Just a quick post to let you know that I won’t be able to make my Morning Tea live chat today. I spent ten hours on a kayak yesterday, navigating through Big Manistique Lake, down the Manistique River, and through the Seney National Wildlife Refuge yesterday, and my entire morning has been consumed by dealing with muddy shoes and soggy laundry (it rained!) plus a few unexpected things that came up today.

I’m working on a post about the journey + long video which I’ll share with you soon, but in the meantime I thought I’d amuse you with this video of me getting stuck on a downed tree and nearly flipping my kayak (I did this probably two dozen times yesterday but I think this is the only time I caught it on camera.)

The video is taken off the front of the kayak, but if you listen closely you can hear Eric directing while I try to sound calm (but am inwardly completely freaking out.)

Despite this, it was a great time and I can’t wait to share more about it with you all soon! We’ll catch up over tea in a couple of weeks.

Warmly,

Meagan

A few years ago I stumbled across a Substack post that discussed, in a matter-of-fact way, the author’s certainty that we are facing civilizational collapse.

At the time, I thought, “Wow, a well-respected writer who is neither a conspiracy theorist nor a cult leader is copping publicly to a belief that our world is on the brink of catastrophe?”

Now, of course, it seems you can’t swing a dead chicken without encountering a thoroughly mainstream take on imminent doom. Predictions of collapse - democracy, food systems, civilization itself - are everywhere, and you almost can’t help but absorb a “collapse-aware” posture even if you don’t put absolute faith in it.

The thing is, I believe a lot of these predictions could likely come true. I agree that we can’t continue consuming and extracting and polluting at the rate we have been for, like, ever, and expect there to be anything left for our children and grandchildren to preserve. I agree that our food systems are strained and vulnerable, that our environment is fragile, that AI and its insatiable hunger for data is potentially catastrophic, and that humans are struggling with social isolation and emotional and mental burnout. I admire writers like , and who urge us to honestly confront our most harmful and self-harming tendencies and work toward a new way of living together on this earth.

But recently I also realized a curious thing: becoming “collapse aware”, as it’s called, has begun to subtly dampen my ability to dream. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, some of my long-held desires about how I hope to spend my remaining years on earth have begun to feel so uncertain as to be unrealistic. The shift was subtle and quiet, but I realized at one point that when I was picturing our future, I wasn’t assuming anything: the existence of jobs, for example, or that I might have any money at all.

To be clear, I have never desired a ton of material wealth or a flashy retirement lifestyle. We’re not talking yachts and oceanfront mansions, here; just normal, everyday dreams, like being able to spend more time on creative pursuits as I age instead of just working to survive; having the freedom to travel a bit, getting to raise grandkids.

When I look to the future now, it’s become marred with a sort of muddy black blur. It’s gotten harder to visualize the most basic things, let alone dream for anything more ambitious. It makes sense: when everything is so uncertain, it can start to seem safer not to desire anything at all than to work toward something that might get yanked away by a collapsing economy or culture or democracy.

But that’s not a particularly healthy place to sit - for us individually, or for the world we’re trying to create - and ultimately, I also think emotionally accepting certain doom is no more realistic than assuming everything will go up, up, up forever.

The thing is, none of us know exactly how this earthly story will play out. If you’re a person of a certain faith you can see the ending - but not, with precision, all the twists and turns and timelines that get us there. If you are a person of uncertain faith you see even less of the picture. But for every one of us, most of the plot is a mystery, and I tend to think that’s by design.

Sure, we can make some guesses about what’s to come based on looking back: life has been hard for all living beings, catastrophic at times, and marred with crises since the very beginning. And yet, over the next twenty, thirty, fifty years, it is just as likely that things will turn out better than we hoped than that they’ll turn out as bad or worse.

I’d argue, in fact, that relegating ourselves to a belief that certain things are absolutely to get steadily worse is just as much an effort to control an uncontrollable future as speculating on un-ending progress.

Which isn’t to say we should all bumble merrily along worrying about nothing but shopping trips and promotions and 401ks and our next tropical vacation. (We probably never should have been worrying about those things so much in the first place: even if the endless pursuit of possessions and convenience hadn’t harmed our human home, I don’t think it was very good for our souls.)

But I’m not talking about that, anyway. I’m talking about having the audacity to hope and even dream and desire things - good, community-building, humanity-enriching things - instead of letting those dreams and desires be permanently dampened by doom, gloom, and pessimism.

Is it possible to balance realism, preparedness, and even a conviction to change course, with hope for the future and the willingness to dream? I hope so. Because I, for one, am ready to reclaim desire in this stage of my life, even if it turns out my dreams require a gentle redefinition.

I chat a little more about how I’ve been feeling about this (especially now that I’m standing on the precipice of the empty nest) in this month’s Journal episode. Plus I share details of our Upper Peninsula trip, behind-the-scenes glimpses of running our family’s bookstore and public market, some photos of life in our 2003 RV, and what I expect to find in my garden in Southwest Michigan when I return next week. It’s all below the paywall below - and, pssst, I’m running a 70% off sale on annual memberships through the end of July, so now is an excellent time to subscribe ahead of some exciting things I have planned for fall. (Emptier-nest pantry planning! Tea! Updates on my novel-in-progress! And more details on how Eric and I are planning to spend the next phase of our lives.)

Journal episodes come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more, join us today - at 70% off annual memberships through July!

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And then yesterday, it hit me. I am less than one year away from Clara graduating high school. That means I am about one year away - figuratively, if not practically - from the “empty nest.”

Now, I want to be clear that I don’t expect my literal nest to empty out the minute Clara graduates. This won’t be my first mom-of-a-graduate rodeo - I know that the path to independence is rarely linear, and our doors will remain open to any of our offspring who need a place to land while they plan their next steps.

But emotionally and mentally, next spring will usher in a huge shift. Sure, one or more of my kids may still be here in my house, but that doesn’t mean I’ll have to be all the time. And even when I’m sharing space with an adult child, everything about the way I spend my time, allocate my emotional and mental resources, and plan my future is going to be on the potential chopping block.

When Clara was little, the youngest of five, I remember marveling over how relatively young I would still be when she turned eighteen. “I won’t even be fifty before they’re all adults!” I’d crow, with a gleam in my eye that moms of littles will understand. Of course I loved my children, and I even, most of the time, loved actually parenting my children, but there were times when the promise of release from all that restriction and responsibility seemed almost unbelievably sweet.

In that era, the days were often long and - with apologies to - at times the years felt also kind of long. Squinting at the finish line, which seemed so far off from my vantage point with a nursing baby and a household of rowdy young boys, I envied that future version of myself. I figured she’d know exactly what she wanted to do, and would finally have the freedom and space to just do it.

I’m actually finding, now that I’m on the cusp of this mythical shift, is that the shape of my future dreams feels a lot more vague than I imagined it would. It makes me anxious: it’s all just a little too open-ended at this point.

I love a blank page, but I like that page to be bound up inside a journal, giving me some structure about how to use it - not sitting on top a messy stack of endless blank pages that I can arrange any way I might want to, or simply let blow all over the room.

Creativity loves constraints, as they say, and over the decades I’ve learned to structure everything - creative pursuits, work hours, social life, where and how I’ve lived - around the simple fact that I had children who needed to be a priority. I’ve been working through the identity shifts and sadness that can come with the letting go of later motherhood, but this level of freedom is honestly a little dizzying.

I made a short video to kick off a topic I will be returning to again and again over the next year both here and on YouTube: when I theoretically could do anything or go anywhere, how will I decide what this next stage of my life should actually look like?

I’d love to hear what you’re struggling with if you’re also somewhere along this strange countdown - and if you’re further along than me, I could use your advice.

Leave a comment

And if you’re active on YouTube, a quick ‘like’, comment, or share directly on my video would help me so much as I grow my channel!

monday morning tea chat

I’m bringing back my regular live chats over tea, right here on Substack! I’m going to start with 2X monthly for now, on the second and fourth Mondays of the month at 11 AM EST. This is a casual, conversational livestream - I’ll be on-camera and you can chat with me in the comments if you like; no pressure. Just click this link at 11 AM EST tomorrow (Monday), or if you get on your Substack feed at that time you should also see the livestream there. I’m looking forward to chatting with some of you tomorrow!

Thanks for being here, friends. I’ll talk to you again soon.

Warmly,

Meagan

Before we left for our trip, we contacted Tours Accolade, a company that creates custom walking tours of Quebec City based on an individual’s genealogy. The genealogist, Kim, identified over 950 unique ancestors, and once we arrived in Quebec, our guide Xavier led us through a three-hour tour in which he named dozens who had specific ties to the area going back to the early 1600s - and, in the case of one Indigenous ancestor, much earlier - while he pointed out places that would have been meaningful in their everyday lives.

A decent number of the ancestors identified belonged to people whose names appear in historical records. In fact, more than twenty of the forty-seven names that appear on a plaque commemorating the founders of Quebec City are my direct ancestors. We also had forty-two direct ancestors who were part of the filles du roi, some seven hundred women who were sponsored by King Louis XIV to travel across the Atlantic and help populate New France.

But despite these important-sounding designations, these people were mostly not noble. I suppose this isn’t that surprising: people with power and wealth would have been incentivized to stay in Europe; it was the folks with nothing to lose (or close to it) who could be tempted to make the dangerous sea voyage to a wild new land full of dangers.

Instead of royalty, then, it’s not surprising that my Quebec lineage boasts an array of normals - farmers, fur traders, laborers, bakers, artisans, soldiers, sailors and widows - who became notable because they showed up and made their mark in a brand-new place without many people in it.

And the stories - which Xavier pulled from court documents, wills, and other historical records - reflect a gritty reality. There were narratives of bootlegging and drunken brawls, murder, abuse and adultery, and in one case, an ancestor (my nine-times-great-grandfather) who was convicted of sorcery1.

Somehow I was more intrigued by - perhaps even prouder of - these quirky, ordinary folk than I was of the (very few) hints at noble or royal lineage that appeared in the tour. My ancestors - most likely yours too - were largely normal people who lived ordinary and mostly-undocumented lives. Like all humans, their lives were full of drama and mistakes. We are here because of all that drama. We each only exist due to a very specific mix of human messes and mistakes.

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Over several days, as Clara and I followed the westward path that our ancestors took over hundreds of years, I found I began to feel connected to our surroundings in a more embodied way. I became less concerned with finding evidence of names on gravestones and plaques, and more interested in simply absorbing our surroundings.

In Quebec City, where our trip really began, we felt like tourists learning cool stuff about our ancestors; facts that were relevant but also a little distant. But by the time we got to Montreal, I had the uncanny feeling I’d been there before. The streets in the Old Port neighborhood, dominated by nineteenth-century architecture, felt familiar and friendly. Maybe that’s due to all the research I’ve done about Alida and Clara’s lives which included over a decade in Montreal in the late 1800s.

After crossing over the US border yesterday, Clara and I made one more stop: at the home of my Aunt Kay, my mother’s half-sister, who shares our French-Canadian roots via my grandmother. My sister Kathreen and cousin Carolyn were also there, and the five of us, three generations, gathered for the first time since Gramma’s funeral.

As we sat and chatted on the front porch, it occurred to me that we, gathered together in one place, were a living legacy: communally, as the shared descendants of my grandmother, and her mother and father, and their mothers and fathers and so on. But also individually, as descendants of our own unique mixes of genetics and backstory.

And speaking of genetics, it was not lost on me that my mother’s half-sister Joy, whom she never knew and who died before I knew she existed, had just as much shared heredity with my sister and daughter and I as did Aunt Kay, but none of the shared history. Conversely, Aunt Kay’s father and Carolyn’s grandfather John, who raised my mother, is not my genetic relative but he still played a major role in my family. It’s almost certain that many of the names who appear on my list of ancestors are there through adoption or adultery, and are not genetically related to me at all. And yet, those people are part of my story. DNA counts, but it isn’t everything.

It’s estimated that if you go eight or nine generations back, a typical French Canadian pioneer could today have hundreds of thousands of descendants. The further you go back, the most shared connections we all have. In the end, does it really matter which names make up one person’s specific pedigree?

For myself, I’m finding that researching my family history - and history in general - is becoming less about notable names and events of historical significance, and more about gleaning what wisdom I can from the people who found ways to survive.

Locating my own ancestors along different points of the timeline simply gives me a meaningful entry point - a more personal window into, say, the life of a twenty-five-year-old widow scratching out a life for herself and her young daughter in a busy city in the 1800s, or the life of a young orphan in the 1600s who has left everything she knows behind and traveled to another continent, where she must find a husband and learn to tend a homestead in a harsh, wild climate.

I’m still processing so much from this trip, but overall it’s left me with the sense that we are each, individually, rather insignificant - but within the whole, absolutely essential.

Nothing I accomplish in this life is likely to be remembered. Ouch, I know. But it’s true. The majority of our (billions and billions) of ancestors are either completely lost to history, or documented in the most fleeting of ways: a birth certificate here, a census record there; some of it likely wholly inaccurate or at least misspelled2.

But just because a person’s legacy will probably be lost to time does not mean it doesn’t matter.

We are, each and every one of us, here because of a long string of survival stories that go all the way back to the beginning of human life. And along the way, those ancestors were aided by others who lent their care and protection and guidance, if not necessarily their actual DNA. For better and for worse, the world is the way it is because they - individually and collectively, privately and publicly, willingly or resentfully - helped to make it that way.

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We live in a world full of aspiring celebrities, aspiring influencers - and now probably an unprecedented number of aspiring trillionaires. So many of us spend so much of our lives seeking some kind of notability, even if we don’t call it “fame”. We want to be remembered, to leave a mark. We want followers. We want recognition. We want credit. And, sadly for us, we probably won’t get it…at least, not in the way we hope.

But we can’t discount the invisible impact we’re creating all the time anyway. Not only in the children we bear, but also in the care we put into our people and our surroundings, the art we create, the homes we protect, the friends we shelter, the strangers we befriend. The untidy, messy whole of our collected lives is quite literally creating the world that will hold future generations in ways we cannot comprehend.

My concerns matter less than I would like to think they do, but my contribution matters so much more that I will ever fully grasp.

Thank you to Quebec - and its people, my people, past and present - for the reminder.

In my Kin series, I’m exploring the everyday lives of our ancestors and what they might still have to teach us. This series is supported by paying subscribers. If you’re a member of The Kettle, thank you so much for helping to make this work possible.

Clara and I also enjoyed MANY tea experiences in Quebec, which I will be sharing more about soon!

I wrote and recorded this month’s Journal from the middle of a two-week mother-daughter road trip through Quebec. Our goal for this trip was as follows: eat a lot of poutine (Clara), drink a lot of tea (me), learn as much as possible about our family’s French-Canadian ancestry (both of us) and have as much fun as possible doing it.

Fortunately I lucked out with the world’s most delightful teen travel companion. We are really having such a lovely time, friends.

In this month’s Journal episode, I share how I planned the trip and some of the practical details that have made a long journey manageable, from AirBNB logistics to traveling well with a teenager. I share some details about what we’ve done so far, on the first half of our trip (we are exactly in the middle of it now) and what we’ve got planned next.

If you’ve got questions about traveling in Quebec - such as, do you need to be able to speak French? (answer: non, though having a few phrases in your back pocket is helpful) you will definitely want to listen!

I also talk about how I’m approaching the unknowns about the family research I’m conducting on the fly, and leaning into what’s important so I don’t spend the whole time obsessing about whether I find a specific name on a headstone.

As Clara and I visit the places where our ancestors once lived, worked, worshipped, and died - many of them more than four hundred years ago - I’m finding myself much less interested in specific places that are now lost to time, and much more interested in understanding the larger story of legacy and the way an ordinary person’s impact continues long after the details of their personal story have faded.

Come along with me for a very special edition of The Kettle podcast!

Journal episodes come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more, join us today.

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When you’re planning something as big as a 2000-ish-mile road trip to explore a family history that spans four hundred years, it helps to have a few anchors to guide the itinerary. So I’m calling this trip our “Cathedrals, Poutine & Tea Tour” — an exploration of the things Clara and I are each most interested in against a backdrop of family history and ancestral research.

These things may seem unrelated, but actually each anchor element will give us a unique lens through which we can experience the region:

poutine

This quintessential (but fairly recently-invented) Quebec comfort food is a favorite of Clara’s and will be a tasty exploration of how regions create their own unique food cultures.

tea

You might not think of tea as a very French drink, but the layering of British influence on top of Quebec’s early French foundations has led to an interesting and unique tea culture in Quebec, and Montreal in particular has a thriving tea scene with Victorian British undertones (think fancy finger sandwiches on three-tiered platters). There’s also fascinating history around indigenous/boreal herbal infusions that I am not as familiar with, but very intrigued by. I plan to explore all of it in full, delicious detail!

cathedrals

Quebec, and Clara’s and my Canadian ancestors, were primarily French Catholic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there are countless historically-significant buildings we can explore in the region, focusing on cathedrals and parish churches will give us a lot to work with - especially since so many of our own ancestors were married, baptized, and buried in and near churches that still stand today.

our ancestral journey

We leave Sunday, and it will take us a few days to get to Quebec City, after which point we’ll start working our way back West (the same direction generations of our ancestors would have drifted, eventually landing them in Michigan). We’ll be on the road for two weeks, and I’ll be posting longer essays here on Substack, long-form video content on YouTube, and shorter on-the-fly shares on Instagram from the road.

Be sure to subscribe if you want to follow along!

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In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this conversation I had with genealogist last month. Lisa gave me such great advice about planning ancestry travel and how to conduct genealogical research, and I’ve been leaning hard on her wisdom as I’ve been planning our trip.

I’ve also written quite a lot about my family’s French-Canadian ancestry in my Kin series if you’re interested in diving further into our backstory and what it all means to me.

That’s all for now, friends, but I can’t wait to take you along with Clara and I on our trip. More from us very soon!

Warmly,

Meagan

Instead, I shared a story about my ducklings learning to quack with no fewer than five people, and left by 9 PM.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed myself thoroughly while I was there, and packed plenty of laughs into a shorter period of time. It’s just that finally, on the cusp of forty-nine, I’ve learned to call it a night before the night has exhausted all it has to offer, instead of semi-desperately trying to drink its dregs long after everyone else has gone to bed.

I no longer feel the need to be always searching for something “out there” to entertain, amuse, or sustain me, because I’ve realized that there is plenty “in here” (at my home, or even inside my own mind) to keep me company.

I just need less, in general.

“I get it,” another friend (who was at the party) said to me recently when I remarked that I hadn’t been out much lately. “You’re in your tea and chickens era.”

My tea and chickens era, mmmm? I liked the sound of that.

In truth, this “era” is not all that different from my natural state as a little girl, when I was dreamy, bookish, shy, and spent hours daydreaming about what it would be like if I could get pigeons to land all over me like the old lady in Mary Poppins.

At some point the world crowded in, as it does, loud and demanding and never really satisfied with what I had to offer. I responded by trying to become faster, louder, shinier, funnier. Trying to appear more certain and take up more space.

Riding the wave of that energy was buzzy and fun while it lasted, but I’m glad to be on the other side of it now. My midlife energy feels less like reinvention and more like a return to a dormant version of myself - a version who, it turns out, requires a lot less frantic activity to maintain. What a relief.

I shared more about this midlife “return” to my girlhood self in my latest YouTube video. I’m trying to get these videos to get seen by more people, so a comment, heart, or “subscribe” over at my YouTube would be so helpful! If you feel like leaving a comment, I’d especially like to know: what era are you in?

weigh in on YouTube!

And speaking of tea: if you’re a member of the Kettle Community, we’re having a (very relaxed!) little afternoon tea this coming Sunday, May 17 at 4 PM EST to celebrate my recent graduation from the Tea Sommelier program! It’ll be on Zoom, and you’ll find the link at the bottom of the May Journal under “upcoming live chats.” I hope to see you there!

video links

• Grab Laura’s new book

• Laura’s book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

• Laura’s novella, Juliet’s School of Possibilities

• The Frugal Girl

• Midlife Lady Leisure Pursuits episode about big ideas

• My book The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read: How We Let Our Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next came out a year ago today! My last chapter was entirely about time - how we spend it, and how we perceive it, especially as our kids create independent lives and we move into the next steps of ours. (p.s. - I usually use Bookshop links, but for some reason my book is super cheap on Amazon right now - so if you are wanting to buy a couple of copies as gifts, this is a great time.)

Because even though we all, in the throes of early motherhood, knew in our hearts that “it goes so fast” and “babies don’t keep”, we were also caught up in the forward thrust of Real Life happening all around us. Our own ambitions, whether they be career-focused or personal, mattered to us; our families’ needs for food, shelter, clothing, and a reasonably functional and clean home might take precedence over rocking said baby. There was no fairy mothering godmother to tell us exactly how to slow down, let things go, prioritize; we made decisions in the moment and probably we could sometimes have made better ones. - The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read: How We Let Our Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next

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Eric and I met at the end of February 2020 and married in May of 2023, when the kids and I moved into the house he’d built a decade before.

In the three years we’d been dating, I’d spent lots of time in this house and on this property. But there is a difference between being a comfortable guest and living somewhere. It’s taken me all of three years to finally start feeling like this house is really mine. I’ve had to give my attention to its hidden corners and approach its quirks with curiosity to claim it as my own.

This spring, I realized that it’s now time for me to make friends with the outdoor spaces, too: the woods and pond and all of the living things that inhabit them.

How do you make friends with outdoor spaces? I recently read The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery and this line walloped me. I must have read it seven times.

”The woods are so human,” wrote John Foster, “that to know them one must live with them. An occasional saunter through them, keeping to the well-trodden paths, will never admit us to their intimacy. If we wish to be friends we must seek them out and win them by frequent, reverent visits at all hours; by morning, by noon, and by night; and at all seasons, in spring, in summer, in autumn, in winter.’

When I read that passage, it occurred to me: I haven’t made friends with our property. I have mostly kept to a small radius around the door; trudging a path from garage to car, home to chicken coop and back. When I’ve strolled our acres of woods I’ve walked with a quick, almost nervous stride, like an intruder afraid of being caught.

In this Journal episode I’m diving into some ways I’m trying to become more friendly with our outdoor surroundings. From being a more attentive neighbor to getting around on foot to beautifying some small corner of your space, I hope you’ll be able to put some of these ideas into play this spring and summer - whether you have a postage-sized lot or, like me, are trying to get accustomed to living on a much-larger property than you’re used to,

You’ll also find book and tea recommendations, morel mushroom recipes, and, of course, some duckling videos - all below the jump.

Our seasonal monthly journals come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more, join us today.

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I’ve lived in a few big cities and a handful of medium-sized cities and enjoyed the energy and access to amenities. I’ve lived in the heart of several small towns and enjoyed the walkability and simplicity of life within easy reach of everything you need, (if not necessarily everything you want.) And now I live on acreage about a mile from the downtown, and enjoy a 24-7 nature program out my bedroom window—which includes the drama around my own chicken coop.

The problem with trying to zero in on an “ideal”, though, is that there are always tradeoffs for a nostalgic girl like me who harbors certain fantasies about rural life, but who also loves sidewalks and public libraries and bustling street scenes.

Settle in a city, or even a small town, and zoning laws will probably make it difficult to raise poultry for eggs or bees for honey. In some neighborhoods, you may not even be allowed to convert lawn space into a garden. Move to the country, though, and you’re isolated from both neighbors and the necessities of life.

The truth is, I’ve never really wanted to choose. I want to be able to produce many of the necessities of life in my home, and also to walk (not drive!!!) to procure the rest. I want sidewalks and public amenities and sidewalks with signs of life, but also a restful little haven in my own backyard.

The ideal life, I finally decided, would be to live in a house on the edge of a village. A big enough property for a flock of chickens and maybe a couple of goats, a nice big garden, and clothes hanging on the line. But close enough to the town center to be able to walk to the grocery store and bank and post office and library.

While fantasizing about this magical house on the edge of the mythical village it’s easy to get lost in rose-colored romanticism of the past. I know that my ancestors’ lives were incredibly difficult at times. But in studying their lives, I’ve also realized how many different ways their homesteads were set up to be more connected. More…human, if you will.

My great-great-great-great grandparents, for example, operating a farm in rural Quebec, would have lived within sight of neighbors because early Quebec farms along the St. Lawrence River were intentionally laid out in long, narrow plots called rangs, each with road or river frontage.

Since houses were built close to the road, villagers would have seen each other traveling to the market, visiting other homes, heading to the parish church, or otherwise going about their business. Local interdependence meant that most people lived near, contributed to, and benefitted from a population center of some sort, even if it was only a few dozen people.

Later, when my great-great-great grandmother Alida emigrated to the United States, living the rest of her life (and raising a lot of children!) in the lumber-town village of Pequaming, Michigan, life would have looked different from her farm upbringing.

Homes would have been much closer together, with modest lots instead of large stretches of farmland. But in those days, even people who didn’t have a lot of property would have kept a kitchen garden, chickens, and perhaps even a pig or a cow. This wasn’t out of romantic ideas about homesteading, but simply survival: the company town wouldn’t necessarily have had fresh produce, meat, or eggs, and they were a long way from a larger population center.

Alida’s second husband was listed in the census as a teamster, which likely meant the family lived near the horse stables, a little ways away from the more densely populated area of the town. So walking back into town - to visit the market, pick up bread baked in a central oven, attend school, civic meetings, or church services, and socialize - would just have been part of their family’s routine.

In those days, home was also often the site of commerce; if you ran a small business or “took in work” as a seamstress or cobbler it would have been normal for customers to stop by your house during the day to pick up the shirt you’d stitched or shoes you’d mended. Social ties, food, commerce, family, and domestic life were tied together in a way that would be difficult to replicate today, no matter where our home is located.

Towns have changed, and so has the way we spend our time. I’m only about a mile from my village’s town center, but almost all the essential services (supermarket, library, post office, school, drugstore) moved out of that block long ago and are now grouped in the business district an additional 2+ miles away.

It’s hard to imagine where most of us would find the time for an hour’s walk to pick up milk and bread. But it’s not really just about walkability, is it? Or chickens, either, though I love mine dearly. I think when I’m romanticizing old-fashioned villages - and what it would have been like to live on the edge thereof - what I’m really longing for is a sense of connection and belonging. Connection between my activities and the results they produce; between the land I live on and the life I care for; between my day-to-day routine and the other people in my proximity; between my feet and the ground.

Today, I live on a beautiful property, with space for chickens and ducks and trees and a pond, and I’m not terribly far from town - the best of both worlds in a lot of ways.

I think, in fact, that finally having landed here has made me realize that while I’ve been waiting for the “perfect” surroundings or circumstances to help me human-ize my life, that perfection doesn’t actually exist. It’s up to me to make it happen, no matter where I’m starting from.

I can envy Alida’s interconnected, nature-forward, walking-heavy lifestyle, but my guess is there were plenty of times when the roads were muddy, or an ankle was sprained, or shoes weren’t fitting right, that she wished she could get around some faster, easier way. Just like there must have been times that having so many neighbors or family members in her personal space felt crowded and invasive. Times she wished she could simply relax instead of having to move onto the next homemaking task on her plate. Perhaps at times she longed to live a different way, in a more ideal setting.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as situational purity now, just like there wasn’t then. And there’s always something we can do, no matter the circumstance we’re in, to feel more…human. I could have had a bigger garden and a more walking-oriented life when I lived inside the city limits if I’d prioritized those things and been willing to sacrifice convenience and other forms of leisure. I could probably have even had chickens if I’d been willing to rally others and fight for them at city hall. Certainly I could have been at a better, more engaged neighbor at every point of my life.

My current circumstances are as close to my ideal as they are likely to ever get. Working inside of reality, instead of wishing for an ideal is up to me. There is so much about our modern lives that our ancestors would have killed for - and in fact, they regularly risked death to make (gestures) all of this a reality for us.

Is it possible that gratitude for the gift of modern convenience and a wistful longing for a more old-fashioned way of life can co-exist peacefully inside my nostalgic soul?

There’s no going back in time, but there’s a lot I can do right now to cultivate a more human way of living within my actual, modern life, without trying to recreate some mythical village of yesteryear. And what that looks like for me goes back to that feeling of connection and belonging.

I don’t just want to peek out at a nice piece of property before bed as my reward for making it through another long, busy day; I want to feel like it belongs to me and I belong to it. I don’t want to just drive from place to place to place as quickly as possible so I can check the task off the list; I want to feel like getting there was an experience.

I want to live inside my life, and I want my life to speak through me.

As for my “ideal” setting, I guess I’m sort of past worrying so much about that. Despite our most lovingly-held dreams, sometimes we just land where we land, and it’s up to us to make the best of it, not wish it away.

For now, I’ve landed in a lovely house on the edge of a village. It’s a little further away from a town center than I’d dreamed. It’s a little closer to a loud highway than I’d dreamed.

Still, it’s the canvas for the life I’m creating now.

Isn’t it a dream?

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In my Kin series, I’m exploring the everyday lives of our ancestors and what they might still have to teach us. This series is supported by paying subscribers. If you’re a member of The Kettle, thank you so much for helping to make this work possible!

In today’s world, we have a curious definition of “comfort.”

Whereas the word might have once been used as a verb, like something you might provide a suffering friend, it’s often now used in economic terms. Someone who is financially stable is said to be "comfortable”. The trappings of affluence we surround ourselves with denote “comfort.”

But as I’ve been thinking and writing about the everyday lives of my ancestors, I’ve been wondering - what might comfort have meant to someone living in humble circumstances 150 years ago?

My great-great-great grandmother Alida grew up as the youngest of at least twelve children on a farm in Quebec, later lived as a young widow with her daughter (my great-great grandmother) Clara in working-class urban lodgings in Montreal, and finished out her life in a lumber mill town in rural northern Michigan. She was an adventurous woman who took incredible risks to seek a better life.

At no point in Alida’s life was she likely to have been “comfortable” in the way we now use the word to mean “economically stable.” But she almost certainly worked to incorporate moments of comfort into her life, and appreciated those moments for the comfort they gave.

for our ancestors, comfort might have looked like:

• Relief from work. Alida would have spent much of her time doing hard physical labor. A brief break at the end of the day, or a Sabbath spent at church services or quietly reading and resting would have felt incredibly luxurious (and that’s even considering that she probably still would have had to do basic housework, even on Sabbath. No “bed rot” days for a working-class 1800s wife.)

• Warmth. In Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, before central heating, Alida and her family would have spent much of their time trying to stay warm. How comfortable must it have felt to cuddle up in a warm bed with a hot brick at your feet after a long winter’s day? How luxurious would that first 50-degree, sunny day have seemed in the spring?

• Time and space for personal grooming. It’s unlikely Alida had running water inside her home at any point in her life. Privacy would have been at a premium. A tub or wash basin full of (hopefully warmed!) water and a cloth would have been a welcomed way to wash away the dirt of the day. Certainly feeling cleaner would have felt like a comfort.

• A full stomach. The feeling of being satiated must have felt like incredible comfort for people who knew better than to take that feeling for granted.

• Small luxuries. What decorative items might have graced a mantel or sideboard in Alida’s home? Did she treasure a lace-trimmed petticoat, a pretty cup and saucer, a small collection of books, or flower-scented soaps? Did her budget allow for white sugar and flour, coffee, hot chocolate, or tea? Did her workload allow her the time to sit down and enjoy a moment of respite? All would have been considered luxuries: treasured, appreciated, and carefully guarded.

Whatever Alida’s comforts were, they were likely humble and limited in number. Her conveniences, even fewer, and still hopelessly inconvenient when compared to our modern “easy-button” lives.

Am I happier than Alida was, with all of my modern conveniences and comforts? Or was she happier than me, because she was able to better appreciate small luxuries I can barely even begin to notice?

It’s impossible for me to say for sure, but I do know one thing for sure: one road to greater contentment for any of us is to learn to be comfortable.

We can’t control the price of groceries or rent or homes. But there is one key thing we can control, and that is: once our basic needs are met, what do we need to feel we have a good life?

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In fact, you might even argue that the first line of defense against a rotten economy and an uncertain future should be dealing with our own personal comfort-seeking tendencies. Rethinking what we need for comfort and the role of convenience in our lives is not only a fantastic way to reserve cash for necessities if things really tank, but it also means that if we find ourselves in really hard times, we’ll be able to adapt and find the joy in whatever life has to offer.

what is comfort, anyway?

Sometimes I think back to the house I grew up in. My mom and siblings and I watched our tiny 13” TV from a two-decades-dated floral sofa left over from my parents’ early married life. Our floors in the 1890 house were hardwood, during a time when wall-to-wall carpeting was all the rage, with a big, old-fashioned braided rug, and our fireplace took wood, not gas like my friends in more modern homes.

We had no cell phones, no computers, no “smart” anything. By today’s standards, our lifestyle would seem humble and not at all “comfortable”, and yet compared to my great-great-great-grandmother’s home in 1880, it would have felt like a science-fiction level of luxury. So were we comfortable, or not? Am I more comfortable now than I was then? Looking back, it doesn’t really seem like it.

But when we think about “comfort” today, I think we often mean something different today than our ancestors might have—and even something different than we ourselves meant two or three decades ago.

Perhaps instead of trying to escape or relieve physical discomfort, these days we are trying to relieve (or distract ourselves from) mental or emotional discomfort, disconnection, disassociation through consumption, consumerism, convenience.

But the problem is that, unlike food or blankets, there will never be enough of whatever is out there to solve what’s in here. That’s on us to figure out.

Can we learn to appreciate small things, become more enamored with creating than consuming? Can we give ourselves a breather from distraction and production for long enough to see where real comfort lies?

Can we re-imagine, in small, humble ways, what it means to be “comfortable”?

The news is scary on a lot of levels right now, my friends. But more and more, it seems to me that learning how to be comfortable (how to be comforted?) is the biggest power move we can make.

And I’m here to learn from whatever our ancestors can teach.

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The Kin series is supported by paying subscribers. If you’re a member of The Kettle, thank you so much for helping to make this work possible!

I’m hosting a conversation about Ancestry Travel with Lisa Elvin-Staltari, right here on Substack, this weekend: Sunday, April 19 at 5:30 EST, for paying subscribers only! Upgrade now to join in.

I’m writing this on Holy Saturday, the day that, in the Christian faith, represents the pause between Christ’s death and resurrection. Whether or not you embrace the Easter story as wholly true, doubt its veracity but appreciate its symbolism, or find yourself skeptical about the whole thing (I’ve found myself doing all three, sometimes in the same five-minute period, so wherever you are, I see you) there is no doubt that we can all relate to the feeling of waiting for a fresh start.

I think what we all long for - always, but maybe especially this time of year - is the idea that we can begin anew; that this crumbling world and we, its corrupted people, aren’t too far gone to find our way. And perhaps learning to sit in the “in between” with hopeful anticipation and even a measure of active participation, instead of just passively dreading what’s to come, is our most important life’s work.

In our Journal episode + newsletter for April, I’m leaning into the quietly watchful energy of Easter weekend. After a hectic start to my year, March brought me some much-needed calm. But how can I lean into a slower season without either trying to solve things that are too far in the future to worry about yet (see: borrowing trouble), or getting stuck in the quieter energy of the moment and letting inertia take over?

At 48, I’m still learning to ride the wave gracefully from peak to trough and back again. In this episode I talk a lot about what that effort looks like right now, from planning an herbal tea garden without over-committing, to making progress on my novel without worrying about what might happen once the draft is done.

I also share a peek at life on our property this time of year, from our plan to add ducklings into the mix and what the bird life (both wild and domesticated) is looking like around here right now. I also talk about the appetizer-only Easter spread I’m planning now that there’s just one child left at home, and I share a couple of upcoming events for members of The Kettle, like a live chat about planning ancestral travel with genealogist Lisa Elvin-Staltari coming up April 19.

All this plus photos + links below the jump.

Happy Easter and welcome to April, friends!

Journal episodes come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more, join us today.

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This happens twice a year, when the time “springs forward” in March and “falls back” in November. Yes, my watch is supposed to automatically sync with my phone and reset itself, but for whatever reason, it never seems to work as promised.

This wouldn’t be a big deal except that, so far as I can see, there is no way to manually reset the watch. I have read many suggestions online of ways to do this, but they all led me to a dead end. Either the functionality doesn’t actually exist, or I can only access it from the app - which won’t work since it won’t sync to my watch.

So twice a year I go through this same dog and pony show: I turn my Bluetooth on and off, I “forget” and re-pair the watch, I restart my phone, I update the app, I delete and re-install the app; I ride an endless merry-go-round of technical busywork (my least favorite kind) that lasts until it either works or I give up and mentally adjust an hour forward or backward every time I look at my watch.

That’s where I’ve been for the past few weeks, until last night when it randomly synced and started telling the correct time again. (Why? Who knows!)

To be fair, it was kind of dumb of me to buy a smartwatch to begin with. As someone who has almost all push notifications turned off and has not heard the sound of my own phone ringing for close to a decade, I was never tempted by the always-available promise of an Apple Watch. It was Garmin folks who got to me, via a completely different promise: that somehow a piece of tech could transform me into an athlete.

For a month or so after purchasing my “Lily 2”, I tried every available feature to optimize my “performance.” Then slowly, piece by piece, I shut down my watch’s functionality. Notifications setting my wrist abuzz drove me batty, so I disabled all connection between my email, phone, and text messages. I tracked my sleep for a week but the results were never surprising and I don’t like sleeping in a watch, so I abandoned that too. My VO2 Max was killing my battery life, and anyway I still don’t really know what VO2 Max is, so I turned it off.

As it turns out, my extremely predictable daily wellness walks don’t benefit much from heart rate tracking or GPS mapping, either.

As I disabled one feature and ignored the next, my watch slowly morphed from a piece of ostensibly wellness-enhancing, life-maximizing wearable smart technology into an expensive pedometer that, twice a year, can’t figure out how to do its job.

the trickery of tricked-out tech

More than a decade ago, on the edge of the “smart everything’ craze, I took part in a focus group made up of everyone’s favorite consumer: moms. We were tasked with giving our opinion on a “groundbreaking” new refrigerator concept that was being developed by a major appliance brand.

Using a special scale built into the refrigerator’s shelving, we were told, the fridge would detect when the food that was meant to go in that specific spot was running low. Sensing that you were low on, say, milk, the fridge would then send a text to remind you to grab some on the way home from work.

The marketing agency that organized the focus group seemed so excited about the way this technology would revolutionize a busy mom’s life, but all I could think was, “Whose kids put the milk back in the same spot every time?” and “But aren’t we looking in the fridge pretty much every day already?” and also “Are we really this busy - and if so, isn’t that the problem to solve?”

I thought to the last fridge I had purchased only a year before. I didn’t care about bells and whistles then either—I really just wanted a fridge that did the barest minimum job, keeping food cold for my family which then included five young kids. But it was surprisingly hard even then to find an appliance without “innovative” “features”.

And inevitably those “features” also seemed to be the parts that functioned the most poorly. The face on the second, smaller snack drawer - perfect, the website claimed, for juice boxes and squeezable yogurt pouches and cheese sticks - constantly popped off when the drawer was jerked by hungry little hands. The shelves, which promised to be “easy clean”, frequently came off the tracks. The water dispenser was awkwardly placed and shot water at a strange angle, often missing the glass entirely and hitting me in the chest.

How about a fridge that just…works? I thought, while filling out my survey.

When the kids and I moved into a rental after getting divorced, our tiny kitchen sported a stalwart and decidedly not-fancy old fridge that had been keeping food cold for probably twenty-five years without fuss. I initially missed “features.” A snack drawer, a built-in water dispenser, even an ice machine: our trusty fridge had none of these. But what it did was work, and that was both a pleasure and a relief.

I have no idea if the 2015 version of a “smart” fridge was ever made, but I did see an ad recently for an AI-powered refrigerator that can monitor your fridge’s contents and let you know if something is running out. (Gee, I wonder what Big Appliance Company will do with the information gleaned by spying on the contents of your fridge…)

This feature may seem convenient if you want to stop off at the grocery store on the way home from work, but it also means one more app you’ll need to maintain space on your phone, and room in your brain, to operate. And if that app stops functioning, you’ll have to spend even more time re-installing or re-syncing or reconnecting or rebooting, something I personally want to do less and less as time goes on.

Tools and tech that promise to reduce labor rarely actually eliminate it. They just shift it somewhere else. The time you don’t spend peeking in the fridge and jotting down a list before you leave for work in the morning, gets transferred to time spent checking in with an app on your phone later in the day. In other words, the time we used to spend doing things is now being shifted to robot admin. And all the while we become rusty, less habituated to remembering how to manage our own possessions.

No, thanks.

Some people genuinely love their smartwatches, their detergent-dispensing washing machines, their AI-powered refrigerators. But I bristle at the modern assumption that we all want “features”. I resist the idea that we’re all happy to pay handsomely for untested or even intrusive bells and whistles while basic functionality falls by the wayside.

Why aren’t simplicity, durability, or ease in repairing celebrated as “innovative features” in today’s marketplace?

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At some point, I will buy another watch. Something inexpensive and basic that does the two simple things I actually want it to do, consistently. That doesn’t, for goodness sakes, require yet another app.

But for now, keeping this dumb old smartwatch on my wrist feels like a useful reminder that sometimes, the very technology that promises to make my life so much easier actually just adds a lot of silly, frustrating busywork, making me ever more dependent on a complicated web of “features” that rarely add actual value to my life.

And next time we’re in the market for a “new” fridge or washing machine, I may just buy the oldest, plainest one I can find.

more on tools, tech, and the labor to maintain it

Years ago, I read More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and it completely changed my outlook on whether or not “household tech” actually makes the job of running a home easier on the person responsible for most of the work. I’m not planning on giving up basic appliances any time soon, but there is a lot of food for thought in this book about the way “labor-saving devices” led to higher standards of cleanliness, more household objects to maintain, more isolation and less rest.

Could this new wave of “smart” tech be creating a similar dynamic, shifting us toward untenable - if mostly invisible - levels of administrative burden, consumption, and energy use while promising to make our lives easier? I think you know where I stand!

have you seen my latest series, Kin?

I've been doing a deep-dive into my great-great-great grandmother’s life to glean lessons about how to live well today. If you love tradition, genealogy, food, or just stories of resourceful people surviving in tough circumstances, you may enjoy these essays:

hey hey hey, I’m a tea sommelier!

Thank you to everyone who has followed along with my journey to becoming a Certified Tea Sommelier. After nearly a year of study and completing eleven courses I finished up the program last week, and took my final exam on Thursday - which I passed! More soon as I develop this side of my plans to make tea education a larger part of this Substack. In the meanwhile, if you have tea-related questions, I’m all ears! Hit “reply” to this email or leave me a comment below and let’s chat.

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Do you have any family recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation - and if so, do you have any idea where they originated or how they’ve changed?

These days, when so much of the food we eat comes from supermarket chains that carry the same foods everywhere, the idea that there is such a thing as a foodway - a fancy anthropological way of referring to the way foods are sourced, prepared, and eaten in specific times and places—can almost seem outdated. But 150+ years ago, the place a person lived - possibly down to the neighborhood - and what decade they were living in would have made a big difference in what and how they ate.

I wanted to explore a single dish that would likely have been a staple in my French-Canadian ancestor Alida’s home, and ask: how would she have sourced, prepared, and eaten that specific dish throughout her life?

hello, habitant soup

When I researched the most traditional Québécois foods, one came up again and again: yellow pea soup, also known as “habitant soup.”

Along the St. Lawrence River, yellow peas were a staple crop and dried peas could be easily stored year-round. They were a cheap, accessible source of calories.

Yellow pea soup is still considered a traditional Quebecois dish, would have been a very common meal for French Canadians, including Alida. Let’s explore how she may have experienced this simple dish differently throughout her life.

Alida’s rural Quebec farm years (1850s–1860s)

Alida grew up on a farm in the small village of Gentilly inside the city of Bécancour, Quebec on the south side of the St. Lawrence River, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.

Alida’s childhood version of habitant soup would have been made with yellow peas (fresh when available, dried the rest of the year), salted pork or ham hock, onion, carrot, turnip if available, herbs like summer savory1—a traditional staple in Quebec cuisine —and water2.

It probably would have been simmered throughout the day in large batches in an iron pot over a wood stove or hearth. Stoves were becoming more widely available by the mid-1800s, but since the St. Cyr family had been farming for generations, I imagine they lived in an older house with a hearth.

The soup would likely would have been thick and rustic, served with a hunk of pain d’habitant, a traditional, rustic Quebecois white bread baked in pans. And since in those days Quebec farms would have been as much about subsistence as profit, it’s likely most of the ingredients were produced right there on the farm.

I wonder how young Alida and her siblings felt about “habitant soup”. Did they love it? Did they get tired of it? And what job would little Alida, the youngest of ten, have been given to help bring this meal to the table?

Upper Peninsula mining town, company housing - late 1860s

As a young girl, Alida moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And as a teenage bride, she and her new husband lived with her sister Eleonore’s family in the copper mining town of Hancock.

They likely lived in simple company housing or a boardinghouse, cooking in a shared kitchen or on a small stove. Pea soup still would have been a staple meal: it was cheap, filling, and most of the traditional ingredients (or reasonable substitutes) could be obtained at the company store. The soup might have been thinner and simpler, and was likely stretched as far as possible to feed larger numbers of people.

In the 1870 census, Alida is reported as working on a farm. I wonder if she was able to bring home fresh vegetables for her meals?

1870s to early 1880s - working-class urban Montreal

I’m not sure why Alida and Francis wound up back in Canada after their brief stint in Michigan, but they were definitely there by 1871.

When Francis died in early 1881, it left Alida a 25-year-old widow with a 10-year-old daughter. I think of this Alida’s (and Clara’s) “urban frugal” era. The duo lived right next door to Alida’s sister Philomene’s family, including her 11-year-old son Hormisdas - a built-in playmate for Clara? - in Montreal’s Saint-James Ward, a dense immigrant neighborhood.

Their apartment would probably have been cramped, with a small kitchen, and very likely pea soup was in a common rotation—though it may have contained no meat at all if money was really tight.

The 1881 census reported that Alida allent a boutique (goes to shop) for work. Since her brother-in-law was a cordonnier (shoemaker) it’s very possible she worked in his shop, and/or took in sewing work for him.

Expanding out a bit to the neighbors three or four doors down, we see a diverse mix of trades, from journalier (day laborer) to pharmacien (apothecary worker) to forgeron (blacksmith) to cigarier (cigar maker).

In these kind of artisan neighborhoods, it was common for families to live in apartments above the stores. And given that not one but two boulangers are listed within a couple of dwelling numbers of Alida and Clara, it’s very possible she lived literally right above, or next door to, a bakery.

This would have been a busy, bustling neighborhood, and a lifestyle in which time and space were both at a premium. With a small stove, expensive fuel to run it, and limited space and time, life just wasn’t set up for a homemaker to bake her own bread - instead, she’d likely walk down the street (or perhaps just downstairs!) to the boulangerie, where large ovens made it possible to buy warm, fresh-baked loaves.

In urban Montreal it’s unlikely that Alida grew her own savory and other herbs. Instead, she probably purchased them at a public market, like Bonsecours Market, or perhaps at a small grocer or dry-goods store in her neighborhood.

I wonder what this period of life was like for young Clara. Did she love the bustle and noise of the city? Did she enjoy living so close to her cousin, aunt, and uncle? Or would she prefer the rural life she eventually found?

Michigan lumber town (Pequaming/L’anse, 1880s-early 1900s)

A couple of years after being widowed, Alida, now with a teenaged Clara in tow, returned to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula —likely drawn there by her older sister Eleonore, who was now a fixture in her little village of L’anse, a lumber boom town in Baraga County on Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Bay.

Articles mentioning Eleonore (“Leonora”) and her husband Ovid refer to them as some of the earliest settlers to the area, so this might have seemed to Alida like a stable and secure place to get back on her feet.

While the 1890 Baraga County census was unfortunately lost in a fire, I was able to find Alida’s marriage record to her second husband, Frank Dault, in 1885. The two were married in Pequaming3, a waterfront sawmill village in L’anse Township.

The 1900 census shows that by 1886 Clara had a younger half-brother, with several more children to follow (by the 1900 census, Alida has seven children living at home in addition to Clara, who had moved out by this point.)

Frank, a teamster for the mill, would have worked long, hard days, and Alida had seven children to feed. Timber was abundant and cheap, so most likely a wood stove made up the center of the kitchen.

In a town like Pequaming, modest houses with a couple of bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen would have been common. And everything belonged to the company: the housing, the yards, and the goods Alida and her family were able to buy.

The company store would have provided the basics of this dish: dried peas, shipped in bulk, and salt pork or ham, priced higher (possibly a lot higher) than what Alida would have been used to paying in Montreal.

Alida may have had a small kitchen garden for onions, potatoes, carrots, and herbs. Growing up on a farm and later working on one, she would have known how to grow things - but whether she would have had the time and inclination is another question! It’s unlikely there was a bakery in such a small village, so Alida may have made her own bread - or just as likely rolls, biscuits, or fry bread - to accompany the meals.

what inspired the move?

Obviously something inspired Alida to move from the relative security of Montreal, where she was poor but surrounded by family and parish life, to the frontier of Michigan. She had lived there before, so on some level, she knew what she was getting into, but after ten years in Montreal it couldn’t have been an easy adjustment.

Perhaps Alida and her sister Philomene had a falling out; perhaps she preferred country to city life; perhaps her other sister Eleonore simply made her a more appealing offer. The steady, competitive wages Alida’s brother-in-law, and eventually her second husband, were able to command must have felt like a big step up from the urban poverty she’d left, despite the tradeoffs.

And certainly the beauty of the Keweenaw Bay must have had something to do with it.

As I study more and more about this time period, the trajectory from strapped yet self-sustaining, to technically wealthier yet more dependent, seems common. In rural Quebec, Alida’s family would have grown most of what they ate on their own farm. In Montreal, Alida and Clara lived in a tight-knit working community that would have served most of their needs, with the money flowing back into a hyper-local economy. In Pequaming, everything cost a little (or a lot!) more, and that money went right back into the company’s coffers.

This same pattern was happening all over North America, and it drastically reshaped families, communities, and the way work, life, and home intersect.

It also reshaped the way we eat—forever.

Who knew there could be so much history in a humble bowl of pea soup?

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There’s so much more to uncover in our family stories, and I can’t wait to keep going! In my Kin series, I’m exploring the everyday lives of our ancestors and what they might still have to teach us. I intend to keep this series free for everyone, but this is exactly the kind of work paying subscribers help support, so if you’re a member, thank you so much for helping to make this work possible.

When I was a kid, our family became the owners of a typed copy of my paternal family tree, dating back to the 1700s. I was interested, but in a vague sort of way. Long lists of names and locations didn’t mean a whole lot to me then, especially since I’d never been to most of those places and had no real sense for how those people had lived.

There were family rumors that we were related somehow to John Hancock, a detail that I’ve never been able to find evidence to support—and that anyhow didn’t interest me much. In the history textbooks that bored me in school, “great” men were a dime a dozen: who cared if I was distantly related to one of them?

When I first started poking into my lineage myself as a young adult, now using modern tools like Ancestry.com, I found myself alternately fascinated and frustrated. Sure, those tools - even in the early 2000s - were powerful and fast compared to the painstaking research my elder relatives had done to piece everything together by hand.

But scanning those lists of dates and names still felt pretty similar to the history textbooks that bored me as a kid. My interest was piqued, but my imagination never really engaged.

It wasn’t until more recently, when I zeroed in on a specific relative, that the story began to take shape. And since then, I’ve been pretty much obsessed.

This is Alida Peltier, my great-grandmother, born Alida Brunette in 1902, in Houghton County, MI. Alida didn’t live to be much older than she appears in this photo; she died of tuberculosis in 1927 as a young mother, when my grandma, Katheryn, and her older sister Evelyn were just one and three years old.

Digging into Alida’s story, I discovered that five of her siblings also died young - a toddler, from enterocolitis, and four other siblings from tuberculosis.

That meant that Alida’s mother Clara1 lost more than half of her eleven children by the time they were in their early twenties. Knowing that lit something up inside me. My God, losing six children? How did she survive it? Just who was this woman?

Digging in more deeply to Clara’s story brought me to another Alida; her mother: my great-great-great grandmother, Alida St. Cyr, born in Quebec to a large French-Canadian family. And researching her life blew the door wide open on a whole, huge branch of my family tree that I’d previously kind of ignored.

Since both my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were from Quebec families, my French-Canadian roots run deep. It turns out I am descended from at least ten, but almost certainly more, filles du roi—a relatively small number of French women who were sent to help settle the barely-developed New France (Canada) in the mid-1600s by King Louis XIV. (For more of a deep dive into the filles du roi, I highly recommend this YouTube series by genealogist Lisa Elvin-Staltari!)

The women and their descendants produced large families for generations, and today most Canadians and many Americans can trace their lineage back to at least one fille du roi. Following the numerous trees available online, it seems I’m likely distantly related to Justins Trudeau and Bieber, as well as Celine Dion and Taylor Swift.

But that kind of Ancestry.com-fueled body count is exactly the kind of data dump that tends to make me feel overwhelmed and disconnected. Instead, I find that it helps me to focus in on just one ancestor at a time.

So today, let’s talk about Alida St. Cyr.

Born in 1855, Alida grew up on a farm in Gentilly, just outside of Trois-Rivières, Quebec (about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.) From the research I’ve done, it seems both of Alida’s parents’ families farmed in the area for generations.

But the family farms were beginning to fray. Early French-Canadians had been encouraged to have many children (the whole point of the fille du roi campaign) and they were very, very good at it…so good, in fact, that population pressure made it difficult for family farms to support all those adult children.

As was happening across the globe during this industrial boom, factory work in cities like Montreal and Michigan’s booming mining and lumber economies increasingly pulled young men away from those family farms. And with the newly-built locks at Sault Ste. Marie making it dramatically easier to ship from eastern ports to Lake Superior, a new world had opened up for young Canadians looking for opportunity.

That opportunity is, I imagine, what led Alida’s family to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the 1860s. In 1868, at the age of 13, Alida married my great-great-great grandfather, Montreal-born Francis Dubé, 22, in the copper mining town of Hancock. The marriage was witnessed by her father, Louis Moise St-Cyr, who then made the 15-ish day journey back to his farm in rural Quebec in time for the next census.

How long her father was in Michigan, when Alida traveled there initially, and why great-great-great-great-grandpa Moise and g-g-g-g-grandma Appolline permitted their teenage daughter to marry a man nearly a decade older in a foreign country are details that are likely lost to time, but I do know this: Moise and Appolline were in their forties when Alida, the youngest of at least ten children, was born.

Maybe they were just…worn out.

a time of incredible change

In June 1870, Alida and “Frank” turned up on the Michigan census, living with Eleonore, her older sister, and her family in Hancock Township. Frank is listed as working on the dock, while Alida was recorded as working on a farm. By this point, she would either have been pregnant with her oldest, Cyrille, or he would have been a babe-in-arms.

Cyrille was followed by the birth of my Clara in July of 1871, and her younger siblings Joseph Albert and Marie Eugenie in 1873 and 1874. Sadly, toddler Cyrille’s death record places Alida and Francois back in Montreal in the working-class Saint James Ward, where Francis eventually found work as a cordonnier, or shoemaker. Little Joseph lived only a year, and while I can’t find any more records on Marie - the last of the Montreal babies I’ve located so far - she doesn’t appear to have lived long enough to make it to the next census.

By 1881 Alida, now widowed, and Clara, ten years old, were living in Montreal next door to Alida’s married sister Philomene and her husband Phillippe, a shoemaker. By 1883 the duo headed west again, and in 1885 Alida married another Francois (Dault) and settled in Pequaming, Michigan, a tiny lumber town in the Keweenaw Bay.

Good. Ness.

Setting aside having four babies (and losing three of them) in your teens, can you imagine your life changing so dramatically, over and over, by your early twenties?

Can you imagine going from a long-established farming community in rural Canada, to a booming mining town in remote, far-northern Michigan, to a working-class neighborhood in urban Montreal, and then to a company mill town along the shores of Lake Superior…all within about a decade and a half?

from this…

to this…

to this…

to this?

putting myself in my ancestors’ buttoned-up boots

Even as someone who has moved a lot in my life, it’s hard for me to imagine it. But I want to. And through that curiosity, I’ve finally found a way to write about the research I’ve found myself so obsessed with over the past few years.

Instead of chasing names and dates - which has a way of leading me in frustrating circles and also, keeps me in front of a screen way too much - I want to put myself inside the shoes of my grandmothers before me: cooking foods they might have cooked, trying skills that would have been second nature to them, walking the world the way they would have walked it.

So in my next several installments of this series you’ll dive deeper into Alida and Clara’s lives in French Canada and Michigan in the mid-late 1800s and early 1900s, and eventually my plan is to expand this series to other ancestors, following lines of my family who come from Ireland, Finland, England, and other European and Nordic countries.

Friends, things are uncertain right now for so many of us. But we have a rich source of wisdom at our fingertips: the generations who came before us. If they could find hope, happiness, and reasons to move forward in times of unimaginable grief and hardship, then we can deal with whatever is to come. And maybe we can learn a few practical skills along the way, too.

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I am already so excited to dive in, and can’t wait to take you along on this adventure with me! I intend to keep this series free for everyone, but this is exactly the kind of work paying subscribers help support, so if you’re a member, thank you so much for helping to make this work possible.

Want to learn more about Alida and Clara? Read my exploration of a traditional French Canadian food and the way it would have changed throughout the eras in Alida’s life.

Hello friend,

A few weeks ago, in the midst of pulling together last-minute logistics for the book festival I had been planning since December and in between deadlines for my new job, I started feeling the pull to pick up my knitting again.

I’d made a few washcloths as starter projects back in the fall, but I have a lovely hand-dyed wool yarn and I wanted to make something wearable. So, I planned to try a scarf in a “broken rib” stitch, alternating knitting and purling.

The pattern didn’t seem particularly complicated, but as I knitted away, I noticed the needle was becoming rather crowded. And when I counted the stitches I realized my scarf’s width had ballooned from 35 stitches to 57 in just a few inches. Whoops.

After watching a few videos on YouTube, it became clear that, when switching back and forth between knit and purl stitches, I had been wrapping the yarn around the side of the needle instead of passing it between the needles, creating an accidental yarn over and adding stitches as I went.

Since I didn’t know when exactly I’d added the stitches, I didn’t know how to fix the problem, and I unraveled the entire thing; hours’ worth of work.

Now that I knew what was wrong, I (theoretically) could start over with the same pattern and (hopefully) do it correctly, if I was just able to remember how to correctly switch between stitches.

But at that moment, my overloaded brain just could not handle any more information.

I considered why I was feeling drawn to knitting in the first place, and realized that, at that moment, it was all about having a soothingly rhythmic, tactile experience—not mastering a project that may still be a bit beyond my very novice abilities.

So I picked up my yarn and kneedles, cast on 35 stitches, and did what I know how to do: I just knit, the same stitch over and over, all the way down the row. Then I flipped it and knit another row. And another, and another, and another.

The garter stitch, as it’s called when you simply knit every row, isn’t anything to brag about—but I still think it’s turning out a lovely scarf. Every time I sit on the sofa, I find myself reaching for my project, and my over-busy brain starts to calm down as my hands move. Mission accomplished.

Sometimes it just isn’t the season for purling.

Seasons - both literal and metaphorical - were on my mind as I recorded this month’s Journal episode. As we creep expectantly toward spring (is March hard on anyone else?) and I try to catch my breath after an incredibly busy winter, I’m thinking about how we are impacted by the seasons in our lives, and how we can either resist them—or ride them out as gracefully as possible.

In this episode, created exclusively for members of The Kettle community, I talk about the small signs of spring, like finding more and more multi-colored eggs in the chicken coop, that help remind me that the seasons really are shifting even on those days when the temperature drops.

I also share about the “Creative Solo Dates” (inspired by Artist Dates in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron) that I’ve scheduled into my calendar to ensure I get some playful white space in my now much-more-busy weekly schedule. I’ve also created a printable checklist of creative date ideas in case you’d like to join me.

And to celebrate my last month of Tea Sommelier training, I offer not one, but two tea recommendations!

It’s all below the jump. Thanks for being here, friends, and happy March!

Journal episodes come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more, join us today.

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That’s how much I knew about how to run a literary festival when the spark of an idea lit up my hippocampus a couple of years ago.

It was just a tiny germ of an idea then; a cluster of cells.

I knew I wanted writers and readers to congregate in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Manistique, where my husband and sister and brother-in-law and I opened a small public market and bookstore a few years ago.

I had some pretty clear ideas about the vibe I wanted— welcoming, unpretentious, small-town-y—and the time of year: winter, when town is quiet.

Other than that, I had nothin’. How to get writers to come, how to arrange the itinerary, how to sell tickets, how to handle day-of logistics…basically, any actual knowledge of how to plan an event like this? None.

“Nothing” is also how much I knew about how to run a literary festival back in December, when I made my first formal outreach and committed to the idea. After lining up a Feb 28 book signing with debut novelist , I thought “I wonder if I could pull a few more authors together on the same day, and make a little event out of it?” I started reaching out, and it snowballed from there.

So I knew a whole lot more about how to run a book festival by last weekend, when I found myself…well, running a book festival. had been born.

And it turned out to be…rather incredible.

Fifteen authors—myself included, though I stayed firmly in the role of facilitator, rather than presenter—came together for a series of thought-provoking, intimate conversations about the art, craft, and business of writing with a particular focus on writing in and about northerly places.

The panelists - , Steve Amick, , Chad V. Broughman, Mikel Classen, , , , , J.L. Hyde, , , and - were insightful, earnest, and honest; the attendees were respectful, rapt, and happy to be there. Many books were sold and signed, and I suspect more than a few aspiring authors went home feeling inspired to put words to paper.

But while it may seem to have come together quickly, the roots of Writing North go much, much further back. As a little girl growing up in a remote area of far-northern Michigan, I loved books, and hungered for stories and landscapes and people that felt familiar, written by authors who understood and valued the place I came from.

As I wrote in a Writing North newsletter:

When I started my writing career in the early 2000s, I studied New York Times-bestselling authors, trying to learn to write like them in order to impress my (mostly) New York City-based editors. Later, as a blogger and podcaster, I attended tech conferences in California, and again wore that place like a cloak. The sensibilities that had grown out of my childhood surroundings felt, for a time, like a career liability.

But decades after moving away, I found myself longing for the kind of authenticity you can only access when you write and read the stories that are real to you; and as I began spending more and more time in the Upper Peninsula again - eventually opening a business here - I began once again immersing myself in the stories written by others who’d lived or been inspired by the landscapes and people of the North.

For well over a decade, I made several treks per year to industry conferences focused around specific niches: magazine journalism, book authoring, blogging, podcasting. While these were often held in interesting places, the content wan’t typically informed by the location. (And while I always like to get out and explore any new place I’m visiting, conference hotels do have a way of sucking you into their vortex: while wearing a path in the carpet between Ballroom C and D, you could be in any Hyatt, anywhere.)

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I suspect that a big part of the reason so many of the authors I invited said “yes” to speaking at a brand-new event put on by someone most of them had never heard of—in a sleepy town of 3000 some of them had never been to, often driving hours and even crossing the longest suspension bridge in the Western hemisphere on an icy February day—was precisely the small-town, rural sensibility our event offered.

That sensibility spilled over into the festival attendees, too, who were mostly ordinary people from in and around Manistique who love books and were eager to get to spend time in the same room with people who write them. Our “fanciest” event, a wine-and-appetizers reception held at a gorgeous B&B a couple of blocks away, still felt relaxed, cozy and small-town. And the majority of the event took place at a community arts center right in the middle of our little main street.

There’s something that particularly tickles me about the image of internationally-bestselling author giving a presentation about how her book The Marsh King’s Daughter was made into a feature film, surrounded by children’s paintings stuck to the wall and with a 1960s Ben Franklin sign on the facade behind her.

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Actually, those painted trees and that Ben Franklin sign might be my very favorite part of these festival photos. It’s so emblematic of the event itself: instead of placing these accomplished authors on a large stage in a state-of-the-art auditorium, they sat in the platform in front of a storefront window in a small-town arts center.

It all feels so delightfully you-can’t-do-that, that it makes me feel like the best kind of rebel. We did do that, and overwhelmingly, everyone—from the presenting authors to the attendees—seemed to love it.

You could do it too, you know.

if not you, then who?

While kicking off our first panel at Writing North, moderator remarked on something that stuck with me all weekend. She said that, due to funding cuts, the kinds of literary festivals and book events that once might have been hosted by arts organizations, universities, and other entities had all but dried up, leaving writers hungry for the kind of connection and camaraderie that our little book festival offered.

Until that moment, I hadn’t even considered that this tiny, grassroots little event might have filled a need left vacant by larger institutions.

But then again, those larger institutions weren’t usually hosting their events in places like Manistique, Michigan to begin with. Maybe the gap created by losses at the institutional level have actually opened up a place for those of us with small budgets and modest facilities to experiment with ideas that once might have felt audaciously ambitious, in places that were too humble to be considered “literary.”

And wherever those gaps have opened, we should step into them. After all, we can’t yield the responsibility (or right!) of bringing together creative people entirely to institutions, can we? The work of being good ‘literary citizens’ starts with us: citizens. And it turns out, you don’t need a big budget or extensive event-planning experience to start. You only need an idea you’re passionate about, some helping hands1, and the willingness to be ignorant until you aren’t anymore.

Should you really start a literary festival? I think so. Or, if not a festival, then whatever that other thing is that’s been taking up space in your head: an artists’ retreat or a knitting group or a foraging club. You know, the thing you think your town really needs, or you keep wishing someone would start.

Maybe—just maybe—that someone could be you. You don’t have to wait for a stamp of approval, a certain level of knowledge, access to a big facility, a pot of money, a large enough social media following, or a permission slip.

You just have to take one little step. And I recommend that you start exactly where you are.

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If you’re a paying subscriber looking for my monthly Journal post/podcast, it’s running a little late this month as I settle back in. I’ll be writing and talking about seasons this month - how to know what season you’re in right now, and how to ease into it. Look for it this weekend!

Well, it’s February. What? (Is this where I admit that there are two suspiciously Christmassy-red bins sitting in the corner of my living room, still waiting to be put back in storage?)

It’s a beautiful start to the month here in very snowy Michigan, and I’m happy to have a slow weekend to rest after what’s been a pretty eventful few weeks. The sunrise this morning was just spectacular, and I’m writing this curled up with a cup of tea and nowhere in particular to go.

I needed this pause.

January got off to a running start, with no immediate signs of slowing down. That’s life, and as much as I’d like to believe I can keep things at a steady, calm pace all the time, that’s just not the season I’m in at this moment in time.

In this episode I share about some things that are making my life feel very full right now - a book festival I’m organizing from scratch, weather-related travel snafus last week that I’m still recovering from (anyone else get stuck in DFW for 18 hours?), an intensive writing program that’s helping me define the heart behind my novel-in-progress and give it shape, and, oh yeah…a brand-new job at a marketing agency as well - with a new title, Director of Storytelling.

Between book festivals, writing my own book, and channeling my decades of experience as a storyteller into a new career role, it’s probably no surprise that storytelling is on my mind right now.

And one thread that kept emerging as I was thinking about this month’s Journal was how easily we distort experiences through the way we talk or write about them (see: the number of times I referred to my annoying flight delay as a “nightmare”, when it was really more of an inconvenience.)

I carried that forward to consider the stories I tell myself when my life looks a little fuller than I’d planned for. A single slightly-too-busy week can start to look like a sign that my life has become unsustainably over-scheduled, or a schedule “oops” turns into some kind of proof that I’m falling irredeemably behind.

But, as I share in the episode, a good night’s sleep, a solid meal, and a quiet morning catching up on my biggest priorities have a way of allowing me to catch my breath and realize it isn’t all as overwhelmingly hopeless as it seems. (That, and time with my chickens, of course. See below the jump for some chicken-photo goodness!)

Sometimes life is frustrating. Sometimes you sit on the tarmac waiting to deplane for four hours when you’ve got much better things to do. Sometimes you bite off just a weeee bit more than is easily chewable, by choice or by circumstance.

But the way we talk about these moments matters, and it’s so easy to add unnecessary weight to an already-heavy load by the way we frame what’s happening or how “behind” we tell ourselves we are.

In the airport bookstore I picked up the book Heartwood by Amity Gaige, (which got me through a long delay - I talk about it a bit in the episode!) It centers around a woman who is lost on the Appalachian Trail, and in one part of the book, another character - Beverly, the game warden heading up her search - talks about how when people get lost while hiking, they often panic: they break into a run, wear themselves out, lose things, lose the trail, get injured.

I’m trying to remind myself that “busy” isn’t always bad, the way I talk about my life impacts the way I experience it, and if I’m starting to panic and wonder if I’m lost - or the load just feels too heavy to carry - I have a choice: I can sit down for a few minutes, take a breath, have a snack, and look around me while I figure out what to do next. Sometimes it turns out I really do need to backtrack or unload something for good. But a lot of time, I just needed to rest and let a new story emerge.

I talk about all of this in this episode below, as well as share some stories about chickens in the snow (and what having poultry means to me as I step into this busy phase.)

Journal episodes come out at the beginning of each month, and are a benefit for paying members of The Kettle Community. To hear the full episode, see more photos, resources, and links, and find links to community events like our weekly Co-Create sessions on Zoom, our private Discord chat, and more.

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I was driving - of all places - to my yoga studio at 9:45 on a Sunday morning, hoping to make the 10 AM class, when I saw a car coming to a stop at the light in front of me. My phone was safely in my purse, I wasn’t fiddling with the heat or radio, the ground was dry, I had plenty of time to brake. And to be fair, I did apply the brakes…just, apparently, not hard or fast enough.

And so, with a plastic-y “THWOK,” I hit the car in front of me at about 5 MPH. I think I was just as surprised as the (thankfully, very kind and unhurt) other driver.

I missed the class, which really bummed me out, as I’d signed up for a “30 classes in 30 days” yoga challenge at my studio.

and I have long joked about our poor low-stakes driving abilities - which, you understand, is not the same thing as saying we are bad drivers. Give us a slick road or a winding patch of freeway, something that requires our full attention, and you’ll feel perfectly safe in our cautious, skilled hands. But meandering across a parking lot or backing out of a garage? Prepare for a slow-mo crash.

Of course, there’s really no such thing as “low stakes” driving, when you come to think of it. You can do plenty of property damage in a driveway (ask me how I know.) And I have years’ worth of foot and ankle injuries, mostly sustained during “low-stakes” activities like walking across a parking lot or getting out of a recliner.

I suppose it’s the lack of care that I apply to those so-called “low-stakes” activities that makes me so likely to bungle them. Novel situations, like driving down an icy road or hiking up a steep hillside, tend to get my full attention. More everyday scenarios, like pulling up to a stoplight on a street I drive down every day or walking across a parking lot, can start to feel like the white noise of life; barely worth noticing.
Right now I am juggling several big, new, attention-seizing, “high-stakes” projects at once.I’m not one to self-diagnose, and I’ve never personally found it very useful to apply a label to the way my brain works, but let’s just say I probably exist somewhere in the “neurospicy” realm. So, rather than meeting a daunting list with fear and trepidation, there’s a sort of buzz, a heightened awareness and energy, that comes along with juggling it all.

The downside, of course, is that the smaller, lower-novelty tasks and routines that typically make up the bulk of my day tend to get short shrift as my attention shifts further from them (which probably explains my extremely slow-speed fender-scuffer).

I woke up Friday morning with vertigo. This happens to me a couple of times a year, and I’m somehow always surprised by it, even though I figured out a while back that for me, there’s a definite link between a frenetic schedule and a dysfunctional vestibular labyrinth.

Fortunately, I get a little wiser (or perhaps just a little better at self-preservation) with every passing year, and these days I can sense that my equilibrium is shifting off-balance long before the room starts to spin. Vertigo isn’t the canary in the coal mine; it’s losing my phone, forgetting my to-do list, bumping the bumper in front of me.

Despite my dizziness, I dutifully showed up for yoga on Friday; my seventeenth class in sixteen days. My particular form of vertigo is worst when I’m lying flat on my back - let’s just say savasana didn’t have its intended restful effect. I decided to sit the rest of the weekend out, even though it means I probably won’t meet the challenge goal of 30 classes in 30 days. Instead, I spent the weekend baking bread, flipping through seed catalogs, and adding more bedding to the chicken coop in advance of the oncoming polar vortex.

And after 48 hours of a slow and restful pace, I’m feeling more balanced…literally.

They may not seem as exciting as new projects and new-year challenges, but when you think about it, it’s the small, easy-to-overlook moments that make up most of our days…and by extension, make our lives. And one of the things that’s surprised me most about the stage of life I’m in is how much I value those quieter rhythms, even as I’m being carried away by the energy of novelty and newness, intensity and impact.

Juggling a lot of new things is still fun and exhilarating for a little while. I guess I’m just wired to love a burst of dopamine in my to-do list every now and then. But these days I find that I’m pretty quickly ready to get back to the steady, predictable pace of sipping tea and overseeing sourdough. High-intensity living can be fun and exciting, but it isn’t actually a substitute for just…being alive.

I’ll share more soon on everything going on with me as soon as things calm down. But one thing is certain: if I have anything to say about it, they will calm down again, and soon.

The truth is, no matter how much I may thrive on the occasional bout of high-stakes living, the stakes are just too high to stay in that place all the time anymore.

Warmly,

Meagan

As I write this, early in the day of January 1, I’m surrounded by the detritus of a family holiday gathering: half-filled stockings (stuffed, I’m sure, with balled-up candy wrappers) littering the sofa, the treat platters that once held a festive bounty now empty except for a scattering of dried-up cranberry-bread crumbs.

And I’ll admit, I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts about it all.

The other night, the kids and I watched an episode of The Bear that centers around a very dysfunctional family Christmas. Jamie Lee Curtis gave a knockout performance as a heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, mood-swinging, and generally melting-down matriarch as she puts together an elaborate dinner for her three adult children and an array of other family and friends.

The episode was darkly funny, wildly entertaining, and also more than a little hard to watch, particularly if you don’t love high-stress TV to begin with (me) and/or have experienced holiday gatherings tainted by the specter of a loved one’s mental illness (also me).

Still, while I didn’t want to identify in any way with Curtis’ character, there were small moments of recognition throughout.

(As of yet) I haven’t broken down sobbing at the dinner table or driven my car through a wall, but I’ve still taken on more than I need to and then seethed in silent - even smiling - resentment when nobody seems to appreciate my efforts.

And while I’ve made huge strides over the past several years, there still always comes a point where I look around me and ask “Wait, why am I doing all this, again?”

This year was my first-ever Christmas when one of my kids didn’t come home, something I’ve been preparing for (and not-so-secretly dreading) for years, and despite wanting to support my son’s very grown-up choices and his attempts to break away and do his own thing, what can I say? It stung. And holidays with adult kids coming, going, and generally living their own lives without a lot of regard for their parents’ agendas, can carry with them all kinds of expectations, disappointments and hurts.

Sitting on my sofa this morning, awash in lingering un-ease even as I basked in the warm glow of the still-festive Christmas tree, a thought crossed my mind: I could use an attitude adjustment.

And I don’t mean “I should really count my blessings” or “I should focus on the positives in my life.” Indeed those are both worthy practices, but for someone who already tends to cast both future and history in an overly-rosy glow, sometimes I benefit from a slightly more…forceful life edit.

Instead, I’ve found myself ruminating on the theme of this month’s Journal - tending - and how I can apply it not only to my home and surroundings but also myself: my body, my mind, my tender heart; which, under all those layers of good cheer and festive preparation, is always especially tender this time of year.

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