Wheeling Around The Year

I meant to write one of these every month, and now I’ve missed two.

In my defense, it has been (how shall I put this?) Quite A Summer. Parts of it have been deeply painful, the kind of pain that is shared by every single human on this earth (and yet is always unique and specific). We lost a beloved member of our family, and we are still reeling. I don’t know when we won’t be reeling, if ever.

They say that death makes you appreciate life, and of course that is true (though it’s not that simple). So, in no particular order, here are the things I’m appreciating of late:

-Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders

-My sweet doggos

-Smitten Kitchen’s burst tomato, corn, & zucchini galette

-Tom Hardy reading children’s books (you may notice a theme)

-My friends, near and far

-My lucky, lucky life

I feel extraordinarily lucky to have two (TWO!) books releasing in this next month, including my very first picture book (Tom Hardy, feel free to call me. For, like, any reason). Both The Wheel of the Year and My Wheel of the Year are about cycles: the way we move through our lives, and each season is punctuated by rituals and memories—ancestral ones that we carry with us, and the ones we create. When I became a parent, I wanted to create seasonal rituals that were nature-based, separate from the others we had (that are equally valuable, like pictures on the first day of school, picking a board game and playing it every night until we tire of it, making roast chicken for my parents because my dad loves the potatoes with drippings, the cycle of sourdough, and on and on). The pagan holidays of the Wheel of the Year have been touchstones.

They remind us that death is a part of life. That the world spins on regardless. That love is never lost.

If I sound resigned to all of that, I’m not really. But I can hope that with a few more turns of the wheel, I’ll reach a kind of peace with it. In the meantime, there’s always Tom Hardy.