3 Lovely Things for an April Snow

A letter to strengthen the blood and lift the heart

It’s snowing.

Not all of us live in New England or generally at northern latitudes. Florida friends, you’re sweating it out in 90° days, right? My Midwest people, I hope the storms leave you safe and dry as possible. My beloved Abby, up in the PNW, how’re you faring? Daffodils in full bloom?

Here, in New Hampshire, it’s… snowing. Waxy rhododendron leaves wear caps of snow. The dog’s snout snuffles through snow. Winter spinach flips the bird, trembling and green, at the snow covering it again. Actual birds, well, they do bird things. The song sparrows play their banjo-kazoo-washboard tunes. Cardinal car alarms ring. Crows hold their Philosophy of Snow summits in the tallest dead pine trees and jeer at ravens. Bird things.

As for me, I worry and drink tea. A Fret Bird at her kitchen table, forgetting to breathe, mind flying back and forth, goggling at snow.

Maybe a Fret Bird is at your window feeder today, too? Or maybe not! Maybe you’re the rising Chickadee! Or not a bird. Maybe the mood today is UPS truck, or a Chopin’s Fantasisue-Impromptu! Is this you?

Or you’re a human person up for something beautiful on a Friday at noon.

Me too. So here we go, with 3 Lovely Things for an April Snow.

---

1. April Album Art: Prince!

On April, 6-8 p.m., at 17ROX in Keene, New Hampshire, we’ll be gathering again for ALBUM ART.

At ALBUM ART, we gather, work on our art (or social media campaign or meal planning or journaling or letter-writing or what have you), and listen to two albums start to finish, as Thomas Edison intended. Folks are welcome to bring snacks and come and go as you need. The night is somehow gentle and radical. Iconoclastic and no more than wisps of air. We resolve the binary, maybe? We are the Big Bang and the silence before the Big Bang? Sure!

This month, my kid and I found a kickass combination of gentle and radical sounds and feelings:

Purple Rain by Prince & Blue Horse by The Be Good Tanays.

There’s a bizarrely similar mystical weirdness and sensuality in BOTH albums, as different as they are. It’s one of those crazy pairings that show art in its true form: a huge, wildly funny, middle-of-the-night, whooping, weeping, whispering conversation across bodies and time.

At April ALBUM AT, we’ll also be accepting donations for Arts Alive. This local organization supports creatives throughout the Monadnock Region (including me!) and does the deep infrastructure work to make the arts a sustained part of our economy and culture. NH GOP legislators are doing some vicious budget work this term, cutting state funding for the arts completely. As in, abolishing it. Nothing. Erasing the very mechanisms for funding the arts. Places like Arts Alive need us to stand up for them, as they’ve stood up for artists and the arts economy for years and years.

So let’s hang out, listen to some amazing music, make art together, do good together! See you at the 17ROX on Thursday, April 24, 6-8 p.m.

---

2. Geraniums

Slight editing done to account for my poor photography. They really do look like this!

---

3. An Essay on Go-Bags by Margaret Killjoy

My inspiring friend and ride-or-die buddy in the work trenches, Lorien, got me thinking about disaster preparedness. She’s an incredible gardener and food-preparer and thinker. (Hi, Lorien!) Looking at climate-change hyper-powered floods and hurricanes and fires, economic uncertainty, social unrest, government officials trying to axe the foundations of our collectives lives, I am of the mind that preparing for change on some level, in ways we can, is a rational move.

That thought led me to Get Yourself a Go Bag by

Margaret Killjoy

. Margaret’s got immense technical skills and expertise for preparedness. Like, you get detailed lists of what to pack and when and how and why. And she’s very funny and irreverent and far-seeing. I deeply appreciate loving anarchists.

Most of all, I love when Margaret writes about disaster preparedness as a project of interdependence. “Prepper” culture has so long howled of suspicion and derisive individualism, of beating out enemies and hunkering down alone, alone, alone. And it’s just not the only way to be.

At the end of the essay, Margaret writes:

As with all preparedness, the goal here is not to become self-sufficient for its own sake, but so that you’re in a better position to be useful to those around you.

…

Whenever the veil of normalcy is lifted by crisis, we are once more exposed to the essential truth that has been with us as long as we’ve been a species–we rely on one another for safety. While people can indeed present a threat, especially in times of scarcity, the field of disaster studies shows that by and large, communities come together to care for each other in times of need. The primary exception to this are the people who represent the old order, whether governmental bureaucracy and law enforcement–who might be more committed to clinging ot the previous status quo than being of use–or the wealthy elite, who are terrified of losing their positions of privilege.

The rest of us know, or learn quickly, that caring for one another is how we can best stay alive.

---

Alright, my friends. Rain or snow, here we are together. If you have a second, tell me your lovely things. I could use them, too.

Typos left in as tributes to imperfection.

Love,
B