My grandmother’s favourite plants were invasive, which is hysterical if you knew her. But you didn’t know her, and so you’ll need to let me explain.

Doris Ross was a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall, with kind eyes and a ready smile. She was gentle and soft spoken, always having pleasant things to say and candy to give out to the brood of grandchildren trailing in and out of her and my grandfather’s home. To this day, I can’t eat pringles or those hard raspberry candies without thinking of her. I keep a jar of the latter on my desk.

She was the mother of four girls—my mom and her three sisters—who Doris raised with my grandfather, Wilbur. My grandfather is not necessarily part of this story, though he was married to her for some fifty years, and so he is implicitly involved. Not that he would mind; he was the kind of man who wrote words on the thick skins of bananas at his friend’s and family’s homes, for the person to find an hour, a day, two days later.

[Memory vault #1: I’m three years old and playing with my cousins at the house on Everett, the one whose halls are still mapped in my mind. I swing a bubble wand too close to myself, soap stinging my eyes. My grandmother takes me indoors and washes my eyes out, gently, stopping the tears before they have a chance to fall.]

But back to Doris: long before my sister, Amy, or I were born, Doris gifted Janice, our other grandmother, a wisteria seed. This seed was planted along the side fence and soon—as wisteria does—took over the entire thing, twining between the wood in such a way that no one knew it would be a problem until it was too late. Years later, my sister was enamoured with the blooms, and was adamant a seed would make its way home.

Just last month, my mom told us this story again, adding this time that she brought the seed home and planted it just to humour Amy, thinking the seed wouldn’t take root. The wisteria is still going thirty years later, and has destroyed two fences, but none of us are willing to cut it down.

[Memory vault #2: I’m eight years old and am at my grandparents’ townhouse, after they moved from the large house on Everett but before they moved into our basement suite. I play with lego on the carpeted basement floor and, in the middle of some narrative, a paper airplane soars down the stairs and lands on the house I built. When I look up, there’s no one there, but I hear my grandparents laughing together as my grandfather retreats down the hall.]

Some time in the eighties, Doris also gave Janice a few cuttings of silver nettle (Solanum elaeagnifolium) to plant in their ravine, which my other grandfather, Dennis, had been working on for some time. He had cut paths in the soft earth along the sides, carving trails high up above the creek that cut through the valley at the bottom.

Two weeks ago, as I walked the paths I’ve traveled for over thirty years, I captured a video of the silver nettle bending in the wind. Rising from where I’d knelt, I saw a sea of silver nettle curving against the breeze blowing through the ravine. Sun dappled across them all as the creek burbled below.

[Memory vault #3: I’m thirteen years old and am beginning to lose parts of myself. At Easter dinner, I pick and prod, pretending to eat more than I do. But then my grandma carries out the traditional bunny cake, you know the one, and I can’t help myself: I pick jelly beans off the plate one by one, then accept a piece of cake larger than I want, and yet it’s exactly what I need. And there is no guilt, at least this time. Years later, this memory is a lifeline that will haul me forward.]

When Doris and Wilbur lived in the basement suite, Doris brought baskets home to hang on the front porch. There were petunia, fuchsia, coleus, and trailing snapdragon, among countless others over the years. But it was just one, the trailing snapdragon (Asarina procumbens) that has left its mark.

Twenty years later, its pale, bell-shaped flowers bloom beneath the front porch, along the border between our house and my aunt’s, and even as far down as the road. The ditch flowers, too, one we’ve never pinpointed the name of, bloom in the front garden, with more of their seeds stored safely in an envelope. There’s no way the seeds should have survived as long as they have—and yet, no matter how long we wait to plant them, they still come up.

[Memory vault #4: I’m sixteen years old and don’t know what I’m losing, my half-formed brain not making sense of how permanent this is. At the funeral, I have a panic attack (too many people, too many feelings permeating the room, I can’t breathe, I don’t understand) and walk the hour home. I won’t regret it until I’m old enough to know what this means.]

Now, I find parts of my grandmother wherever I look: our back garden; my other grandparents’ farm; beneath the front porch and along the patch of cedars connecting us to my aunt. I see her in the pale yellow of the snapdragon’s bell-like blossoms; I see her in the sea of silver nettle blanketing the ravine. I see her too in the pale purple blooms that, for a few weeks each year, burst to life along our back fence.

I’m a gardener now, too, just like my mother and her mother before her. I don’t necessarily tend toward invasive plants, but I do love those that take root easily and fill the garden: delphiniums, echinacea, daisies, and rudbeckia. Lupins, I believe, are my one caveat—I will never tear them from my garden, no matter how much they expand toward the edges. In this way, I am like my grandmother: I love something so much that I want it to take over.

My grandmother left before she got to know me as an adult, but I like to think she’s with me as I lean in close to the wisteria to listen to the bees hum there, or kneel on a patch of moss to take in the silver nettle. She’s there in the cakes I bake, and the bell-like blossoms of the snapdragon, and in the envelopes we use to store seeds.

[Memory vault #5: I’m thirty-three years old and am walking down our stairs to close the front door for the night. The screen door is open, and a breeze blows the scent of wisteria in, and for a moment I see my grandmother’s kind eyes, her ready smile. I taste those hard raspberry candies, and hear her and my grandfather’s laughter, trailing down the hallway as a paper airplane lands at my feet. I pick it up, and the message—which is inexplicably in both her and my grandfather’s handwriting—says:

We are always with you. We are everywhere you are willing to look.]

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

― Anais Nin

During my art therapy degree, one of the things we learned about was broadly referred to as “the stories we tell.” In simple terms, this means what we tell ourselves and others about what has happened to us, or how we show up in the world. A general example would be when we say something like “I’m the kind of person who needs to spend time with other people to be happy¹ .”

One story I’ve told myself for the last five or so years is that I struggle with consistency. I start and stop projects with alarming frequency, leaving a sweater half-knit in my bin, a dress pattern cut out and pinned together left to rot in a box behind my mirror. My to-read shelf is littered with books that have bookmarks partway through, many of which haven’t been touched in weeks.

And my Google Drive; don’t even get me started. It’s pristine in its organization—every folder has multiple subfolders, and every document has its place—but the sheer amount of projects I switch between is staggering. Right now alone, I think I have six or so novels in varying states of doneness, and this doesn’t include those which are in the planning stages, or those I wrote a long time ago and would like to revisit. And the poetry books—let’s not go there.

I’ve always been this way, which in all likelihood has to do with having ADHD, that joyous creature that lives in my head and colours everything I do. Most of the time, it’s not an issue. I’ve lived this way my entire life, and have found workarounds for the more exasperating ways my brain decides to buck against me.

But I digress; what I’m saying is, the narrative that’s woven itself into the threads of my life is that consistency isn’t a word I’m friends with. Hell, we’re not even on speaking terms. And yet, I’ve been spending time with this story I’ve spun, and have come to a realization: I don’t struggle with consistency. In fact, I’m actually quite consistent², because I do eventually finish things: the books I read, the novels I write, the sweaters and scarves and toques I knit and the dresses I sew. Everything does get finished eventually—it just may not be on the timeline that other people expect.

What it comes down to is attention and interest. If I’m not entirely locked in on something, then I can’t do it which, unfortunately, extends beyond creative projects and into my work and personal life³. A good example that arose recently had to do with a book I was reading. It was a fine book—well-written and interesting characters—but I just couldn’t get into it. It may have been that I wasn’t in the mood for a mystery, or it may have been that there was another book I wanted to re-read instead. Whatever it was, I just couldn’t make myself focus on it, and so I returned it to the library.

And you know what? I think that’s ok. We’re only on this earth for a brief period of time, so why spend it—especially our free time—on things that we’re just not into. Besides, even if I’m not working on one project at a time, I still create constantly. And yet I’ve still had people tease me about how I constantly jump between creative projects, between books I’m reading or writing, saying that I can’t focus. In some instances, they’re right—I can’t focus, but it’s only because what’s in front of me isn’t gripping me in the way it should, or another idea has burst through stronger than the one I’m on. But then I just move on, rather than push myself to work half-heartedly on something. Often, too, I come back refreshed, with new ways of looking at the work that end up making it better.

In the past I’ve had people ask me how I write and create as much as I do, and the answer is that there’s this constant stream of ideas carving their way through my mind. It’s like a dam has been breached, or there’s a tide that just keeps rising; there’s no turning the ideas off. Even when I set one project aside, I always have another one waiting in the wings, so that there’s no fallow period where I list this way or that, trying to figure out what to do. There’s always something to work on, and it always gets done.

I think that’s the key to being a creative person, or at least my key: having multiple projects on the go, so I can work on whatever it is that I’m drawn to that day. It doesn’t matter if I edit a batch of poems one day and write a chapter in my novel the next; it doesn’t matter that I knit a few inches of a shrug before switching to cutting fabric for a new tote. What does matter is that I keep making things, day by day, doing my best to keep my creative spirit alive.

FOOTNOTES

¹ I am not one of these people. I’d like to say this is a story I’m telling myself (that I do enjoy spending lots of time with others), and yet, thirty-three years of living has told me that’s not the case. I need to be alone a lot! And that’s ok!

² The joys of having autism and obsessive compulsive disorder means that there is a certain order to my life, whether that’s a good thing or not. Having ADHD at the same time is, in all honesty, a laughable experience. But more on that another time.

³ I wish it didn’t, because it’s a whole other can of worms. C’est la vie.

April, more than anything, was a month of fragments. Nothing felt cohesive or connected—it was the continual starting and stopping different projects, ideas, dreams. And yet, I still lived it, something I’m trying to remember: I was there, even if it didn’t feel like I was.

And I was there; I remember the sandhill cranes, uncommon for where we live. I remember digging out our back yard to turn into a wildflower bed. I remember walking the aisles at the nursery, helping my mom pick out a new flowering tree¹, and I remember slow simmering a pot of bone broth, dusted with herbs from last year’s garden. I remember the wind, blowing in through the kitchen window.

There were also parts I’d like to let go in the wind, sleepless nights worrying about where I’m headed and what life will look like next year, next month, next week—tomorrow. I’d like to let go of the migraines, and the expectations, and the looping thoughts that rattle behind my skull when I’ve drank too much coffee too late in the day.

But April was alive, and so was I. I’m still trying to remind myself that alive doesn’t always mean good.

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what April held, and what May will bring.

WATCHING Scarpetta! I read some of the novels when I was a teenager (an ill-advised move?) and loved them. Also watched a few Jason Statham action movies and Diary of a Madman (A Vincent Price classic).

LISTENING TO a lot of podcasts on the afterlife and spiritualism. One is a series I started last year but never made it past the first episode (by no fault of the podcast itself!), but am getting back in to—it’s called Ghost Church and is created by Jamie Loftus.

READING A couple of ok books, but I also took Three Days in June out of the library on a whim and loved it. I don’t know what it is about books where not a lot out of the ordinary happens, but I’m so into them.

THINKING ABOUT my garden, mostly. I bought daikon radishes² and peanut seeds.. We’ll see how that goes. And my tomatoes and peppers, and how I will have far too many of them when harvest time comes.

EXPERIENCING a sore back with no answers! But also the beauty of April that comes after a long, drawn-out winter.

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Lately I’ve been loving sandhill cranes; cedar trees; rose black tea; spicy ketchup chips; warm winds; old nonfiction books; small wooden shelves; secret owls; thyme; bone broth; mason jars of water; paint by numbers; shiny stones plucked from the gravel driveway.

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog.

—Welcoming Beltane with sparkling wine and garden picnics

—Jac Jemc’s Nightmare Fuel

—Drawing inward to be a better human

—Spring is here & new seeds in the garden

—Things won’t always go according to plan

Some of what I’m looking forward to in May:

Getting the rest of my seeds in the ground (carrots, sunflowers, beets, peanuts) and transplanting my peppers and tomatoes / going back to teaching (!!!) / my wildflowers opening in the side garden / buying a trellis / cleaning out my closet / morning coffee on the back porch every day / salads made with the mixed greens I’ve grown

A few days of note in May:

1. MAY 1: Beltane

2. MAY 1: Full flower moon in Scorpio

3. MAY 16: New moon in Taurus

4. MAY 31: Blue moon in Sagittarius

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• Driving through the farmlands on the way home from Fort Langley and seeing two sandhill cranes in a nearby field

• Helping mum choose the flowering crabapple tree that will be planted in the front yard

• Sitting quietly with grandpa, watching a snake watching us

• Walking around the farm and seeing everything that’s in bloom

• Feeling more certain with where I’m going in life

• Homemade apple cinnamon muffins eaten with a big slab of butter

• Thrifting tiny vintage pill holders made to look like fine rose china

• Having a good long week of rain storms before the warmer weather comes in

• Beginning the overhaul of my aunt’s front yard (think pathways and wildflowers)

• Spending more time outdoors, especially walking around the trails of the bird sanctuary

• Lying in a bed of moss in the middle of the woods

• Making chicken noodle soup with homemade bone broth, plus onion and garlic I grew last year

• Transplanting the purple peppers I’ve grown from seed³

• Writing at my kitchen desk with the window open, a cool breeze blowing in

• Beginning the second draft of a novel I finished writing in February and knowing where I want to go with it

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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FOOTNOTES

¹ It’s an ornamental crabapple, which she’s already put in the ground. I can’t wait to watch it grow.

² I went to water the garden one morning and found that all of them had come up in the past 24 hours. This is huge, because so many times I plant something and less than half the row appears.

³ They’re huge already, so I’m hopeful that I’ll get a lot of peppers from them!

Driving down the road that runs parallel to ours, C and I pass an old home, set far back from the road, its gardens overgrown. The rezoning proposal—sixty townhomes shoehorned into this residential lot—distracts me enough that we nearly hurtle into two deer, taking their time crossing this busy street. After a moment, a third deer appears, nearly as large as the first two but with white dots smattering its rear end. I’m so taken with the deer that I forget my complaints about the development until we drive by on our way home.

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April 6, 2026

C and I arrive home five minutes after the commotion—a bear trundling down our neighbour’s side steps and across the driveway where my niece sat thirty seconds before. She and my mom hurried to the front porch and, by the time they got there, the bear was already at the end of the driveway. Not coming for them, but following an ancient path that was carved a century ago, before the houses, before the roads. Later, my sister shows me photos of the bear, and I regret the detour on the way home that made us miss his significant body trundling down the center of the road.

April 11, 2026

A Facebook page for a local park has been inundated with photos of a barred owl, its dark eyes glassy and unreadable, and so C and I drive the winding roads there, binoculars in hand. It’s a grim day, all cloud and thunder, and so the walk is soggier than anticipated. Peering up into each tree, I will the owl’s small form to make itself known, but all we find are pine boughs and a particularly stubborn goose, hooting from an island. The walk is pleasant enough, even without an owl spotting, and when I fall asleep that night I dream of owls in the trees around our house, calling softly in the dark.

April 12, 2026

A morning trip to a neighbouring town to visit a monastery. Walking through the red gate into the woods, I hold my phone high and capture eight different bird songs at once, some of which I’ve never heard. Standing still, we listen to their trills and * before heading deeper into the woods, and at a crest of the hill we see more development: cleared fields where farmhouses once stood, and the bones of new townhomes going in. Further into the woods is the first trillium of the year, and a patch of bleeding hearts; further down the path we find the cliff’s edge and look over the valley, and I ask C, as I always do, how many owls he think are nearby.

April 14, 2026

A cold, wet morning at the garden center results in a tree being bought—ornamental crabapple, to be delivered the following week—and then lunch in a nearby town. We wander the antique mall, and I find two beanie babies I’ve been searching for: a squid and a robin. On the drive home we take the backroads and, in one of the fields, we spot two large birds that look like herons, except for the slash of scarlet across the tops of their heads. Later, I figure out they were sandhill cranes, exceptionally rare for where we live. Having spotted them feels like a gift, a secret only we got to see.

April 16, 2026

This morning I wind up at the farm, and after a chat with my grandparents over coffee, I head outside to see what catches my eye. Loads of flowers are blooming—lunaria, tulips, periwinkle, and trillium—and wind pushes its way through the trees. Bending toward the pond to look for toads, grandpa tells me to look out for the snake he’s seen recently; imagine my surprise when I round the other side of the pond and find it, larger than I expected, sunning itself on the banks. When it sees me, it doesn’t rush away, but slowly twines itself around the new willow stems, turning to face me. I don’t know how long we sit and watch each other, just a few minutes apart, but eventually the snake unwinds itself and swims across the pond.

April 17, 2026

Once more I set out to find the owl, this time alone. Despite the parking lot being nearly full, I pass few people on my walk, and the hiss of cars on a nearby highway lulls me. Soon I see two blue herons passing overhead, and a tree swallow swoops nearby, its sapphire back gleaming in the sun. Then there’s a cormorant, a single swan, and dozens of marsh wrens shooting through the air above the lake. Over the bridge and along the path, I see a woman, standing and looking up into the trees, and when I ask if she’s looking for the owl, she responds:

“No. I already know where he is.”

She tells me where to look, but then says to come back at dusk, when I’ll see him soaring low over the open fields. We talk for some time about birds, how she lives in the mountains and loves it but can’t take her usual route—she needs a new hip, and so the flat paths of the park are where she wanders now. Her phone rings, and I thank her for her help. It’s not until I’m walking away that I realize I didn’t ask her name.

We all know by now that there’s no such thing as “private” when you post online—and the internet has a long memory. Photos you shared fifteen years ago might resurface, or an ill-advised tweet may haul itself up from the depths¹. If you haven’t noticed, I’m massively into archiving bits of my life online. I like the ease of it, that I can nicely format what I did, read, or watched and curate a digital folder of myself to look back on. But lately, I’ve been wanting more privacy—I want to be able to log what I’m consuming online without anyone seeing what’s there.

Not that there’s anything wrong with what I’m consuming—it’s more so that I want to be able to archive things just for myself. I don’t necessarily want to discuss what I’ve read, or watched, or listened to; often, I just want to experience it, and then sit with the work myself². This isn’t to say I never want to discuss the media I consume—more so that I want these discussions to happen organically (and in person), rather than someone scrolling through an app and passively seeing what I listened to/read/watched.

And yes, I understand that paper and pen exist, but apps make everything so neat and shiny! Plus, they offer features that I can’t access offline. I’m thinking of Letterboxd specifically; I love that I can look at a film’s cast and then easily find other movies a favourite actor was in. Technically I can just Google this, but I do love that it’s all in one place. That, and lists—I’m a sucker for anything that lets me make lists.

(Lately I’ve been sharing less of myself online, parsing out what I do share in fragments so that there are still parts of me left over in real life that no one else sees. I’m not sure if this is me returning to who I was before—afraid of being perceived, not wanting to be known—or if I’m just tired of the constant output that comes with being online.)

But then this bleeds into a conversation around convenience. Before Letterboxd, I watched a film and that was that—maybe I’d discuss it with whoever I watched it with, but that was the furthest it got. I didn’t write down what I watched, or give it a starred rating; I just experienced it. Now, I have something like fifty different lists of films I’ve watched/want to watch, and am afraid to close my account, because what if I want to look back on what I’ve logged? What if I want to see what I rated something?³ It’s just so easy.

And now I’m so used to having Letterboxd (and other apps that allow me to make lists/archive the media I access) that I don’t know how to behave without them. I tried writing down the films I’ve watched this year in a notebook, but it felt wrong. Where are the icons showing the film’s poster? How do I see the average rating, and read reviews by people who have watched it before me?

(Then again—none of these things really matter, and I never read reviews before I got these apps. More often than not, I enjoy something wholly that someone else has dragged, and vice versa. Besides—and no offense, people on the internet—but I value the opinion of those I know personally far more than a faceless review by someone I’ll never meet.)

The thing about our experience with media is that it’s so subjective. What one person finds joy in, another will find boring; what one person can’t put down, another will DNF in the first five minutes. In regards to Letterboxd: I once had someone ask me to explain my rating system, but I couldn’t make sense of it. What do you mean, explain? It’s entirely tailored to my likes and dislikes, because it’s my rating system⁴. I don’t mean to sound sour; it’s just that, sometimes, I want my archival systems to be just for me. And not everything needs an explanation!

It’s strange, because I don’t feel this way with substack, or instagram, or my blog. In fact, I love sharing on these platforms and the conversations that come out of them. But maybe, in terms of media, it’s an area where I’m still uncomfortable being perceived, or maybe it’s a question of intentional (writing a blog post) versus unintentional (logging a book I’ve read). The first is meant for others to read and engage with, to find meaning or connection in; the second is a personal archival practice. But then again, posting something online, in any form, is intentional sharing—even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

But back to digital curation: much like a good chunk of the internet, I’m singing the well-known song of I want to get off my phone. It feels like, as time goes on, the world is trying harder to keep us in front of our screens; we can log what we’ve read, order lunch, and post a silly little video, all in the span of a few minutes. Really, we can do pretty much anything from our phones, and so we’re back to convenience again—which, to be honest, I’m not so sure is such a good thing⁵.

(And I do! I do want to get off my phone, though all of us seem to now. I wonder, sometimes, if this is a collective distaste with what the internet is now or if we’re all taking cues from one another. Neither is a bad thing—we really do need to spend more time offline—though I don’t have the answer just now.)

I think the thing here is that, for myself, I need to take a step back and understand that the shiny apps with all their pretty features are not necessarily better. I will always be making lists, and logging the media I consume, but I’m not certain that I’ll always do it online. I just need to remind myself that there was a before, and that I can go back to it. The trick is to make the transition.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Not only do I not have any ill-advised tweets, I don’t even have twitter. Thank god.

² If I do want to discuss the media I consume, I write about it on here/my blog/instagram. I’m not super into someone sending me a message saying “I saw you read x,” because often they have different opinions than me and want to know why I don’t share their opinions. I’m not joking—this has happened with so many books over the years. There’s nothing wrong with having different opinions! But if I wanted to get into a discussion, I would.

³ It doesn’t matter that I’ve never actually wanted to know what I’ve rated something after the fact. My brain still tells me this might be important later.

⁴ No shade on anyone who has an intricate rating system, but mine is entirely vibes based.

⁵ I have soooo much to say about convenience/using our brains, but that’s a discussion for another day.

When I was nine years old, I made my first-ever batch of muffins, all by myself. They were lumpy, and undercooked in the center, and I don’t think I stirred the flour in well enough because there were pockets of the stuff all the way through. I’m glad to report my muffin baking skills have improved significantly since then, mainly due to my mom, who was always patient and able to explain things in a way that made sense¹.

I can’t talk about my love of food, and of spending time in the kitchen, without crediting my mom. Each week we had a new batch of cookies and muffins and bread, and dinner was always balanced and delicious, even for sensory-averse eaters like my sister and I. Even when I struggled in my teen years, my mom found ways to make eating a positive experience—one that’s stuck with me into my thirties.

Now, some secret lore from the vault: I had a blog around 10-12 years ago, which was everything you could expect a blog of that time period to be. Part of it included my most-loved recipes, everything from the fettuccine I learned to make in ninth grade to the potato soup that saw me through a rough year. Mostly, though, I enjoyed sharing my baking: bread, cookies, cakes, and muffins—anything that I could package up and gift to friends and family. Over the years, I’ve regretted closing the blog down, mainly because I loved sharing the recipes that bring me joy each time I make them.

Enter these gingerbread muffins. Growing up, my mom had a collection of the Company’s Coming cookbooks, which I added to as soon as I began going to thrift stores². Any recipe I tried from them turned out perfect, and they were always simple to make—something that my fellow ADHD people will understand the necessity of.

And so I’m starting this series off with these gingerbread muffins because they’ve been something I return to again and again over the years. They taste of winter, but they’re also not too sweet—and if you like anything with ginger or molasses, you’ll fall in love with them right away.

If you know me in real life, though, you’ll know I don’t often follow recipes exactly³. It’s just that, when I look at a recipe, I often think of how I can alter it to fit what I have or what I want to add. And so, while the following recipe is from the Company’s Coming muffin cookbook, I’ve fiddled with it over the years to suit my own tastes.

Without further ado, here’s my favorite recipe for gingerbread muffins:

INGREDIENTS

• 1 ¾ cup flour

• 1 tsp. baking powder

• ½ tsp. cinnamon

• ½ tsp. ginger

• ½ tsp. cloves

• ½ tsp. nutmeg

• ¼ tsp. salt

• ¼ cup melted butter

• ½ cup molasses (I prefer darker molasses, but any will do)

• 1 egg

• ½ cup hot water

DIRECTIONS

1. Set your oven to 400°F and grease a muffin tin⁴; set aside.

2. Combine the first seven ingredients in a medium bowl and mix well; set aside.

3. In a large bowl, combine the final four ingredients, making sure the egg is well beaten and the molasses is incorporated with the remaining ingredients.

4. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet and stir until they’re just incorporated (make sure you don’t have any pockets of flour!).

5. Add the batter into the muffin tins, filling about ¾ full, and bake for 20-25 minutes.

6. Serve warm with butter and marmalade, or just butter. They’re also surprisingly good with any sort of Nutella-esque chocolate/hazelnut spread.

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FOOTNOTES

¹ Recipes, math homework, you name it! I really lucked out in the mom department.

² I started thrifting at fourteen, so you can imagine the collection we amassed over the years.

³ Or at all. I’ve had people ask me for recipes over the years, and I end up writing down what I remember. But when it comes to certain things (soup is one of them) I hardly ever end up with the same result twice.

⁴ I use my massive muffin tins because I like massive muffins. But if you’re a small muffin kind of guy, a regular muffin tin works perfectly fine.

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There’s this quote that makes the rounds online about how your thirties are the time when you become the person who you were in middle school, except you love yourself this time. This, at least for me, has been true so far: at thirty-three, I read books I enjoy, rather than books I think I should read; I take long walks outdoors and notice the flowers that bloom throughout the seasons; I paint, and sew, and knit just for the fun of it. Most importantly, I don’t spend my time on things that don’t bring me joy—books, movies, hobbies, people—because I think I should be engaging with them.

In short, I do whatever it is that I want to do and I don’t give a single shit whether it’s cool or not. Much like everyone else when they’re thirteen years old, it was absolutely devastating to think about the fact that I could be uncool, to the point where I built walls around myself, hiding significant parts of my life because I thought I would be made fun of by the people I so badly wanted to be friends with. Looking back, I have no idea why I wanted to be friends with them, but now I know that, at that time, I equated them with normalcy. Here were girls who knew what makeup to buy, and which clothes to wear, and what to say to make people laugh. They weren’t afraid for their bodies to be seen in the gym’s changing room and whispered about other girls’ outfits during lunch. I don’t care about cliches, and so I’m going to ask that you think of Mean Girls, because there really is no better comparison.

On hiding who I was: let me give you an example. From the ages of seven through to, well, now, I was obsessed with The Sims. I scrambled to get home from school just so that I could build strange, meandering homes, always complete with themed rooms (we had most of the expansion packs) and inexplicable floor plans¹. I remember one time a group of the “cool” girls showed up at my house unannounced, and I scrambled to close the game on our dinosaur of a computer so they wouldn’t catch me playing it². The panic I felt then, at the thought of being found out to be doing something they would laugh at—something they’d made fun of other girls for—I still remember how visceral it was.

(You may have guessed that these cool girls were, in fact, not cool. If you guessed this, you would be right, though you couldn’t have convinced me of this then.)

It scares me to think that something as simple as a computer game caused that level of terror in my thirteen year old self, but I’m grateful to be able to say that I no longer hide any part of my life from anyone—and I no longer care about fitting in with those kinds of people. Which is probably a good thing, because anyone trying to be cool probably isn’t the kind of person I want to be around—we’re adults, for god’s sake. The time for showing off is over! Remove the illusion of who you pretend to be!

Jokes aside, I get why we present these masks to the world. We want to be loved, and accepted, and to fit in with the crowd. I’m no exception—even as an adult, I’ve pretended to be a certain way to make other people comfortable, or to make sure I’m not singled out³. Not that it helped; certain kinds of people still like to point out what’s different about me. Yes, I know I speak strangely sometimes, and sometimes I don’t speak at all. I move my hands and body in ways that other people don’t, and I hold full conversations with my eyes looking anywhere but a person’s face. I do all sorts of things neurotypical people don’t do, but I’m no longer trying to hide it.

And yet I can’t pretend I don’t notice other people noticing. When I was a kid, this was catastrophic; now, it’s mainly just irritating—why does it matter what I do with my hands, and what does it do for that person who’s pointing it out? If it were out of curiosity, that’s different, but whenever it’s done, it comes across as a way to put me in the spotlight⁴. Maybe they’re living out their thirteen year old self, too, who never progressed past being the cool girl. Or maybe I’m being uncharitable⁵.

But back to middle school: while I may have been navigating the horror of Being A Human Perceived By Others, I was still full of more whimsy than most people have in their left foot. I talked to trees, and imagined great, sprawling worlds inside my head, and made art that had way more glitter than it ever needed. Despite everything⁶, I still managed to find beauty in every little thing. This whimsy wheezed its last breath around the age of fourteen, by which time I had so effectively hid parts of myself I thought other people would laugh at that I was unrecognizable to who I was before. But by some miracle⁷, it resurrected itself before I hit twenty, reappearing in glimpses and glimmers as I began the winding journey back to who I was before.

And thank god for that. I feel like every year since I turned nineteen⁸, I’ve slowly found parts of myself and sewn them back onto my once-failing body. There’s my love of rosy pinks and mauves, hiding behind the hedge; there’s my obsession with the solar system poking its head around the fence. There’s my joy at running my hands over a patch of moss, a tree’s bark, or a small, rough stone, hauling itself over the hill.

And there are my walls, crumbling around me, putting who I am back on display for the world to see. Only this time, it’s not catastrophic—it’s coming home.

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FOOTNOTES

¹ For reasons unknown to anyone at all (just kidding, it’s the autism), I have always been enamoured with house blueprints. We had a magazine full of elaborate floor plans, received from a walking tour we did of something called the Street of Dreams, which were the first five houses to go up on a mountain near where I live. I cannot tell you how many times I scoured them for some new detail or to calm my nervous system after a long day. I think, even now, I could draw them from memory.

² Funnily enough, I think I was most afraid that they would ask me about the layout I’d designed. I have always been excited by blueprints and floor plans, and so you can imagine the embarrassment a thirteen year old would feel, talking to people they think are cool, but unable to control their enthusiasm while explaining the structure and organization of a virtual house they’d built.

³ This has worked as well as you might imagine (it hasn’t).

⁴ Because it’s always done in front of other people, and they’re always smiling when they do it—and it’s entirely reminiscent of bullies acting for an audience.

⁵ Actually I’m not, and I’m going to be so for real with you: if you’re the kind of person who needs to call other people out on their differences to make themselves feel better (or you try to shame someone into being a certain way, like reading certain literature/etc.), I feel so bad for you. And I’m also going to make you feel just as uncomfortable as you’re trying to make me (or whoever it is you’re bullying! I don’t discriminate).

⁶ You know, The Horrors and all that. We don’t need to get into it.

⁷ By miracle, I mean the unending love and support of family and friends, and hitting rock bottom so solidly that there was nowhere to go but up.

⁸ My nineteenth birthday was the turning point for The Horrors. I’m still dealing with the effects of that time, but each year it gets a bit easier.

For once, February moved through in a blur. Usually it lingers, lasting a minimum of ninety days, but this year it’s lasted about ten. I’m not complaining—historically, February is my least favourite month, the last gasp of winter before spring makes its way around the bend.

I think part of the reason February flashed by was that, for the first three weeks of the month, I focused on a series on my youtube channel—called The Logbook, February 2026—which took up most of my time. And then the final week I buried myself in the second draft of a mystery novel which had been giving me trouble¹.

I will say, February wasn’t all bad: it’s when tangerine crocuses bloom in the back yard, and I’m able to move plants around² without fear of them not taking, and the neighbour’s garden is full of snowdrops. There were wind storms, too, one of my favourite things in the world, and lots of time spent with family and friends.

And then too there was a much-needed rest from social outings³, though to be honest, that’s going to continue into March as well. Plus plans for the future, storage situation overhauls, and redoing our bedroom in the most beautiful shade of blue I’ve ever seen.

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what February held:

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WATCHING It’s What’s Inside and Coherence, two sides of the same coin. Plus A Man on the Inside (I’m a Ted Danson convert), and a much sought after rewatch of The Thursday Murder Club.

LISTENING TO “My Regards” by Maisie Peters. That’s it. It’s on repeat.

READING The Lost Art of Mixing, Erica Bauermeister’s second novel, and The Man Who Died Twice, the second book in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. I also read Erica Bauermeister’s House Lessons, which has made me want to renovate an old house even more.

THINKING ABOUT spring planting. On Friday my grandma and I planted seeds to put under her new grow light, but I want to be out in the sun and the dirt! At least it’s March now.

EXPERIENCING a renewed love for herbal tea, and a desire to go to bed earlier. I think this winter aged me.

• peach tea

• thick socks

• waking with the sunrise

• periwinkle

• tapered candles

• seaside mysteries

• wind storms

• garlic chicken soup

• rosemary

• acrylic paint

• tangerine crocuses

• doing it myself

If you like my writing, you may want to check out my blog, which lives in the broader bog of the internet. There you’ll find more in-depth and personal posts about everything from writing, to gardening, to notes on living simply with the seasons. It’s very much a blog circa 2005, so if that’s your thing, hop on over to check that pond out!

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog. A few I’d like to highlight this month include:

—Nothing matters as much as you think it does

—Finishing the first draft on a snow-filled evening

—Physical gardening records & the first signs of spring

—Finding water & first drafts

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• A blanket of snowdrops covering the neighbour’s lawn

• Lying in bed at night, listening to the wind batter the side of the house

• Digging through my tea cupboard and finding a forgotten box of lavender tea

• Redoing the cover for Salt Bones, something I’ve wanted to do since I published it last year

• Getting another tattoo, despite the fact I got one at the end of January (whoops)

• Drinking coffee and talking with my grandparents, as always

• Finishing the first draft of a novel that had been rattling around in my brain for years

• Finishing the second draft of a novel I had struggled with where to take in autumn

• Making homemade chicken noodle soup with ungodly amounts of garlic (and miso paste)

• Feeling at peace with decisions about work and life—more to come on this, likely on my blog

• Finally repainting our bedroom and being wholly obsessed with the new colour

• Taking a week off from social gatherings to reset my fried brain

• Franklin cuddles at night, and on the couch, and at my computer. Endlessly my favourite part of having such a creature in the house

• Impromptu family dinners followed by absolutely ridiculous games of Uno

• Melting hunks of dark chocolate into milk heated in our new steamer

• All the new buds on the trees when I go for walks in the afternoon

• An evening spent painting pottery with C’s mom, which was lovely indeed!

• Reducing my burgeoning mend/sew pile by about a third

• Cleaning out a corner of the garage for an exciting new project—also more to come

• Donating a bunch of things I wasn’t using anymore, making the house feel lighter

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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FOOTNOTES

¹ I could not figure out how everything tied together, but having left it alone for a few months while I worked on another novel, I found that when I returned I had all the answers. Fun how that happens, isn’t it.

² I moved a bunch of Siberian wallflower from the front yard to the back. It was first a surprise flower back in 2018, and I’ve been looking for seeds ever since. We had some in the front yard last year and it multiplied to the point of taking over. Now, the back yard will be blanketed in it too!

³ December and January are often so full of social engagements that by February I’m more than ready to hibernate. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen until the last week of February this year, so I see myself staying in my cave a while into March, too.

1. This poem by Rita Dove:

2. February 4, 2026: Spent most of the day filming and then editing for youtube, but found pockets of time to stand outside and stare at the sky, something I’m trying to do more often. Ate fettuccine alfredo, drank strong coffee, read by the light of the window until the sun began to go down.

3. This note from February 5th:

   

4. These quotes by Natalie Goldberg:

“I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.”

“In writing practice, there’s no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.”

“Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.”

5. This artwork by Georgia O’Keefe:

6. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Julia Cameron’s autobiography, Floor Sample, and have been surprised at how raw it is. When I read The Artist’s Way a couple years ago, I had no idea this positive, motivational person had been so far down in the depths of her own life at one point. It helped, too, that we’ve shared paths, both professionally and personally—it’s making my current read of her workbook, Finding Water, all the more impactful.

7. These photos of our bedroom & its fresh coat of paint (Franklin approved):

8. This note from February 7th:

9. February 16, 2026: The only word I can use to describe today’s feeling is wrong, though this likely has to do with inevitable cycles than anything else. Once the house was clean, I ate a bowl of french onion soup while reading newsletters that have piled up, then spent the afternoon working on the second to last chapter for my first draft. The end is near…

10. These horoscopes from February 6th and 15th:

11. “My Regards” by Maisie Peters. Stuck in my head for weeks now, and I don’t want it to leave.

12. I’m also reading Julia Cameron’s Finding Water, and this week’s chapter talks about friendship and support in our creative work. Cameron talks about how we need support from others in order to be the best writers/artists/creatives we can be, and part of that is listening when they tell us that our work is on the right track (and also listening when they say something isn’t working). I used to be terrible with both praise and criticism, to the point I didn’t share my work with anyone. Now, though, I’m finding it easier to hear it all, both the good and the bad. I guess this is what progress feels like!

13. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from “Small Ceremonies” by Carol Shields, flipped open at random:

“Her voice rocked with such mourning that I felt I must accept. From the roof of my mouth a small scream escaped, saying ‘yes please.’”

Historically, January is one of my favourite months, a time to draw inward and think about the year to come. January also often sees snow, though this year it was noticeably absent, which makes me wish for spring all the more.

But January blew in, warm and grey, trumpeter swans announcing the arrival of the new year just past midnight. Since then, the days have fused, a carousel of reading, writing, and sewing, with the occasional birthday party in between¹.

By design January was a solitary month—birthdays aside—and now that I’m coming to the end of it, I find myself longing for small ways to connect with others. Most of the month was spent writing the first draft of a new novel which, by the time you read this, will be just about done.

It was also a month of dreaming. The first seeds won’t be planted indoors until late March, and yet I’ve created lists of seeds: seeds that I saved last year, seeds that I’ll order online soon, seeds that, given the proper conditions, I would grow in a heartbeat².

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what January held:

Lately I’ve been:

WATCHING a couple new and exciting things! I found a six-part documentary called Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Klein which was amazing. I also started watching Nigel Slater: Eating Together, and got all the way through River Cottage Forever. So, a lot of British television (I wouldn’t have it any other way).

LISTENING TO strangely, not much! I’ve stopped putting music on in the car for the most part—not because I don’t enjoy listening to music, but because I’ve been needing a lot more quiet as of late. Still slowly working my way through Witchy Woman Walking, though!

READING sooo many good books. I’ve recently re-read The School of Essential Ingredients, and have begun (again) Joy for Beginners, both by Erica Bauermeister, and both of which are by far two of my favourite books now. I also read Nigel Slater’s memoir, A Thousand Feasts, as well as the first two novels in the Midsomer Murders series.

THINKING ABOUT gardening, more than anything. We had a few unseasonably warm days and it was hard for me not to get to work! Otherwise, thinking about the book I’m writing—I’m nearly done the first draft, and I already know what I’ll do in the second and third.

EXPERIENCING a rediscovered love of smoked gouda cheese and cravings for miso soup. Plus, enjoying the sun coming through the windows, even if it is freezing outside.

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Lately I’ve been loving balsamic salt and vinegar chips; watching birds go in and out of the cedar hedge; soft pinks; homemade ginger turmeric shots; beeswax melts; longer days; zinnias of all colours; rich golds; vibrant sunsets; wind rushing through the pines.

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog, as well as on my youtube channel. A few I’d like to highlight this month include:

—Finding my way back

—Thirty-three: becoming weirder, centering writing, and using the good candles

—January is the month of hitting word counts (a writing update)

—Blue poppies, wheat, and pickled radishes; dreaming of the spring planting season

Today’s poem is “Torn” by Ada Limón. A line I loved:

“longing for life back as a whole, wanting

you to see it for what it is”

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• Hearing trumpeter swans fly over the house at midnight on New Year’s

• On warmer days, pulling weeds from the back vegetable beds, getting my small dose of gardening for the month

• The heron feather my aunt brought along to my birthday dinner, which now lives in the feather jar above my desk

• Said birthday dinner: eating, talking, and laughing around the table with the people I love

• Finding turmeric root at the market (really didn’t think I’d find it) and making homemade ginger turmeric shots

• The way the cedar hedges outside the kitchen window light up as the sun begins to set

• Eating the last bits of my dark chocolate orange, left over from Christmas

• Spending more time on cooking and viewing it as something to enjoy, rather than something that needs done (reverting to how I used to view it!)

• Researching the seeds that I’ll plant as soon as I’m able

• Doing a deep clean of the kitchen, long overdue

• Getting a third moth tattooed on my leg (!!)

• Finding joy in making videos again (because I figured out what I didn’t like about it and cut that out)

• Celebrating six years with my love and eating the most incredible parmesan fries

• Finding a crocus teacup at a thrift store that reminded me of my grandma

• Baking a plum spice cake to use up some of the fruit in the freezer

• Visiting Fort Langley with my mum and finding four of the Nancy Drew books I still needed for my collection

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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FOOTNOTES

¹ In my family, January is the month of celebrating, even more so than December. In our small family circle, there are four birthdays, spread out over two weeks. Add to this extended family and friends, and there are around fifteen birthdays to acknowledge. It’s quite the time!

² When we went to Alaska last May, I saw blue poppies growing in someone’s yard. I’ve since researched, and while they could be grown in zone 8b, they can be quite finicky (they prefer a maximum of zone 7). So, I think I’ll just keep dreaming, considering how hot our summers are now growing.

1. This poem¹ by John Newlove:

2. December 30, 2026: a quiet day with little to do. Drank two cups of coffee in the morning, then read on the old orange chair for an hour or so. Tidied the kitchen, made a pot of turkey soup, went for a walk when the rains cleared in the evening. Thought about endings and beginnings.

3. These quotes by Virginia Woolf:

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

― Virginia Woolf

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

4. I realized the other day that I haven’t written a poem since sometime early last year. I had been so caught up getting Salt Bones off the ground, and then working on fiction projects, that I hadn’t made space for poetry. I also think I hadn’t felt the need—often, poems come when I’m trying to figure something out, and life has been straightforward (read: uneventful) in the past year. I’m trying to decide if this is a good thing or not.

5. These photos of my office in the late afternoon sun²:

6. These horoscopes, for January 17th and my birthday, respectively:

7. January 16, 2026: an unseasonably warm day for January. Coffee with a friend, then on to my grandparents’ house. Grandpa was working in the yard, his jacket hung over the back of the rock wall; grandma was in the basement, going through her fabric stash. When we drank coffee at the kitchen table, we talked about birds, about zinnias, about people aging and becoming unrecognizable.

8. This screenshot³ from my notes app:

9. Lately I’ve been thinking about just how much I enjoy writing these little letters to you, and in all their forms (blog posts, field notes, the monthly archive, the logbook), I can’t seem to choose one that I enjoy above the others. They’re all unique in their way, and all bring joy in different forms—I’m taking this as a good sign.

10. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from “Summer Solstice” by George Bowering, found within 15 Canadian Poets x2:

“The grass needs cutting, part of it

is yellow, it is dying of starvation, hell

it will be back next year, somewhere

else, & so will we, will we?”

FOOTNOTES

¹ This happens to be one of my favourite poems of all time, and I couldn’t tell you why. I first read it in 15 Canadian Poets x2 after picking a copy up at the local thrift store. I found it by flipping the book open at random and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

² Listen, I know it’s not good for the planet to be this warm in January, but it’s still nice to have a bit of sun streaming through the windows after months of cloud and rain. I do love stormy weather, but I’m also a gardener, and sun makes me think of everything I’ll be planting in the coming months.

³ I made this little legend up for my weather scarf. At first there was a five degree span, but now there’s only four; the way it was before, I didn’t think I’d hit red or orange all that often, and that made me sad.

This morning, December 31st, is the first day we’ve had any real show of winter this year. It’s just past ten and the roofs across the street are still thick with frost, and the mountains across the valley have a thin dusting of snow. Still no snow here, unfortunately, and I find myself dreaming once again of moving somewhere where winter feels like a real season.

It’s strange to say I’m writing this the day before it arrives in your inbox. I am, by nature, the kind of person who gets things done weeks or months in advance—to the point that, by the time I post, I’ve already moved on to new experiences or ideas, leaving what I’ve written feeling like an echo.

I’m inclined to say that I’ve gotten worse at planning ahead in the past couple months, but that’s not quite true. It’s more that I no longer feel the urgency to get things done far before they need to be, at least in some areas of my life. I don’t like the feeling of being down to the wire, but when it comes to posting on here or my blog, it doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This could be for any number of reasons, but I’m choosing to believe that 2025 has taught me to slow down and to not worry about being ahead of the game (in more areas than one). The pressure I’ve felt the past few years to exist fully in online spaces has fallen away, and I’m left with joy for posting once more. Being online is supposed to be fun; it’s not supposed to make you want to turn away from it.

With the year coming to an end, this is just one of the ideas lurking in my mind right now. Today’s newsletter will be a regular monthly archive, but if you’re looking for more year-in-review content, I’ve written a New Year’s Eve post on my blog. This also feels like a good time to say: if you haven’t already been following along on my blog, take a look! Substack is more like a monthly roundup, while my blog is a more personal, in-depth look into the corners of my life.

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what December held:

Lately I’ve been:

WATCHING lots of Midsomer Murders, of course! But I also rewatched Hot Fuzz (easily my favourite movie), and a few holiday classics: The Muppet Christmas Carol, Klaus, and Arthur Christmas.

LISTENING TO Florence Road, particularly “Heavy” and “Miss,” as well as “My Manic and I” by Laura Marling. Incidentally, Alas I Cannot Swim is quickly becoming one of my new favourite albums.

READING The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham, and it’s a crime it’s taken me this long to get to it (Midsomer Murders is based on this series). Also just finished The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and loved it!

THINKING ABOUT gardening, unfortunately. If it’s not going to snow, I’m going to dream about what I’ll be planting this coming season. Also thinking about coffee (how do you find your favourite kind when there are so many?), pine-scented perfume, and scoliosis (there is a reason for this).

EXPERIENCING joy from the moments of sun this winter brings; joy from wearing a sweater I knit myself; joy from the holidays being over—so full of love, but I am a creature of solitude.

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Lately I’ve been loving cedar-scented incense; Irish creme coffee in the afternoon; watching chickadees and dark-eyed juncos out the back door; vintage upholstery fabric; grandpa slippers; brown ink pens; rich golds and browns; waking with the sun; sweet apple perfume.

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog. A few I’d like to highlight this month include:

—New Year’s Eve, 2025

—Softening into the season: gifts from the kitchen & Yule celebrations

—Looking ahead to the new year: waking with the sun & writing like Hemingway

—The last of the garden cleanup & plans for next spring

I also started a series on instagram called At My Table, where I post a little video of what I’m working on—unsurprisingly, at my kitchen table. You can watch the latest one here.

Today’s poem is “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (one I’m sure we all already know and love). A line I loved:

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• A full few days of holiday celebrations, which felt especially festive this year

• Spending hours in the kitchen with my sister, baking up a storm

• Finishing knitting the amethyst sweater, and moving on to the coffee sweater

• Beans brought home from my dad’s coffee plant; I’ll be figuring out how they best grow in the coming days

• Repainting the yellow wall in our living room; it fits so much better than the previous shade

• And then repainting the shelf in the kitchen the same colour as the wall—again, a much better fit

• Finding an exceptionally perfect upholstery fabric, covered in old houses, at the thrift store

• Sewing a massive tote bag out of another vintage upholstery fabric

• Waking up and seeing a dusting of snow on the shed out back (even though I’d like to see about a foot more)

• Buying a bullet journal to turn into an offline reading archive—I’m very excited to spend the next few days setting it up

• Building a puzzle with my mum while the wind rages outside

• Eating grandma’s homemade cheesecake, brought home after Christmas dinner

• A new tarot deck, painted by the author of my favourite book

• My new turkey socks, which I will be wearing as often as possible

xoxoxox,

Catherine

1. This poem by Kayla Czaga, published in PRISM international:

2. December 11, 2025: Woke late and drove to my grandparents’ home not long after rolling out of bed. Baked gingersnaps and shortbread with grandma while grandpa chopped wood behind the barn. Later, sat on the back step and watched the rain come down, then went inside to finish knitting a scarf; snow geese flew by the window at dusk.

3. These quotes from Adrienne Rich:

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”

“Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”

“To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.”

4. For a long time, I’ve had a tenuous relationship with art, and I’m finally at the point where I’m sick of saying I’m going to create and then I don’t. My pastels are out on my desk, and once I’ve finished writing this, I’m going over there to draw something. [A note from later: I drew figs & pomegranates, and am now kicking myself for avoiding making art the past few years].

5. A look at my year ahead, as told by my horoscope:

6. A little writing update: the past few days have been busy, but as of writing this, I’m just past 20,000 words on my new novel. Over the next few days, I have little else I need to do, and so I’m looking forward to having a good amount of time to plow ahead. I’m aiming to have the first draft done by the end of January!

7. This notes app entry from December 4, 2025:

8. A friend from a past life, someone who’s known the worst sides of me, came for dinner late last week. He, my mom, my sister, and I had a wonderful dinner together and talked late into the evening. I always find it strange to reconnect with people who knew me before—who may have known me better than I knew myself back then—when I struggled to be a human. He’s also seen me at nearly every stage of my life, from early teens to mid-twenties to now—it’s a strange feeling to be known in this deep way.

9. These festive photos of Frank and Theo, taken throughout the month:

10. December 19, 2025: Slow morning drinking coffee and flipping through one of Natalie Goldberg’s books on painting. Then to the grandparents’ home with Jane, and on to Michaels—yarn for the weather scarf, at least the first few months, is bought. At Oldhand: talk of analog media, reading more & logging our thoughts offline, and owls.

11. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, flipped open at random:

“My parents couldn’t understand what was going on. They behaved like people who had been struck by lightning.”

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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As I’m writing this, flood sirens blare just across the border in Sumas. It’s been raining heavily for days and the Nooksack River overflowed its banks several hours ago, a replication of four years past. An evacuation order has been given for thousands of people in the US; just across the border in Canada, nearly 1,000 properties are on alert.

When the floods hit in 2021, I remember someone saying:

“Why are you so worried? This doesn’t affect you.”

I think what they were trying to say is that it doesn’t directly affect me, and they’re right—I didn’t have to leave my home, or worry that I’d have a home to come back to. But whether we like to admit it or not, we’re all connected to others in our community. And so when something like this happens—flooding, or forest fires, or any other large-scale environmental event—those who aren’t in the weeds still worry for their neighbours.

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November was, if nothing else, a short blur gunning toward the end of the year. I know a lot happened, but most of it is a smudge; the last thing I really remember is Halloween, walking around the houses with my sister and niece, the rain coming down in sheets. And so I find it hard to believe that it’s December today, that 2025 is on its way out.

The thing is, I know I did something—lots of somethings, as it would appear. I worked on my novel, did some editing on my next poetry book. I planted a second crop of garlic, watched horror films with friends, celebrated my grandparents’ birthdays. I also knit an entire sweater, a few chickens, and a scarf, along with starting a second sweater. And yesterday, the sun shining bright, I saw two birds at the bird sanctuary I’ve never seen: a belted kingfisher and a double-crested cormorant.

Autumn is stunning with its crimson leaves and earthy smell, the rest of the garden wilting away, but I am unequivocally a winter girl—give me frost on the rooftops in the morning and wind battering against the house long into the night. A few days ago, I found myself running between my car and the house, the wind so cold it bit through my jacket, and in that moment I felt more joy than I had in weeks.

It wasn’t that November was bad; it’s that, all year, I long for the time when I can wear thick sweaters and make pot after pot of soup. Snow wouldn’t hurt either, though we’ve never had enough of it where I live to suit me. If I had it my way, I’d live somewhere north, where the first snow falls early November, and the grass doesn’t reappear until spring.

Maybe it’s because I was born in January, or maybe I’m just wired to long for the cold and the dark. Whatever it is, I feel myself relaxing now: winter is almost here.

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what November held:

Lately I’ve been:

WATCHING Weapons, twice in one week. I love horror movies, especially when they’re unique (and not a remake—I’m tired of remakes). As always, I’ve also been watching Midsomer Murders while I knit.

LISTENING TO a lot of MCR, as I usually do in October/November. Plus Florence’s new album, some old Mitski, and old Regina Spektor, too. For podcasts, I’m still working through older episodes of Witchy Woman Walking—I love everything she has to say.

READING Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford, which was a ride. Also re-read Savannah Brown’s Closer Baby Closer and Margaret Roach’s And I Shall Have Some Peace There. It’s been a bit of a month of returning to well-loved classics.

THINKING ABOUT snow—it’s the time of year where I start dreaming of it. Also thinking about what I’ll plant in the garden next spring (I’m hoping to try my hand at wheat), and whether I should build an art shed or not.

EXPERIENCING cold fingers, cold toes; it’s the time of year where I lose all circulation to my extremities. And then excitement; things that have been keeping me busy (and away from my writing) are coming to an end.

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Lately I’ve been loving warm browns; licorice tea; gingerbread cookies and loaves; lamps with orange lighting; the tinsel garlands wrapped around our curtain rods in the living room; holographic stickers; decaf coffee after dinner; watching the mountains across the valley.

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog, as well as on my youtube channel. A few I’d like to highlight this month include:

—Holiday crafts & the best kind of problem

—It’s ok if people don’t like you

—Showing up as myself & making art again

—No longer in the mountain’s shadow

Today’s poem is “Family Members” by Margaret Avison. A line I loved:

“shaped to cumber

the sundance waters or

the still angora mists of dawn.”

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• Coffee and cake on the farm for grandpa’s birthday

• Seeing a tree on my drive home from the library that had every colour of leaf—crimson, amber, burnt orange, lime all together

• Spooky movie night with the gang, rewatching a new favourite

• Finishing an autumnal-coloured sweater I’ve been working on since mid-October

• Starting a new sweater using the same yarn, but in an amethyst colour

• Finishing my fiction course !!

• Decorating our home for Christmas with handmade, thrifted, and vintage decorations

• Finding vintage, dark gold towel racks at the thrift store and putting them up the next day

• Additionally, picking out paint colours for the bathroom that will look good with the new towel racks

• Seeing birds I’ve never seen (!!) at the local bird sanctuary, along with about a thousand ducks

• Planting a second round of garlic so that I’ll have two harvests next summer

• Seeing the evergreen tree lit up downtown

• Finding a book at the thrift store that feels so true to who I am as a person that it feels as though it was written about me

• Meeting a large orange cat on one of my late evening walks

• Making pumpkin buns with the pumpkin my grandma and I canned last month

• Starting to make handmade Christmas presents for family and friends

• Feeling, for the first time in a long time, settled in my future and what I’m working toward

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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1. This poem by Anne Carson:

2. Lately I’ve been thinking about how much time alone I need, while also trying to balance the guilt that comes along with saying no to plans. I’m endlessly lucky to have the amount of wonderful people in my life that I do—I just don’t feel like I can keep up with everyone while balancing work/creative life/time alone/general adult things. Moving toward my 33rd birthday and wondering when I’ll get the balance right.

3. A couple photos of the farm, which I especially love during these darker days:

4. November 15, 2025: Went to the rock and gem show with the family; A won a large agate in a raffle and I bought myself corpse crystals, which are exactly what they sound like. Afterward, stopped by the farm to drink coffee and chat. Ate too many chocolates and spent the evening knitting.

5. Two particularly relevant horoscopes from November 9 & 13:

6. These quotes from Bell Hooks:

7. I saw/heard snow geese for the first time this year on November 14. I don’t know what it is about them—their size, or their discordant honks—but I’m absolutely feral over them. If I drive past them in a field I always pull over to listen and watch for a while. That day, though, they flew closer to the house than I’ve ever seen them fly before—closer than I’ve ever seen them in a field for sure!

8. November 19, 2025: One of those days where everything blends together and suddenly it’s past six in the evening and you’ve done about twenty different things. Some tasks of note: finishing up a drawing I’ve been working on; making caramelized onion pasta; figured out the order of poems for my next collection.

9. This notes app entry from November 12:

10. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from The Mountain Year by Chris Czajkowski, flipped open at random:

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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Hello dear readers,

I’m writing this to you from a coffee shop, as I often do. Outside rain comes down in sheets and wind blows wet leaves across the pavement. I am warm, and excited for what’s to come. I’ve made a few changes lately—or rather, I’m going back to who I was before.

Because of this, I wanted to try something a bit different today for paid subscribers. Instead of our usual mid-month post, I’ll be sharing a short essay I wrote as part of a larger collection—really, an extended diary entry (something a few of you will already be familiar with from me!).

It’s rough, but that’s the way I want to post it. I’m trying not to be too precious about my writing now, instead posting it as-is to capture the stream-of-consciousness flow that comes through process.

I hope you enjoy!

If you enjoy my work, please consider signing up for the paid newsletter, where you’ll gain access to additional essays, mini book reviews, behind the scenes photos, and diary entries, among other things. Founding members also receive digital copies of all my current and future books.

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Like many people I know, October is my favourite month. The trees lining the road are burning with crimson and amber, with marigolds adding to the fire. The sun is still around but the days are cooler, and if we’re lucky, we get torrential storms where wind buffets the house. And then there are the pumpkins, the last of the harvest coming in out of the cold. This year, a number of the sugar pumpkins were cooked and canned, an all-day project that took place in my grandma’s kitchen.

This October was better than most Octobers in recent memory, likely because I wasn’t up to my eyes in work. I had time to go on long, winding drives by the river and drink my coffee slowly while listening to the rain. I also had time to catch up on knitting and sewing projects, read leisurely during the evenings, and work on my novel.

As I write this, I’m drinking apple cider I made from apples picked with my grandpa last week. I’ve never made apple cider before, but it turned out perfect, not too sweet or too spicy (I don’t measure ingredients most of the time.. I don’t think I ever will!). But there are still dozens more apples, and so I’ll be cooking those down to make cider, too, which will be jarred and frozen to be enjoyed through the year.

And now, the rest of the newsletter. Here’s a little collection of what October held:

Lately I’ve been:

WATCHING Ludwig (2025–) which we burned through in just a few nights, as well as Shetland (2013–), which is an adaptation on Ann Cleeves’ Shetland novel series. Also, a few annual rewatches: The Ghost & Mr. Chicken (1966) which I’ve watched with my family every October since I was around seven years old, as well as Over the Garden Wall (2014), which I’ve watched every year since 2016.

LISTENING TO weirdly some old Sum 41, specifically their album Chuck (2004) which was a staple in childhood. Also entirely hooked on Witchy Woman Walking, a podcast that is equal parts witchy, self care, book recommendations, and f-bombs (so, you know, everything I love).

READING Twilight Falls, the fourth book in the Shady Hollow series, as well as A Song for Dark Times (Ian Rankin) and A Lesson in Dying (Ann Cleeves). Lots of mysteries and crime for October; exactly the way I like it.

THINKING ABOUT the mountains in the distance; how in a few weeks I’ll need to wear a coat anywhere I go, rather than getting by in just a sweater; how much I love my purple officer (painted in August, but still admiring it now).

EXPERIENCING so many headaches, but we persevere. Also living for the changing leaves, how cold the wind is, fuzzy socks, and sweaters. Franklin has taken to sitting on me while I’m at my computer, so to type I need to shift my body in such a way that my spine protests greatly. But I can’t complain!

If you enjoy my work, please consider signing up for the paid newsletter, where you’ll gain access to additional essays, mini book reviews, behind the scenes photos, and diary entries, among other things. Founding members also receive digital copies of all my current and future books.

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Lately I’ve been loving deep, earthy browns; earl grey tea; walks by the river; salt and vinegar chips; early bedtime; early to rise; reading diary-like nonfiction; fresh oranges; quiet, slightly spooky instrumental music; playing the piano in the middle of the day.

Since the last time we spoke, I’ve posted a number of times over on my blog. A few I’d like to highlight this month include:

—Amber rivers & turning toward light

—The first draft is done!

—Overloaded with pumpkins & a visiting mantis

—Autumn is here, a trip to the lake, and my first western grebe

Today’s poem is “Frances: Day by Day” by Arleen Paré. A line I loved:

“she / does not need to recall what was said / dreams recur and recur”

Franklin’s message for the month:

To cap off this newsletter, here are some of the things, I loved, noticed, or cherished lately:

• An absolutely transcendent cherry chocolate croissant, eaten while driving between the river and farmlands on the way home from a local historic town

• Franklin being the sweet, perceptive cat that he is, cuddling up to me when I need it most

• Delivering pumpkins down the road to our neighbour one dark evening

• Carving pumpkins with the family at the kitchen table after a roast dinner

• Watching Over the Garden Wall with two dear friends and a ton of snacks

• Finally finishing sewing the two dresses that have been languishing beside my machine for weeks

• And then promptly cutting out fifty year old wool fabric—bought by my grandma to make a coat for a friend in the ‘70s—to make a coat of my own

• Painting our front door a deep burgundy after talking about it for months

• The sky, split by a storm: one side near black, the other blue

• Spending an entire day in the kitchen with my grandma to can our sugar pumpkins

• Watching Scream (1996) alone with a big bowl of popcorn

• Making fettuccine alfredo at home, the way I was taught when I was a teenager

• Visiting my grandparents for my grandma’s birthday, and giving her the cardigan I knit for her

• Quitting caffeine, after a long struggle with it (at least hopefully.. check in next month to see if it stuck)

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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1. October 12, 2025: Had one of those days where you do one hundred little things: running errands, mending a dress, casting off a knitting project, hanging the marjoram up to dry. At the end I felt all the loose ends in my mind had been tied off. I call it closing tabs, like on a computer, exiting out of things you’ve finished or no longer need.

2. This poem by Marilyn Dumont:

3. I’m trying to get better at acknowledging my achievements, so here’s a word count update for you, in case you don’t read my blog (though I’d recommend it ♡). Last Thursday, I finished the first draft of my novel! It’s in rough shape, and I had the audacity to add another main character when I was almost done, so the next draft will be a lot of writing and rewriting. But the main story is done!

4. These quotes by Françoise Gilot:

5. This photo I took on October 13, 2025:

6. A conversation with a friend recently, where we were talking about our art process, turned into a conversation around creating in general. Through our conversation, I came to understand (again) that social media has skewed how I create in that, no matter what it is I’m doing—sewing, knitting, drawing—I feel like I need to share it online. But I don’t want to! There’s just the little gremlin voice in my head that tells me I should. I’m working quite hard to silence this voice, and slowly, I think it’s working.

7. October 19, 2025: Received a few rugs that my great-great-grandmother made; one sits in front of our side door, the other at my altar. Evening was a belated Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and roasted carrots. Finished knitting the red scarf that’s been haunting me all of October.

8. These sculptures by Louise Bourgeois:

9. This weekend we had the most rain we’ve had since last spring. I’m the kind of person who loves autumn and all that comes with it, so I had a lovely weekend knitting on the couch, listening to the rain on the roof. I find that the older I get, the more time I spend appreciating different weather patterns—I’m beginning to think I may actually be a ninety-year-old man in disguise. If only I had a porch to sit on.

10. This note I wrote myself on October 17, 2025:

11. Something that happened: we were at my grandparents’ home, drinking coffee after bringing the rest of the pumpkins in from the field. We were talking about ancestors, and what they leave behind, and my grandma showed me a burial shroud my great-great-grandma sewed for herself. On it was a handwritten note: “For my imminent burial.” You can guess from the fact that the shroud is still in my grandma’s possession that it did not, in fact, get used. Which is sad, but I can also see some humour in it.

12. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from Recovering by May Sarton, flipped open at random:

xoxoxox,

Catherine

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I’ve found myself drawing inward these past few weeks, if for no other reason than I was too unwell to leave the house. But autumn, for me, is always a period of rest and contemplation, often after a long, busy, and social summer season. The darker days and changing leaves bring with them time spent at home, preparing for the coming cold.

I’ve always loved the transition between seasons, but my favourite is when summer turns to autumn. The canning and drying is done (or just about) at this point, but I take my knit sweaters down from the high shelf in the closet, and pull the bin of quilts from under the bed. And then I organize my tea stash, moving spiced apple and licorice to the front and moving lemon and rose to the back. I also recently transferred my thick winter socks to an easily accessible drawer—which shouldn’t be as exciting as it is, but it gives you an idea of who I am.

If you enjoy my work, please consider signing up for the paid newsletter, where you’ll gain access to additional essays, mini book reviews, behind the scenes photos, and diary entries, among other things. Founding members also receive digital copies of all my current and future books.

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