If you’ve read a lot of gothic novels, or even Victorian novels in general, you know how artistic the heroines tend to be. Ellena in The Italian does professional needlepoint, Helen was a landscape painter in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and in Uncle Silas and The Woman in White the heroines are both good at drawing. I can’t even count the heroines who sing and write poetry.

I never set out to live like a gothic heroine, but I sing and do needlepoint and now I’ve been inspired to to nature sketches. I get email updates from the Cornell Bird Lab, and the latest one was all about nature journaling and field sketching. The examples are beautiful, and it seemed like a romantic (and extremely cheap) way to while away a few hours of quarantine. I’m not good by any stretch of the imagination but it was fun. It’s supposed to snow again tonight, but next time the weather’s good the kids might try some field sketches, too.