Bloom indoors

Julia ♦ December 28, 2022 ♦ 2 Comments

House plants in the conservatory at Dunster Castle, Somerset.
Photo by Ian Turk, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Compfight.com

“I bloom indoors in winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.” – Annie Dillard

One of the best things about being an adult at Christmas is how it seems such a short time between one Christmas and the next.  When I was a child, there was a mild but unmistakable melancholy that began with the anti-climactic feeling on Christmas evening; the magic was over for another year, and it seemed forever before another one would be back.

Now, I actually enjoy the period after Christmas as much as the time beforehand.  Maybe even more.  Beyond the fun of drinking all the new teas people gave me using whatever new items I may have received as Christmas gifts, there’s a delicious feeling of settling down for a winter that still seems full of promise. The days will grow gradually longer, and spring is coming, but for now the weather is the perfect excuse to give myself the liberty to stay inside and putter around doing my favorite things.

What do you look forward to doing this winter? I love to browse my books and sip my tea (or cocoa spiked with coffee) and write notes and letters. I like to dream of gardening, and sometimes go so far as to plant seeds, though they rarely if ever get large enough to transplant. I make more time for the crafts I love all year long.  I clean out closets and weed through possessions and imagine being completely organized.  If the weather is unusually cold or nasty, I’ll fire up the gas logs and read or nap by the closest thing I have to a roaring fire in a masonry fireplace.

What ways will you bloom this winter?  Send me some suggestions to add to my own list.  As in the summer, I’m well aware that I can never do all the things I dream of doing in one season. But winter is a great time for daydreaming; for reaping the harvest of contentment and peace that eludes us in the frenetic pace we tend to adopt in milder weather. Enjoy the parts of your personality that only come out indoors!

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.