Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

JOYCE HINNEFELD

I’ve been thinking about how I spend my days for a lot of days now. At various points I would have sounded pretty bitter in response to this question. But this month is one of my favorites. The days are brighter, and so am I.

In late November 2023, my husband Jim, who’s a good deal older than I am (I’m 64), fell and suffered a brain bleed. He was in the hospital at the time, and he fell after taking a shower during a nursing staff change-over (7 pm—a time I’ve learned to dread in hospitals). I returned from driving home to get his things for what would be, we thought, a simple overnight stay and found him on his hospital room bathroom floor, barely conscious.

He recovered from the brain bleed, maybe. It’s still not clear what’s happened since. After a week in the hospital and two weeks in rehab he came home, and despite endless rounds of physical therapy he never walked without a walker again. Two and a half years later he has dementia, is in a wheelchair, and has been in a memory care facility since the beginning of February. I visit him most afternoons. He has a number of health issues, we still aren’t certain about the source of his dementia, and I could no longer care for him on my own, even with the help of two lovely part-time aides who were here to help me on weekday mornings.

The only other thing I want to say about this situation is that at one point, Jim’s gerontologist told us that basically, when you hit 80, it’s all going to start going downhill (Jim’s now 82). Ever since then I’ve been doing the math, calculating how many good years I have left. It’s not a bad exercise really. So if you’re within counting range of 80, you’re welcome, I guess.

Here’s something my friend Rita, who lost her husband to glioblastoma eight years ago, told me when Jim came home from rehab in the dead of winter two and a half years ago, and I was sleeping on a recliner next to the fold-out sofa bed I’d bought for him on the first floor of our house: Start noticing, and appreciating, really small things. I wish I could describe how she said this to me. It was more of a command than a Hallmark-style, self-care bromide. So I’ve been doing that, or trying to, ever since.

It’s our instinct as writers to notice small things, I think, but we can lose that capacity when life is crashing around us like a flood—which, of course, it basically always is now, if you read the news. These days I try to start a round of writing by reading something to slow my pulse and my racing mind, to remind myself to breathe and to notice things. Lately I’ve been reading Larry Levis’s collected poems, Swirl and Vortex. So far I would describe these poems as setting nostalgia and yearning up against loneliness and violence and seeing how everything shakes out. Yesterday I read a poem called “The Double,” and now I’m in love with these lines:

This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

Another way I try to pay attention to small things is by following the advice I read on Rob Walker’s Substack The Art of Noticing: “sky before screens.” This morning I heeded that advice by taking my coffee outside and sitting on a bench and looking up at the sky, then at the blooming irises and honesty plants in the garden, and then at our lovely old ramshackle house that needs a lot of work and that I may not be able to handle for that much longer. And I remembered how very, very fortunate I’ve been.

Before the sky, and the poetry, and some time on a writing project, though, there are the pets to deal with. We have three aging pets—two cats (Frankie, age 18, and Mouse, age 15) and a dog (Rusty, age 14 and a half). They’re all rescues; the cats were chosen by our daughter Anna, who’s now 25 and living in New York, but the dog was my doing. I love them, they’re good company, but they also need care—medications; a couple slow, ambling walks a day for Rusty; endless cleaning up of pet fur and vomit and litter boxes and the like. The pets like me and my company more than they probably should, because I can be pretty cranky with them. When I’m noticing small things, though, and also reading and writing, I tend to slow down and just enjoy their purring and tail-wagging and ceaseless begging for treats.

Today I’ll go to visit Jim at lunchtime, because there’s a pre-Memorial Day barbecue and live music at the place where he’s living now. Usually I go after lunch, and if it’s sunny and not too hot, I take him on a couple loops around the pretty grounds, and then we sit for a while and look out at the sky and the trees. Other days we sit in his room and watch a movie or something on YouTube; lately that’s meant Architectural Digest videos about modern homes or the architectural history of New York City, which is where we were both living when we met, and a National Geographic program about desert animals. We hold hands while we sit, and I am learning to simply breathe and enjoy that too. Because I miss the Jim I used to know, the one I fell in love with, but this Jim is sweet and loving too; in that sense, he hasn’t changed.

Some evenings I still get myself out of the house. Last night I had a public library board meeting, tomorrow evening I’ll have dinner with some friends. But late this afternoon I’ll get Rusty out and then settle in to watch the storm that’s predicted for our area, and I’ll be glad for the rain, which we need here in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. I’ll check the news to see who will be our Democratic House of Representatives candidate come November, after yesterday’s primary. I’ll fix something simple to eat, and maybe I’ll watch an episode of Hacks or Rooster, because it feels good to laugh, even on my own.

And then, my reward after a full day: time with a book. I just finished Tana French’s The Hunter, which I enjoyed for the intrigue and the depiction of life in a small farming community in the north of Ireland, but mostly for the character of Lena, who “takes an expert’s fine-tuned satisfaction in the fact that here she could distinguish March from April blindfolded, by the quality of the damp earth in its scent . . . .” Now I’m savoring Volume II of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (with thanks to my friend and fellow writer Alix Ohlin for the recommendation), a meditation on time and a master class in the art of noticing.

These days I feel lonely and nostalgic, and also lucky and still in love. I’m like those blinking amber streetlights in the Levis poem—getting ready for nightfall and thinking about time in a new way, like the character Tara Selter in On the Calculation of Volume. I’m giving all the articles and videos and algorithmic brouhaha in my Instagram feed about longevity and looking youthful only the quickest glance before I put my phone away, then head for the garden bench or my favorite reading chair. Which is what I’ll do later today, once the storm is over and I’ve opened the windows to the cooler night air.

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**THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…**

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

Necessary.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

There isn’t a single book that I read repeatedly, but I often go back to W.G. Sebald, especially his book The Emigrants. Sebald’s novels move me deeply, maybe because there’s a sense of dislocation and strangeness in his work—something that’s not uncomfortable or unhappy, but instead quite beautiful—that I’ve always found relatable.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

These days I think it’s probably a little strange that I look forward to bringing in the print edition of my local newspaper, The Morning Call, every morning, then scanning the headlines and reading a bit of local news while I have breakfast. It’s actually pretty expensive to subscribe to the print edition, but I like reading a newspaper this way. I also think it’s important to know what’s happening in your local community and region, and I’m grateful that we still have a good, functioning local paper.

By JOYCE HINNEFELDA

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