The End of 2025

 

Another year! What to make of it. I never know, or maybe I’m just scared of figuring it out. As every year goes by, it seems as though they are speeding up even as they are shimmering and simmering and filling up to the brim with adventures and challenges and joy and big decisions and light and the night’s fingernail moons hanging over us. We are approaching warp speed and no one is wearing their seat belts or knows where the universe ends. We need Levar Burton to explain things to us, and maybe share a few book recommendations while he’s at it.

 

A lot of big balloons this year, as it seems like with every year. We made it back to Japan after many moons and one pandemic, and got lost in Taiwan on the way back. We saw The Superior Labor, Hobonichi, Midori, Traveler’s Notebook, and Opus 88. We got new shelves in the shop along with more books to fill them up with. We had the pen show and Chinese New Year and snow days and sunny days and staff Connect4 tournaments and dressed up as pencils for fun. Junia’s gotten into colouring, Naomi joined a youth orchestra with her violin, Caleb got neon snow pants. I filled up a few journals and drank a lot of bubble tea.

 

We welcomed Foglietto back into the shop, boxes and boxes of these notecards that I love so much. Shopify came by and spent several hours filming us for some very, very short clips of us in their Black Friday commercial. Junia scammed any number of people to read books to her. We moved to the west end, both heartbreaking and exciting. I discovered Facebook Marketplace and have acquired many precious treasures at the low, low cost of driving 50 minutes out into Scarborough and back again.

 

We explored the library, brought home stacks of books, read some good ones aloud together (Treasure Island, Wildwood, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Terry Pratchett’s Bromeliad Trilogy, Wonder, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Golden Compass, and too many that I’ve forgotten) and returned a whole bunch back late. Every year, as I look back and think about what we’ve read, it’s disconcerting to think about who we were at the beginning of the year, who we were when we were deep in the American south or England or some made up land. Sometimes, most of the time, it seems like these stories are the only thing I have to offer these goblins.

 

It is impossible to sum up a year in photos, and yet here we are.

Grateful as always for everything; it’s all a dream. How did we get here? How did these gremlins learn to read, learn to eat with chopsticks, learn to self-checkout library books? How do we have people coming into the shop once, again, and again, with their hard-earned dollars, allowing us to be a part of this community and economy and existence? You don’t know what you don’t know, and I had no realization, no imagination or vision, for what it means to run a stationery shop carrying these things that I love, and that I think still offer some meaning in this world that is speeding up and moving online and increasingly run by AI. We’re all just playing the cards we have, and most days I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but others, maybe just a few, there is a glimmer of hope. Or maybe we just enjoy it while it’s here.

 

These are the good old days and what a gift it is to know them while they’re here.

 

2026 is big and looming and I’m terrified for it all. The future, the kids growing up, the shop teetering on the brink of the age of technology. All eyes are on Chicken as we consider some expensive radioactive rays for his hyper thyroid. Tuna continues to munch on plants and scratch up the furniture and drink from the toilet and we love him so.

 

We just had our staff year end gathering yesterday. I didn’t do my newsletter in part because it’s a slow time of year, all the warehouses and delivery people taking time off, and also because I was babysitting my turkey in the oven, agonizing over burnt wing tips and dry breasts. And now here I am, chewing on cold turkey, and thinking about this past year and yesterday.

 

It was so lovely to see everyone all together at once. Our people! Our people, together with an abundance of food and children and cats. How wonderful to contemplate these people that come into our shop and our home. Their hands keep it all humming, and yet also it’s something entirely real and surreal to contemplate that we get to participate on the journey of these people, for however long our paths intersect. Staff come and go, and we get to know them and they, us, and the kids, and we get to watch as they develop friendships and achieve life milestones and the gift of being able to walk with them for as long as they’re with us is something I never realized was a part of the deal.

 

At the end of this year, they crowded into this new space, our new home, with their This year, for my Secret Santa gift Celina gave me a Toronto Public Library Passport and it was the perfect way to end 2025: with dreams of adventures for the next.