The Seasonal Living Journal

A Word Before We Begin

There is a particular kind of contentment that has nothing to do with productivity or ambition — it arrives quietly, the way light does on a February morning, slant and tentative, catching the dust motes above the kitchen table where something slow is simmering on the hob. I wrote this book because I believe we are all, at our core, creatures of the turning year, and that we suffer a little when we forget it — when we eat strawberries in January and miss the extraordinary gift of waiting for them until June, when the garden insists upon it and the pleasure is almost unbearable. These pages are not a prescription for living, nor a list of improving tasks; they are more like a long letter from a friend who happens to keep a well-stocked larder and rather muddy boots — an invitation to step outside on the morning that smells of rain and thawed earth, to notice the first fat bud on the hawthorn, to stir something warm and fragrant on a darkening afternoon in November and feel, without quite knowing why, that all is well. My hope is simply that you will carry this little book through twelve months and find it honest company — that it will sit beside your tea, grow splattered with something involving blackberries, and come to feel, in time, a little like your own.

— Agnes