Volcanoes are so hot right now, if you’re a fan of Tom Hiddleston, that is. (I am.) Pompeii: Out of Time recently dropped on National Geographic, with Hiddleston leading us along the paths of three people trying to survive during the eruption of Vesuvius.

A few years ago, our decrepit garage was on its last 2x4s—all the wood was rotting because of water damage and soil pushed against the exterior walls, chipmunks had claimed it as their territory by stockpiling bladdernuts and defecating on everything, and the doors no longer closed properly, in ways that made you think, “Am I ever getting out of here again?”

Spoiler: I’m more of a cloud gazer, but I don’t regret my education via The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

One, two, three, I usher each cold, drowsy bee
from dirty clothes piles in the basement
to the front door’s barren flower pot.
But one warm day, a bee buzz, buzz, buzzes…

I wrote this poem last night with my favorite notebook (rose pink, 8x10, lay-flat binding; I kid you not, I bought a dozen—I’m old enough to know when you love something you have to stock up before it’s ruined or discontinued). I sat in the sunroom in the near-dark and listened to the rain. For two hours, my phone was far away and I focused on only this.

Generally we talk about living vicariously through books, but for the last few weeks I’ve been questioning if we can’t experience dying vicariously as well. Maybe that’s obvious on the surface—we experience living vicariously so why wouldn’t we experience dying vicariously too? But I’m not sure it’s obvious, or at least it wasn’t to me.

I spent last week sick with something that seemed like a fairy tale curse, as if one of my nemeses out there demanded “may the ocean drain from her nose every second she is awake and her head be as if stuffed with cotton batting.” Once that was over I had three days of migraines. Meanwhile, we are sick on a national level and that’s not so easily healed, especially when we receive fresh wounds every day.

If you haven’t already indulged in this visual treat, I recommend curling up with the lost spells for an hour. In the middle of a busy coffee shop, sardined between one long-legged man at the table to my left and a stark conversationalist with a bulky winter coat to my right, I found something akin to a meditative state among Jackie Morris’s enchanting paintings and Robert Macfarlane’s poems.

Since before I emerged yesterday morning from our winter cocoon of fluffy white duvet and pink knit blanket, the snow fell steadily. Our bedroom blinds obscure the windows’ view and soften the morning light, but it’s almost always possible to tell when it has snowed. The snow has a brightness all its own.

It’s the end of October and the weather feels properly settled. We’ve reluctantly closed the windows and embraced the manufactured heat pouring through our vents at the press of our thermostat. The fireplace is only used for date night or family gathering once or twice a year, providing a cheerful ambiance more than heat, and yet it was disproportionately startling to me to read Nicola Twilley describe the refrigerator as “eventually displacing the hearth as the heart of the home”…