Every few years, I fall down a stupid rabbit hole of googling people I grew up with. I have refused to join Facebook for the very reason of not wanting to be in contact with most of them, so I can’t really give you a good reason for why I do it.

I grew up in a large, mostly white town that skewed conservative at the time. It’s purportedly gotten more liberal since I moved away, but its current Republican mayor was first elected when I was 10.

While Karen and I have stayed friends since our high school days, I mostly let everyone else go pretty early on. We (just) predated the internet and it was easy to drift apart as people left for college. As time has gone on, I’ve kept the distance intentionally, although Karen sometimes shares updates about people we both knew. There was just too much rampant conservatism and casual racism from what I remembered (and what Karen shared about her Facebook interactions) to want to welcome that back into my life.

So, why then do I torture myself by looking up the people I grew up with?

I had a drink with a girl I’d grown up with back before our tenth high school reunion. She had come back to attend; I lived nearby but wasn’t going. I asked her why she wanted to bother and she said that she really hoped that some of the people we’d grown up with had escaped.

I’m a little more forgiving now in middle age than I was in my 20s, but I suppose it comes down to exactly that. I check up on them because in the end I want them to have lived happy lives and to have had horizons that expanded beyond the narrow experience we grew up with.

And just often enough, I discover that one of them has.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten authors I discovered (and liked) in 2020. Easy, since nearly two-thirds of last year’s books were written by authors I’d never read before!

1. Kate Racculia
2. T.J. Klune
3. Talia Hibbert
4. Amy Stewart
5. Jerry Craft
6. Beth O’Leary
7. Quan Barry
8. Mira Jacob
9. K. Eason
10. Virginia Kantra

How about you? Any new-to-you authors you loved last year?

The Christmas tree is out, but the ornaments and decorations aren’t yet put away.

We won’t run out of underwear or masks this week, but I have no clean handknits (including my favorite hat).

I put my knitting away for the night with the bind-off a third done.

My book is further along, but not yet ready to return to the library.

And, my cookies didn’t all get made. But that means there will be warm cookies tomorrow afternoon or evening, and no one will be mad about that!

My garden looks dead, but it is not. I harvested some rosemary today. There is also still lemon balm and peppermint. My sage has some tiny leaves on it, so I heaped leaves around it to encourage it to think warm thoughts. I believe some of my tiny leeks are still alive, and I definitely saw that some of the greens I’d planted were making an effort, as is the omnipresent sorrel. I pulled down the rest of the bulbless onion grass stalks, which are strawlike, and added them to the beds to protect what’s already been sown and might be growing under the leaf litter I leave as mulch. If I’d been smart, I would have constructed a low tunnel or cold frame earlier in the season to see if I can actually harvest greens through the winter. Maybe next year.

This little pansy, which I planted Labor Day weekend, was also still giving it its all:

I also found several fluffy seeds, which I’m guessing are milkweed. They wouldn’t get to stick around in my plot, so I re-sent them on their windy way.

I’ll start to think about planting peas next month. If there’s a warm weekend in February, I’ll get some in then; otherwise, I’ll sow the first round in early March.

I will say that the nice thing about a mid-Atlantic garden is that you don’t have many months where there isn’t something you can harvest.

It’s a plain, old two-day weekend, so I should probably scale back my expectations for what I’m going to get done. We did start the weekend by baking chocolate chip cookies and going to a friend’s house for supper and a movie. I know, I know. I haven’t been in someone else’s house (or had someone in mine) since visiting my parents for my birthday a year ago. We’d already postponed this from last month when the hospitals were overwhelmed. We wore masks, we stayed distant, and mostly we’re all careful (although both Rudi and Shawn are working some in person). But it was absolutely a risk we could have avoided, and only time will tell if it was a mistake or not. (Clearly, I’m feeling a little guilty.)

In addition to baking the rest of the cookies (I made two dozen to take with us), I’m hoping to spend some time outside, send off some mail, turn the heel of my sock, do some laundry, finish a book, and, alas, take down the Christmas tree. It’s time.

What do you have on tap for the weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past Thursday (which, let’s be honest, was the most beautiful day many of us have had in a while):

1. National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman knocked it out of the park with her recitation of “The Hill We Climb.” There was not a single syllable that she uttered without thought, from the honorifics to the word play, and I anticipate a long career for the 22-year-old.

2. I have yet to talk to a single woman who came away from yesterday dry-eyed, with the installation of Kamala Harris as the first female vice president of the United States.

3. The Mall being closed to everyone had the single benefit of it allowing the most remarkable fireworks show in D.C.’s recent history.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?