Making the World Small Again

How We Spend Our Days

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Summer has begun in earnest for us. The previous one wasn’t much of a break, for various reasons, and so I’m looking forward to the slower pace this year. 

Annie Dillard wrote that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. I’ve long enjoyed and been challenged by the statement. The school year doesn’t allow for the healthiest of schedules, for myself or our family. We make compromises I often wish we didn’t. But this summer feels like we can come closer to executing Dillard’s notion: more home cooked meals eaten together, including breakfast; daily exercise; daily reading, workbooks, artwork, and French; daily writing; and time spent together, just talking. 

I wrote what’s below last November, which in many respects seems the opposite of the season we are entering. But in re-reading it, I think it fits our plans for the upcoming summer. 

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It’s November as I write this and the leaves have mostly fallen. Reports for this weekend call for highs in the upper thirties, our first frosts. The time has just reverted back to Standard. It’s dark by six. Our kids attempt to squeeze in a few more minutes of play before we call them in, our house on the busy street, a mile from downtown. 

We moved to our current home in early 2020 in part to be closer to the city. I’m a city person. Before moving here we had been living on about three acres of exurbs. A number of people thought us batty for giving it up. But we’d been missing parts of our life in Chicago: the walk-ability, the corner coffee shop, the library one block away, city parks, my goodness the city parks, of having the things we do located nearby. What’s now called the 15-Minute City, the irony being the bigger the city, the smaller the footprint you can make. We don’t often do it right, but the desire is there. In many ways, moving here was in search for a smaller life. Someday we’ll get there. 

Two books I’ve been reading lately have reinforced this. One’s a re-read. The Book of Stillmeadow. It’s from the 50s, a used copy, out of print, gifted from my mother, who knows me, and it’s become a treasure. Gladys Taber and her family purchased an old Connecticut farmhouse where they planned to spend weekends and any other available time. Taber collected her writings over the years at the home and on the land and then organized them by month, providing readers an annual overview of life at Stillmeadow: their dogs and chickens, their garden, their 17th century home with all its charms and shabbiness. Taber’s beautiful and simple prose beguiles the reader into believing they too should live in the country, even when she describes the well drying up or the garden failing, slaughtering their dinner or taking a pig by car in to see the vet. 

The other is Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking, a 2019 release on the pleasures and benefits of getting out there and huffing it, over hill and dale, as often as you’re able. He also urges municipalities to make such outings easy and safe, for everyone. Many of the takeaways seem intuitive, yet he supports them with interesting studies and examples. And I’ve used his section on Creating Walking in my own writing classes, of walking into our ideas, especially when feeling stuck.

Both bring me back to Thoreau. They speak to, in their disparate ways, of living deliberately, of being present. Thoreau disdained having less than four hours a day to tramp through Concord’s wilderness, sauntering as he called it, going to his holy land. I don’t have such time, if I hope to retain both job and family, but I do have time. I could try coaxing the family to come along, to discuss our days, our hopes for the next one, a lap around the park, to toss the football, to be together in the cooling and very soon to be cold air, to quit rushing around, even if only for a few hours, to refrain from wishing we were anywhere else, doing anything else, but being right here, with each other. 

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Mailbag

• Bret Stephens recently delivered a terrific address at the University of Chicago on freedom of expression and the importance and necessity of considering the opposing side. Here’s a link to the transcript. 

• One of my favorite pieces to write and converse with you on was “Building a Uniform.” Before, during, and after writing it, I took a deep dive into menswear. This included Men and Manners by David Coggins, The Kingdom of Prep by Maggie Bullock, the book Take Ivy, and Avery Trufelman’s podcast Articles of Interest: American Ivy (Season 3). It was a wonderful season of reading and further building out the wardrobe. Thank you for the conversation and recommendations. 

• And lastly, I’ve essentially finished my novel. Three years I’ve worked on it. One year to complete the first draft and then the past two revising and editing and rewriting. I tell my students when they’ve completed a first draft they’re only halfway done, and I’ve read that when you’ve made your book as good as you can make it, you’re only halfway to getting it published, if it ever happens. Thank you for the encouragement with the chapter I posted. Here it is, if you’d like to check it out (again, maybe).