Happy Solstice <3

home for the holidays

I love the practice of honoring the solstices and equinoxes; they are like beats in a rhythm, one of earth’s metrics for keeping time through the seasons. Sunlight will predictably starting waxing tomorrow, which I find comforting, but on the shortest day of the year I am feeling nostalgic.

I’ve been home for a week now and staying in my little brother’s bedroom until his return tonight. Years ago, before it was Conrad’s room, it was mine. His Sci-Fi novels now line the desk and his sketches are tacked up around the mirror, but the dresser in the corner once bore the weight of my clothes. The walls are grey, but they used to be yellow. Sunlight still catches the dust and dog hair that move through the air by the south facing window in the afternoon, and at night I tuck myself underneath a heavy comforter because the room is drafty and the radiator needs bleeding.

I started a new knitting project. Not a noteworthy development, but once again I am pleasantly reminded of knitting’s ability to get myself out of a state of stagnancy. The rhythm of it calms my nervous system. Creating something with my hands gives me traction and acts as indisputable truth that I did something today. Some kind of progress.

I’ve been in a rut, on the writing front but the emotional one too. Maybe it’s sleeping in the room that held me when I was small, or returning home being a blunt reminder of life here moving forward with or without me, or perhaps it’s just my luteal phase, but I’ve been grumpy. Earlier this week I couldn’t sleep, so I rearranged my brother’s bedroom at 11:30pm. An attempt to control my environment. Nesting to feel some type of grounded in order to find rest, like how animals circle their sleep spot before they settle in. I moved the big pieces of furniture slowly, quietly to avoid waking my parents down the hall. In the morning, when the room had filled with weak winter light, I felt better.

I finished my first semester of grad school, which probably has something to do with the uptick in my knitting production. After imposing a harsh daily writing goal upon myself in November, my novel now feels like a tangled mess of plot lines lacking both confidence and direction. As an attempt to go easy on myself once December arrived, I chose to commit my time to reading a 945 page novel instead of forcing myself to churn out more words. I read Lonesome Dove in ten days, and now I am sub-consciously equating my novel’s progress to a horseback journey from southern Texas to northeastern Montana. I’m exhausted and I’ve only made it to San Antonio.

The days pass quickly at home. I’ve reverted to the routine I kept for almost a year before I moved to New York, and, like a mirror, it’s showing me morsels of the person I am now. It turns out this person is different from the one who left here in early August. It’s easy to be this new person in Brooklyn, where she is an anonymous student. But at home I am confronted by all the different versions of myself that once lived here and the people who knew each one.

In 2025, I will write my way to northeastern Montana. Progress is rarely linear, except when knitting, and I am no stranger to the unpredictable terrain of identifying the pathways to my inspiration. Sometimes I have to pause, notice, absorb, and knit something before I can pack up camp and continue my journey north.

As the year comes to a close, I am remembering the things about 2024 that felt sweet, and I will keep them close as I turn towards 2025.

Here’s to longer days, friends.

xo