2024.90
Even when things in my life are not great—I know that I don't have to chop wood. I don't have to plastic my windows. I don't need to worry about any real winter to speak of.
It's been a dark morning. Dark sky. I forgot it was supposed to rain this week. Rain in Santa Barbara still comes as a surprise to me. You forget it's something that happens and when it does, it feels like a huge bummer. My wife's amaryllises seem disappointed this morning too, blooming and waiting.
I know. Poor me. I get so much sun where I live that I forget it rains. I know a reader or two of this newsletter lives in Michigan. I can imagine they're rolling their eyes so hard right now. One of my favorite people lives in Chicago, and she calls me a "bougie baby". She's not wrong.
I haven't always been like this. Inside my heart, the way I look at the world, it's still a cold winter and my father has gotten us up at 6:30am on a Saturday to chop wood all day. The stove in the downstairs living room was the only thing we had to heat the entire two-story Kansas farmhouse. We put up plastic around the windows every winter to help hold heat in. Some nights, instead of sleeping upstairs, we'd sleep in front of the stove.
I think there is a very real core inside me defined by shit like that. Even when things in my life are not great—I know that I don't have to chop wood. I don't have to plastic my windows. I don't need to worry about any real winter to speak of. Everything else is filtered through that lens. I feel like I'm seeing roses all the time.
And yet.
