Three Things from Finally Home
Routine! Routine! Piggy!
What I’m Writing…
After five weeks away I am happy to be home and on a tight writing schedule. Well, tightish. Which means that some time between 10 and 11 I leave our cozy apartment, buy a NYT, and get breakfast at our local diner, The Bus Stop.
I am a creature of habit, except when I’m zipping all over the place, and I like to read actual books and newspapers. Am I the only person who misses the way the ink on the NYT used to smudge all over your hands?
This also means I always order pretty much the same thing: a ham and cheese omelette or, if it’s closer to lunchtime, a turkey club with extra mayo and well done fries. Thus fed, I walk the half mile to the Jefferson Market Library. After my bed, it is my favorite place to write.
No phones, no sounds of construction from the apartment below. Just me and my novel for two or three blissful hours.
Believe it or not, we are leaving town again in a couple of weeks, so my focus is on revisions, revisions, revisions. The poet William Matthews said that revisions aren’t cleaning up after the party; they are the party. So I’m here partying like crazy!
Remembering things like smudged newspapers, how about when we had to type everything, including entire novels?
My friend Glenn recently sent me this…
The first page of my first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, mostly written on a beat up oak table in my apartment on Bleecker Street.
Compare the first line from the original and the published book!
Next year is its fortieth anniversary. It has been re-issued three more times. Above, its original, gorgeous title. Unbelievable!
And look at where the reading was! I’ve been going there for more than forty years!
What I’m Knitting…
When I leave the library every afternoon, I come back home and knit. My 2-2-2 routine is both productive and comforting. Write for two hours, knit for two hours, read for two hours.
And yes, it’s still all about Sophie scarves.
I just bought yarn for three more: Bright Iris, Rosebud Pink, and Deep Pansy.
They make the best gifts and are truly the most soothing knitting (whilst watching Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette).
Have you read Lucy Caldwell’s novel These Days? If not, please do. It’s about an Irish family during the Belfast Blitz in WW II. My book recommendations are in my darling husband’s newsletter Michael Ruhlman as The Promiscuous Reader, but I bring up Caldwell’s book because I learned a great new word in it: tricoteuse. Historically, they were women who sat and knit while watching executions during the French Revolution! Dutiful logophile that I am, I marked it in my trusty black and white composition notebook. Now I’m trying to figure out how to use it in a sentence three different times, as my seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Gibney, had us do so we “would never forget our new words.”
Another fun knitting fact: look at these Irish stamps:
No wonder I love Ireland so! And if you do too, or if you’ve always wanted to visit Ireland, join me and Suzanne Strempek Shea, Luis Alberto Urrea, Madeleine Blaise, and more, plus Irish writers Mia Gallagher and Sara Baume in Dingle, May 29-June 7.
What I’m Thinking About…
Plays!
We are blessed to have so many theaters in our Greenwich Village neighborhood, and since we’ve been home we’ve gone to a play every couple of days. Another routine, of sorts. Plays and movies, then sharing a meal at one of our favorite Greenwich Village restaurants.
Friends, imagine how wonderful it is to step out your door and in twenty minutes or less be eating at a charming restaurant, or be seated in a theater waiting for that magical moment when the lights go down. Below are the five we’ve went to since we’ve been home.
We are definitely people who don’t like going above 14th Street and, happily, so much is right outside our door.
When I was a kid growing up in my little town in Rhode Island, I dreamed of a life filled with theater and art and books. I dreamed of living in a big city. Now I think just about every day, Michael and I look at each other and say: “We love living here!”
Speaking of books, we also went to celebrate our friend Christopher Castellani and his new book, Last Seen, at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. Books are magic, aren’t they?
And also…
My hair!
I am delighted to have my essay “Hair: The Long and Short of It” in Oldster Magazine and I’m delighted to share it with you.
PS…
Piggy!
In June, my first picture book will be published. (available for preorder now!) How exciting is that? Piggy is based on my daughter Annabelle’s beloved Piggy, pictured below, age twenty. Kirkus gave the book a rave—yay!—saying it’s “an ode to early childhood bonds and the beauty of a well-loved toy.”
Welcome to our routine back home in snowy NYC. I am treasuring every minute of it. We’ve also had friends and family over for dinner and for cocktails, had popcorn for dinner, hurkle-durkled on snowy mornings. (Hurkle-durkle is another word I’ve learned fairly recently and love using in sentences. Thank you, Mrs. Gibney!)
Friends, we know too well how easily the rhythms and comforts of life can get upended: canceled flights, a blizzard, and oh, so much more.
So let’s appreciate our predictable days when we can. Get lost in our work. Knit a Sophie scarf again. Walk in our neighborhood on a snowy night, holding the hand of someone we love. Celebrating our own Piggy—someone or something loved good and hard and is still beautiful.
Thank you for reading, for subscribing, and my goodness for paying to subscribe! You put a smile on my face.
So uplifting! What a great life. somewhere along the way I gave up my copy of somewhere off the coast of Maine, but I remember that cover well.
my first favorite book and still on my bookshelf all these years later.