The Monday Newsletter
The newsletter started the way most of my recent bad decisions had started, which was on a Monday morning at the kitchen table with the dog asleep on my feet and the coffee too weak because I keep forgetting that the little scoop in the bag is not the tablespoon it resembles. My husband had been dead for eleven months. The house we had bought together sight unseen, in a village in central Vermont whose chief distinguishing feature was that it had once, briefly, been the birthplace of a minor Unitarian pamphleteer, was still arranging itself around my absence of him. I had six goats. I had three acres. I had retired from the Brattleboro public library after twenty-nine years in which I had developed opinions about the Dewey Decimal System that I will take to my grave. I had a Substack because my niece had set one up for me over Christmas, ostensibly so I would stop emailing her the same recipe for white bean soup every February.
I called it *Thoughts From the Barn*, which was both accurate and, I thought, sufficiently off-putting to keep the subscriber count down around the eight hundred people who had already forgiven me for a great deal over email. The essays were short. I wrote about the goats, who are named after minor Edwardian novelists and who will eat a sweater off a clothesline if you give them three seconds and a breeze. I wrote about bad television, a genre I have