This book edits continue, but I’ve made a lot of progress this week—thank you to those of you who’ve prayed for my work; I really appreciate it. I had a quick doctor’s check-up this week, and we could do nothing but laugh at my elevated cortisol levels. Of course they are: I’ve got major edits I’m trying to finish in two weeks, a daughter to marry off in four weeks from yesterday, and a homeschooled son to graduate from high school in five weeks. Oh, and a class to finish teaching the Tuesday before the wedding. (I’m officially in my George Banks season; I’ve sent this gif more times lately than I care to admit.)

I’m hoping a year from now I’ll look back on this season in wonder how God sustained me through it all… It’s all I can do, really! That, and fight for sleep.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. I admittedly haven’t been reading much on the internet lately because my life is too full for such fun. I’ve read some things here and there (see below), but otherwise, unless I’m teaching or running an errand, these days it’s mostly me working on the book (often at our neighborhood coffee shop) peppered every hour or so with walking breaks. Last weekend I did, however, manage to read (via audiobook) Murder Takes a Vacation, by Laura Lippman and it was delightful. For whatever reason, cozy murder mysteries are the perfect antidote for me as I work on a theology-dense book, so unlike what I normally write. Scroll down a bit for my next mystery of choice.

2. I’m such a fan of C.S. Lewis, which means I’m such a fan of this rant from : “I actually believe it’s my calling to impress on you the depth of your error before we, as a generation of Christian culture, lose touch with this great man forever. I hope you’re ready. We’re going to do it up right, with a podcast where I yell at people while they complete remedial Lewis reading, and essays where I wax pedantic about deep lore. I’m going to dig up the oddest bits of ephemera from his deepest archives and remind us all just how blessed we were that such a man lived and loved God with all his strange, wonderful, broken heart and mind.”

3. I also absolutely love St. John Henry Newman, so this surprising essay about him and …Easter chocolate? from (actually, her husband) was a nice break to read in between book edits: “…this witness of mutual charity was one more step in the journey of the remarkable Cadbury family, whose frequent contemplation was the query, “And who is my neighbor?”

4. John is my favorite Apostle (the real guy, from the Bible, but sorta-kinda also the character in The Chosen), so this was fun. …Vegemite, however, is terrible.

5. And finally, this is a joke, but also not. It’s also actually a weirdly helpful explanation (bookmarking it for my high school personal finance class next year).

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

The Mudflats Murder Club, by Brian Thiem

Quotable 💬

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

-St. John Paul II

If you could suddenly, immediately acquire an expert-level skill or talent, what would you choose? 💪

I loved this reader-submitted question! And I genuinely don’t know what I’d choose because it depends on the day and in which area I’m currently feeling deficient… For right now, I’ll say my answer is a trade skill, because I’d love to help Kyle more with our forever fixer-upper renovation. But I do also wish I were a better singer.

• The arts (singing or playing an instrument, painting, writing, etc): 60.2%

• A trade skill (carpentry, electric work, plumbing): 20.2%

• A people skill (conflict resolution, meeting new people, leading a team): 13.2%

• Athletic prowess in your favorite sport: 6.4%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are three very small things you’re grateful for?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Sea urchins with miniature hats.

Happy Eastertide! As we continue to celebrate the longest feast season in the Church calendar (remember, Easter lasts fifty full days, all the way to Pentecost), may we keep a lively spirit in the midst of all our to-do lists and plate-spinning. I often find it ironic that this long feast sits smack-dab in the middle of what is arguably the busiest season for many of us (I’m looking at you, the end of a school year), yet here we are.

Our family had a wonderful Triduum this year, participating in our parish’s Spy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and finally Easter Vigil masses and services, and phew, was I wiped out… 😴 My middle son and I also walked ten miles on Good Friday in a pilgrimage starting thirty miles away from our front door. We left our house at 5:30 a.m., and let me just say I felt that. I may or may not have napped for almost three solid hours Monday afternoon.

I’m now spending most of my waking hours steeped in book edits, and probably will be for the next few weeks until I get the next draft of this book to my editor. Which is to say: I’ll most likely be unapologetically absent, quiet, and/or brief on the internet for this current season, but it’s all in the name of making this book what it most needs to be.

Pass the dark chocolate and whiskey. And prayers. Thank you in advance!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Did you fast from screens, social media, or the internet in general for Lent and kinda want to still keep up a fast of some sort? and wrote a comprehensive guide for how to carry on the digital fast: “Like monks and hermits, we need a new structure for how to live, one that replaces what has been removed with a pattern of life that accords with our human creed.”

2. I can’t remember if I’ve ever shared this in 5QT, but my go-to recipe database for literal years now has been Plan to Eat. I use it almost daily as my online recipe storage box, and I can’t imagine functioning in my kitchen without it. It’s super-duper handy if you’re looking for something like it.

3. Whenever I have some reading downtime (and I make sure I do each day, even if it’s ten minutes), these days I pick up two novels-in-progress by two writing friends of mine: and Faith Moore, both of whom have asked me to read their books in advance. Are both these novels delightful? Yes. Am I woefully behind in getting back to them? Also yes. Alas.

4. If our grandmas had oura rings, would their lives have been less of a thrill? I nodded my way through ’s short but punchy words: “Have we dwindled life down to scores? Have we literally sucked the fun out of living?”

5. And finally, no one utters fopdoodle with their dignity intact—a fun list of goofy English words from .

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

Alexandre Desplat Radio—good background music for deep-focused book edits

Quotable 💬

“That is one good thing about this world...there are always sure to be more springs.”

-L.M. Montgomery

What’s the best Easter candy? 🍬

Yep, good-old plain chocolate is by far the best choice for Easter (though I don’t mind a jelly bean here and there). Peeps are an absolute abomination.

• Chocolate Bunnies/Eggs: 36.7%

• Cadbury Creme Eggs: 24.4%

• Robin’s Eggs: 18.9%

• Jelly Beans: 17.3%

• Peeps: 2.7 %

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Join Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What one small thing could you do this weekend that would make your next week better?

Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Space evangelism (and welcome to the old neighborhood).

Happy Eastertide! I hope you had a lovely day of reflecting on Christus Victor.

Here’s your friendly reminder to keep on feasting, because Easter is a full fifty days... It feels good to be in a season of feasting after the long Lenten season, doesn’t it? Phew.

Our family had a fantastically full Holy Week, but it was also one of our best. …I’m grateful for the liturgical calendar and how it meets us just where we need to be.

Let’s talk spring reading, shall we? It’s a good season for reading, but it’s also one of the busiest times in family calendars, so for me, cracking open a book feels like both a luxury yet also a necessity. Giving myself permission to sit and read, even for fifteen minutes, is often just what’s needed to tether me to something more than my to-do list.

Read more

It’s hard to believe it’s already the last week of March... Sometimes beginnings of the year start slow for me, but not 2026 so far—this first quarter has absolutely whooshed by.

I love that the last week of the month coincides with the start of Holy Week, so instead of simmering in my in…

Read more

“Mrs. O, can we have more classes like this?” is always music to my ears when I hear comments like this as students file out to their next class.

I heard this from a few students this week, and because I was desperate to come up with an in-class project to review all the material we’d covered thus far since September, I whipped up an idea that morning. I divided the students into groups of five, then gave them modern-day scenarios: a local service business that encourages its employees to tell its clients something (an appliance, a car) is about to break down even though it’ll probably last several more years; a soldier ordered to participate in a drone strike with probable civilians (including children) nearby; students at public school demanding that a controversial guest speaker be uninvited because their topic could potentially cause harm, and the like. I then gave each group ten questions specific to their scenario in order to review what Western civilization has received from the three ancient cities that’ve poured its foundation: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. After answering the questions, they then had to come to a decision about what should be done in their modern scenario, decipher which ancient city most affected their ethical decision, then defend their answer to the class. It was a lively conversation, one that was much too short for our 1.5-hour class.

(If you’re curious, the city that was most cited? Athens, the birthplace of philosophy and democracy.)

…For the rest of the school year, we’re unpacking the events that led to the legalization (and therefore spread) of Christianity, the inevitable fall of the Roman Empire—and why, and all the pieces that fall into place to set the table for the time periods we’ll cover next year: the “Dark” Ages, Middle Ages, and Renaissance. I’m stoked.

Seven more weeks of the school year, but who’s counting! …Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is next week to kick off our study of Stoicism.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. One of the more fun names on Substack, , has written a lengthy-but-worth-it (meaning: very readable) treatise on how to be happy. Through all the meta-analyses of various studies that actually say something, he’s synthesized it into ten big things, looking at it through a Christian lens: “If we define happiness as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain through pursuing dopamine loops and passive living, then yes—that’s definitely not much of a priority for us in God’s mind. But a happiness that comes from living a rich, moral life that’s centered around Him and His kingdom is something followers of Jesus have been pointing toward from the very beginning. Joy, happiness, flourishing, etcetera aren’t the goal of our spirituality, but they’re an undeniable side effect.”

2. Speaking of… I know, I know I keep talking about and/or linking to Arthur Brooks, but since he’s making the rounds with his new book releasing in a few weeks, he’s all over the internet right now, and it’s genuinely good stuff…. Here he is this week—I really enjoyed his thoughts on marriage in particular (fascinating how much more eye contact women need than men).

3. Co-sign on this short thought here from : “You CANNOT increase your joy by avoiding discomfort. Joy and pain run on the same neural circuits, so you actually decrease your capacity for joy by avoiding discomfort.” I’m sure this is neurologically true, but this is also definitely spiritually and emotionally true, too. We were made for hard things.

4. All three of my kids have read the book Project Hail Mary and are frequently nudging me to read it1, and the two that have seen the movie really enjoyed it. I was happy to see my favorite father-son duo, and , discussing the movie in their new shared podcast—I haven’t yet finished their whole conversation, but I’m liking what I hear so far, and I agree with them on why sci-fi matters.

5. And finally, the jury’s still out on what I’m going to make (if anything) for an Easter dessert, but in years past I’ve made this relatively healthy carrot cake (I do cupcakes), and it’s delicious (I go with regular cream-cheese frosting). As a carnivore, last year I simply whipped cream with a touch of allulose and vanilla, then froze it and enjoyed it with blueberries—and since I hardly eat sweet things any more, it felt like a serious treat and was just the hit I needed.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir—the recommended audio version2 (slowly—see above)

Quotable 💬

“I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here is big medicine and strong magic...the command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. ”

-C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

What’s your least-worst chore? 🧹

I agree with the majority here; I actually don’t mind folding laundry (unless it’s Mt. Everest because no one else in the family is willing to do their part). Folding laundry is therapeutic and rhythmic; it’s touching clean things, and it requires me to stay in one place for a few moments. It’s also an excuse to listen to something while I do the otherwise monotonous work. A hundred years ago, laundry would have been an all-day event. Now, if done right, it can be a quiet hum in the background, followed by an excuse to meditate for ten minutes. (I also don’t mind vacuuming for the same reason.)

• Folding laundry: 46.8%

• Handwashing dishes: 25%

• Sweeping and/or vacuuming: 20%

• Dusting surfaces: 7.4%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are three things you’ve learned about yourself this Lenten season?

Other than our subscribers’ monthly gratitude chat this upcoming Monday, I’m taking next week off the internet to better keep my focus on Holy Week, so no 5QT next Friday. I’ll see you in two weeks!

See you then,

- Tsh

p.s. - Increasingly me, after three cups of coffee.

As you’re reading this I’m camping with my clan. The weather’s supposed to be beautiful, we’ve got a few more days still until Spring Break winds down, and we’ve got one of the better camp spots at our favorite go-to local state park. We booked this weekend ages ago as a way to celebrate a final family hurrah before the oldest kiddo gets married (in less than two months now 🤯)—unbeknownst to us at that time, her fiancé would now be living in the area, too, so he’s joining us as well!

It should be a delightful spring weekend.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. One of the challenges of camping this time of year: Lent. Since we fast from meat on Fridays, and since we’re big meat-eaters in our family, let’s just say the weekly Lenten fast feels very …Lent-y for our clan. But we’re gonna try fish tacos over a campfire—we’ll see how it goes!

2. If you’ve read 5QT for any length of time, you know of my great love for Arthur Brooks. I’ve already pre-ordered his book that releases at the end of this month, but I was happy to recently see him chat with George Kamel, a more recent follow of mine (as I continue to do research for my upperclassman personal finance class next fall). It was a great conversation (here it is in video form, if you prefer).

3. This past weekend we got another five ladies for our backyard flock! The chicks are currently living in a big cardboard box topped off with a window screen in our dining room and are incessantly chirping at all hours of the day. I used to be intimidated at the prospect of chickens, especially in the early stages, but once you get the hang of it it’s really pretty simple. They’ll live indoors in their box for a few more weeks, and then we’ll slowly introduce them to the big girls currently in the coop out back. There’s a whole art and science to that part, but we’ll get to it later. …Let’s just say it involves watermelon.

4. Speaking of chickens… I really enjoyed this piece from about why all the girl bosses suddenly want chickens. It was reminiscent of my about-face I had in light of burnout in my work about eight-ish years ago, so I wouldn’t exactly say “suddenly” here—I’ve seen a slow, subtle change with a lot of women in this line of work since I started writing online more than eighteen years ago now. But I totally get what she means, and it made me all the more glad I waved goodbye long ago to places like Instagram and media like girl-boss podcasts (and goodness, I haven’t made a funnel in years): “We’re not checking out. We’re hedging in the most human way possible.”

5. And finally, because you know I can’t go too long without sharing one of these from Max Miller… Here’s that deep-dive on what pioneers ate on the Oregon Trail that you never asked for.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Annika1

Quotable 💬

“Real freedom does not mean being ruled by one’s impulses from one moment to the next. Just the opposite. Being free means not being a slave to one’s moods; it means being guided in a course of action by the fundamental choices one has made, choices one does not repudiate in the face of new circumstances.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe2

It’s been a couple months now… How are those New Year’s resolutions/goals/plans coming along? 🥂

This question was a suggestion from Kyle, and I thought it was fun because I genuinely, legitimately forgot that New Year’s was even not too long ago. …Joke’s on it, though, because I had no goals or resolutions to remember in the first place, like the majority of you. I typically do make some sort of quarterly goal, but what with absolutely everything on my plate this spring—daughter’s wedding, book deadline, class, senior graduating, etc. etc. etc.—I gave myself an overload of grace this year. And I’m glad I did.

• I’m guilt-free because I never made ‘em in the first place: 65.3%

• Uh… They’re ekeing along, I suppose. Hit or miss: 20.6%

• Solid! I review them weekly and track my progress: 7.5%

• Oh yeah—I completely forgot about those: 6.6%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

You’ve got a weekend free, but with only enough time to go somewhere nearby with one tank of gas, there and back. Where do you go?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - NYC dogs in bags.

I’m smack-dab in the middle of book edits this afternoon as I write this, and I’m actually making good traction (for once). Therefore, this particular 5QT will be a bit on the brief side. Onward!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. A few days ago I republished to my upgraded subscribers an older piece from The Art of Simple (thanks for answering my question last week!). I just unlocked it for everyone, so here it is, if you’d like to either remember it from years ago or read it fresh for the first time: “Remember what the wise sage Winnie-the-Pooh once said: ‘You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.’ Don’t ignore the friendship possibilities God has already put in your life in the name of waiting for that one perfect kindred spirit that may not exist. Embrace partial solutions, in this and in all of life this side of the veil.”

2. Why do ‘mother of the bride’-specific dresses all look like they think I have big hair and time-traveled from the 90s? I think I finally found the dress I’ll wear to my daughter’s upcoming wedding, but I had to dig deep (and ultimately search for ‘bridesmaid’ or simply ‘cocktail’ dresses). If you needed that wildly specific tip for your life at the moment—well, there you go.

3. Speaking of the 90s (and 80s, for that matter), I was fascinated by this piece about the resurgence of an appreciation for physical media from , especially among Gen-Zers who never grew up with it: “Nostalgia is absolutely a major cause of this moment. Yet, to leave it at that would be missing something. That something would be a cottage industry that is rapidly expanding and improving at the same time the Internet gets worse and subscription costs go up.”

4. I’m working on plans for teaching a personal finance elective at our co-op next year, and as I gather resources and ideas for this class, I was reminded just how much I like our family budget-tracking software. I know, such a boring topic! But I thought I’d at least share, in case you’re in the market for something (I know I often focus on our family finances in the spring—hello, taxes). Turns out my software of choice, Monarch, has a thing where current users can provide a link for others to get 50% off their first year—so, here you go. They’re not paying me or an affiliate of any sort! I just thought I’d pass this along.

5. And finally, ten unsexy habits that save me serious money. Similar to the above, this isn’t usually the subject matter I typically consume, but as I research for my forthcoming class, I found this pretty commonsensical yet helpful if it’s needed. (At least I do most of these things, too.)

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

My new Best of playlist

Quotable 💬

“We aren’t always free to change things, but we are always free to live through them in faith, hope, and love so that in every situation we grow humanly and spiritually.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe1

Choose one and only one… 🥩

This quirky question was thanks to my fifteen-year-old son, and as a current carnivore it spoke deeply to my innermost soul. Akin to most carnivores (who can’t shut up about the bioavailability of all needed nutrients through it), I’m Team Beef™ all the way. With a side of bacon.

• Beef: 43.8%

• Chicken: 43.4%

• Pork: 9%

• Turkey: 3.8%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

We’re just over the halfway point of Lent now—how’s it going for you? What are you learning about yourself?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - Gondor calls for aid.

I first wrote the following essay in the second half of the website’s life, but like most of the topics I wrote about there, its idea had long been taking root in my mind for years, slowly growing from a seed to a spout to a full-bloom leafy plant. Five-plus years later, I’m relieved to say that not only do I still agree with my original ruminations, but I’m on the other side of my need as witness to how well God meets heartfelt desires like this.

As with all my essays I plan to republish, I’ve edited it for clarity (because I’m a better writer now, thank goodness) and content (because some of my ideas have deepened or even changed with earned wisdom, also thank goodness).

Enjoy.

The topic of friendship has been a common one around our house lately. We have several kids who’ve shared a desire for more—or for more like-minded—friends, and after taking off my mom hat when the kids are in bed, I pour myself a drink and confide the same thing to Kyle.

I, too, would like to have more like-minded friends. It’s a weird thing, to be a full-grown adult and confess that it’s hard to make friends. It conjures up playground emotions of vulnerability and awkwardness because it puts you in a position of need, which feels uncomfortable.

Being on the receiving end of years of emails and private messages from readers: a lot of us feel this way.

Some of you who’ve written me are in your teens and have confessed a desire to find friends who share a kindred-spirited value of people over things, quality over quantity, meaning over status.

Some of you are in your twenties, doing the career-building thing and feeling alone, or doing the young parent thing and likewise feeling alone, and overall feeling alone as you navigate some pretty big waters.

Some of you are in your thirties and forties, like me, realizing how isolating our roles can be, whether they be breadwinner or stay-at-home parent or something in-between, longing for more local support and camaraderie.

Some of you are older than me, walking ahead and confessing that it’s still hard as we get older to make friends.

Let’s just say it collectively: finding friends can be hard. But finding friends is also so very worth it.

Here’s what I’ve told my three children for years now1: partial solutions. It’s something my therapist in Thailand taught me years ago, it’s something I’ve also been writing about for years, and I say this phrase at least once a week at home.

Life is full of partial solutions—where there’s a way to get a need met, and it might not be the ideal way, but it’s a way that still works.

Partial solutions apply to almost every area of life, from decorating our home, to getting dressed in the morning, to carving out a career for ourselves, to making dinner, to electing a politician. We can’t do the absolute ideal thing, but we can do the good-enough. And of course this is the case with friendships, too.

When I espouse the idea of partial solutions to my kids, I’m telling this to myself, too, because it’s easy for me to build a wall in order to hold on too tightly to my ideals, because when it comes to friendship, I really would love to find more kindred spirits2, so I embrace my must-have list of qualities in a person in the name of holding on to my integrity.

I’d like my ideal friend to be uber-local to me (as in, lives in my neighborhood), an entrepreneurial breadwinner who gets the challenge of providing for her family both financially and maternally, a Christian—with the same theological convictions as me, please—and while we’re at it, it’d be great if she also currently lives in a fixer-upper renovation and deals with all those challenges therein. Oh, and a mom with kids the same ages as mine.

I’m unintentionally treating real human beings as caricatures of personhood instead of divinely-made souls walking through real life on earth, like me. Ridiculous, right? But when I’m feeling pouty and pitiful, I take a step back and realize that this is precisely what I’m doing: being ridiculous. (Another word for this is picky.)

Here’s what I’ve been telling my children, and therefore myself, too: Pray for and hope for close friendships. This is a good desire. But don’t be so idealistic that you’re blind to the opportunities for friendship right in front of you. The person in your life that you least expect might end up the answer to your prayer.

This looks like pursuing that person already in your life instead of waiting for someone who might not exist. It looks like looking out for who might need a friend more than you. It looks like taking the initiative to get together when you’d rather wait to be invited. It looks like keeping healthy boundaries when you feel particularly vulnerable about all this, not turning to social media for a facsimile of the real thing.

It looks like continually keeping your eyes peeled for someone who fits the bill, but it looks even more like keeping partial solutions at the forefront of your mind when you yearn for companionship. Maybe God’s already answering this prayer; you just need to recognize who it is He’s really bringing to you.

We can be each other’s kindred spirits in the most surprising ways; it doesn’t need to look how we think it should look. Very often, the path to finding a good kindred spirit is to simply reach out first to that one person you already have in mind. Ask her to coffee; ask him if he’d like to go on a walk during your lunch break. Go first and initiate, because even though it feels like you’re the only one who’d like a friend—you’re not.

Remember what the wise sage Winnie-the-Pooh once said: “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

Don’t ignore the friendship possibilities God has already put in your life in the name of waiting for that one perfect kindred spirit that may not exist. Embrace partial solutions, in this and in all of life this side of the veil.

Partial solutions is the best answer to the question of where and how to find deep, meaningful friendships.

This time of year is always interesting as a teacher, because everyone has a case of the blerghs… even the teachers. My students are usually top-notch and have great attitudes, but I can tell that even they are hankering for Spring Break. I’m happy to report that ours begins in just a few weeks, and I am here for it! As a family we’re not doing much other than a few days of camping, but it’ll be nice to have a breather and get out in some nature.

My go-to solution for the school-year blerghs: remember your why for learning the way you do, be it homeschool or wherever. Get some fresh air every day (even when it’s still cold or unseasonably warm). Go on daily walks and move your body, just for fun. Perhaps (briefly) set down the challenging classic and read something short and light-hearted. Schedule a game night one evening—yes, even in the midst of busyness. And keep that menu plan nice and easy.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Speaking of my students, this week we had a really good in-class conversation on AI and its role in the learning and writing process—and why it’s so important (especially in their generation) to fight with every fiber of our beings the over-reliance on it to do our human work for us (because tool = something that helps us do our work; machine = something that does our work for us). I liked ’s recent thoughts on AI slop, in particular its connection with our diets: “Our bodies crave instant gratification, and the sugar highs and lows we experience from the junk food exacerbate this. Much easier to pick up the phone than go outside to see wildlife (which requires us to expend energy). Much easier to scroll through AI slop than enjoy a good book. When we want to be entertained, we throw patience and effort to the wind and instantly pick up our mobile slop dispensers and scroll the hours away — alongside a packet of crisps or two.”

2. I love the wisdom that’s been going around for a long time (from the likes of Arthur Brooks and Andrew Huberman) about going on a walk first thing in the morning before having any coffee. The problem with that for me is that I wake up naturally at dark-thirty, and as a woman I’m not going on a walk in the dark by myself, even in our ridiculously super-safe neighborhood. But I’ve decided to embrace partial solutions, as always, and the past few weeks have been doing body stretches and light pilates in the living room near all the windows as the sun comes up (I may switch to the back deck next week). It’s been delightful, and it really is fascinating how much better I feel if I do that before having coffee. Once the sun and/or Kyle is up, I’m happily leashing up the dog and strolling through the neighborhood—but before then, I’m doing the closest thing that works for me, and it’s been really good for my mindset (and my body the rest of the day, surprisingly enough).

3. I appreciated this reflection on the role of laughter in our pursuit of virtue—even when we’re the punchline. I admit I struggle with that sometimes, yet ’s words are what I needed to read: “No one enjoys being laughed at. But bearing ridicule may be the kind of foolishness that is consistent with the cross. If we can allow it, mockery can become a kind of small apocalypse, revealing what society thinks of us, what is truly inside our hearts, and the marrow of our actions both public and private.”

4. From late 2007 to the end of 2020, I ran a website called The Art of Simple, and over time, I published many of my own thoughts as well as a smattering of writing friends’ too. I’m toying with the idea of importing some of my favorites written by me (and perhaps by others’ with their permission) here into Substack. It’s getting expensive where I’m hosting it, and Substack is so user-friendly and easy to find. …Any thoughts on this idea?

5. And finally, I loved this short shot-in-the-arm of encouragement from Fr. Mike Schmitz. I completely agree, too—lately I’ve been spending my early morning hours with Jesus just… listening. Not starting with bringing him my laundry list of concerns (because he already knows all of it anyway), but simply enjoying his presence. It’s been a game-changer. 10/10, would recommend.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Masterpiece’s new The Count of Monte Cristo series—it’s excellent (so far)!

Quotable 💬

“Faith frees us from doubt, error, lies, blindness, and nonsense. Hope frees us from fear, discouragement, worry, and guilt. Love frees us from egoism, avarice, turning in on ourselves, and a narrow, meaningless life without value or fruitfulness. It frees us from frustrations and bitterness. The measure of our freedom is the measure of our faith, of our hope, of our love.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe1

What’s the best thing about the current weather in your neck of the woods? 🌳

I really liked this question from Kyle, because it’s not about a set type of weather, it’s about all the craziness that this time of year brings just about everywhere in the world. If your area is like mine (central Texas), weather changes by the hour. So for my answer today, I’m going with “I love wearing shorts and t-shirts in February!” because it is genuinely warm already around here, and I’m choosing to embrace it.

• No matter the temp, I’m choosing to go with the flow by the hour: 66.7%

• Hey, I like a good reason to stay indoors: 17.4%

• I love wearing shorts and t-shirts in February: 15.9%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are you learning about yourself this Lent so far?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - A sparkler, an egg, and a moment of truth.

What’s the official “anniversary” gift for 400? Platinum? Uranium? Plutonium? Either way, happy 400th issue of 5QT! I started this weekly letter before I migrated to Substack in 2019, and it quickly became one of my favorite regular work tasks. I’m happy to say it’s still way up on my list… It’s sometimes challenging during busy seasons—such as, oh, now for example, what with a book-edits deadline, current open enrollment for my classes next year, and a daughter getting married in a little over two months. But I’m grateful for the work no matter how full life is, so thank you, thank you, thank you for reading this over the years! I’m honored.

When I’m not doing all the above, these days I’m daydreaming about this spring’s backyard garden—I’m keeping it simple this year (see: above), but I’ll at least do my usual cucumbers and tomatoes for my summer stash of pickles and salsa. I want to get better at flower-growing, though… Any resources out there? YouTube channels? Podcasts? Do share!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. If you’re a leveled-up subscriber of The Commonplace, don’t forget to share your monthly gratitude lists—it’s one of my favorite things to read each month. You guys are naming everything from the Winter Olympics, to spring weather, orange cake, planting seeds in milk jugs, Lent, backyard chickens, goofy dogs, and more… I love it.

2. Leisure is the basis of culture, according to the 20th century philosopher Josef Pieper1. But leisure isn’t lounging around or mindless playing; believe it or not, it takes intentionality—and for those of us with a lot of plates spinning, it’s sometimes annoyingly harder than it should be. Arthur Brooks, one of my favorite modern thinkers, has a solid episode about what leisure actually looks like, boots on the ground. Good stuff.

3. Fridays in Lent are challenging for me as someone who eats mostly carnivore, but it helps to still focus on getting as much protein and good fats as possible. Along with some scrambled eggs, here’s my go-to carnivore breakfast smoothie: this bone broth2, about a 1/4 cup heavy cream, about the same in coffee (decaf if I’m already floating), about 10 drops of iodine, and a handful of ice. Blend and done.

4. I never grew up really thinking about generations in a clear-cut, divided-line manner the way they’re talked about now (which is perhaps, ironically, a symptom of my actual generation). I honestly believe I’m from the best generation—the ‘xennials’—which I’ve also heard called the Oregon Trail generation or the Star Wars generation. Basically, it’s those of us born between 1976-1985 (when those OG Star Wars movies released and when we got to play OT in elementary school once a week as a reward for good behavior); we’re not quite Gen-X, not quite Millenial. This short video is surprisingly accurate, I think.

5. And finally, speaking of the 80s… I’ve shared these before, but it’s been a few years, and by-golly if they’re not so much fun (and a rare gem that briefly went viral during that Covid lockdown era). The 1986 one is still my favorite. All hail the fourth grade.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

This Movie Soundtracks for Reading & Studying playlist

Quotable 💬

“Faith is the essence of our capacity to receive the free gift of God.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe3

Reminder: I’ve got a Lent Playlist! 🎧

If you’re reading through my Lent book Bitter & Sweet right now (or even if you’re not), here’s your friendly reminder that I’ve also got an accompanying daily playlist to keep you company throughout this long season. It’s a gem, if I say so myself! …But definitely not because of me—it’s because there’s such good music out there in this department these days.

Over or under: which is correct? 🧻

I asked this visual question a few years ago and I remember the correct answer (over) winning, but I don’t remember it being this much of a landslide... Glad to see I’ve still got a solid group of smart readers here.

• Over: 90%

• Under: 10%

Find the next poll here.

Historic Highlands: Our 2026 Pilgrimage to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

“There is no other place like Scotland in the whole world.” - Sir Walter Scott

Come with us to Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What are three very small things you’re grateful for?4

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - A lemon on a pear…5

By early next week, February 2026 will have officially been in the books (already! ...this month flew by), so let’s end this month well. I read this yesterday in my Lenten read, Fire & Light:

“Gratitude opens us up to the gifts of grace. Not that it makes God more generous (for he is fully…

Read more

Happy (?) start to the season of Lent! …I never know how to say that. Is it happy? I think so, in a way, because I actually really appreciate this season, but it does feel a little strange because the point isn’t exactly happiness, but more virtue (in a union with Christ kind of way). Then again, Aristotle would say real happiness is a virtue á la eudaemonia, which at a deeper level is about a state of true, deep flourishing. And since virtue is becoming who we’re made to be, and eudaemonia is about well-being at our core selves, then I suppose Lent really is about our happiness. So—a happy start to season of Lent, indeed.

I’ll show my nerdy self out.

We had a fabulous Shrove Tuesday serving and eating pancakes at our parish, followed by a full Solemn Mass for Ash Wednesday, so I’m feeling as ready as I’ll ever be. Bring on the 40+ days.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. ICYMI, a few days ago I shared my simple guide to Lent—and it’s not too late to “start,” even if you haven’t done much (or anything) yet… “This year, you may be invited to more actively participate, or, you may be invited to quietly let the season have its way with you in a posture of receiving. Ultimately, Lent is just that: an invitation, and should be treated as such. Lent is very old—one of the oldest-known traditions in the Church (we have documents referencing Lent from the second century)—which means it’s a time-weathered tradition and practice in the Christian life. It means, practically, that Lent is an invitation for everyone.”

2. This is my fourth Lent in a row where I’ve created a set weekly menu plan for all six-plus weeks of the season. This means I’m plugging-and-playing the same week’s menu for all of Lent …and my household doesn’t mind one bit (in fact, one kid has said he prefers it this way). I keep it super-simple: things like soup in the Instant Pot on Mondays, Taco Tuesday, etc. Nothing fancy. This helps me stay focused on my own Lenten fast, it simplifies our routine, and it reminds us of our modern sensibility for novelty—and how unnecessary that really is. For a season, we can stick to the same simple food at home, and it makes mama a lot saner (and therefore happier).

3. How far back in time can you understand English? This was quite a ride from —I got to about 1300 before it all fell apart in my brain: “Þanne after muchel tyme spak þe Maiſter, and his wordes weren colde as wintres is. His vois was as þe crying of rauenes, scharpe and schille, and al þat herde hym weren adrade and durst nat speken.”

4. I’ve only seen one of these films, but it’s one of my all-time favorites, so I’m intrigued by these other four recommendations for good films for Lent by : “Great art can itself be a kind of contemplation that draws us more deeply into the liturgical reality of Christ’s experience in the desert and His passion.”

5. And finally, because I can’t seem to no longer go a month without sharing something from Tasting History (one of my favorite YouTube channels), here’s that fascinating history of boxed mac-and-cheese you never asked for.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Fire & Light, by Fr. Jacques Philippe (my chosen Lenten read this year)

Quotable 💬

“We must remember death. I understand.
And yet I remember too the wild grace
That I saw poured out where the waters played. 
So Lent begins: ‘Through him all things were made.’”

- Andrew Peterson (via a new sonnet of his… lovely)

Lent is Here ➕

At the risk of incessantly repeating myself, here’s your remind that Lent has now begun this week, but you’re not behind. If you’re looking for a daily guide for the season, you might like my book, Bitter & Sweet. Together, we spend the six-plus weeks of Lent walking through the seven cardinal vices, as well as their corresponding virtues, and how we might use Lent as a gift to shed the former and take on more of the latter.

Similar to my Advent guide, Bitter & Sweet uses daily Scripture, a short reflection from me, a question to ponder, and a song (with accompanying playlist), as well as weekly art. Lent is a long season, so it’s helpful to have a companion to keep the fire going... If you’d like my words to be that companion for you this year, consider this book—I put my heart and soul into it.

Learn more about Bitter & Sweet 🍋

In these weekly polls for 5 Quick Things, how often is your answer the most popular one chosen? 🙋‍♀️

I know this was a self-referential question, but I’ve been genuinely curious for a long while now… As for me, my answers tend to be the second-most popular choice — I’d say my personal answer is the reader’s top choice only every couple months. I don’t really know what to do with this information, but I wanted to know. And now I do.

• Half the time: 67.2%

• Seldom: 28.5%

• Every couple months: 3.1%

• Every time: 0.9%

• Never: 0.3%

Find the next poll here.

Come to Scotland: July 18-28, 2026 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Until the end of TODAY, February 20, the company I partner with has a generous deal to register for this summer’s pilgrimage to Scotland! You can get $100 off for a single registration when you use the code LOVETHIS, or $250 for two with the code LOVETHIS2. I’d love you to join us! Learn more about our 2026 pilgrimage to the Historic Highlands.

Learn More 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What is your honest hope for Lent this year?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - Get that dog a medal.

A few years ago I wrote a practical guide to Lent, and as I sat down to write some Lenten thoughts this year, I realized I’d basically say the same thing again. So, I’m dusting off the following from my archives and tweaking it just a bit. I hope it’s encouraging and helpful! -t

Heads up, in case you weren’t aware: Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, February 18, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season on the Church calendar. There are a great many think pieces on this season out on the internet, and there’s no need for me to add to them. Yet Lent often sneaks up on us—before I had a book about Lent, I’d often find out it was almost Lent this week, or even on Ash Wednesday itself. …Perhaps this is you right now. If so, welcome!

I’ve found this long season in the liturgical calendar to be both deeply formative and practically challenging. There have been years when it’s been clear I need to receive the invitation of Lent to actively participate in the season—and there are years when it’s clear that Lent should be …humming as theme music in the background (usually when all of life feels Lenten). This year, you may be invited to more actively participate, or, you may be invited to quietly let the season have its way with you in a posture of receiving. Ultimately, Lent is just that: an invitation, and should be treated as such.

Lent is very old—one of the oldest-known traditions in the Church (we have documents referencing Lent from the second century)—which means it's a time-weathered tradition and practice in the Christian life. It means, practically, that Lent is an invitation for everyone.

Most people connect Lent to the act of fasting, and that’s true; it’s a literal season of penance. But to many modern minds, fasting is simply not eating food in some way: skipping a meal, eliminating a type of food (caffeine, sugar), or otherwise a more spiritual form of intermittent fasting. These are valid forms of fasting, but fasting is much broader than food, and fasting can mean more than eliminating something—it can also mean adding something.

BIf you want to participate in Lent for one of the first times but aren’t sure where to begin, it’s good to understand some foundational ideas:

1. Lent isn’t about doing some sort of personal quest. It’s not “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge,” as some journalists put it a few years ago. The point isn’t to better yourself by way of personal grit and effort.

2. You will screw up. In some ways, this is the point—not to watch yourself fail spectacularly and have an excuse to beat yourself up, but to have tangible evidence of your human finiteness. You can’t do hard things on your own, out of sheer effort. You need the grace of Christ to do hard things. To do anything. This long Lenten reminder is a gift of grace to us all.

“Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.”

-St. Catherine of Siena

3. Much of the Lenten season is about fighting your “noonday devil.” Acedia is one of our most universally felt and universally unspoken-of enemies in our modern era. It’s spiritual apathy, or as my favorite shorthand definition puts it: it’s a sadness that good things are hard. A few years ago on my podcast I unpacked the vice of sloth, so perhaps it’s helpful to listen to my short introduction to acedia, then listen to the next episode where I unpack with Dcn. Harrison Garlick the noonday devil and how to fight it.

4. Lent is a three-legged stool, with each leg representing the three traditional practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. They’re best done in tandem with each other: take one away, and you’ll have to use more of your human effort to not fall over on the wobbly stool. Practice all three in some way (even in a very small way), and it’s easier to rest all your weight on the seasonal purpose of penance.

Within this trifecta, Lent can involve eliminating something in your life—something you sense has a hold on you that shouldn’t—yet it can also involve adding something to your life—something you don’t yet do but sense could bring you to further unity with Christ.

“Lent is a time of grace, a time for conversion, a time to come home to God.”

-St. Maximilian Kolbe

If the overall purpose of Lent is penance, and if the purpose of penance is to shed attachments that keep us from being more of who we’re meant to be—a saint—then our ultimate goal when we participate in Lent is virtue. After all, a habit of virtue is the act of becoming more fully human in the original sense of it all (you know, pre-fall).

If the goal of Lent is a cultivation of our virtue by way of penance, and if there’s a trifecta tradition of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, each of which could involve either eliminating or adding something… That’s a lot to take in. No wonder Lent feels overwhelming and some of us just don’t bother at all.

Let’s get practical, then. If you’re like me, you can think of all sorts of ways in which you could cultivate more virtue in your life, yet you know this isn’t a personal “40-day challenge.” Lent is long, and we often take on too much at the beginning and burn out by week three. It’s good to start small.

First: Start with prayer. Any Lenten practice you take on should be led by God and not made up on a personal whim. God often uses our own inklings, practical circumstances, and wisdom from other people, so don’t write those off. In my experience, I typically discover what I should do for Lent in the quiet hours of contemplation; it’s often the thing that initially makes me think, “Oh no, not that thing!” Yes, that thing.

Next: Listen to my short episode on acedia. Get into the right mindset of what it means to battle our human tendency towards apathy during Lent.

Then: I find it helpful to break down all my options practically into lists, noticing what stands out to me. As per my Benedictine Rule of Life process, I think through the five habit practices of worship, work, study, hospitality, and renewal, continually keeping the end goal of Lent in mind: deeper union with Christ through the cultivation of virtue.

“The purpose of Lent is not to force on us a few formal obligations, but to soften our heart so that it may open itself to the realities of the spirit, to experience the hidden thirst for communion with God.”

-Pope St. John Paul II

Here are a few ideas. They tend to have a yin-yangness of taking away and adding something in tandem, but these pairs don’t have to be chosen together; this is simply a helpful way to think through penances.

Worship (what it is we love) 🙏

• Eliminate: sleeping in

• Add: a set time of morning prayer

• Eliminate: a show that we know isn’t great for us

• Add: a particular book1, podcast, or show that is

• Eliminate: one meal per day or week

• Add: taking the money you’d spend on that meal and giving it to charity

Work (how we participate in creation) 🔨

• Eliminate: sleeping in

• Add: using the morning hours to work on a side project you’ve wanted to do

• Eliminate: complaining about your job

• Add: writing your Rule of Life

• Eliminate: excess spending in a particular category (clothing, eating out, etc.)

• Add: anonymously doing one extra (not-loved) work task each week

Study (what it is we learn or think about) 📚

• Eliminate: scrolling social media

• Add: using that time to read a book or take a class

• Eliminate: watching a particular (not great) YouTube channel

• Add: watching a particular (better for you) YouTube channel

• Eliminate: endless “research” about a particular topic

• Add: implementing the knowledge gained from the research on that topic

Hospitality (how we love our neighbors) 🏘️

• Eliminate: one particular block of time in our week you tend to waste

• Add: using that time to serve your community in some way

• Eliminate: listening to podcasts on your long commute or daily walks

• Add: calling a friend to catch up with them on this long commute or daily walk (and then praying for them)

• Eliminate: excess items in your home (perhaps decluttering one item per day or one box per week)

• Add: inviting one family or friend over for dinner each week

Renewal (how we care for ourselves) 🚶

• Eliminate: excess food in some way (a meal, a category like sugar, caffeine, alcohol, etc.)

• Add: a simpler menu plan (the same breakfast or lunch, or the same weekly dinner plan throughout Lent)

• Eliminate: evening TV time

• Add: an evening walk

• Eliminate: a creature comfort (your pillow, warm showers, etc.)

• Add: cultivating a new hobby, or perhaps a house or community project

I’ve limited myself to sharing only three eliminations and three add-ons from each of these five categories to curtail the simple response many of us feel at the start of Lent: overwhelm. Remember, the point isn’t to do as much as possible, or to make it as hard as possible. The goal of Lent is union with Christ, so let him lead you to a specific form of participation. Consider your participation an act of worship.

If you can, go to an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow; they tend to be all over town at many hours of the day, and they’re open to everyone. It’s not required, of course, but there’s nothing quite like another finite human being smudging ashes on your body and reminding you that life is short and that you, too, will one day die. Remembering our mortality is the right way to begin a season of penance and renewal.

May we all have a rich, blessed start to our Lents this week! Lean on all the grace poured out for you. No white-knuckling here.

“Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.”

-Thomas a Kempis

It’s been a bit of a mind game watching the Winter Olympics this week, of which we are huge fans in our household, because temps around here have been gloriously sunny with highs in the 70s (I’m currently wearing shorts, a tank top, and sandals). No matter the weather, watching the Olympics tends to be a bonding experience for our clan, admiring various forms of whooshing down either snow or ice—which, you have to admit, is the bulk of what these winter sports are. I’m mostly a fan of all the skiing, but I also enjoy the wildness of those seemingly made-up-on-a-dare (almost certainly involving alcohol)1 sports of luge, skeleton, and bobsled. (I’m a rarity in that I don’t particularly enjoy figure skating.2)

I’m writing this a few days earlier than usual because by the time you’re reading this we’ve out out-of-town guests for the weekend, so this will be a bit on the short side. Onward!

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. In case you missed it, earlier this week I wrote a short essay on why I love travel and how it dovetails well with my homebody nature—and in particular, why I love pilgrimages: “Travel allows us to encounter the world’s wide variety of people and places. Pilgrimages, a particular form of travel, allows us to encounter those people and places while hearing from God about why He wants us to encounter them. What’s the sacred stuff beneath what I’m seeing, tasting, and touching? What’s the sacred stuff in me? What does He want to tell me through this particular journey of mine? How am I called to return home a little different?”

2. I’ve been sluggishly sick this past week, which means I’ve been doing more watching than reading than usual... Because of this, here’s a Q&A with a farmer that normally wouldn’t be my typical topic of interest, but turned out to be riveting. I already appreciated the farming trade, but now I have an even deeper newfound respect for our hardworking farmers.

3. I’m a simple girl these days: I see Arthur Brooks’ name on it, I click play. I appreciated this short-and-sweet interview format, and I love the topic.

4. Continuing with the I’m-sick-so-I’ve-been-watching-stuff… The most isolated town in the world, and why people live there. I’ve been itching to travel lately (see: my essay, linked above), so stuff like this has been my balm until I get back out there.

5. And finally, what book would you live in? What a fun question from .

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, by Cardinal St. John Henry Newman

Quotable 💬

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Lent is Coming! ➕

Hard to believe, but Ash Wednesday is this next week already, and that day signifies the first day of the Lenten season. I’ll share more of my thoughts in the coming week, but in the meantime: if you’d like a daily reading, might I suggest my book, Bitter & Sweet? In it, I spend the six-plus weeks of Lent walking through the seven cardinal vices—and their corresponding virtues—and how we might use Lent as a gift to shed the former and take on more of the latter.

Similar to my Advent guide, Bitter & Sweet uses daily Scripture, a short reflection from me, a question to ponder, and a song (with accompanying playlist), as well as weekly art. Lent is a long season, so I’ve found it helpful to have a companion to keep me going... If you’d like my words to be that companion for you this year, I’d be honored to walk alongside you this year through this book.

Learn more about Bitter & Sweet 🍋

What’s the ideal Valentine’s Day gift? 💝

We’ve got quite the spread of reader answers over here, and while I do agree that the top choices are all lovely—a walk-and-chat combo is basically my favorite free thing to do—I also agree that it’s a pretty dumb holiday. I mean, the actual St. Valentine the man was probably pretty great, but I’m not a fan of Big Holiday™ telling me when to feel romantic. My contrarian nature pushes me to do nothing on February 14, and instead do the date thing on either the 13th or 15th (or thereabouts).

Therefore, my answer is dinner out: because these days, with all we have going on, Kyle and I feel like ships passing in the night, and nice dinner out sounds like a veritable vacation. I’ll take it. (...But not on the 14th.)

• Walk & chat: 18.80%

• Nothing 16.9%

• Dinner in: 16.1%

• Dinner out: 15.3%

• Flowers: 14.3%

• Chocolate: 10.3%

• Massage: 8.2%

Find the next poll here.

Come to Scotland: July 18-28, 2026 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I love, love, love leading pilgrimages (see the above)—I’d love it if you prayed about joining us in Scotland this summer, where we’ll walk through the rugged highlands and listen to God’s voice on the Isle of Skye, in the halls of medieval castles, walking through historic St. Andrews, and more. And if you sense through prayer that this pilgrimage is meant for you, I’ll join you in prayer that God will provide all you need to go.

From now until February 20, you can get $100 off for a single registration when you use the code LOVETHIS, or $250 for two with the code LOVETHIS2 to register for this summer’s pilgrimage, Historic Highlands.

Learn More 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

Who are three people in your life that you love? (Do they know?)

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - A corpse could do the same thing.

I love where I live for so many reasons: our scrappy 90-year-old fixer-upper that will never be finished, our walkable neighborhood and its third places, the people around me who I’m honored to call neighbors, the fact that our family has lived here longer than anywhere else in our adult lives (we were quite nomadic the first half of our marriage, including overseas). There’s something good and right in finding real contentment with the soil you’ve been given to bury your roots.

As I unpack in my Rule of Life workshop, Benedictines take, among the other traditional religious vows, a vow of stability—a commitment to stay put where they’ve committed to serve, even when it’s difficult, or more common in our modern era now, even when life gets boring and ordinary. For those of us who haven’t taken formal vows, there’s still a lesson here: that there’s a quiet, settled wisdom in choosing to stay put somewhere for the long haul, no matter the drudgery of daily life.

For much of my early adulthood, I searched for novelty. I didn’t know this, really; I just thought I was made for adventure, cut from different cloth than my peers who prioritized jobs with benefits and buying a house before age thirty. This assumption served me well because it’s how I met Kyle on the mission field, where we both, out of our own volition, lived in war-torn Kosovo and opted for fields potentially riddled with mines over a neighborhood with lawns and cared-for playgrounds. We spent our first 12-ish years of marriage either living and serving overseas, preparing to do so, or recovering from doing so (along with a year-long stint living out of backpacks with our kids while we circumnavigated the world together).

But there was something in the pair of our bones that finally settled, when we admitted how much knowing and being known mattered, and that there really is adventure also to be found in growing backyard tomatoes, taking kids to tae kwon do and gymnastics practice, and joining local book clubs. As of this fall we’ve now lived in our run-down cottage for a decade, and we can’t imagine living anywhere else. There’s almost nowhere I’d rather be than in my thrifted green velvet chair with a view through the window of the sycamore in my front yard, watching the leaves come and go throughout the seasons as I sip my morning coffee. Turns out there’s a Baggins side in me after all.

But those Tookish bones in me are still strong, too, and it doesn’t take much for them to need a stretch in their joints to continue exploring the world’s nooks and crannies. Once we hung up our backpacks after our family’s year of travel, Kyle and I made a commitment to dust them off whenever we could. Even deeper, we committed to sharing that love for the world, helping others stretch their Tookish bones no matter how dormant they’ve been, and to show friends new and old the places that matter.

This is why I started leading pilgrimages, taking folks to places they’d otherwise not encounter. Because we live in a world with trees and languages and different recipes for bread, and because we’re made with ears and feet and skin and hair, we witness with our eyes that we are not just souls, and definitely not brains-on-sticks. We are body-soul composites, meant to nourish those souls with real-life touching and seeing and hearing. This God-given world, imperfect as it is, matters.

Travel allows us to encounter the world’s wide variety of people and places. Pilgrimages, a particular form of travel, allows us to encounter those people and places while hearing from God about why He wants us to encounter them. What’s the sacred stuff beneath what I’m seeing, tasting, and touching? What’s the sacred stuff in me? What does He want to tell me through this particular journey of mine? How am I called to return home a little different?

Because yes, God can talk to us anywhere, be it in the Costco checkout line or underneath the Sistine Chapel. Yet not all places are created equally, and there really is something sacred about standing where St. Patrick brought the Gospel to Celtic kings, where St. Peter’s bones are laid to rest, where St. Paul shared good news on Mars Hill, where medieval villagers built the world’s greatest cathedrals, or even where the Italians first gave us the gift of gelato and pasta. And to stand in those places with friends new and old, who can revel in good conversation over a drink in the pub later that night and wonder aloud about it all? That’s the gift of a pilgrimage. That’s how it’s been for me the past eight-ish years since I’ve started leading them. What a gift.

And what a gift to do it again this summer, this time on the sacred soil in the hallowed highlands of Scotland, home of William Wallace, log-throwing, tartan tribes, and the Fife Way. Where we’ll wander the thin-placed corners of the Isle of Skye and castles that hid priests brave enough to celebrate the Eucharist when death was on the line? To talk theology, sacramental worldviews, jobs and gardens and kids, and to laugh about our human frailty reflected in long bus rides and long walks around the Loch Ness in pub corners over glasses of Scotch? To be accompanied by my friend Fr. Gabe, who’ll bring us the Eucharist, Confession, blessings, and quite possibly an evening of karaoke with his impressive singing voice—and most definitely friendship, of which he has an abundance to share? That’s the gift of pilgrimage, too.

Young and old, singles and whole families, devoted Catholics or I-don’t-know-what-I-am-anymores, veteran pilgrims and first-time travelers… All are welcome. In fact, all together make the experience that much richer as we listen and learn from each other. What. a. gift.

If you sense that this pilgrimage has a spot with your name on it, I’d love, love, love you to join us this summer. It’ll be me, my husband, and my two boys on board, and on the travel list so far I recognize some beloved pilgrimage regulars (Hi Rick! Hi Claire!) as well as some new-to-me names. And I can’t wait to see you all.

Starting today and through Friday, February 20, my partnership company, Select, is offering you $100 off for a single when you use the code LOVETHIS or $250 for a duo with the code LOVETHIS2 to register for this summer’s pilgrimage of mine, Historic Highlands.

If you’ve been on the fence about signing up, this is obviously the best time to hop off that fence and truly commit! I’d love for you to take advantage of their generosity.

I genuinely believe that if God wants you to go on this pilgrimage, He will provide you with the means to do so. Perhaps this short-but-sweet deal is a possible sign for you? …I hope so.

There’s something delightful about the pairing of an informal vow of stability—to stay put in life’s ordinariness, with a posture of pilgrimage—to allow God to lead us out of our comfort zones and into the wilds of following Him to new places, even for just a week. After many years of wandering, this rhythm has found its place in my Tookish bones, and my Bilbo soul is eternally grateful for it.

My fervent desire is that we all learn to live more aware, daily, of the beauty, goodness, and truth that surrounds us everywhere—if only we have the eyes to see it. Those eyes can indeed be sharpened anywhere, be it in the carpool line or in the wilds of a hidden forest. Yet every now and then, we’re given an invitation to see God’s grandeur with fresh eyes in new-to-us places. I invite you to ask yourself: am I being asked to go on pilgrimage this summer?

If you are, I hope you’ll say yes. I’ll join you.

Learn more about Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

A little more:

• My recent thoughts on third places (via waxing poetic about my beloved neighborhood coffee shop)

• My thoughts after returning home from last summer’s pilgrimage down the Rhine River

• My thoughts a few years ago after returning home from our pilgrimage to Ireland

• My chat from a few years ago with Fr. Gabe (I’ve got another one with him coming soon!)

p.s. - To keep it easy for you, here it is again: Register for Historic Highlands, then get $100 for one with the code LOVETHIS; $250 for two with the code LOVETHIS2.

p.p.s. - Questions about the administrative stuff, like using the code for your registration? Kindly reach out to my friend Rebecca Stoker at rebecca@select-intl.com. Thanks!

It’s wild that not too long ago we were in an ice storm, because the past few days and for at least the next week, we are in the midst of gorgeous weather… Since it’s around my oldest’s birthday I’m always aware of weather around now (on her first birthday we weren’t sure whether we’d get a snowstorm or a warm day at the park)—you truly don’t know what you’ll get during mid-February in central Texas. Right now, it’s day-at-the-park weather, and I’ll take it.

In unrelated news, that daughter’s fiancé has officially moved to Texas this week! I’m so thrilled that they’re no longer long-distance. With a little more than three months until the wedding, it’ll make all the things so much easier for them, not least of which is their actual relationship. Kyle and I did long-distance for a brief stint of our dating stage, and it was wildly challenging.

Oh, and in still more unrelated news: today is my family’s five-year anniversary of coming into the Catholic Church! It’s been such a great grace, and from that movement God continue to surprise me daily. Absolutely zero regrets.

All in all, it’s quite the busy season around here: wedding planning, book edits due in a few months, our class registrations for the next school year opens next week (how?), pilgrimage planning and praying… Just so much. But as I was reminded of this morning, they are all things that ten years ago I was merely praying I’d get to one day have on my plate. I’m so grateful to be asked to juggle it all.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. If you’re a leveled-up subscriber of The Commonplace, don’t forget to add your current book stack to this month’s book chat—readers (and me) are sharing what they read last month, what they’re currently reading for February, and what they’re getting started sometime between now and next month. I love reading about all your piles! I see some trends on repeat: The Correspondent, Emma M. Lion, Stunned by Scripture, and the latest for Well-Read Mom, to name a few.

2. Speaking of books, I’m thinking through what I’d like to read over the next few months… I’ve got an essay in my head swirling around about this, but until I actually get it written, here’s a shortlist of my criteria: a simple, straightforward, living-simply leaning personal finance resource (I’ve already read a lot of them, but I’m curious if there’s one I’ve missed—this is both to teach my own kids and for a class I’m teaching next school year); fiction or nonfiction about Scotland (I love to read from where we’ll be traveling this summer!), and newer books that read like classics (sounds weird, but most of my reading hails from at least a hundred years ago). If you’ve got any recommendations, I’m all ears!

3. has been lately championing making third places family-friendlier with simple additions like stepstools in bathrooms. I enjoyed her recent piece on her Step Stool Revolution of 2026: “Big interventions, however excellent, can sometimes seem overwhelming, but a little idea—the kind of small change that individuals can make—can go a long way in making people feel more welcome and supported.”

4. I’m just a tiny smidge younger, so I really appreciated my long-time pal ’s latest piece on what it’s like to inch closer and closer to fifty: “Each loss, small and large, becomes a constant reminder of mortality, a sign that, while The End may or may not be quite near, it is certainly on its way, no matter how loud you scream or protest. But is this long, slow process of becoming less actually a negative thing? Does it have to be an experience we enter into kicking and screaming? Or is there a gentler, more peaceful way to grow older?”

5. And finally, these two men are some of my favorite current living thinkers and teachers, so I absolutely loved this recent conversation of theirs. (I’m gonna try to listen to it a second time this week.)

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

The Natural Order of Money, by Roy Seabag (a re-read; see above)

Quotable 💬

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

- G.K. Chesterton

If you could take a high school class again, for fun—this time as an adult—what would you take? 🎒

I asked this question a few years ago, and I believe I answered ‘foreign language.’ …It’s still my same answer; I love learning new languages but flat-out don’t make the time for it. I’d love to dust off that skill and learn more: French, Latin, and Italian, to name just a few.

• Art (of all sorts): 38.6%

• Foreign language: 18.9%

• History: 18.7%

• English: 13.1%

• Math: 4.6%

• Science: 3.7%

• Sports: 2.4%

Find the next poll here.

Come to Scotland: July 18-28, 2026 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Travel is one of the most formational activities we can do here on earth; one of the few activities that, for the most part, is worth the money spent—especially when it’s invested in something that pays dividends in our souls for years afterward. That’s been the case with pilgrimages for me, and it’s one of the reasons I love, love, love leading them.

I’d be honored if you prayed about joining us in Scotland this summer, where we’ll walk through the rugged highlands and listen to God’s voice on the Isle of Skye, in the halls of medieval castles, walking through historic St. Andrews, and more. And if you sense through prayer that this pilgrimage is meant for you, I’ll join you in prayer that God will provide all you need to go.

Learn More 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

Where would you choose to go for an afternoon if you had to walk there from your front door?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - Solving three mysterious with an old-timey pipe.

Hey all,

Happy February! Most Januarys eke by for me, but this one was quite the opposite. I cannot believe it’s already February. Today, for Candlemas, we are officially taking down our Chrismtas tree and keeping a plethora of candles lit around the house. We are also calling my mother to wish her a happy birthday, prepping for class tomorrow, and doing what we can to make a little progress on book edits. We1 have a busy day today.

Let’s talk books, shall we? Share what you read in January, what you’re now reading for February, and generally what’s in your TBR stack. I’ll share mine below in the comments thread, as always.

Read more

As I type this we’re waiting on my mom to arrive—she’ll (hopefully) be able to alter Tate’s wedding dress, which has finally arrived and in which my daughter looks absolutely beautiful. Seeing her in the dress makes it so real! My mind is still blown that in 3.5 months I’ll have a married kid.

My mother-of-the-bride dress is also on a hanger; I’ve decided to wait to try it on at the same time. I think I love it, but we’ll see… As a shortie, clothing often fits me funkily. Here’s hoping!

Along with that, we’ve decided on the photography, food, and drinks, and at least who the vendors are for all the other stuff—I imagine all those other details will come fast and furious over the next few months. I’m grateful that, so far, this is a very “it takes a village” sort of wedding: one of her former high school teachers is doing the flowers, part of the centerpieces are hand-me-downs from a friend’s wedding this past summer, the reception emcee (not really a DJ; Tate’s making playlists instead) is a longtime family friend, and along with (hopefully) altering the dress, my mom is also baking the cake (she used to do this professionally). It’s a beautiful thing to witness.

I’m trying to enjoy the process, knowing it’s going quickly and it’ll be my one time as the mother of the bride. I’m super grateful Tate’s about as low-key and flexible as they come, and that so far, this is going to be a beautiful celebration. But by golly, does the Wedding Industry™ want you to think you need a ton of expensive stuff to, you know, get married—that thing people have been doing for millennia. Navigating the whole thing these days requires keeping your wits about you.

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. In case you missed it, this week I published a stream-of-consciousness essay essentially singing a paean about my favorite third place (while I was at said third place): “Kyle comes in the front door, plaid shirt and bed-beard, and sees me still talking with Katherine so he walks to the counter to claim his coffee. By the time he sits down across from me, Alex and his wife Cora with their toddler Cece have claimed the table next to us. With Anne and her gaggle of friends at one end and us on the other, as well as the nice tech developer-guy (Steve? I want to say that’s his name) who always asks me how my son’s college applications are coming along sitting in-between, we are now a row of regulars, all in one conversation admitting that we are clearly here to prepare for cabin fever.”

2. We are die-hard All Creatures fans around here, and are thrilled that season six is now out (we’re trying to savor it slowly). I loved this piece from about not only why it’s so good, but what real-life lessons we can take away from this great series (obviously originating from real-life memoirs from a country vet): “Even if your day-to-day tasks lend themselves more to the cerebral, doing physical work is important to our souls as we fight an increasingly contested reality that we are wholly embodied creatures who exist in the material world with bodies that are meant for loving and clapping and cleaning up and clinking glasses and climbing mountains and swimming in the ocean and ladling soup into bowls and digging in the dirt and holding wriggling children in one hand and a well-worn read aloud in the other.”

3. Even though it was far from an “endless winter” around here this past week, this essay from about the meaning behind Narnia’s endless winter read like good timing. It all has to do with what evil actually is—and it’s not what most people think of it: “St. Augustine, drawing from both Christianity and neoplatonic philosophy, teaches that evil is not real. In other words, evil is only real like a hole in the ground is real. As a hole is a lack of the ground, so too is evil a lack of the good. And just as the hole cannot exist without the ground, so too can evil not exist without the good. In other words, evil is like darkness to light, evil is a lack of something.”

4. My friend Katie Kimball is a cooking teacher extraordinaire, and after years of teaching her beloved online class for kids, she’s now got one for her teenagers. If you’re looking for a solid cooking class for your adolescents—either as a homeschool elective or as a genuinely-useful life class for your adults-in-the-making, right now she’s got a free sneak-peek at the class through this Monday (along with a bonus class about parenting teens). It’s long been our goal to launch our kids out of the house knowing how to make ten meals from scratch, and they’re well on their way... If you feel daunted by that prospect, a tool like Katie’s wise guidance could be useful.

5. And finally, speaking of… I’m back with my favorite deep-diver of really old recipes! This one is a classic: what it was like in a medieval tavern.

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman

Quotable 💬

“Maybe ye don’t know it, Mr. Herriot, but this is the best time of your life.” “Do you think so?” “Aye, there’s no doubt about it. When your children are young and growin’ up around ye—that’s when it’s best. It’s the same for everybody, only a lot o’ folk don’t know it and a lot find out when it’s too late. It doesn’t last long, you know.”

- from James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All1

You’ve got three hours of free time. What do you do?🚶‍♀️

What a bunch of nerds we all are. …But yeah, that’s my go-to first answer, too. Though if I were to answer literally right now, I’d for sure take a nap. The crazy weather has made me so sleepy lately, and I’m positively dragging by the afternoons this week.

• Read a book: 55.2%

• Time outside: 16.2%

• Make something: 14.5%

• Take a nap: 7.8%

• Hang with a friend: 6.3%

Find the next poll here.

Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

This summer’s family-friendly pilgrimage is the historic Highlands of Scotland — we’ll explore the Isle of Skye, attend the Highland Games, wander through castles and farmland, and more. I’d love you to join me and my family!

Learn More 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Quick Links 🔗

• 📐 Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Join the next pilgrimage: Scotland!

Create your Rule of Life ✍️

Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What were you doing this time last year? What do you have to be grateful for in light of that?

Have a great week,

- Tsh

p.s. - Please don’t. Hesitate to ask.

This past Saturday, I woke up Kyle in my usual way.

“Psst…” I whisper, nudging him.

“Mmphm?” He mumbles, eyes still closed.

“It’s 7:08. Coffee’s open. Wanna go or sleep in a little?” Reader, know that the nights before, I always ask him if he wants me to do this, and he always, always says yes.

Brief silence. Then, “…Sleep. I’ll see you there.” He turns his back toward me. Reader, he also always answers with this. I don’t know why he wants me to still ask him, but I oblige.

I pick up my backpack—I’ve been up for two hours and have long been dressed for the morning—and head out the door at 7:10 a.m. I also arrive at 7:10 a.m. because we live that close. This is handy for our daughter who works here, and also for our dog, who is mostly fantastic at staying put in our yard, but if she ever wanders off, it’s to the coffee shop where she’s probably looking for us. Before she moved away, the former head barista used to send me a simple text: Ginny’s here again.

The air smells of the ice storm predicted on its way late tonight. Two days prior, I went on a long walk in shorts; this morning I’m in my down jacket and wool cap. This is winter in the Texas Hill Country.

I slug my backpack onto the second-best seat in the house (the best already claimed by what’s-his-name with a friend I don’t recognize; they’re already talking theology with a Bible in between them) and I order our usuals. The baristas know Kyle will claim his pre-ordered drink whenever he shows up, and I know they’ll deliver the breakfast tacos to our table whenever they show up from the taqueria down the road.

I enjoy two minutes with my book and then in walks Anne1, turtleneck poncho and oversized hunter hat, complete with ear flaps.

“Morning,” I say, “Walk here?”

“Pfft, girl,” she answers, “You know I didn’t.” She’s here almost every morning, bright and early, orders something small in a to-go cup, and often takes it with her on a morning walk. This time, though, she pushes two tables together. As she waits for friends, we chat about our husbands at home; hers already up with his preferred home brew and chair, mine on his way but honestly probably back to snoring. She then pulls out her phone and her thick reading glasses to check the forecast. Combined with her outfit, she looks like a benevolent spy doing a terrible job trying to hide.

It doesn’t take too long for her friends to arrive: Paul and Betty, a couple who’ve retired here from Chicago to be closer to their grandkids, Melissa, a quiet single woman I’ve never really talked to, and June, an older woman who recently moved to an apartment just across the river about a ten-minute walk away. She used to drive ten minutes. I doubt she moved solely for the convenience of the coffee shop, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she moved here for what that ten-minute walk represents.

She waves at me as she walks past. “Getting ready for the exciting weather?!” she asks me with a smile and eager clap.

Back to my book, I read a paragraph once, then twice, then on the third reread I admit I have no idea what the sentences say because I don’t have my earbuds in and can hear every conversation around me. I could put them in, but I don’t really want to. I’d rather hear the cacophony. I overhear Jason at the espresso machine say, “Good morning!” followed by a very British, “Good morning, everyone!” from the back. One of the owners, Katherine, has entered from the back employee door with her husband, Dan, who’s from New Zealand.

Two minutes later, Katherine sidles up to my table. “I’m so sorry we didn’t give you the family discount on your order this morning.” Originally from England, she’s lived here long enough to have a sort-of hybrid accent; definitely not transatlantic but still not straight-up purely Texan nor Brit.

“Oh! I didn’t even notice,” I reply honestly.

“I was lying in bed watching the transactions come in, wondering how business was doing and whether we should even be open right now, and I saw your name come through and it was full price.”

“Truly, it’s okay. It was our usual and I truly didn’t notice.”

“Kyle coming later?” I nod.

We proceed to chat about all the little heart-wrenching decisions she has to constantly make as a small business owner. “A few of the baristas were telling me how they depend on weekend morning shifts to make rent, and that if we close they might be short on cash,” she says with a wince. “But I can’t stand the thought of them getting in an accident on the way. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“If the roads are that bad, there wouldn’t be that many customers here anyway, right?”

“True,” she agrees, “Though you never know. The die-hards who walk here might be banging on the front door in desperation.” I grin and raise my eyebrows: guilty. “…Though we’ve sold an absolute ton of retail in the past twenty-four hours. I couldn’t believe how many bags of beans people bought. Seems everyone’s getting ready to hunker down.” I had my daughter buy us a bag yesterday.

Kyle comes in the front door, plaid shirt and bed-beard, and sees me still talking with Katherine so he walks to the counter to claim his coffee. By the time he sits down across from me, Alex and his wife Cora with their toddler Cece have claimed the table next to us. With Anne and her gaggle of friends at one end and us on the other, as well as the nice tech developer-guy (Steve? I want to say that’s his name) who always asks me how my son’s college applications are coming along sitting in-between, we are now a row of regulars, all in one conversation admitting that we are clearly here to prepare for cabin fever.

“It’s like we know we’re not going to be here for a few days,” Alex muses. We nod in agreement.

They live a ten-minute drive from here, on land, where they are renovating a 128-year-old farmhouse. We briefly exchange renovation woes; our latest is Kyle’s uncertainty on whether he can replace more siding in this upcoming storm; theirs on whether all their old pipes will freeze. Alex and Cora share their plan to keep their animals warm, and I make a mental note to nudge Kyle that we should do the same with our chickens.

“You have ducks? Get eggs?” Kyle asks Alex.

They laugh. “More than we need. Want some?”

“Yes, please!” I say too eagerly.

“We’ll put some on your porch swing sometime,” says Cora. “If you ever see them there, just know they’re from us.”

Kyle and I sip our coffee, inhale our tacos, and weave our conversations in and out of just us and then with other regulars. Kyle and I talk about our big kids for a few minutes, then we remark with Alex and Cora about the delights of toddlerhood as Cece greets one of her best friends, David, who’s just come in with his parents who also live a few blocks away. They hug and shriek like two-year-olds, then proceed to chase each other around the coffee shop. Katherine smiles at the scene from behind the cash register; she doesn’t seem to mind.

“Has Cece ever wandered into the employees-only area?” I ask Cora.

“Yep,” she laughs. I think of the many antics Tate has told me about the gaggle of children that comprise the regulars here: the two little girls who always incessantly knock on the back ordering door to talk to the employees (one time Tate exited the bathroom and one of them greeted her with a loud, “I didn’t know people who work here were allowed to go potty!”), the toddlers who play shop in the kid-sized coffee shop replica out back, the little girl in glasses and pigtails who comes in with her dad for routine dates, wherein she brings her purple plastic purse and dons Elsa heels.

There are times I want to be here because I want to get out of the house in order to focus on my work, yet there are times I hesitate, because while I go ostensibly to write, it is clear why I often don’t.

Then again, there are times to get work done and then there are times to close all screens and look at humans in the eye. The work will still be there.

///

It is now five days later, and though there’s still snow on the ground where the sun doesn’t hit, it’ll most likely melt by this afternoon. I’m back at the same corner table to finish up my thoughts here, and two other regulars are next to me. They saw me in line and saved this seat for me when it miraculously opened. One of my best friends is across the way having coffee with her church friend; she’ll probably come over here in a bit to say hello and sit for a spell. Anne and her usual lady group of five are huddled around a two-person table. The ordering line stretches across the shop and nearly out the door.

People are glad the coffee shop is back open.

We humans are made to live in-person, in the flesh, near each other, with plots of land we can see and comment on and ask about. It is a good-and-right thing that I know one of the women at the table next to me is a financial planner and the other one bakes the cookies for the coffee shop. There is a deep rumbling of satisfaction that I know the wandering cat out on the cafe’s porch that I’m watching right now is named Poppy and lives two blocks away from me. It is also good that I know that Anne’s husband is a firefighter, that Cora wants to ask me homeschooling questions sometime, and that Lucy the barista might be able to do Tate’s makeup for her wedding.

Another hour later, and Paul and Betty are now at the table next to me, sharing with me their ice storm experience. Chris, another work-from-home regular, has just walked in and has sidled over to my table neighbors to talk about his weekend’s hunting adventure. He got two does.

Also:

• A Drink With a Friend episode from the archives on third places

• An essay I wrote a few years ago on third places and homesteads

• My brief thoughts on how online “community” isn’t really community

• ’s recent piece on hosting more family dinners

• on building neighborhood communities and also on stoop coffee

• …And honestly, just search “community” or “neighborhood” on Substack and you’ll see how many people crave it, know their need for it, and are willing to roll up their sleeves and find creative ways to make it happen in their local spaces.

I didn’t realize until this morning that it’s been a couple months since we’ve done a gratitude check-in around here! So let’s start off 2026 right. I also can’t believe it’s already the end of January… Whoosh, indeed, as always.

In the comments thread here, share ten things you’re current…

Read more