personal essay | Leslie A. Lindsay| Writer & Creative

KATHERINE MAY’S NYT BESTSELLER: WINTERING & HOW IT RELATES TO A PERIOD OF TIME IN MY LIFE

By Leslie Lindsay How does one care for and repair ourselves when we find ourselves slipping through the cracks? ~NONFICTION SPOTLIGHT|ALWAYS WITH BOOK~ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A meditation in what it means to winter, this intimate, part-memoir, part exploration, part essay, WINTERING by Katherine May (Riverhead, November 2020) explores all the ways winter is a lesson in self-care, healing, and rejuvenation. I once believed I could live in the northern climate of Minnesota. My mother scoffed, “It’s one of the coldest places we have in the U.S. Why would you want to go there?” Simple: I had a job at the Mayo Clinic. I also wanted to get away from my wildly unstable, mentally ill mother. Still, her warning, her motherly instinct to shelter me from the harsh realities of a 6-8 month long winter, was somewhat…comforting. As children had been doing for eons, I defied her. I moved to Minnesota. Encapsulated in the snowy drifts and what I am sure was my first real blizzard, I hunkered down. I sat in the bay …

Parenting in the Time of Coronavirus–how are we coping? And isn’t it interesting that we often revert to our ‘old ways?’ Here, I talk about my daughters’ art, homes, isolation, and more

Published by Always with a Book

By Leslie Lindsay I’m a sucker for houses and homes and architecture. As a child, I grew up with an interior decorator mother. I watched as she made her own patterns, designed draperies, throw pillows, bed skirts, even the canopy to my bed. For me, though, the passion found it’s way into interiors–the structure of a place–the lines, the shape, colors, patterns, and placement of furnishings, accessories, etc. It became a way for me to contain and understand my mother’s erratic moods and behaviors. Most of the time, especially when I was younger, she was fairly balanced. When I was ten, she devolved into psychosis, never to be the same. It was at this juncture in my life, that I leaned on art and architecture as a coping mechanism. I began sketching children’s spaces at an early age. Alcoves. Study spaces. Book nooks. Play rooms. This morphed into floor plans of traditional two-story homes, ones I created model names for (The Oakwood, for example was my signature model, but there were others, too). All throughout …