In days a-gone, sitting down to write one of these, I'd have looked out my window and rustled up words evocative of weather and season and place. Maybe they'd be wistful or musing or whimsical, with something about clogs and pretty earrings and unaffordable knitwear and the passage of time and melancholic beauty and literary references.
Now, ha.
I've been thinking lately about the way histories are presented—so many lived agonies compressed into crisp summations, flattened into memorizable facts and key dates and names. What must have been the queasy uncertainties of the folks living in those times is glossed over, and anyway, sitting at the remove of many years, it's perilously easy to feel that whatever happened was somehow inevitable. Maybe it becomes too hard to remember the possibilities after the fact, except as a sort of game, like in the constant churn of grim speculative fictions that gleefully imagine more terrible versions of our own time (I can never tell if people read these as warnings or take warped comfort in the idea that the bad things in the world could always be worse).
Sitting as we are on the ledge of total disaster, peering into the void with our legs dangling into a chasm of chaotic possibilities, it's surreal to realize that someday someone will look back on this time and trace neat lines of cause and effect. They will write scholarly papers and popular histories where all of our collective anguish and worry will be reduced to footnotes or asides or reductive anecdotes. But for now, the throughline is still ours to draw. SHARPEN YOUR PENCILS, PEOPLE!
If you are looking for things to do, Erin's election checklist is a good place to start. I'm making my plan to vote and reaching out to make sure friends and family have made voting plans, too. And I bought a passel of stamps, so if you'd like a bona fide letter by USPS, email me your address and I'll drop one in the mail.
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Random aside: I have reached the point in at-home quarantined life where socks and sandals have become my very favorite thing to wear, the more elaborate, the better.
Alex Mill linen playsuit / Lauren Manoogian celery grandma cardigan (past season) / Lola Hats Beehive hat / Bonne Maison cedar flower socks / Ruth Asawa USPS stamps / Postalco Pondlife postcard set / Robert Clergerie Iris sandals / Victorian carved agate fly earrings.
