Life is a mystery: how we got here, who we are to each other. Why we exist. What it all means. It can be a lot to go through every day and do the work of living. We have to feed ourselves and maintain our lives. Ideally, we stay hopeful in the face of humanity's long history of greed and violence.

Sometimes, when I don't allow myself to think about what it would really mean in terms of time and cost and effort, I dream about going back to school to study literature. Of all the interests I've ever had, reading books is the one that has never flagged. I cannot remember any time in my life that I have not read books, nor any time where I wasn't excited about reading books, where at some point in the day, when I looked toward evening, I didn't get a little sparkly feeling when I thought about picking up my novel.

I don't like gore and guts. I used to pass out when I got blood drawn. My shoulders scrunch to my ears and I physically shudder when people get descriptive about deep cuts, torn or lost fingernails, eyeball injuries. I don't want to see broken bones sticking out of skin or peer into an incision during surgery. I'd never survive a cadaver dissection for anatomy or med school.

Today is my birthday, and I took the day off for it. I walked with the birds and crickets this morning and listened to cattle low. I copied favorite or new-to-me words from The Weight of Ink into the purple notebook I fill with words I like: simper, fettle, apostate. I sat with one leg crossed over the other, sipped my tea, and completed the crossword.

The windows are open. Cool air drifts in. Insects whirr and birds trill. Soft peach light chases the blackness away and lights the white rails of our front steps. A cat lays on my arms and purrs. I love mornings. They're calm. Quiet. Slow moving. The day is fresh and new. The air is crisp. The world wakes and stretches and sings its songs.

Back in the days before cell phones, when I was not yet an adult so junk mail and bills were not unwelcome things I received, I loved mail. I'd eagerly await the mail truck every day, especially in summer, in hopes I'd get a letter from a friend or my pen pal in Maine. When there was a hand-addressed envelope in the mailbox for me, my heart would leap with delight.

I'm ready to be off the steroids for this yellow jacket sting. I can't sleep, my skin is clammy, and in the mornings, which are my peaceful time, my heart pounds like before a race, all full of nervous energy. I listen to the cicadas buzz, to the wet lapping of our cat drinking the cool water I put in her bowl.

The heat broke this week. We opened all the windows and turned off the air conditioning for the first time in two months. One morning at the pool, I commented on the welcome cool weather, and the attendant said, "Yes! My garden is a mess; it's been too hot to weed, and I've just let it all go." I was relieved to not be the only one.

Last week was my first week back at work after a glorious three month sabbatical. During my time off, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to bring with me from sabbatical life to working life because I wasn't sure what might fall away when I started working again. After only one week, it became obvious what disappeared as soon as I started working again: my ability to be present in my personal life.

I love blogging. I lose track of time when I blog. This love for blogging is what brought me to Automattic, the company where I work. After a beautiful sabbatical of blogging for pure pleasure, I return to work and all of my colleagues today ♥️. Over the weekend, while reflecting on my months off, I began switching my brain from blogging as my avocation to blogging as my vocation, and particularly, to thinking about where blogging stands in the wider world.

More time means more books. Over the past three months, I've maintained my early to bed, early to rise schedule even though I didn't need to get up for work. The cats wake me at 5am, and most days, I just stay up after I feed them. When I'm working, I eat breakfast, exercise, shower, and write before logging on at 8am.

If you ever find yourself lucky enough to procure a pastry that is so delicate you can barely breathe on it without flakes flying everywhere, and you question, "How on earth do I eat this without it falling apart in a million golden pieces onto the table, my shirt, and the floor beneath me?", I feel your pain. It's rare to find such a perfect pastry where I live, so I haven't had much occasion to practice.

This is my final week on sabbatical. Over these past months, I've gotten a taste of what it's like to be in complete control of my time, and wow, it was glorious. Before sabbatical, I wondered if I'd feel unmoored without work. I wondered if I'd feel like I lost my identity. I wondered if I'd not know what to do with myself.

Bunnies snack on the leaves of my rudbeckia out front, but not enough to do any damage. The plants are still full, and the bright yellow flowers still bloom. Out back is a different story. Out back, the five rudbeckia I planted at the beginning of my sabbatical are mowed to the ground; a few gnawed stems and a couple strips of leaf remain.

I wrote every day during my recent travel to Europe. My goal was 1000 words a day, but I typically wrote 1500 to 2000. As soon as I began my travel home, on the train from Lille to Brussels, I went back to the beginning of my trip journal and started typing up what I'd written. I used my bookmarks on Google maps to find addresses of restaurants we ate at, or my photos to remind myself of places I didn't write about, and I listed out what we did each day in the digital copy of my journals*.

A pug is sitting at my feet looking up at me with pitiful eyes, hoping for a crumb of my iced lemon pound cake. The coffee shop is painted a soft green. A long cushioned bench upholstered in floral fabric lines the wall. The front window is framed by cascades of lilac and jasmine. In the back of the café is a flower shop.

The streets were quiet when we arrived around 9 or 9:30, and we walked through a green city park with tall trees and butterfly beds at its entrances. The sky was gloomy and grey, but we brought our hats and umbrellas, so we were prepared. I carried my tote and didn’t bring my camera. I didn’t want to spend all my time photographing and I didn’t want to hurt my back carrying my camera and two lenses.

We stopped in the bakery directly across the street from our apartment to get a pastry. The line was out the door. The boulangerie smelled of warm golden crusts. They had great hunks of brown bread that they sliced slabs off of for people to purchase by the kilogram. Next to the line was a plexiglass partition where you could watch the industrial sized mixers with bowls the size of washtubs.

Do you have weird things in your memory that stand out from childhood, things that you're not sure why you retained those particular bits of information? I have very specific words I remember from art lessons way back in elementary school, like the different types of columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian), like the names Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, Sistine Chapel and…

Vanilla painted brick walls rise up on all sides of me, with red doors to each apartment and red frames to the windows. The walls create a little grotto that is insulated from the sound of cars and mopeds and rattly strollers and suitcases on the cobbles outside the front window of the apartment. Instead, I only hear the pleasant tinkling of outdoor diners' wine glasses and cutlery.

I want to take a brief break from my Europe journals to participate in a photo challenge my mom, Beth of wanderingdawgs.com, is hosting. She recently joined the Lens-Artist team of photographers who prompt bloggers with weekly challenges. This week is Mom's first time hosting, and she has challenged us to share stormy images. My mom has been blogging on her WordPress site since 2013, when she and my dad took their RV to Alaska.

I considered trying to see the Mona Lisa, but I got panicky in the crowds. I was in a great hall, a huge red room with paintings bigger than our living room walls, one row at eye-level part of the wall where one might hang a painting, and then another row stacked above so that you had to crane your neck to see them.

As we metroed toward the Eiffel Tower, two stations were closed, including the transfer station we needed, Charles de Gaulle Étoile, because they were broadcasting the match at the Parc des Princes which I guess is near the closed stations. Paris scored another goal while we were on the metro, and cheers went up on the train. -May 31, 2025…

I’m upstairs in the reading room at Shakespeare and Company while Owen shops downstairs. It's quiet up here. The walls are lined with wooden bookshelves filled with English language hardbound books that aren't for sale. Next to me is a reading nook, like a window seat in the corner, with a red velour cushion on it. I could sit there with my back against the honey wood wall and read if I were reading instead of writing.