Editor’s Letter: Onwards Towards Spring

Our last winter in Brooklyn, before we threw up our hands and headed back to sunny SoCal, was brutal. Our daughter wasn’t a year old and she had to be wrapped in a whole flock’s worth of wool and covered with a down sleeping bag every time we took her out in her stroller. You could barely see her eyes, she was so covered in layers of warmth. But the snow and the ice and the near-frozen wind didn’t care; it whipped at our cheeks and tried to keep us inside. And in truth, all I wanted to do was to stay inside. I’m from California, warm-blooded, and although I’d raged through many winters in New York as a college student and as a twenty-something, it just wasn’t the same as an over-tired new mom. But then again I didn’t want our daughter’s first memories to be exclusively of the inside of our apartment, which we’d moved into before getting pregnant. I wanted her new eyes to see the inside of the Natural History Museum, to visit bustling bistros, Grand Central Station, and more—but all of those were a long, cold, slippery walk away to the train station. Undeterred and inspired by my daughter’s newness, our family pressed on through the seemingly endless winter together. We ventured out, she lifted me up, I kept her warm and I put wonderful things in front of her eyes. And in the back of my mind, like a churning motor that kept me moving forward, was the knowledge that no matter how intense, how oppressive, how bitter winter was, Spring was coming. We dedicate this issue, then, to the green season and to the promise that it holds, no matter how far away it might seem.

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