February! What’s not to love about a month that includes a holiday celebrating love?
But things are never quite that simple. This year, February also saw us pass 500,000 COVID deaths in the United States. There was another impeachment trial, and despite startling revelations and compelling evidence, this one had the same result as the last time. Hell—I mean Texas—froze over. But wait, there’s more…
I’m discovering that choosing each day’s headline is a real challenge. Some days the news is almost boring (what a pleasant change!), and it’s hard to determine what story might actually be important; other days, the headlines vie for attention and it’s difficult to choose just one story to spotlight. And other days, I have to try to keep some focus: it might be tempting to stitch about Ted Cruz’s disastrous trip to Cancun while his constituents froze, but ultimately what he did is more of a joke than a worthy story.
The other day, as I stitched the last of the statements about love, it dawned on me that my listening and reading materials intersected perfectly with my stitching. I’ve been listening as I work to the audiobook of Roddy Doyle’s recent novel Love, and I’m reading Kate Clayborn’s gentle novel Love Lettering. Coincidence? Hmmm.
