I hope this finds everyone safe and warm! This past week has been a doozy, knocking me for a loop.
As I shared in January, I had a lot of plans for the month: lunch with friends, plans to buy a cello, submitting my draft on time—all plans without knowing an ice storm would devastate Nashville through the end of the month.
I know the news amplified the coming storm, leading to empty stores and pre-emptive school closures, but I’ve already been through this before in Nashville.
It’s never the snow, which usually melts within two days; for us, it’s always the ice—coating the hills, clinging to power lines, and bringing down trees. I’m naturally an overpreparer (I still have the 25-year bucket of food in the garage from the pandemic, water pens, emergency radios, and a supply of over 7,000 seeds, should we ever need to return to subsistence farming lol), so this is no different.
We were lucky enough to get our grocery order on Friday and tucked in on Saturday, when it started snowing. The kid loved the snow and played, and all was well—until the ice and rain started on Sunday, coating everything.
We lost power on Sunday at five a.m., and it got cold quickly, with temperatures in the teens. We were lucky it flickered back on around seven, just long enough for us to race—literally race—to cook food before it went out again. We had maybe thirty minutes, and then it was gone until the next morning.
We all huddled in our main bedroom, pulling the kids’ beds inside and sealing up all the doors and rigging up makeshift heaters with cans and candles. This was definitely family bonding time, and it would have been wonderful if I didn’t have a manuscript due on Monday.
We were fortunate that the power came back on, as many of my friends went days without power, and I thought we were in for it when we lost power again on Wednesday for several hours.
It’s been an interesting week navigating it all, and it’s not over yet: 50,000 homes and some of our schools are still without power more than a week later.
The ice storm, the kids being out all week (plus tomorrow), still having to work remotely, and the overall state of the world took (and is taking) a major toll on my mental health.
When I started drafting this this morning, I was bogged down by the past ten days of being frozen in the house, suffering from a severe case of cabin fever.
I felt empty and exhausted—switching between anxiety and existential dread at the level of greed, corruption, and overall inhumanity I’d become paralyzed by this week. My screen time was off the charts, making it hard to plan and set goals for the future when everything seemed bleak.
I’m really glad I didn’t press send.
Instead of freaking out over the state of the manuscript, my house, and my life, I took the time to make progress on the physical sources of stress: the sink full of dishes, piles of clothes from laundry loads before the storm, and then taking down and detangling my daughter’s hair for their eventual return to school, and this article.
All of that helped me to get rooted back in my body, and none of it took as long as I thought, leaving me the rest of the day to put in more changes on this manuscript.
As my thoughts turn to this month, there are NO extravagant plans. All I want to do is get this book off my plate and BE PRESENT throughout the month. That looks like saying no to new opportunities and turning down all that doesn’t serve me, as well as putting the phone down, and putting the focus on my family for family and kids.
I think my one big takeaway is that I need to slip into restive hibernation from Thanksgiving until Valentine’s Day. In hindsight, I would have been better off not trying to act as an agent of capitalism with the constant go-go-go, and had taken the time to enjoy the holidays with my kids and ease into the year.
I’ll see what February has in store, and I’m hoping that it’s time freedom and rest.
On a finally positive note, several podcasts for the book came out and I’ll share the news below.
In Between The Pages with James Lott Jr. Spotify Link
My very first interview! I had a wonderful time with James and feeling like a “real” author. So much fun!
Narratives and Night Caps Spotify Link
Talking with another Brie about all things Nella, writing, and the overall fate of the world. I can’t wait to partner up again.
Author Montez: Episode 2.1: The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter
Such a lovely write-up of the book and a walk-through of the text and highlights of favorite passages.
How about you? Were you affected by Winter Storm Fern? How did your January turn out?
Happy Reading and Writing -
Bri
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