I recently purchased a new purse. I love a crossbody bag, but mine was a little too bulky, and I wanted something smaller, sleeker. I also hunted down a pair of sneakers after seeing a Japanese lifestyle vlogger wearing them (I also coveted her wallet and had to find that.) Instagram kept showing me an ad for a dress, so I finally caved and bought it. And on and on we go.
When I looked at the various random pieces I’d acquired over the past 4-5 months or so, I realized they all pull together into a pretty snazzy outfit!
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There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!
Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!
In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.
And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.
There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.
I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.
Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.
But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.
When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.
I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)
Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.
I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.
Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.
Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.
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Once, in another lifetime, I was having a phone conversation. I don’t remember with whom, or what it was about, but I uttered the phrase “…unbeknownst to me.” Just in passing, really, without even thinking about it. Because it was the right word for whatever I was trying to say. It’s just a word that lives in my head, the way certain words do, the kind you’d use whether anyone was listening or not.
Someone was listening, as it turned out. And he wanted to know why I had to “talk like that.”
Like I was showing off. Like “unbeknownst” was something I’d hauled out to perform intelligence at people. I didn’t understand the accusation at the time, it took me years to fully parse what was actually being said, which was not you “think you’re better than everyone” so much as “why can’t you think and talk and act like me.” It wasn’t, I think, insecurity exactly. It felt more like a profound intolerance for anyone operating outside his frequency. I was supposed to be a mirror. Smaller. Simpler. Legible to him.
I was with this person for ten years. I was twenty-four when we met; he was thirty-five. By the time we moved in together I was pushing thirty and he was inching toward forty, which I mention only because the disparity in our ages felt, at the time, like evidence that he knew things I didn’t. That his read on the world — and on me — carried some authority mine didn’t yet. He was paranoid and controlling and could construct an accusation out of thin air and a vocabulary word. He also knew, on some level, exactly what he was. He told me once, with the particular self-satisfaction of a man confessing to something he expects to be forgiven for, that he was leftover meatloaf. His words. He already had a wife, a life, a family, and what I got was whatever was left on the plate at the end of the night. He said this like it was charming. Like self-awareness was the same thing as not doing harm.
What he could not do was meet me where I lived. And rather than acknowledge that gap, he spent years convincing me the gap didn’t exist — or that if it did, I had dug it myself, on purpose, to make him feel small. More than that: he convinced me I was fine with a small life. That I wanted it, actually. That the ceiling he’d put on our world was appropriate to someone like me, because no one would ever love me or understand me the way he did. I was too much and also not enough, and he was the only one willing to take on the specific burden of my particular whateverness. I believed him. For a long time, I genuinely believed him.
Here’s what I think I know now, that I didn’t know at twenty-four: people who are threatened by how you think are perhaps not going to grow into people who aren’t. When someone hears unbeknownst and reads it as a failure to be more like them, the problem is…probably not your word choice.
What it looks like when someone is actually on your level, or what it looks like for me, anyway: you say the weirdest thing that comes into your head, and they catch it. They throw something weirder back. Ývan knows I think I’m better than everyone (I’m not going to pretend otherwise!) and rather than flinching or sulking or demanding to know why I have to talk like that, he makes me even better. This happens multiple times a day, every day, without either of us keeping score or making it mean something about the other person’s worth. There’s no single example I can point to because it’s not a single example; it’s the texture of everything, the whole fabric of how we move through the world together. Either someone delights in how your mind works, or they don’t. I’m not sure there’s much of an in-between that holds.
And this isn’t only a story about a romantic relationship. The same principle applies now to everyone I let close, friends, collaborators, people I gave my time and attention, and best words to. The meatloaf guy was the most extreme version, but he wasn’t the only one operating outside my frequency who I kept making excuses for.
I actually think about that post-telephone call exchange every day. But it was seeing one of those “what advice would you give your younger self?” social media posts that made me try to organize and articulate all of my thoughts about it. So here it is.
Younger me: If They’re Not On Your Level, Don’t Fuck With Them. Your weird heights are the view from which you were always meant to see the world; don’t you dare lower yourself. You are not too much. Do not swallow your words. Do not dim your vocabulary, your curiosity, your particular brand of expansive weird intelligence. Do not accept a half-life with a half-person and call it love. Do not accept leftover meatloaf and do not say thank you for it. Do not make yourself legible to someone who isn’t worth the translation.
At this point in my life I have, I’m glad to say, surrounded myself with people who operate at my frequency, who catch what I throw and throw something stranger back, who make me more myself rather than less. It took longer than it should have. But here we are.
And unbeknownst to that younger, credulous, catastrophically undersold version of myself: she was not, in point of fact, consigned by fate or deficiency to subsist upon the desiccated leavings of someone else’s life. She was owed, and has since received, the whole magnificent, unabridged feast.
Also: I’ll talk however I like, motherfucker. Go die in a fire.
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I don’t always post on the Unquiet Things blog here to share when I send out my monthly Trinkets & Treasures newsletter… but sometimes I do, if only as a reminder to folks that it exists!
My newsletter is different than the email notifications you get in your inbox whenever I post on the blog, and is hosted separately. Because it is separate! It’s where I share a monthly roundup of favorite things and new discoveries, and usually feature a new-to-me artist. This month’s artist is me!
I just wrapped up 31 days of horror writing. Daily movie reviews throughout October —free, written because I genuinely love doing this. That’s not a complaint; nobody asked me to write any of it. I do this because it’s what I’d be doing anyway, thinking about movies and books and perfume and occult art, and the blog is just where I put those thoughts so other people can enjoy them too. Everything here has always been free because that’s how I want it.
This blog and its accompanying newsletter are completely passion projects. I have a day job that pays the bills, and this is what I do with the rest of my time because I love it. But every now and then, I need to gently remind you that if you enjoy the things I write, there are some ways to support that work.
My Perfume destash: I’m selling some bottles from my personal collection over on Facebook. Indie and niche scents, good stuff, much cheaper than buying new. If you’ve been curious about any of the perfumes I’ve reviewed over the years, this might be your chance.
Signed copies of my books: All three titles are back in stock, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy. If you’ve been meaning to pick one up or want to complete your collection, now’s the time.
My Pango bookshop: Fully restocked with lots of new titles. Horror, Gothic fiction, folk horror, art books, occult and esoteric subjects. I’ve been adding books steadily, so if you’re looking for something specific or just want to browse through my extremely specific taste in literature, go take a look.
New! Postcard sets: Over the years, I’ve created and posted silly mashups of words and images on social media that, as they say, “went viral.” People thought they were a hoot and a holler. The public’s pickle was tickled. I teased the idea over the summer. Well, now you can own them as actual physical postcards. Send them to your friends. Confuse your relatives. Stick them on your fridge. Whatever brings you joy. (Pssst…if you purchase one of my books, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, I’ll include all four postcards for free!)
That’s it. Just wanted to remind you these things exist. If you can support the work, I appreciate it. If you can’t, that’s fine too. The blog will still be here either way.
And remember, if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I watched Companion four hours ago, and I genuinely cannot remember it. Not in a “the details are fuzzy” way, but in a “did I actually watch this or did I just scroll through stills on my phone?” way. I know Sophie Thatcher was in it, and everyone says she’s great, so sure, I’ll take their word for it. There was a house. There were other people. Things happened. A robot gained consciousness and questioned her existence and the nature of love in an unequal power dynamic. I think there was blood? The trailer had already told me she was a companion robot, so there was no surprise there, just watching a story I’d encountered before play out in the most obvious way.
I don’t think Companion is bad, exactly. It seems competently made. But it’s aggressively forgettable, like eating a meal that technically had food on the plate but left no impression whatsoever. I kept thinking “why am I watching this?” while I was watching it, which is never a good sign. It seems like it wants to say something about AI consciousness, about abusive relationships, about what makes us human, but I’m not sure it actually digs into any of those ideas. It gestures at them and then just… moves on. Maybe I missed something. I don’t know.
Here’s what I can tell you: I read Sierra Greer’s Annie Botearly on in 2024 and I still remember that story. If you want to actually feel something about an AI’s growing consciousness, if you want to sit with the uncomfortable reality of a relationship where one person has all the power and the other is learning what autonomy even means, maybe read that instead. Annie is a top-of-the-line robot girlfriend, and as her intelligence evolves, she begins to question her purpose and her relationship with Doug, her owner. Doug’s behavior is upsetting in its gross specificity: choosing Annie’s outfits, controlling her libido settings, expecting perfection (she’s a bedroom bot, but he’s criticizing her kitchen cleaning!) while claiming to love her growing humanity. I found Annie, a robot, more human and more compelling than anyone in Companion, which probably says something about the difference between a story that uses AI as a plot device and one that uses it to examine what it means to become yourself. Or maybe it just says something about what works for me.
I also read Olivia Gatwood’s Whoever You Are, Honey last year. It plays with similar themes of identity and performance, hints at questions of consciousness and reality (one character may be questioning whether she’s even real), but it never makes it obvious. It’s about the personas we adopt, the ways we perform ourselves for others, the strange intimacy and envy that can develop between women. The narrative has a dreamlike quality and the ending doesn’t resolve neatly, but I prefer it that way. It keeps evolving in my imagination. Companion was over the moment it ended.
I can’t recommend a movie I don’t remember. But here are two books for your TBR instead.
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After yesterday’s disappointment, I needed something good. Or at least something not terrible! Final Destination: Bloodlines was exactly the combination of not terrible and actually quite good that I was hoping for! Full transparency: I began watching this movie a month ago, but stopped after 20 minutes because I decided it would make good October fodder. And I was right!
The premise is ridiculous, and if you’ve seen even one, you know all you need to know: Death has a design, and if you mess with it, Death will find increasingly elaborate ways to correct the cosmic ledger with outrageously elaborate Rube Goldbergian setups. Is this movie dumb? Absolutely. Does it make any logical sense? Not even a little. Does it try to say something profound about fate, mortality, or the human condition? Well, sort of, a little? But that’s ok! But the big difference between this and yesterday’s crappy waste of time is that Bloodlines knows it’s ridiculous and leans into that with such absolute commitment and affection that it is genuinely joyful to watch.
The setup: In 1968, Iris has a premonition about a Space Needle-esque restaurant disaster and manages to save everyone. Flash forward to the present, and her granddaughter Stefani is having recurring nightmares about that night. Turns out Death’s been working through the original survivors and their descendants, everyone who shouldn’t exist because they were supposed to die that night. (I just visited the Space Needle recently, and I thought about that opening scene A LOT when I was gingerly stepping on the glass floor! As a matter of fact, those are probably the scenes that freaked me out most, which is why that’s mostly the imagery I’ve selected for this post.)
It’s a neat expansion of the franchise’s mythology that seems to respect what came before while giving us something new. The “bloodline” angle makes the stakes feel bigger and the design more convoluted and intricate.
But we’re not here for the plot. We’re here for the deaths! And Bloodlines delivers. An MRI machine. A backyard barbecue. A garbage truck. Everyday situations transformed into elaborate death traps where one wrong move sets off a cascade of carnage. The film understands these sequences work best when you can see all the pieces being set up, when you’re silently screaming at characters to notice the garden hose, the glass shards, the precarious positioning of that lawn mower.
The tone is exactly right. This isn’t torture porn, it’s slapstick with arterial spray. There’s a darkly comic sensibility running through every kill that acknowledges the absurdity without winking so hard it breaks the tension. When someone gets demolished in the most convoluted way possible, you’re allowed to gasp and laugh. The film gives you permission to have fun with the horror.
The practical effects are gory, gorgeous chaos. Bodies don’t just die—they’re eviscerated, impaled, crushed, and dismembered with genuine craftsmanship. Kind of makes you appreciate the artistry while also wanting to look away and maybe puke a little bit.
Tony Todd. Oh, Tony Todd. His final film role is here, playing the series’ mysterious mortician who always seems to know a very weird amount about Death’s design. He was clearly unwell during filming, and watching him deliver his lines with that iconic voice coming from a visibly weakened body is heartbreaking. The film gives him a proper sendoff, finally explaining his character’s connection to everything in a way that’s both satisfying and surprisingly moving. It shredded me, honestly. This absolutely legendary performer, knowing his time was limited, giving us one last performance that’s a goodbye to his character and (whether intentionally or not, but it surely must have been) a meditation on mortality itself in a franchise built around cheating death.
Bloodlines gets it: you don’t need to pretend you’re saying something profound to make an effective horror movie (or an effective movie, period). This is a movie about wacky, sadistic Looney Tunes-esque cartoon deaths, and it never tries to dress it up as something more important.
It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s inventive, and in its own weird way, oddly heartfelt. Exactly what I needed.
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Christmas Eve Fortune Telling by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy
As a human of a certain chromosomal combination and a certain advancing age, my body is doing weird things, which often means doing more or less of what it should.
Take my period, for instance. Ever since my first onset of menses at the tender age of ten (and what a shock that was, nobody prepared me for the fact that it could last three entire months) my menstrual cycle has been what you might charitably call “unpredictable.” Less charitably, you might call it “completely unhinged.” After those initial ninety days of wondering if I was dying, my exceedingly awful male doctor put me on birth control pills to regulate things. Thirty-nine years later, I’m still on the pill, my uterus still chaotic.
For most of those decades, the pharmaceutical intervention worked well enough. Monthly cycles that arrived more or less on cue, lasted a reasonable amount of time, and then politely departed until the next month. But bodies can turn on you in an instant! For the past six to eight months, my period has decided to freelance. Spotting when it’s not supposed to, showing up fashionably late or scandalously early, generally behaving like that friend who says they’ll be there at seven and rolls up at nine-thirty without explanation.
The practical solution was simple enough: light pantyliners, all the time, just in case. Because there’s nothing quite like discovering your body has decided to redecorate your underwear AND your sweatpants while you’re standing in the ten-items-or-less line at the grocery store. So now I’m constantly prepared, like a very well-padded Boy Scout.
Between the practical preparation and the daily inspection of said pantyliners, I started noticing patterns. Not timing patterns – my uterus has clearly said “you may fuck off entirely” to all that – but actual visual patterns. The shapes that small drips and drops and globbets of blood make on thin cotton padding. At first, it was idle observation, the kind of thing your brain does when it’s bored. Like finding faces in clouds or animals in doctor’s office wallpaper – that human compulsion to find patterns and meaning in random shapes. Pareidolia. But then I started paying attention, really paying attention, and realized this felt different from seeing an Abraham Lincoln-rabbit hybrid in a cumulus cloud. (I don’t know how it feels different, exactly? But it does?)
Today, unmistakably, the small spot of blood had formed the shape of a sword. Not a vague, “if you squint real hard and look from the corner of your eye” sort of resemblance, but a clear, defined blade with what looked like a simple hilt. Sharp. Purposeful. Impossible to ignore. I wanted to snap a photo and include it with this post, but better-Sarah, classier-Sarah thought “um yeah maybe not.”
So! Welcome to my accidental practice of what I’ve decided to call playtexomancy: divination through menstrual blood patterns as captured on pantyliners. It’s probably not what the ancient oracles had in mind, but they didn’t have to deal with irregular periods and modern feminine hygiene products.
The sword, though! Did you see what I included in the “What’s In My Bag” post from the other day? If not, take a look! That felt significant in a way I couldn’t dismiss as pure pattern-seeking. Swords cut through. They defend. They represent clarity, decision, the ability to sever what no longer serves. And here’s my bod, in the midst of god only knows what all hormonal confusion, apparently offering me a symbol of cutting through uncertainty.
Is this ridiculous? Probably. Am I reading meaning into random biological processes? Almost certainly. But I think it’s oddly comforting and fun to find messages in the chaos; it’s a way of discovering my own patterns when my body has abandoned the expected ones, of paying attention to what it’s doing in a curious way instead of just being frustrated with it. Maybe it even connects me to something larger and more mystical during a time when my body feels completely unreliable, even if – especially if – those messages are materializing on mass-produced sanitary supplies.
Humans have been seeking signs in blood for millennia. I’m just upgrading the ancient practice with leak-proof technology and wings for extra protection!
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I often think of getting a chance to visit my younger self, and after she’s gotten over the simultaneous horror of how fat I have gotten, but how cool my nose ring is, here is what I would tell her:
Stop. Fucking. Around.
I know, I know – you think you’re buying yourself time, that if you just wait a little longer, the thing you’re dreading will somehow become easier or disappear entirely. Spoiler alert: it won’t. What you’re actually doing is choosing to suffer twice – once in the anticipation, and once when you finally have to do the thing anyway.
I spent so many years getting myself into the dumbest situations because I was procrastinating or avoiding something or lying about something I should have done and never did. The elaborate cover-ups, the increasingly ridiculous excuses, the way one small avoided task would snowball into this absurd comedy of errors that was infinitely worse than just handling the original thing.
Today, I had to make a series of phone calls I was dreading. Without getting too much into it, my boss made a companywide announcement that was going to affect our part-timers and that it would occur “sooner rather than later,” which means absolutely nothing and is not in any way useful or helpful. So I got to be the one to call each of them personally and clarify things, which included giving them an actual timeline. The doing of this was never not going to suck. And I did not want to do it.
My younger self would have spent days catastrophizing about these calls. She would have imagined every possible terrible reaction, rehearsed scripts that she’d never use, and probably would have “forgotten” to make them until the last possible moment, making everything infinitely more stressful for everyone involved.
Instead, I just… made the calls. They were fine. Some people were disappointed, some were understanding, most were just grateful to have actual information instead of corporate vagueness. The whole thing took maybe an hour, and then it was done.
The dread of doing it will hurt you more, and you don’t need to spend even more time hurting. Life is going to hand you plenty of genuine suffering – toxic relationships, bad breakups, family drama, health scares, financial stress, random bullshit that isn’t even your fault. Why volunteer for extra? Why choose to torment yourself over something you have to do anyway?
That’s it. That’s the wisdom. Stop volunteering for extra angst. The thing you’re avoiding isn’t going anywhere, but every day you spend dreading it is a day you’re choosing to feel like garbage for no good reason.
Do the fucking thing. Your future self will thank you. Also, one day, someone will think they have the right to tell you that they don’t want you to get a nose ring, and when they do, I want you to just cackle like a loon right to their face and tell them to FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF YOU NO GOOD PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.
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I am having a Hot Grandma Summer. I am no grandmother (I don’t even have kids let alone grandkids), and I mean Hot as in overheated and on the verge of a meltdown, not wildly attractive. Just so you know where I am coming from. But in trying to make myself as comfortable as possible over the next few months, I am taking a page from the books of grandmothers.
I am wearing capri pants, which I recall a friend making fun of a few years ago. Whatever! This hemp pair was an Instagram ad from a place called Toad & Co. and I was influenced because their models looked cool and comfortable and like their pants had air conditioning. I bought a pair for myself, and they really do feel like it! These dowdy clam diggers that end mid-calf can BREATHE. I wear them with an Iron Maiden tee shirt.
I’ve been braiding my hair back in a Princess Leia hairdo that gets it completely out of my face. Not the fancy ceremonial ones from the throne room, but the practical Hoth braids when she’s gotten down to business. My hair is long enough now that I can wrap it around itself and stick a few bobby pins in to hold everything in place. I could do a claw clip but that always looks sloppy. This is much tidier, and it is definitely a little Tasha Tudor old-fashioned (which I love), but most importantly, it keeps everything off my neck when it’s ninety-five degrees and humid, and I am sweaty and broiling and overstimulated by the feeling of hairs touching my face.
I schedule time to watch my programs. Not binge-watching or catching up on shows, but watching my programs with the gravity of someone who has made an appointment. I love the specificity of that phrase – it makes passive television consumption sound like a medical procedure or a civic duty. Currently, I’m working my way through old episodes of Midsomer Murders, which is perfect grandma viewing. Cozy English villages, murder by hedge trimmer, John Nettles looking concerned while standing next to a flower bed. It’s exactly the right pace for someone who is having an evening snack of prunes and Sleepytime tea. I’ve spent the last few years so busy reading (which I will never complain about, but) I haven’t been watching much of anything at all. Thinking about it this way makes it a little easier to step away from a book. Also, my eyes aren’t great, and I need to give them a break every once in a while!
I grow vegetables because I like to see a pile of colorful vegetables stacked high in a basket (see also spilling-over jewelry boxes and dragon’s hoards), and because there’s something deeply satisfying about eating a pepper that you watched grow from a tiny seedling into something substantial enough to stuff. This year I’ve got peppers and eggplant, which seem to handle the Florida heat better than most things. The kale proliferates with zero help from me, and I’ve got lots of herbs that I use approximately half of but I don’t feel guilty wasting them because I like to look at them and sniff them, too. Our squashes all got destroyed by vine borers, which was disappointing but not surprising. Florida heat kills a lot of stuff. Which is why next summer I think I might just try growing pretty flowers. A harvest of colorful blooms is almost as good as a pile of vegetables!
I pickle things, which sounds very industrious and domestic goddess-y until you realize it’s basically just shoving vegetables into jars with vinegar and waiting. I’m terrified of canning, so I’m not over here poorly sterilizing jars and giving people botulism – this is all refrigerator pickles that get eaten within a few weeks. Mostly cucumbers, onions, and carrots. I like sharp, sour, tangy things, and the more with which to give me a pinched and puckered face, the better.
My hands hurt nowadays but I’m still knitting, albeit very slowly, like a determined turtle with inflamed joints and a concerning click in their wrist. After 20+ years of knitting, I have discovered I like working on socks best – they’re portable, they don’t require too much thinking, and even knitting the same pattern a million times, they’re still interesting. First, you knit the cuff, which leads into the ankle, and before too long, you’re turning the heel and decreasing for the toe stitches, and you’re never really working on one part long enough for it to get tedious. For years, I knit complicated lace shawls, trying to one-up myself with each new project, but at this point, I know my skills and my limitations, and I am just here for a reliable, good time. (I think a reliable, good time is a common thread woven throughout grandma core.) Anyway, I’ve been working on the same pair for months because I only knit a few rows at a time while watching my programs. At this rate, John Nettles will solve several more murders before I finish the heel turn.
I spend a lot of time on the screened back porch these days, iced drink sweating in my hand, bare feet cool on the concrete while the ceiling fan spins lazily overhead. I listen to birds – not in any serious birdwatching way, I couldn’t tell you what half of them are, but their constant chatter is hypnotic, and I love imagining that they have very important business to attend to. When we can only hear the calls but can’t see the birds, I use the Cornell Merlin app to figure out what’s making all the noise. I always remember how I’d see old people sitting on their porches, looking for all the world like they are doing absolutely nothing. But, man, I get it now. Yvan and I sat out on the porch two weekends ago for four hours just talking and listening to birds and it’s a good time.
I take magnesium baths because I read somewhere that magnesium is good for sleep and joints and muscles. I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, but I don’t want to take any chances! I sink into hot water and let the day dissolve while I think about absolutely nothing, which is harder than it sounds but gets easier with practice. Sometimes though, I watch YouTube videos of single Japanese ladies making dinner, or ASMR head spas.
I do my strength exercises so if I fall down, I can get up. This seems like essential life skills at forty-nine. I do the NYT puzzles and I am getting very good at Wordle, which makes me feel smugly accomplished in a way that’s probably disproportionate to the actual achievement. I attack my hobbies with the enthusiasm of someone who has given up any illusion that they give a single shit about their job. My job has never been my passion and I’m not about to start now, which means I can throw myself into crosswords and knitting and pickling with complete abandon and zero guilt about spending three hours on a puzzle.
In 2016 I suddenly remembered the library existed and have been making up for lost time ever since. I read my library books with the devotion of someone who feels like they need to personally justify the entire public library system through sheer volume of usage. I’m currently holding for about 50 gazillion books and I am about to incite an old lady beatdown on whoever it is that’s taking so much time with the new Riley Sager novel. Seriously, how long does it take to read a cheesy thriller? There’s something both maddening and delightful about the digital library hold system – it’s like having a very slow, very unpredictable book fairy who sometimes delivers exactly what you want to your tablet and sometimes makes you wait four months for the privilege. I’ve been reading a lot of nature writers recently. I do love me some Robert MacFarlane, but his dense, poetic prose sometimes lends itself to spending three years on one book because you can only read a few paragraphs at a time, so I’ve been gravitating toward lighter nature writing – the kind where someone walks around looking at birds or trees and tells you about it without requiring a philosophy degree to follow along. Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard when I’m feeling ambitious, Sy Montgomery when I want to read about octopuses being weird and wonderful. I like reading people who are paying attention to the world in ways I wish I was better at, especially when I refuse to leave the house for four months at a time. I am also on hold for something called The Bean Book. This feels like peak grandma energy to me.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Alice Coltrane and bossa nova, plus some Khruangbin and Skinshape – atmospheric and expansive music that feels sophisticated, spacious, and contemplative. Ella is for Sunday mornings with coffee, when her voice feels like the perfect soundtrack to moving slowly through the house in my pajamas. Bossa nova is for when I’m cleaning or cooking – those gentle rhythms make chopping vegetables or folding laundry feel less like chores and more like meditation. Alice Coltrane, Khruangbin, and Skinshape are for lighting incense and reading at night, Alice’s harp and their ambient textures floating through the room while I sink into a book and let the day officially end.
I’ve also got very specific personal sayings I’m incorporating into my mental dialogue this summer: “Be grateful, not hateful!” and “Always choose the option with sprinkles!” These are my own little grandma mantras, though you probably get the context in which they might be used, and they may work for you, too. “Be grateful, not hateful” is for when I catch myself sliding into resentment or bitterness and need to redirect toward appreciation instead. “Always choose the option with sprinkles” is about picking joy and the more delightful choice when I have options, even if it seems silly or indulgent. It’s so easy for me to get sucked into feeling sorry for myself in the summertime, and I am trying to combat this in even the most cheesy ways. These cheerful little sayings are deliberately upbeat, slightly corny wisdom that feels very much in the Hot Grandma Summer spirit.
I am also taking a break from social media again this summer – 2.5 months this time instead of the one month I did last year – and so I have no idea what’s going on with anything or what’s hip or cool or which celebrity said what stupid thing this week. Where this once made me frantic with FOMO, now, it just feels like the most unimaginable sort of relief.
You might look at all of these things and think…Sarah…this is pretty much exactly what you’ve always done as long as I’ve known you! Ok, you got me. I have always worn shapeless, comfortable clothing and loved murder mysteries and dreamy music. I’ve been knitting since I was twenty-five and cooking since forever. Maybe calling it Hot Grandma Summer is just giving a name to what I was already doing, or maybe I just wanted an excuse to buy new pants. Either way, here we are.
Last week I wrote about my folk horror summer survival guide, and this week I’m talking about Hot Grandma Summer, which might seem like I’m all over the place, but hear me out. I am doing these in tandem. Both are ways of connecting to older rhythms – whether that’s ancient folklore or traditional domestic practices. Whether I’m lighting incense and reading about stone circles, or sitting on the porch with an iced drink, watching heat lightning, and listening to tinny jazz on Bluetooth speakers, it’s in service of creating time and space for myself that feel untroubled and mellow (yes, even the eldritch dread of the old gods, I am counting that, too.). Both involve slowing down and being intentional about what I consume, creating comfort through specific, curated experiences.
The hemp capri pants work for both projects.
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