Dear Readers,
New Englanders believe in seasons—if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I’ve moved here. I heard someone say “Grapefruit is my favorite winter fruit,” and I was confused by that at first. I mean, fruit is fruit. You can get grapefruit any time you like. But I’m starting to get it.
At the time of writing this, the trees are just starting to turn. At the time of writing this, I’ve just eaten my first apple cider donut of the season. But by the end of December, by the time this issue launches, I know it’ll be different; snows and fireplaces and unbearable allergies. The feel is different. A time for hunkering, a time for cozy anxiety, which is distinct from sweaty anxiety.
The great novelist and short story writer Ali Smith said of “A Winter’s Tale” that it has so much of summer in it, and I believe that. A surprising unfreezing, life bursting forth after being stuck for so long.
If you’re snowed in often like I am, literally or metaphorically, for now, we wait. Just know that it will happen—miraculous and improbable as a statue coming to life. In the meantime, in the waiting time, we have love for a baby, we have the things we left behind, we have the past in the present.
“What do you do while you’re waiting?” Mr. Rogers asks Daniel Tiger. I remember from almost three decades ago. The question still compels me—you can do, you can make while you are waiting. And indeed, the contributors of Thimble have made, in their grief, in their patience, as they await their diagnoses, their parents’ death, in the still life of December.
Mr. Rogers proposes having a glass of orange juice. I’m having grapefruit instead.
That, I think, is what it means to use shelter as a verb. We shelter as we wait, using what we have. Won’t you, reader, shelter with us?
Best,
Nadia Arioli
