The thaw is the most uncertain stretch of the year, and the one I look forward to most. Eight weeks of half-light, half-mud, half-promise — when nothing has yet bloomed but everything is preparing to. This issue is about that interval, and the slow work of being attentive while the world figures itself back out.

Hannah Lederer's twelve-part feature on Soren Beck's cabin is the longest piece we've ever run — fourteen years of building, dismantling, and rebuilding the same six-hundred square feet, and the strange peace that came from doing it alone. We sent Cleo Mayhew up the Bitterroot in February to make the photographs; she slept three nights on Soren's floor and came back with the pictures we'd been waiting for since 2019.

Elsewhere: Iris Whitlock returns to ceramics in a barn-built kiln, Margot Ackermann descends into a 1908 farmhouse cellar, and Theo Holcombe walks thirty miles on a single road. The departments are full this quarter — forty-two new entries between the four of them — and the essays section is at twelve.

Read freely. Then, if you'd like to keep the lights on around here, subscribe at $48 a year and we'll mail you the next four issues. Thank you, as always, for being here.