Rejoice

Listening to Sufjan. Watching the clothes dryer cloud steam into the icy air outside. Packing bags. Checking lists twice. I'm determined to find some quiet, no matter how far I have to travel to find it.

I'll be quiet while I find quiet. I'll see you in the New Year. I wish you a beautiful and delicious holiday season.

xo,
WHP

On the few hours

Waking before dawn and coming home after sunset has never felt right to me.

Little sayings: volume twenty-two

On holding one together

There are times it feels near miracle in scope to not create catastrophe in ones wake. Now is one of those times.

I have made all the choices to be where I am and I remain committed to each and every one of those choices. But sometimes I bite off more than I can chew. Or I chew with anxiety and fear that at any moment -- one more second -- I will turn and find myself in pieces.

And when the people you expect to be there are not there and trouble after problem after unexpected visit tumble over one another, enter: mother. Enter: family.

They drove long and into the night. They cooked for me and came with their own oversized soup pot. Bags of ingredients spilled over all the counters. They brought wine and left dessert and happy scrawled notes and christmas oranges. They spent nights in my apartment to look after the cats when I couldn't. They took the dogs home with them and send me photos of their naps and treat-time throughout the days so I won't miss them so much. They ask "what can I do for you?" They took my hand. They shared my burden.

Without family, the bottom would be so much deeper.

A brick building a weekend a cat yowling

"The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

(Thank you to girlfriends who pass along books that are so timely it takes everything I have not to dog-ear the pages of their copy.)

Gbox WHP feature

Thank you to Gabriel over at THE GBOX for writing up an ode to landscape and the city. This here town, you can't get one without the other.

Corners

My fingertips smell like mandarins, my hair smells like campfire and the apartment smells like cloves.

Each day I anticipate how good it will be to take a hot bath in the evening and to bring tea to bed while I make my way through the longest novel in history. I can barely gather the energy to shuffle the animals into their own beds and off of mine before making it dark.

It takes so many nights to finish a novel when it slips out of my hands only a few pages in. And the sleep is deep and I don't remember any dreams.

And the winner is ....

The winner of November's giveaway is Kylie! (Congratulations, darling!)

Her sentence to bring our story forward: "Where her new surroundings will be a far cry from his home in the city."

xo,
WHP