Happy belated pizza day
I definitely purposefully missed my self-imposed deadline JUST because the word "belated" doesn't get enough love
Well hello, and happy pizza day. I’m excited to present installment one of this blog in true MK form—completely procrastinated but full of love. The first draft of this email was totally tragic, full of kvetching and less-than-deep insights about how fucking depressing winter can get. Picture me babysitting, eating takeout meatballs after the baby went to sleep and waxing poetic on here about snowbanks that have become brown slush. That’s all you need to know about the previous intro to this email. Delete!
This morning I was eating an egg on bacon on toast, staring out the window and having a flashback. Remember when I moved to New York and the first morning here I sat on the fire escape, and it was sunny and May? And I thought, “Right now I’m freaked the fuck out but before I know it, it will be some regular, bleak day in February and I will have been living my life in this place for months”? Zooooooooop (we’ve zoomed out of the flashback now)—here we are, in February and all its dreariness. And even though I feel blue about it, I also feel pretty damn lucky about how time passes, and how the seasons make you feel it.
There is a podcast called Poetry Unbound hosted by this poet-theologian person named Pádraig Ó Tuama. I love it for the poetry, the spiritual insights, the host’s Irish accent. I highly recommend listening while on a walk. The most recent episode shared this poem—“i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense” by Danez Smith—that feels so right about seasons, and winter, and right now. I linked it here if you’re interested in reading or listening.
So I said this blog was going to be about some ongoing creative projects. Here’s my report: I have been spending the last month making lots of music with Mara. We’re writing and recording songs for our band Talon, and someday very soon they’ll be ready to share and I’ll be so excited to dump a bunch of indie-rock jams in your inbox. I haven’t been writing much. Nothing’s been churning in the Mary Kate Charron Poem Factory. Soon, I hope.
Still this show is HAPPENING people. I want to share some photos from last summer and an old poem, to use the rest of this letter as a memory box. The existential dread of this old poem “Faucet” prevails, so that’s still relevant. And these summer scenes will become relevant again, thank God. Welcome to my time capsule…
I. Cape Cod
II. Siblings
III. End of Summer
Thank you for being here as I feel out what these emails are going to be. I suspect it will be a lot like this deeply itchy experience of being in my early twenties—lots of trying to “figure it out,” not a lot of “living in the moment” quite yet. It’s a process, so I hear. A PROCESS I AM COMMITTED TO FIGURING OUT. Ha ha
I love you all! Until next time…