Thoughts on mountains.
How I'm becoming one with my surroundings.
Mountains serve as great metaphors. Scaling a mountain, having a “mountaintop experience,” and coming down from the mountain are all useful descriptions for a variety of life experiences.
I’d like to offer another way of thinking about life, specifically my life over the past few weeks.
Philly Snow Piles.
In this city, a full-coverage snowfall can turn a greige urban jungle into a magical universe where discarded trash, cracked sidewalks, and forgotten dog waste (that should have been removed in the first place) are buried under a blanket of white.
Everything washed clean, reimagined.
You have snow piles that become igloos, co-opted by neighbors in friendly play. They sparkle with potential. The sun rises and shines through these carefully constructed structures, delivering hours of communal connection and laughter.
It’s not all sunshine and igloos.
A few days later, you get these.
A pipe bursts, necessitating a full road excavation. There’s nowhere to throw the dirt except for the huge mound of snow that takes up the entire sidewalk. In a matter of days, our winter wonderland turns into a frozen urban hellscape where parking is impossible, and neighbors are texting things like “who has an ice pick?”
The storm also coincided with the first “full week” of the semester, which meant virtual learning for both the kids and me (helloooooo fall 2020 PTSD), and a storm of other life curveballs, plus the general sense that the world is on fire.
I like to live my life like an igloo—keeping up the facade that everything is bright, clean, and open to community and connection. At times, I’d like to pretend that the surface is all that exists, that if I put a fresh, sparkly white coat on everything, no one will ever know what lies beneath the surface. (Like my anxiety-ridden pacing that occurred the other night as I stress-weighed my suitcases stuffed with books to pack for a conference this week. You won’t see my dead-eyed stares on any social media post.)
A few years back, Brandon and I were meeting with a friend and mentor, bragging about how “good” we were doing at marriage (we’d only been married a few years at this point).
The evidence?
“We barely fight!”
He dug deeper and shared something that I think about almost daily since then:
“It sounds like you might be good at peace keeping but not peace making.”
🤯
Say what??? In one sentence, he unpacked my MO in all areas of life. Pretend everything is fine and refuse to excavate.
Back to the Philly snow piles. Maybe the poop mound is even more beautiful than the igloo when you really think about it. There’s a story to it—that a burst pipe on Moyer St. caused neighbors to come together on the block to help each other out (including the poor man whose basement was flooded in freezing temperatures). That the water department sent out workers in the freezing cold at all hours of the morning who hustled to break the pavement, dig the dirt, and uncover the issue. There was no gaping hole left after the repair; they finished the job, smoothed the asphalt, and moved the dirt so it wouldn’t block traffic.
The product of peace-making.
Inspiration
🎧I have too many book recs to dig into today because of my Substack absence. A Guardian and a Thief gutted me, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Dopamine Nation forever changed my brain, and Careless People outraged me for many reasons.
🎧 My friend Lindsay has built a bookstore from scratch in our neighborhood and now she’s working to help local authors sell their books through school visits! Check out her website.
Creative
🌟 I’m in Texas with 100 lb of books (as much as I could fit in two suitcases) at the TMEA conference! I’m presenting on “The Creative String Orchestra” on Saturday and selling books all week. If you’re there, come visit me!
🌟 Well, friends. I did it. I revised my novel again, and I’m back in the query trenches. For those who’ve been following my journey, a quick recap: I finished my novel at the end of 2024, had beta readers in early 2025, started querying last spring, and received a few full requests and a total of around 50 rejections. I revised, did another round of beta reads, edited again, and am back querying agents. I love listening to episodes of TSNOTY and hearing about authors who took a long road to trad publishing.
Thanks for subscribing and reading. I hope you can reimagine things that don’t go as planned.
Connect with my work elsewhere:
🎧 listen to my podcast with Kimberly McGlonn
💻 order my children’s book, Rosie Rocks!
📚 visit my fair-pay publishing company, F-flat Books.
🎤 get songwriting support through Songwriting for M.E.
The Philly snow piles were cute at first, for sure. Enjoy Texas and the absence of snow piles! 🥰🥰
This made me laugh out loud: "In a matter of days, our winter wonderland turns into a frozen urban hellscape where parking is impossible, and neighbors are texting things like “who has an ice pick?”"
My husband has been taking a class in Philly and has had the same reaction to Philly Snow Piles ◡̈