5 Quick Things #381 🍂

guarding precious time, seasonal drinks, valid ways to live, & an autumn state of mind

Oct 10, 2025

Hi there,

As I walked around our neighborhood yesterday for a mid-afternoon phone chat with my husband, I told him about the reader survey I sent out this week, asking y’all for feedback about you, your internet preferences, and how you engage with my work.

“What did they have to say about 5 Quick Things?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t even ask anything about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have no plans to stop doing them, and even if someone wants them done differently, I don’t want to know about it,” I replied.

“Why is that?”

“Because,” I explained, “These weekly letters are my favorite thing to do—besides write books and lead trips, of course. I will happily do them until my fingers don’t work anymore.”

...’Tis all true. Of all the things I’ve put out in the world, these short, scrappy little letters are about the most consistent (save for in the early oughts when I published on my blog MWF without fail during naptime1). Even when I take summer and holiday breaks, writing these short letters keeps me grounded. I’m grateful for these weekly installments, and for you who keep on reading them.

*Morning, Autumn Sunlight, Eragny* (1900), Camille Pissarro #

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. By the way: take the reader survey, if you haven’t yet. I’d be grateful to learn more about you! Your answers have already been super insightful (and yes, I’ll share some of the results eventually).
2. Even though I’m not quite sure I agree with Rob Henderson on audiobooks (though I’m still mulling over his observations), I do appreciate his overall thoughts on reading here: “Reading takes time. You have to make it a non-negotiable part of the day. This precious time must be guarded! ...Similar to a gym routine, it must be built right into your schedule and must become an unthinking custom.”
3. Autumn has to be more of a state of mind than a weather forecast: this is the sage wisdom I’ve gathered of my own volition over the decades. As a Central Texas resident, I can bemoan October’s unwillingness to not feel like summer, but it won’t change anything and I’ll just be grumpy and annoying in the meantime. But I can choose to buy that ridiculously huge, oversized pumpkin from HEB and put it on my porch, light that cinnamony candle, and watch You’ve Got Mail—these are the things that’ll put me in the right frame of mind. Not staring at the weather app, willing the number to drop.
4. Speaking of autumn, my latest favorite drink at our neighborhood coffee shop—other than black coffee, for which I must begin the day—is a breve, half-sweet, basic witch latte, hold the cinnamon. Breve, because carnivore; half-sweet, because carnivore yet also I want to live a little (and their flavorings are real and not too sweet to begin with); basic witch because that’s their version of a PSL and it’s short-lived on their menu which means I get it while I can; and cinnamon, because sadly, even though I’ve had it my whole life without problem, the cheap stuff now causes my skin to break out. I can take it small doses, but sprinkled on top isn’t great.2
5. And finally, from Robina Khalid, I unschooled my daughter all the way to a prestigious college, and all I got was these lousy 5,099 days. I related so much to this essay (even though we homeschool via a different method): “Actually, wanting to be together as a family was a valid way to live one’s life, that I didn’t have to internalize all the propaganda about prioritizing independence and individualism above all else.”

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Lynley on Britbox (I love that British shows make episodes feature-length films; I hate that it means there’s a total of four of them)

Quotable 💬

“I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.”

- Lee Maynard

Are you the…? 👶

Okay, I find the results to this question really interesting, but I have NO idea what to make of it or what to do with this data. Why are most of us oldest children here? Any hypotheses? (Maybe related: In my previous Well Read Mom group, we found out during our discussion of True Grit that every single one of us were oldest daughters in our family—and there were almost twenty of us. What?!)

Oldest: 55.8%
Middle: 19.6%
Youngest: 18.3%
Only: 6.3%