Growing up, one of my least favorite things about summer was our required reading list for school. I will never forget slowly plodding through Huckleberry Finn or putting off reading The Grapes of Wrath until the end of the summer and thinking I would never finish in time. It always felt like an awful joke to have homework when there was no school. But looking back I don’t think it was the reading that was the problem. Instead, I think it was that I didn’t like being told what to read—which makes summer reading as an adult that much better. [...]

It is the middle of March, and we’ve almost fully survived the week after daylight savings. It’s funny because when I choose to stay up later and lose an hour of sleep, it doesn’t seem to affect me. But when I don’t have a choice, it’s a whole other story. Oh, well. As I write this, snow is falling faster and heavier than it has all winter. I have a pot of what will be bone broth, cooking on the stove. And I am fighting the urge to bake just long enough to get some writing done. I am not [...]