An Open Tuesday
This is the fabric of life up here.
Today is a Tuesday. There’s nothing in particular on my calendar.
No one from any trade is coming by my 257-year-old house to give me a quote that will make me wince and then, eventually, sigh with contentment when the faucet runs hot or the fire actually draws right. No showings. No inspections on a house under contract. No appointment with a maker to pick up the next batch of candles or honey or soap for Lakes & Peaks. No boat ride with a friend, no drinks with a client. Just an open day.
I’ll be honest: as a small business owner twice over, open days sometimes give me anxiety before they give me anything else. The calendar feels like it should be fuller than this. But they also tend to remind me of something, which is that the reason I’m building two businesses around celebrating this place and welcoming people to it well is this: how good this place is, even on a Tuesday when nothing in particular is happening.
These days don’t get posts the way the Fourth of July does, or Bike Week, or ice-out. Nobody photographs a Tuesday. But these are the days that have actually held this place together; for the people who’ve lived here since the 1760s, and, longer than that, for the people who stewarded this land since time immemorial, long before anyone’s ancestors arrived with a governors writ and called it theirs. The fabric of a place isn’t woven just from its holidays. It’s woven from its Tuesdays.
So here’s what this one actually looked like.
I got up early and sat on the back steps in a soft rain, coffee in hand, watching the dogs stretch out their limbs one at a time like they were testing whether the day was worth getting up for. I fed the chickens and stole their eggs for my eldest’s omelet. I sat with my journal and pulled my cards, the way I do most mornings, less to predict anything than to notice what my body already knows before my brain catches up to it.
I threw in a load of laundry. I checked Lakes & Peaks orders against what needs to ship this week. I texted a client about what an inspection actually turns up on a house that’s been settling since before electricity, and texted another about whether a piece of land might be subdividable, then texted the listing agent to ask if his clients even have a survey yet. I drafted Sunday’s post about Fourth of July events across the region. I started a list, because I love a list, for a festival Lakes & Peaks is doing in August that feels impossibly far away and, experience tells me, absolutely is not.
Later, I’ll walk one of the dogs down to a neighbor’s farm. She’s going to talk me through what it’ll take to process the fifty meat chickens I went in on with her this spring. I might keep going past her place to the farmstand down the road, where another neighbor has the green thumb I was apparently not issued, and pick up strawberries or lettuce I had no hand in growing myself.
There will be an hour in the hammock. Possibly two, if I’m honest with myself, which I’m trying to be more of lately. I’ll listen for birds and have to fight the urge to pull out the app and identify every one I don’t recognize, because sometimes being present in a moment matters more than being right about what’s in it.
At some point I’ll grab a beer in the kitchen, and my feet will rest on the same wooden boards some other woman’s did two hundred years ago, or a hundred and fifty, or seventy-five, or fifty. The kids will slam in and out the door on their way to wherever teens go on a June afternoon. It will be, by any reasonable measure, a lovely day. Part work. Part rest. All of it, somehow, beauty.
None of this will end up anywhere but here, in this newsletter, on a Tuesday nobody was watching. There’s no after-photo for a day like this. No before, either, really; it doesn’t resolve into anything. It just happens, and then it’s the next day, and somehow that’s exactly the point.
We’ve gotten used to measuring a life, or a house, or a region, by its highlight reel; the show-stopping renovation, the leaf-peeping weekend, the dramatic ice-out video that gets passed around every March. And those moments are real, and worth marking. But they’re not actually where the substance of life is. The substance is in the unremarkable Tuesday that doesn’t make it into anyone’s story, including, usually, your own.
If you’re the kind of person who’s drawn to a place like this, I’d gently suggest that what you’re actually drawn to isn’t the 4th of July version. It’s the slow one. It’s a region where most of what matters is quietly accumulating in the background of an ordinary day, whether or not anyone’s there to see it.
Wanna know what I discerned from my cards this morning: a slow day isn’t an absence of progress. It’s the thing being stored up. I think that’s true of a friendship, or a business, or a garden, or a region. I think it might be the truest thing about what it actually means to live somewhere, rather than just visit it.
So: here’s to the open Tuesdays. The ones that don’t make the highlight reel, don’t get the post, don’t need to. They’re not what we show people about this place.
They’re what it’s actually made of.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
