Softness
I woke up early on Sunday, around four in the morning, I knew it for fact but leaned out of bed to check just in case: yes, four-something, completely awake, no going back.
I slipped out to the kitchen for water. I always start the day with a mug of hot water. I took it into the living room and picked up a new book. Our living room is lined with drafty windows, a cold breeze ran over my shoulders, but the air was invigorating, it carried the first sounds of birdsong, and the book was exciting from the start. Half an hour later, I made a cup of coffee, resumed reading while the sky reddened, then absently tucked my feet under a blanket at the end of the couch – and that’s when the morning really got good.
Softness is a trait I’ve needed a long time to like. Being hard always seemed the goal, both as a person and a thinker. Industrious, unbreakable, a cowboy of sorts. Softness, even coziness (I still recoil at the word), read to me as mush-brained, wimpy, not rigorous – and I hear how stupid that all sounds now, probably unappealing to anybody else; we all find our minds, I sometimes think, more at home in different corners of the world, and there was mine: determined to tough out anything. It really did take me a while to see softness as something valuable, to be flexible, to be of supple mind, traits I now find admirable and so strong. And in that moment last weekend, I might have stayed there all day – the quiet mildness, the soft blanket on my feet, like I was resting my heels on the back of a dog.
I used to have an uncle who roofed houses and raised horses. I loved him but he was complicated, he had a way of teasing people, particularly children, that went right to the edge and sometimes past it: merciless. I wrote an article years ago about the first time he took me hunting, I killed a deer and he taught me how to dress it in the snow, how first you approach and touch your rifle’s muzzle to its eyeball, to test if it’s dead, lest it rear up and defend itself. He was hard. And yet the first association I made last weekend when I was reading, as soon as I identified the blanket’s silkiness as something nice, even exquisite, was a memory of how on frozen winter nights, rural Montana, my uncle would watch TV from a Lay-Z-Boy draped in fur, the hide of something he’d killed turned fleece side up, and how at home he seemed, almost naked in his nest, and so cozy.
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” for supporters – my Sunday bulletin with three-plus things I’ve recently loved – some recommendations for a trio of memoirs, a new show to binge, newsletters of high value, and weird postcards.
Due to a recent Covid exposure, I had to quarantine for a couple days, rapid-testing (always negative, thankfully) and streaming and doing calisthenics while generally cursing the pandemic, and I don’t know I ever would have expected the sex lives of four women to be a balm, but here is the world, here is me.
Try it over here, with my great appreciation.
“Meditations in an Emergency” is an email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful.
“The Sunday Supplement” is his weekly recommendation bulletin of things recently admired, no paid-placements involved lol 💸
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.