My Current Writing Project

When I dropped my day job, “retiring early” to finally pursue my dream of writing full time and completing a book, I actually had FIVE books started. I had to pick one to finish, and I ended up choosing Lassoing Snakes: nature essays and poetry to finish first, as I was farthest along in it. I still have those other four to finish, plus a couple I started accidentally since retiring. Joy365, about halfway done, is the one I am finishing now. I am hoping it will be complete, rewrites and all, and available for purchase by November 2026. It will be a great gift for many people on your Christmas list!

Joy365 will be a day-book, with short essays with which the reader can interact over the course of any year. The working subtitle of Joy365 has always been “A Celebration of the Ordinary,” or something to that effect. And so the following should come as no surprise.

An Excerpt from Joy365:
Joy365: Blue-handled Scissors
In the knife drawer in my kitchen are a couple of pairs of children’s scissors, left over from my children’s childhood. I find they come in handy for a variety of tasks. One of these is a pair of scissors with blue handles. They are not the ones with the bluntly rounded points, but the ones that are almost pointy but still “safe.” Every time I open the drawer and see them, I smile inside.

These are my oldest son’s second-grade scissors. He brought them home at the end of the year, having lost them in the depths of his public school desk months before. I was confused by the sticky-stiff substance on the blade tips, as the normal use of safety scissors is to cut paper. But, Schuyler’s second grade teacher was more creative and energetic than most teachers. In second grade, her class dissected an octopus.

Apparently, Schuyler had no use for his scissors the rest of the year (the octopus dissection was near the beginning of the year), and he had just dropped them into the murky recesses of his desk without a thought of cleaning the chunk of octopus from them.

So, I cleaned them up, and have used them for various kitchen tasks, such as opening packages or dicing chives, ever since. For the past 25 years. And every time, I smile at the memory of my little “absent- minded professor” dissecting an octopus with safety scissors and then losing them, gunk and all until months later when they came home from school in a brown paper bag full of odd surprises – this one being by far the best.

What is one object you have kept just because it makes you smile inwardly?

©2026 Tessa Chenoa