No joke, I’ve been working to the sound of a crackling fire place on Youtube for the last two days. Check it out:

Look at this library. Listen to this fireplace. Listen to it FOR TEN HOURS because that is how long the crackling goes on for.

I want this exact room, except with a rocking chair, a fluffy robe, slippers, and a cat. I’m aware of how old this makes me sound and I don’t even care, because old people often don’t care about what anyone thinks of them. The COVID quarantine aged me thirty years. In my heart I am 74 going on 75 and all I want is rocking chairs and fire crackles all day long.

I don’t know what you discovered about yourself during the quarantine, but the biggest thing that I learned is that I love to do nothing. Granted, I could have come to this conclusion anyway because after 21 years of parenting, working as a single mom, and finishing grad school, May of this year was the first time I honestly had nothing to do. And couldn’t, really. Nothing was open. No one was visiting each other at that point. I got to know my backyard as Henry David Thoreau knew Walden Pond. Perhaps I shall write a book about it. I will call it Rheams Lawn of Dreams, and it shall be transcendentalist gold. Except that the peak of the action would contain lines like “the grasshopper came back today.”

And that’s okay! Sometimes it’s good to do nothing; remain neutral. I’m been pushing and pushing and pushing myself for years. Sitting by the fire for a while is good. I must teach the cat to fetch me my slippers.