Beautiful things, lately

fens & cathedrals & poems & primroses

• This podcast on Milton’s Sonnet 19 by Grace Hamman is timely medicine for the Lenten soul. I didn’t know that Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he became blind. The well-known sonnet is commonly believed to be written when his long-increasing blindness became total, and I think anyone who has felt stopped in their tracks should appreciate it.

• This transporting piece on Ely Cathedral by Amy Mantravadi. Ely was one of the closer cathedrals to where we lived in the northeastern reaches of Northamptonshire, along with Peterborough with its medieval painted wood ceiling and heady fan vaulting and Lincoln on its high-for-the-Midlands perch next to the castle above the city.

  I once went for a walk in Holme Fen, the lowest point in England, which Wikipedia charmingly lists as being in Huntingdonshire. It’s now a marshy forest with dense underbrush. We were tracked by monstrous mosquitos with stinging bites. (Less painful than a bee, but much more than any other mosquito I’ve met, from the tropics to the antipodes to northern Europe to Virginia in summer.) I was way out of my league with my walking buddy. I trailed moistly behind, simultaneously sweaty and chilled, my inadequate footwear squelching in puddles ever deeper than I’d hoped they’d be. (I know! Fen. It’s on the tin.) This is just reminiscing though. I also like to reminisce about seeing Ely Cathedral as it would have been, the “ship of the fens” rising serenely above the fen damp on her pilgrimage through time. Mantravadi writes:

  God does his work in millennia. History is not an inevitability brought about by human will, but a tapestry of contingencies both colorful and bold, woven by the one who holds our days in his hands. The convulsions of the moment may not be what they seem.

• Pictured above and below: Under the still-bare branches of the trees and most shrubberies, certain corners of our garden are a riot of color. The daffodils are their usual brash selves, the primroses are attempting a hostile takeover, the maroon hellebores are just pleased that they got noticed, the crimson camellia is hitting its stride, and some of the tulips (planted at the end of January!) are going to beat Easter. They shine in the low-angled sunlight like painted eggs.

• I’ve been swimming regularly for 8 months. After a year of some health chaos, 2025 saw me on a new med and experiencing levels of energy I hadn’t in 10 years. The last medication failed so slowly, I thought I was still as good as I was going to get. I thought that if I had more mental fortitude I would magically have the energy to regain some of the strength I’d lost in my 30s. I thought physical therapy would help (it hurt, and not in a productive way). I just needed a new medication. I’m stronger than I was a year ago, and sometimes in the pool I feel amazing and young and like a mermaid. Please, nobody disabuse me of that notion. The staff at one of my spots is starting to recognize me and escalate to banter, which in French is bad news for me, but isn’t it a good sign?

• I’ve recently become a fiction editor at the Wrath-Bearing Tree and have been lucky enough to help with some fun stories there.