A few weeks ago a source emailed to reschedule an interview. This has happened to me many times for many reasons. He lived in a place where it had been raining nonstop for weeks and the sun was finally out. He said he was going to go on a walk outside while he could. Hopefully it would be okay to call me when he was back home. (Unspoken was the fact that, if I couldn’t reschedule, at least he’d have enjoyed his walk in the sun.)
It had taken me weeks of follow up just to get onto this person’s schedule in the first place. Usually when people reschedule they say there was a family or work emergency or they give the vague but still important sounding excuse “something [urgent] came up”.
“This is my favorite reason someone has rescheduled a meeting,” I wrote back and meant every word. I live in the Pacific Northwest where it’s gray and rainy most of the winter. On rare, beautiful winter or spring days, people are drawn outside like zombies seeking brains, blinking our eyes against the sunlight because we’ve forgotten what it’s like. There have been many times when I too wanted to reschedule a meeting because there was a nice day and that fifteen-minute long phone call in the middle of the day (so smart, this timing, until I knew what the weather would be like) meant I couldn’t do anything before or afterward. But that wasn’t a good enough reason to reschedule a call. Or maybe the problem was that it wasn’t an acceptable reason to reschedule for one simple reason: no one is admitting they do it too.
This man did. And, suddenly, I had an inkling of permission to do the same.
The weather in Portland has been gorgeous this week. Today it’s seventy three degrees and sunny with just a hint of a breeze. “Chamber of commerce” weather as the phrase goes, the kind of thing you’d put on a postcard of Portland to say, “See it doesn’t actually rain here all the time.” Yesterday I got my summer clothes out of storage. Today I am wearing shorts for the first time this year. Everyone is outside with their kids or dogs or friends and dreaming of lazy summer days ahead.
Last week, I set aside most of my day on Wednesday so I could go for a long walk in the city just to see what was out there. On Thursday, I took one of my dogs to a park along the river so she could splash in the water. I got a little treat from the universe in the form of a pond of rare, northern red-legged frogs trying to find mates with a chorus so loud I could hear it on the other side of the park. Edits on one of my articles came in, something that needed to get done soon, and I was tempted to rush home immediately. I hate making other people wait. But then I thought to myself, “It’s a nice day and I want to be outside while I can.” I reminded myself that I was allowed this moment of sunshine. I stayed a little longer. I looked for frogs in the pond and finally spotted one—smaller than I thought he’d be for the noise he managed to produce.
Best yet, the edits got done. I was tempted to lie to my editor and say I was “finishing something up”, implying that I was buried under a mountain of work. But instead, inspired by my source, I told her that I’d left to enjoy the sunshine for a bit and would be back in an hour or two. She told me to have fun and enjoy the time outside. I can only hope that my sun seeking inspires more people to give themselves permission to do the same.
I had a lot of fun articles come out this week. Country Living asked me to watch The Oscars and look for outfits that reminded me of chickens—easily the best assignment I’ve ever had.
I wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post about why we should all pay attention to the plants and animals in our own backyard. I was thrilled for the excuse to mention Joan Strassman’s Slow Birding which I think deserved 100 times more attention than it got.
A few months ago I started wondering about the crows that commuted to downtown Portland every night at dusk. It seemed like there were more of them than I remembered when I first moved here in 2016 and I wanted to find out if it was a real phenomenon and whether other places were experiencing the same thing. This is where many of my favorite article ideas come from—noticing something around me and forming a question about it. Grateful to The Atlantic for publishing my article on crows and for the many readers sharing stories about their own backyard and/or local urban corvids. Keep them coming!
I made a batch of Meyer lemon lemonade and am going to take some outside to the park with a book and a notebook and read in the sun. I hope you are all enjoying your weekend as much as I am.
Because all writers have a never-ending hope of finding ways to make writing more financially sustainable, I’ve opened a Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy any of the books I mention here, I will get a small commission.
**Newsletter preview photo by Mike Lambert
Thanks for passing on the permission to use sunshine! And also for the rec “slow birding”
Thanks for pointing out how much of work can wait a bit.
Anne-Marie