A Spring Dispatch
What I'm doing and loving, written when the light is golden and something in me craves to share
Spring came in the way it always does: softly at first, then all at once, like remembering a song you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Something in me tilts toward it every year. The longer evenings, the smell of things waking up, the particular quality of late-afternoon light that makes you want to stand in it with your eyes closed and just *feel*. I have been feeling a lot of things lately. Here’s what’s been up to this month.
Reading
*The Astral Library* by Kate Quinn ✦✦✦✦✦
*A librarian reviews a book about a magical library. I know, I know. My heart didn’t give me a choice.*
Kate Quinn has this gift — she doesn’t just write historical fiction, she holds a door open and waits for you, patiently, until you walk through it. The Astral Library is five stars without a single hesitation, and I say that as someone who has professionally loved books her entire life and is therefore maybe a little too easy to enchant on this particular subject.
A library that exists outside of time, where every story ever told waits on the shelves…it’s the kind of premise that lands somewhere between a dream I’ve actually had and a place I’m genuinely homesick for. And Quinn earns every inch of it. The magic never does the heavy lifting; the *people* do, the way they always must.
As a librarian, what moved me most was how *true* it feels. Libraries as sanctuary. Libraries as witness. Libraries as the quiet, faithful keepers of everything we’ve ever tried to say to each other across centuries. She understands this the way I understand it: in the chest, not just the head. The research is gorgeous, the pacing is a love letter to patience, and I finished it slightly stunned and already grieving that it was over.
Read it. Let yourself be inspired by it. That’s the whole point.
Listening
*The Exorcism of Fairies* Audiobook
I found this one at exactly the right moment, the way the right things tend to arrive. evening, soft rain against the window, a blanket pulled up past my chin, nowhere to be and no desire to be anywhere else. The Irish setting wraps around you like sea mist off a coastal road: atmospheric and a little melancholy and quietly, stubbornly beautiful.
The pacing is slow, and I mean that as the most tender kind of compliment. It trusts you. It doesn’t rush toward you or try to impress you — it simply opens a door and lets you wander in at your own pace, the way you’d enter a house that already feels familiar. I’ve been sitting with it in the evenings and letting it work on me the way good things do: gradually, softly, and then suddenly all at once.
For the spring nights when the light goes lilac and you want to be somewhere a little enchanted. This is that.
Obsessing Over
Fairy Lights. I Simply Cannot Be Stopped.
It started, as these things do, with good intentions and a single strand.
That was not where it ended.
They’re in the bedroom now, draped along the headboard like something out of a Pinterest board pin. They’re woven through the bookshelf between the spines of my favorite novels. There’s a jar of them on the kitchen windowsill that does absolutely nothing practical and fills me with a quiet, genuine joy every single morning when I stumble towards the coffee pot, still half-asleep.
My home is beginning to look like the inside of a fairy tale; the soft, candlelit kind where someone is always about to offer you tea and ask you a meaningful question. I wanted exactly this, it turns out. I just didn’t know how to say it until I started hanging lights everywhere and felt, for the first time in a while, like the space around me matched something inside me.
If you’ve been thinking about it: yes. The lights. Do it. Make your home feel like magic lives there, because it does.
The Hunt
A Mary Poppins Bag & a Full Circle Moment
On my days off this season, I’ve developed a little side quest: the thrift store. Just stopping in. Wandering the aisles with no particular agenda, letting things reveal themselves. It has become one of my quiet favorite things, which is something I could not have predicted because as a child I dreaded it. My mom used to drag us around second-hand shops and I was deeply, vocally unimpressed. The smell. The endless racks. The mystery of other people’s things.
And now here I am, genuinely delighted to be there, and I think about her every single time.
The current obsession fueling the hunt: a Mary Poppins carpet bag. You know the one. Tapestry or kilim, a little worn, ideally with the energy of something that might contain an entire lamp and a hat stand and a small potted plant if you reached far enough in. I haven’t found her yet, but I have faith. The right thrift store, the right Saturday, the right moment of turning a corner and there she’ll be; slightly battered, completely perfect, waiting.
In the meantime, the hunt itself has become the treat. Which is maybe the whole point of second-hand stores, and maybe also something my mom knew all along.
Wearing
Ffern Spring Equinox ’26
Every season Ffern sends something that feels less like a perfume and more like an experience and this spring they’ve made something that genuinely excited me
Spring 26 opens with a brightness that feels like waking up: Sicilian lemon, bitter orange, a snap of timut pepper and ginger, the way sunlight arrives with a little edge to it in early April. Underneath, there’s elemi, something resinous and quietly grounding, like roots beneath the bloom. The petitgrain is green and almost sharp, the smell of something still becoming.
Then it softens, the way spring mornings soften by ten o’clock. Neroli, tuberose, May rose, but not perfume-counter rose, not department store flower. Hedgerow flower. The kind you’d lean into on a walk and then stand there longer than you meant to. Valerian root weaves through it all, herbal and a little wild, keeping things from being merely pretty. Ho wood gives it a warm, quiet backbone.
And the box, loves. The box. Tucked inside was a woodland art print so sweet and soft it’s already earmarked for a frame, and, this is the part that made me actually press my hand to my chest: a packet of wildflower seeds. I’m planting them next month and I have perhaps already thought too much about what it means to wear a scent and then grow the landscape that inspired it. Very me.
I put it on in the morning and feel like I’ve been somewhere green and good, sweet and clean.
Getting Away
A Small Island Escape
I left home under an atmospheric river warning. Not a light drizzle, not “some clouds expected”, but a full meteorological warning, the kind where the sky has decided to make a statement and the statement is relentless. I drove to the ferry in the rain and arrived on a small island to find sunshine. Actual, warm, generous, unironic sunshine.
I was visiting family, which meant the particular sweetness of being known and fed and not having to explain yourself to anyone. The island had that quality small places sometimes have — unhurried, a little outside of time, the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty but full. We sat in the warmth. We watched the water. I remembered, not for the first time, that I am a person who needs the sea nearby to feel entirely like herself.
It was exactly the beginning spring deserved. I came home to clearing skies and felt reset in some soft, cellular way. Deeply recommended: leave during a weather warning. Arrive somewhere warm. Let the salty air do its work on you.
Slow Mornings
The Most Important Meal of My Entire Personality
Something I’ve been protecting fiercely this season is my mornings. Slow ones. Unhurried ones. The kind where the coffee is hot and there’s nowhere to be yet and the light is still doing that low, golden, just-woke-up thing through the windows.
My current breakfast obsession is a maple French toast bagel with fig goat cheese — and I need you to understand that this combination has changed something in me. The sweet maple flavour of the bagel, the cool, tangy cream of the fig goat cheese, the way it all tastes like a morning that’s genuinely glad to exist. I eat it slowly. I do not multitask. This is a spiritual practice.
On the more practical end of things, I’ve fully committed to eating my skincare and before you roll your eyes, hear me out, because sardines on rye crackers with cucumber and hummus have entered my life and I am devoted. It sounds like something a very sensible person eats at a desk, but assembled properly, eaten slowly, with good olive oil involved somewhere, it’s genuinely lovely. Omega-3s for the skin, protein for the energy, cucumber for the feeling that you are a person who has their life together at least partially. I am a different woman since the sardines.
An Evening Worth Telling You About
The Oscar Party: An Account I Will Not Be Humble About
I wore a ball gown. To a friend’s living room. With a bingo sheets and handmade ballots and an energy that said this is a formal occasion because I have decided it is.
There is something deeply, genuinely me about choosing a ball gown for an event that did not request one and I felt beautiful and a little ridiculous and completely at home in both feelings simultaneously, which is maybe the most Cancer Rising thing I’ve ever done.
The cocktails were exceptional: a grapefruit salty dog that was bright and sharp and a little punishing in the best way, and a lavender gin Empress martini that was the color of dusk and tasted like a decision you feel good about in the morning. I held them both at different points. The gown caught the light. The night was soft and warm and full of people I love shouting at a screen.
And I need you to know, I took the prize for most correct winners.
The gown absolutely had something to do with iy.
Thats all for now, lovelies. Spring has only just introduced herself, and I intend to experience every inch I can.