Twenty-five in '25

A strange to-do list I almost did kind of actually finish.

My kids are grown. I am no longer teaching five classes a semester at the homeschool co-op, shuttling kids to quiz bowl tournaments and orchestra rehearsal, and organizing my projects around their schedules. It’s time to move on! If I think of my life as a three-act play, then act one was before kids, act two was during kids, and act three is what’s starting right now. Act three is exciting, but like many other women, I’m hesitating here, to redefine myself. I could be a writer full time. I could be a teacher. I could be a dog trainer, or hike the Appalachian Trail, or learn Italian.

I decided I needed to take this year to clear the path, reset the stage if you will.

Thus the 25 in ‘25 list was born. This isn’t a bucket list in the usual sense, though it is a list of things that were supposed to be done “someday.” The items aren’t all stellar accomplishments or big activities — they’re just tasks that hovered around me like a swarm of insistent mosquitoes, buzzing “but first—” whenever I thought “what’s next?”

Please know: this list makes no sense. There are feats of strength here, and inconsequential BS things, and fixes that I made other people do for me. But all of these items taunted me, defeated me, stymied me, or delayed me in some way, and this year I was determined to get rid of them.

Here’s what I did:

1. Climb Old Rag

Old Rag is the toughest mountain to climb in Virginia. There’s 2500 feet of elevation gain, but what really gets you is the one mile of bouldering at the top. They call it “rock scramble” like it’s a cute breakfast. It’s not. I nearly died but I made it to the summit and even back to the car, with the help of my trusty husband Dan. I don’t know how this one crept onto my “someday I must” list but now it’s gone.

2. Purge Duplicate Books

I was a literature teacher for 18 years and I accumulated many copies of the books I taught. Maybe I thought I would open a school, or fantasized about once more inviting bunches of kids into my classroom to bend their heads over books with me. I had seven copies of Watership Down, for example. Or, I had seven copies. Now I have shunted all my extras into Little Free Libraries while walking around town, and cleared some room on the shelves.

3. Cut Down the Maple Trees

When I was a child spending summers on our property in western PA, there were six big beautiful maple trees bordering the front yard, interspersed with sweet little hemlocks. At the start of 2025, there were four towering maple trees remaining, the other two having dramatically fallen down in life-threatening displays of nature’s fury. I didn’t want to cut the trees down. They reminded me of my mother, and my childhood, and even when they threw massive limbs toward the house, I delayed. But this year, I had them cut down, finally allowing the hemlocks to have their day.

4. Read Middlemarch

I accidentally read all the works of Thomas Hardy when I was a young person. I got going on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, flew through Jude the Obscure and on to Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge, and you guys I even read A Pair of Blue Eyes. As I stood panting and sad, having read it all, I was gripped with regret that I would have no Thomas Hardy to read later in life.

I was a kid. Nothing bad had happened to me yet. These were real concerns.

So I set aside Middlemarch, deciding that what happened with Thomas Hardy would not happen with George Eliot, another favorite author. I would not read Middlemarch until I was fifty. Fifty years old! That was a distant pinnacle, and I imagined raising a withered arm to open Middlemarch and finally cast my dim and watery eyes upon its pages. And then, I guess, die.

Well, I reached fifty. And something prevented me from reading Middlemarch, even though I was interested in it, and even though my friend Joshilyn gave me a lovely illustrated version to mark the occasion. Maybe I thought if I read it I actually would die. I let the years stretch on with Middlemarch on my to-do list, avoiding it. But now I’ve read it. I didn’t love it overmuch — it’s kind of if Jane Austen and Charles Dickens wrote a book together. So there are young couples deciding whether to marry each other but there are also whole chapters where the village elders debate what curate to hire for the local parish. Somehow, even though I have now read Middlemarch, I feel confident I can still wring some feeble meaning out of life.

5. Fix the Kitchen Faucet

The kitchen faucet has leaked forever. Dan replaced it.

6. Clear out the Bathroom Cabinets and Linen Closet

I was a very busy person for many years, while the kids lived here and were doing a thousand activities, many of them organized by me. Often, I paused with something domestic in my hand, not sure where it should go. Usually, the answer was into the linen closet or one of bathroom cabinets, where it could conveniently disappear. Those places have now been upended and most everything thrown away.

7. Get Rid of My Dead Sister’s Crafting Supplies

Look, I told you not all of these were going to be interesting, or intellectually worthy of a critically-acclaimed novelist. But — personal growth.

8. Get Rid of My Homeschooling Supplies

I’m done homeschooling. I do not need to hang onto this stuff. Personal growth.

9. Read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

GEB is a weird treatise on computer science, artificial intelligence and human creativity, written by a math guy in 1979. It’s kind of a cult thing, and you’ve probably heard of it. Maybe you’ve even read it. Well good for you! In 2012 I tried to read GEB but stalled in chapter 4. I even made a book club to read it, and still failed, so it’s been hanging over my head, calling me a dummy, for over a decade. This year, I read it. I did not enjoy it, but there were parts I found interesting. I only finished it this morning, so, you know.

10. Make a Craft Room

The big room at the back of our house upstairs has been a homeschool room, a kid bedroom, a guest room, a sewing room, a bedroom again, and at the beginning of 2025 it was having a major identity crisis as a storage room. It’s now been sorted out and made into a work room for spinning, sewing, knitting, painting, and whatever else I do in Act Three.

11. Purge all the Teacher Decor from the Cottage

My parents were both teachers, and they accumulated a lot of decor items, from large macrame owls to pillowcase angels to little frog figurines. They disposed of these relics by displaying them prominently around the house. This year the last person in my nuclear family died. Now I and my kids are the only people to have lived in that house, or even to have stayed in that house for any length of time, so I claimed it by getting rid of all that teacher decor. Act Three! Who knows what I may replace it with?

12. Start a Grown-Up Lady Sword Dance Circle

For years my friends and I have been following our kids around as they do rapper sword dance, a very specific and odd little dance form that originated in mining towns in Northern England. For years, we have said, “We should do that!” Well now, we have done it. We’re Salt and Steel Sword and we practice every week.

13. Start a Grown-Up Lady Dungeons & Dragons Table

For years I have run D&D campaigns for my friends’ kids, my kids’ friends, my students, and other assortments of children, while thinking, “I’d like to run a D&D table for my friends too.” We talked about it, we even tried it once or twice, but nothing got off the ground until this year. We created a fantasy world together, and now we’re playing in it every week.

14. Purge Halloween Decor

A random accumulation, now mostly jettisoned. No personal growth required.

15. Write 50,000 Words in November

Before this year, I had won NaNoWriMo twice. But it’s been fifteen years since my last win, even though I had many failed attempts. Now, NaNoWriMo has been canceled because the organizers were pedophilia apologists sponsored by AI companies. However, it still cast a shadow of defeat on me, and I didn’t want to let it die without beating it, so this year I successfully wrote 50,000 words in November. I’m glad people continue to do a silly balls-out writing challenge like this, even without the official name, because it’s fun.

16. Reset My Makeup

I had MAC eyeshadow pots from grad school. I had my bottle of Chanel nail polish in “Vamp” from 1994. No, I wasn’t using them, but I had them, as if my identity as a youthful, spirited person was located in something labeled by Urban Decay. Now they are gone and I have a little zipper bag of Jones Road stuff like a normal lady.

17. Collect and Assess My Scribbly Notebooks

If you are a person who scribbles in notebooks, I don’t need to explain this to you. If you’re someone for whom a new notebook will surely fix everything, for whom a bullet list on a fresh page is like a refreshing brain wipe, then you probably have forty notebooks in various stages of fullness and disarray scattered around your life too. I have been recklessly starting new notebooks for years. And I still have them. I have not found one notebook to rule them all, but I have in the darkness bound them. They are in a pile. They are contained. Any minute now, I may figure out a way to create an Overnotebook that will surely fix everything.

18. Use the Salves

I’d like to say this is a metaphor for living fully in the now, and not saving joy or beauty for some future time. And it is that, but it’s also literally using up the salves that I love and collect, in little tins and jars. I can buy more! I don’t have to hoard the salves, guys. I also tried using the lotions and the creams. Amazing stuff.

19. Write an Article About Fiddle Camp

I wrote an article about our beloved Bluebird Family Fiddle Camp, and pitched it to the American Suzuki Journal. I’ve written for this magazine before, and for this piece I got back an editorial note, and resubmitted with changes, so I’m very hopeful this will see print. I have been meaning to do this for 16 years.

20. Write and Record a Song

Tressa and I (of The Virginia Woolfs) have now written four songs and recorded one. That first track is now with the instrumentalists who are going to magic it together, and then will be mixed and mastered, and released in 2026.

21. Fix Aunt Pearl’s Nature Art Thing

I am in possession of a piece of folk art created by my great aunt Pearl, who was a naturalist. Using materials collected on her many hikes and voyages, Aunt Pearl made collages, including a massive one that has hung over the sofa at the cottage all my life. It was a big piece, with lots of seashells, dried mushrooms, bits of moss and strange roots and seeds. When I was a child, I took naps under it, and looking up at it with sleepy eyes, I imagined it was the island on which The Tempest was set, complete with Caliban’s cave, and stormy seas. Over the last many years, the collage has fallen apart, literally, as pieces came off it and got swept up and discarded.

This year, I did my own collecting and drying of materials, scraped off everything I could, repainted it, and remade it. Aunt Pearl would say it lacks sophistication, complexity, and intention. She also required me to be silent whenever we went walking in the woods together. I’m happy with my result.

22. Ride Bikes on the Capital Trail

My friend Maryann and I have always said we were going to ride the Capital Trail from Richmond to Jamestown. This year we worked very hard to make it happen. I trained while in Pennsylvania, putting Beckett in a bike trailer and motoring all over the rails-to-trails in Venango County, PA. Maryann and I rode increasing distances on the Dismal Swamp Canal Trail and elsewhere, building up to our big effort: 40 miles on a down-and-back starting from Jamestown. While we didn’t go the whole 50 miles, I’m counting this as DONE.

23. Start a Review Blog

In the 90s, I used to write movie reviews for TNT Rough Cut and music reviews for Alternative Press. Later, as an author with books out on the shelves, I rarely gave critical opinions publicly, on anything in the arts. But I always wanted to get back to writing reviews. So I dabbled in it at Edinburgh Fringe this year, resurrected my Netgalley account, and started listening to new music on Spotify and mouthing off on social media. I’m not sure how The Bubble will develop, but right now I’m enjoying boosting music and books, and looking forward to writing about live shows in Edinburgh again in 2026. I haven’t officially started the actual blog yet, but The Bubble is up on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram.

24. Finish a Damn Trilogy, Watch a Damn Final Season

I realized a couple of years ago that I was leaving trilogies unfinished and shows partially watched. Not because I didn’t enjoy the stories, or want to know what happened. I don’t really know why I was abandoning series like this — maybe, like my hesitation over Middlemarch, it’s related irrationally to my mortality, as if I might die if the story ended? Anyway, I determined to stop doing that, and as a symbol of my resolve I finished the last chapters of Lungdon, the third book in Edward Carey’s Iremonger trilogy, and watched the rest of Dead to Me. (And I didn’t die!)

25. Camp

I was never in Girl Scouts, or any kind of scouts, and I had never spent the night outside in any kind of tent or even camper, until this year. But I always thought I might be or become the type of person who hikes for miles with a tent on her back, cooks over a small flame, sleeps under the stars, and carries on the next day. So one of the things on my list was to actually sleep outside in a tent, which I did. I slept outside in a tent, about forty feet from my back door, at the cottage in Pennsylvania, and I hated it! Originally I had intended to follow this backyard experience with a car camping experience and then a hiking overnight, but you know what? Nah. I’m checking this box and moving on.

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So, there’s my successful 25 in ‘25! But I have a secret to tell you: My list actually had over 40 things on it, because I knew I would probably fail some. And I did! My next posts will be about the things I tried to do in ‘25, but abjectly failed. Some of the fails are obvious (write a novel!) but some are surprising to me. Who knew that I could climb a mountain, but taking the sewing machine in for servicing would prove too difficult to accomplish?

How’s your to-do list coming along? Are you making one for 2026? Do any of these 25 items sound familiar?