Invest in your siblings
And in silk scarves
I’d like to publicly thank my parents, especially my mother, for having four children.
We hosted Mom, Dad, and siblings (minus Grace and Antoine, the perpetually missed Europeans) over the Easter weekend, and the loudness and busyness of the house was a joy. The older I get, the more grateful I become for what is now considered a large family.
I love how much history we have with each other and how we keep drawing from it and building on it whenever we’re together. I love how each relationship ebbs and flows; how there’s a depth and closeness that is distinctive in each pairing. I love how we pay attention to each other, how we adapt ourselves to one another, even though none of us live in the same place anymore, even though weeks and months (and oceans) often separate us.
The complexity and vitality of siblings is a lifelong gift, one that keeps expanding, changing, and contributing to our flourishing (if we let it).
Invest as much as possible in your brothers and sisters. For most of us, it’s the longest relationship we’ll ever have.
Additional beliefs, now that I am 38
Two is the most stressful number of children. Four is the best number of children. I find myself happily in the imperfect middle with three.
The strength of menopausal women is an observable herald and blessing.
It is never more beautiful in Charlottesville than it is in early April.
Live in linen as soon as the temperature hovers regularly above 70 degrees.
Do whatever it takes to avoid the roommate trap with your long-held spouse. Don’t talk about logistics or discipline or schedules, as much as it’s within your power, after the sun goes down. Read each other poems. Light candles on a Monday night. Have cocktails on the deck after the kids are in bed, with your bare feet on his upper thighs.
Use tablecloths, even if your children trash them, and then teach your children not to trash them. See: Favorite block-print tablecloths from this shop in India. Was also quite pleased recently with this very decent one from another seller in India on Amazon.
Return to Louise Glück when the dogwoods are in bloom.
Contemplate the brevity of your life and the cyclical exuberance of your garden.
It’s time for my silk scarf era. I bought myself two from Lost Pattern for my birthday and would wear them all the time if I wasn’t afraid of perpetual mockery from my clothes-sensitive colleagues.
“Sunset”
By Louise Glück
My great happiness is the sound your voice makes calling to me even in despair; my sorrow that I cannot answer you in speech you accept as mine. You have no faith in your own language. So you invest authority in signs you cannot read with any accuracy. And yet your voice reaches me always. And I answer constantly, my anger passing as winter passes. My tenderness should be apparent to you in the breeze of summer evening and in the words that become your own response.
— From her perfect book The Wild Iris
Currently reading
The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
Mating, Norman Rush
Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch
So good, Abby. ❤️
Love this so much.