I finished this month’s book, The Dirty Life, over a peaceful weekend in Door County to celebrate my fortieth birthday. Honestly I spent a lot of time on the cabin’s plush sofa, putting my feet within Lucas’s reach so he would absent-mindedly rub them as he was doing other things. (It worked. Often. I want to replace our couch immediately.)

January is not Annie’s favorite month. The sunroom is closed off—it’s uninsulated and too cold to leave the doors open. The sunlight is inadequate, even the usual carpet sun-patches are unreliable. And for some reason the heat that cranks out of the vent behind the headboard dares to be inconstant.

At this year’s holiday get-together, my family decided to bake cookies and have a Christmas murder mystery party. Everyone slipped easily into the spirit of the game, and the results were a delight. Scripts in hand and costumes donned, seated at the table were Ralphie Ryder, Mac Skellington and the Sugar Plum Fairy, Cindy Lou Woo and Captain Nutcracker, the Grunch and Grunchess, Kel McCannister, and Rue-Dolph.

“Team Midwest Tour” is inscribed on my wedding ring because Lucas and I moved from Iowa to Illinois to Wisconsin within the first few years of our relationship. Our families are spread across Iowa and Illinois. Unsurprisingly, we’ve logged quite a few miles on I-80, 380, and 151.

I enjoy listening to audiobooks, particularly with skilled narrators (Amanda Ronconi, Jefferson Mays, and Jim Dale to name a few), but I struggle to maintain my focus. I am almost always listening to an audiobook while tending to some other chore—gardening, washing the dishes, picking every rock out of our ill-fated, weedy path at the old house—and it’s easy to drift into thoughts that spiderweb out from the book.

I read most of Two Trees Make a Forest on the way to Aurora, Colorado for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold Conference... It had to be Lee’s writing that made me think about Colorado—a place I do not feel designed for with its high elevation, dry air, and limited greenery—from the perspective of someone who enjoys living there.

This is going to be a quick one, because I’m deep in manuscript-revision after Lucas and I decided to run away to a writer’s conference at the end of September.

And just like that, it’s August. I’ve honestly only read half of The End of Night, our book for July. I found it slow-going to start, with the frequent quotations cumbersome to read, but about a quarter of the way through I started to connect with Bogard and really loved some of the ideas he brought—pardon me—to light.

Let’s take a summer stroll through some recent photos and sketches of things I couldn’t capture with a camera.

Two weeks ago Lucas and I were lucky to attend “Poetry and the Natural World,” a reading and Q&A with Ada Limón, the US Poet Laureate. Limón opened by asking who was attending a poetry reading for the first time.

Did you find anything new or inspiring to you in The Humane Gardener? One of the stories that stood out to me the most was Charlotte Adelman’s. I admire her work to ban pesticides in public areas like the library, as well as gas-powered leaf blowers in the off-season.

I looked out the window this morning to find Lucas sitting on the step as he listened to a few more lines of his audiobook post-run. Past him, on the bench in the backyard, stood a big, light brown bird with a red head. It was too large to be a finch, taller than a robin, but not squat.

Welcome to “Head in the Clouds, Hands in the Dirt: Learning About Our World While Building My Own” which is everything it says in the title, plus a focus on taking action to protect this incredible world of ours.