closed for weather
By fortuitous timing, I’m typing this as I watch Lorelai Gilmore say, “I smell snow.”
Watching Gilmore Girls — I’m early in my first rewatch in a few years — is one of several ways I have spent my weather-induced indoor time this weekend. I’ve also read And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, leaving the light on until Loui came to bed last night because I was a little bit scared; had my first virtual meeting of 2026 with my beloved writing group; spent many minutes working on the new New York Times game, Pips; and cuddled with my cats.
“I feel good,” Lorelai says to Rory in the episode. “Tingly.”
“That’s called frostbite,” Rory replies, since her mother opened up the windows to enjoy the winter weather.
We have done no such thing, and because UK is closed on Monday, I don’t plan to open my door to the snowy cold in the near future.
I’ve also spent the last few days (longer, actually) going through Alice Dunnigan’s archive and notes I’ve taken from other books, working on an outline for the current revision of my book. I feel a little bit buried, though it’s far preferable to being buried in snow and is also very exciting.
In her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road, one of the sources I reviewed today, Zora Neale Hurston wrote about finding authors that became important to her. “They seemed to know what I wanted to hear and said it in a way that tingled me,” she wrote. That’s something that Zora, Lorelai and I have in common: We describe good things as tingly.
I searched my PDF of 280 photos from Alice’s collection at Howard University for the word “snow,” just to see if I could find something else topical (not tropical).
There were two results; one was a man whose first name, evidently was, Snow. The other was from Alice’s “Washington Inside and Out” column in 1957.
“As the civil rights debate progressed, Senator Knowlan called for ’round-the-clock sessions to wear down the filibuster,” Alice wrote, “while Senator Morse of Oregon said he was willing to stay until ‘the snow falls.’”
I just did a little research: Both senators were in favor of civil rights advancement, but Senator Morse felt the bill under consideration wasn’t strong enough and opposed it on principle. He clearly felt strongly about it — it was July, so snow would not be falling anytime soon.
As I conclude this newsletter of loosely related things, I want to thank my sister Ashtyn for the inspiration. When I texted her that I was struggling with my newsletter today, she replied, “Just say closed for weather.”