Issue 10 (👋👋 !) Preview

Munching & bunching, melting and droplets.

Mar 07, 2024

Unconventional position incoming: I really like February. It does that same thing that August does, wherein the fullest expression of the season—in this case: crisp air, white snow, blue skies—is this sort of last gasp before an abrupt and dramatic shift into the next.

I only started noticing (and digging!) it when I started paying attention to Candlemas, a holiday that is heavily Catholic I guess, but which came to me within the context of my kids’ Waldorf school. It’s February 2nd, also Imbolc and Groundhog day; it’s the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox; it’s the return of the light.

As such, it’s a really forward-looking month and short, too. It’s a month that’s full of garden prep, if you’re into that kind of thing. I generally spend the month chortling over my favorite annual read: the Fedco seed catalogue. For this issue of the zine, I took pictures of my own dormant yard and paired each image with a quote pulled from this year’s edition. The juxtaposition of blanketed white earth and balmy summer produce dreams is just so February.

I also took the opportunity to melt away a winter’s worth of built up candle wax mess and repurpose the runoff into new little tea lights. I’m going to put a video up of this process on Instagram, but the instructions in the zine should get you where you need to go as well.

And finally but really MOSTLY, I’m excited to reveal this month’s cover and cover artist. I love these paintings by Rockland, Maine-based artist and pal Tyler Weeks. I first saw them a couple years back when he showed them at a friend’s barn alongside a show where I thought the barn’s floor might cave in from dancing (it didn’t)! They’re a little less like what I described above and a little more of what we’re experiencing now—the post February gray drip into spring. Forward-looking, with light refracted through wee water droplets, as ever.