Sun on my hands. A dog in my lap. Warm tea to offset the chilly breeze. I don’t normally sit outside in January. It feels like a treat.

The yard is in disarray. The solar lights list more with every freeze/thaw cycle. The garden gnome’s mushroom is indoors awaiting repairs. I never managed to bring all the terracotta pots in either. In some ways, 2024 was a year of getting behind. But in others, it was one of growth.

I’m looking forward to the spring. But being here now is good too.

The tap of rain against the window, my mother-in-law’s voice drifting up from downstairs. The soundscape of this house in Frisco is so different from the one I’m used to at home. Today was 12 hours in the car. The next leg will be even longer. Brian and I read to each other and watched the landscape change. We have done this trip at least once a year for a decade. It never stops feeling surreal to me that we can do this. We can sit still for an entire day and end up over 800 miles from where we started.

Forgotten shapes emerge as the seasons change. The branching pattern of the sycamore’s limbs assets itself as the rust-toned leaves fall away. With the collapse of the ferns, our back yard is huge. I walk along the ledge of railroad ties and look at the pattern of ice that has formed at the base of the heap of stones in the way back. In the side yard of a neighbor’s house, a wrought-iron chair that was lost in green foliage all summer is now encased in a twisted snarl of dry yellow fibers. On the other side of the window, our potted basil presses itself against the glass and blooms.

Ice on the window. The view is wobbly. My husband’s feet crunch as he moves down the sidewalk.

This weather is unlike anything I experienced in my desert childhood. In Arizona where I grew up, nothing frozen ever fell from the sky. But sometimes I would check my horse’s water in the morning and find a thin coating of ice on top. I would lift the round sheet out and drop it onto the sand outside the corral. If I left it in the shade, sometimes the cracked pieces would still be lying there when I came back to feed in the evening. This always struck me as remarkable.

I remind myself of miracles. Glass that lets the sunlight spill into my house. Art on the walls. The warmth I can turn on and off with a tap on a screen. The colorful ceramic mug, shaped by the hands of someone I never met. The dark brew inside made of beans grown half a world away, shipped here and roasted while still fresh enough to release the flavor I enjoy so much.

It is so much easier to attend to our sorrows. But joy is here too.

I have a collection of tiny bird’s nests. Each specimen is impossibly delicate, weighs next to nothing, and tucks easily into my palm. They are remarkable in many respects. But I keep them because they are colorful. The birds that made them wove strands of white and black are red and brown in among the grass and twigs.

We tend to find these nests near the winter lot in the early summer. The white fibers came from Steen’s mane and tail. Roland and Fitz provided the red and brown. Although three of our horses have black hair, I like to think those strands came from Arlo.

I don’t know what kind of bird makes these nests. I don’t know the color of the diminutive eggs that incubated and hatched in these soft woven cradles. But I like to think of the young birds that will return when it’s there turn to build. I hope they find plenty of new material to work with.

The season’s first snow is falling. Soft and gentle, it brings to mind our first days in our home. I remember stepping into this living room. I have never been so relieved to unlock a door. We’d spent the four previous months renting an apartment in a basement because the house we’d live in for over a decade was rendered uninhabitable in a severe weather event. We were only homeless for a few days and our good friends were happy to take us in. Still, the experience is not one I will forget.

It was sunny and mild the day we moved. The snow came just after we got settled. Big, generous drifts filled the driveway and heaped on the eaves. We unpacked. We relaxed. We basked in the quiet. It’s been four years but I’ve never stopped feeling grateful for the roof over my head.

A pattern fills my window. The enormous leaves of the sycamore are soft black cutouts in a silvery-blue sky. Dawn is only a blush of color above the eaves of the neighbors’ house.

The leaves shift in the early morning breeze. My field of vision becomes a living textile.

Ligatures make me happy. I’m not sure why. I suppose it’s something to do with connection. Certain letters only change when they are placed next to each other.

I love seeing how different typefaces tackle the question. There is the obvious way to join some pairings, like f and i, because elements clash without some kind of shift.

But discretionary ligatures are my favorite. These are characters that don’t have to adapt for reasons of machinery or even legibility. These glyphs choose to merge. They do it because it’s more interesting to adapt to the person next to you than to stand alone in an unchanging shape.

*The E and N in my logo are an example of a discretionary ligature.

The furnace kicks off and the tick of the clock reasserts itself. The tiny callouses at the edges of my fingers are slightly sore as I press the keys. This is because I typed over 2,000 words today.

I haven’t been writing like that lately. I am out of shape.