuring out that while I was a pretty capable person, I was not a very happy or fun one. That was in my 30’s. I have a lot of relaxing to make up for, you guys. I’m going to enjoy Part II so much.

(Btw, I just looked it up and they are still selling that book. Insert horror emoji.)

Things I want to remember from this week:

My inner smart girl has been squealing over all this:

~Please, please let me live long enough to need a cape-dress like Stacey Plaskett. What a QUEEN. During yesterday’s trial she was poised, articulate, confident, and in command. So impressive.

~ Speaking of queens, I finally finished The Queen’s Gambit. I have no interest in chess, but I’m obsessed as always with a pre-smartphone era. In their downtime, peopled were reading books and playing chess. Alone, if they had to. I can’t get enough of it. Also the clothes.

~ This has me longing to see a murmuration. Murmurations work because starlings coordinate by “rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors.” Each bird is not keeping track of the whole group, just the seven closest neighbors to herself. Locality, intimacy, neighborly awareness. Huh. More here.

~ I finished this beautiful book a couple weeks ago, but I keep picking it back up to reread passages. It’s the loveliest writing and the most powerful exploration of parental grief and love I’ve read.

“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it…”

~ Lastly, some folk music and poetry for a snowy day : A MidWinter Miscellany

Wishing you all snowflakes and good books and warm hearts and homes.

tonia