. . . But today we shall eat ice cream.

We’re expecting snow on Sunday — our first real accumulation in two years. The forecast keeps fluctuating for how much we’re going to get (the current forecast is hovering around four inches, but no one is ruling out a foot, as of yet), but they’ve all agreed snow will stick to the ground in some quantity.

I am excited; I am, after all, a New England girl, and it’s hard to believe winter is here if snow never falls.

Living in a city, the day of snowfall is a magical thing. The number of cars on the road drops significantly (that’s actually what the first couple weeks of the pandemic reminded me of, because of how much traffic was reduced), and it actually gets quiet. Anyone who is afraid of getting wet or freezing stays indoors, leaving the outside world for those who find winter precipitation joyful. And we do flock out, no matter the hour, drawn by the glitter falling from the sky.

Admittedly, the days after snowfall is less joyful, with far too sidewalks shoveled and snow on the side of the road turning yellow and grey by degrees.

But for the first 24 hours, we can hold on to the beauty. And maybe this year, this winter, that’s enough.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Time in person with friends.

2. After the Christmas tree is removed, my usually crowded living room seems spacious.

3. The wall calendar from our alma mater finally arrives. (Rudi also got a calendar as a gift from a friend, so we’ll have two this year.)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

One of the things I’d like to work on in the first half of the year is to account for and decide what to do with the large number of knitting projects I have scattered around the Burrow in half-finished states.

Here we have Smock Madness, started nearly two years ago. This looks like a pretty easy project to power through in the next few days in order to have our first finished object of the year.

Jane Austen adaptations are also great ways to start the year, and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors was one of my favorites a couple years back. To see that Dev had planned a loose version of all six Austen novels centering around the same extended California clan was really intriguing. I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the Raje family.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

Every few years, I fall down a stupid rabbit hole of googling people I grew up with. I have refused to join Facebook for the very reason of not wanting to be in contact with most of them, so I can’t really give you a good reason for why I do it.

I grew up in a large, mostly white town that skewed conservative at the time. It’s purportedly gotten more liberal since I moved away, but its current Republican mayor was first elected when I was 10.

While Karen and I have stayed friends since our high school days, I mostly let everyone else go pretty early on. We (just) predated the internet and it was easy to drift apart as people left for college. As time has gone on, I’ve kept the distance intentionally, although Karen sometimes shares updates about people we both knew. There was just too much rampant conservatism and casual racism from what I remembered (and what Karen shared about her Facebook interactions) to want to welcome that back into my life.

So, why then do I torture myself by looking up the people I grew up with?

I had a drink with a girl I’d grown up with back before our tenth high school reunion. She had come back to attend; I lived nearby but wasn’t going. I asked her why she wanted to bother and she said that she really hoped that some of the people we’d grown up with had escaped.

I’m a little more forgiving now in middle age than I was in my 20s, but I suppose it comes down to exactly that. I check up on them because in the end I want them to have lived happy lives and to have had horizons that expanded beyond the narrow experience we grew up with.

And just often enough, I discover that one of them has.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten authors I discovered (and liked) in 2020. Easy, since nearly two-thirds of last year’s books were written by authors I’d never read before!

1. Kate Racculia
2. T.J. Klune
3. Talia Hibbert
4. Amy Stewart
5. Jerry Craft
6. Beth O’Leary
7. Quan Barry
8. Mira Jacob
9. K. Eason
10. Virginia Kantra

How about you? Any new-to-you authors you loved last year?