If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life. – Carl Sandburg

Goodbye 2024. Hello 2025. What a year. 2024 is soon done and ready to be put away. I’m looking forward to 2025 and see what mischief it’ll cause.

I was caught. I couldn’t read. Couldn’t embroider. Couldn’t wrap my head around anything but doing nothing but cleaning, sorting, shelving. In the bookstore and at home, too. It’s winter and for me that means piles of books I want to read, and stacks of material and baskets of embroidery floss to work through.

So, I didn’t finish many books, but I started a lot. I read nine books. Three about Ulysses S. Grant, soldier and president. Two by local author, Steven Kiernan. Also, Dodie Smith, Amor Towles, and Fiona Davis. I’m once again participating in an online book club hosted by the Grant Cottage State Historic Site in New York. This year we will be reading two books on Grant.

Thanks to Goodreads I see I have started fourteen books this year. Almost finished Kevin Graffagnino’s , Ira Allen: A Biography. It is jammed packed with Vermont history. I already know I have to reread it so I can absorb it all. Highly recommend it. Plus, his newest, Vermontiana: An Annotated Checklist, 1764-1899. And I’ve started several on the Revolutionary War as well as the French & Indian War. Trying to familiarize myself particularly on our area of Vermont and New York. Also a historical book on Salamanca, NY where I once lived as a little girl. Novels? I have started a few: Seize the Day (Saul Bellow), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), The Nightingale (Kristen Hannah), Barkskins (Anne Proulx), The Moon and Sixpence (W. Somerset Maugham), plus, plus, plus. Crazy. But I must get going on Grant at 200: Reconsidering the Life and Legacy of Ulysses S. Grant. Fortunately, it’s just 40 pages before our first meet-up so I must get cracking.

I’m not going to beat myself up for not completing books but marvel on how many I started and work on trying to finish them during 2025. There wasn’t a lot of porch rocking and reading this past summer as the gardens were always yelling at me. I’m going to be looking for my creativity spark to come alive again. Heaven knows I’ve got floss enough and vintage material and spools that I like to work with. And books. I’ve books galore!

Before I forget, I am going to take time at the start of the year to take care of me: reading, b&w movies, embroidering and start 2025 refreshed and renewed. I think I deserve it. So, see you Thursday, January 5, 2025.