My newest book, Love You, Mean It will release on Monday, September 28! The pre-orders are ready now for autographed copies here on my website, along with a limited edition bundle with a custom t-shirt design my husband drew, using our wedding flowers for inspiration.
Love You, Mean It is a love letter to humanity. It is a gentle exploration of faith, hope, joy, and the unconditional love that connects us all to each other and to our Creator. Written by a journalist turned first responder in rural Maine, this short book offers a compassionate perspective and lived experience into the author’s faith.
This book has been a labor of love for several years now, and I am excited – and a little nervous – to send it out into the wide world. I know a lot of folks have been waiting eagerly for this one!
Pre-ordering allows me to purchase a bulk order of books to sign and send out, which is the best way for me to handle these orders. The books will be shipped out between September 21 and October 12, and the limited edition bundles will be shipped out between September 21 and October 19 – the extra week will give us time to get everything packaged perfectly for you.
I haven’t been able to figure out where to start with this one, so I’m just diving in headfirst and hoping I come up for air sometime.
This year has been a difficult year. It’s been a “growing in the cracks in the concrete” kind of a year, of stretching and growing and living through all the things you think will break you. It’s been a year of great successes, great achievements, and great losses and sorrows.
I’ve lost count of how many critical incidents we’ve responded to over the last year. Between the work and the personal losses and everything else, I’ve been just trying to keep from drowning.
A few weeks ago a phrase popped into my heart and eventually made its way up to my head: ‘let the light in’.
If I am a dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete, at least I can choose to grow up tall and to let the light in.
Back at the end of May I wrote another blog post and tried to pick up the threads here for my author page, but life came in with another curve ball. At the beginning of the summer, my husband made the difficult decision to step away from public safety. After being in the fire service and public safety for most of his adult life, it’s left him with wounds that need time and grace to heal. I am more proud than I can ever express that he recognized what he needed and that he made the best decision he could for himself and for our family.
While it was the right decision, at the same time it’s left us in a difficult position financially. Rising costs of fuel and utilities, costs of groceries, and increased medical bills because I’ve had two miscarriages this year have all piled up on top of the reduced income. While he’s trying to find work, I’ve been picking up extra shifts and extra hours while still trying to maintain some kind of work-life balance.
As a result my writing has suffered. Lately we’ve been discussing the future of my writing, and we’ve made several decisions.
The biggest roadblock I face currently with my writing is that there is a nearly insurmountable amount of administrative work that needs to be done as well. Archiving old social media posts onto my website, managing book sales and my Butterfly Mail, managing and moderating comments, answering messages, responding to comments, tracking inventory and expenses, staying on top of paperwork… it’s like a thousand little sticky notes on the desktop of my brain that get in the way of my actual writing.
What we’ve decided to try is to have Chris handle more of the administrative side of things, allowing me to devote more of my time to the writing that I love so much. This will also allow him to utilize his graphic design and photography skills.
This is a new adventure for us and I’m so excited to have him step up and take on this new role.
Here’s what you can expect:
Much better consistency with Butterfly Mail
More essays
More videos of Maine and all the places we love
More books
More tee-shirts and artwork
Maybe even more of the human interest stories I loved writing when I worked at the paper
We’re still chipping away at things at home. I’m still working between 40 and 60 hours a week, but for the sake of my mental and physical health and my marriage I’m not doing the 80+ hours I did all winter. He’s still looking for work locally. We’re still volunteering in a few different ways including with Orion, my therapy dog. We’re both navigating the rocky waves of traumatic stress and critical incidents. And we’re being careful and intentional about making time for ourselves as individuals and as a couple.
So with all of that said:
You’re going to see some changes slow-rolled out across my website and social media accounts over the next few weeks. Things that will stay the same:
Entirely and authentically human. No AI has been or will be used in my work.
We’ll still read every single comment and message and email and card. I have read every comment since I started publishing my writing more than a decade ago and I don’t plan to stop.
Hope, joy, and love. These three things have been at the core of everything for my entire life. Hope, joy, and love are the best tools I bring to my work in public safety, to my communities, and to you; even when life gets hard, as it has this year, these three things are still at the heart of everything I do.
I’m so thankful for this community we have here. I hope you’ll stick around.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been listening to the audiobook for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
5 stars.
I finished it a week or so ago – in the middle of baking and meal prepping before a busy weekend with work.
I made breakfast bowls, blueberry flax muffins, challah bread, and roasted chicken and veggie bowls, by the way. I used the bumblebee mixing bowl my mother-in-law bought me and made challah dough like my mother did when I was a kid.
Anyway, that’s only important because I finished the book and was lucky enough that everything was in a waiting phase because I had to sit down on my kitchen floor and breathe very deeply and very slowly for a few minutes because oh my stars, that was the most beautiful story I’ve read in a very long time.
The sitting down and breathing very calmly was assisted by the kitten and the lab, both of whom tried to sit in my lap. Only one of them fits, but that doesn’t stop a dyslexic theraputically-trained labrador who thinks he’s actually a lap dog, not a lab dog.
I spend a lot of time with the raw edges of humanity, given the work I do. It’s given me some raw edges of my own, but I still love it. I love helping people. I love stepping into their worst days and being able to slow everything down and ground them. I love being there when they need someone, when the problem is too big for them to solve on their own, and even when there’s nothing to do to solve it and all I can do is make it so they’re not alone.
There’s so much joy and love and delight to be found in making someone else feel safe, helping them see that they’re not alone.
And that’s what I found in Project Hail Mary.
There is so much beauty and so much joy and so much wonder about this whole thing we call life, and one of the most beautiful and joyous and wonderful things is that we aren’t alone. To me, Project Hail Mary is about togetherness. It talks about impossible choices and mistakes and failures, but it also talks about why making those choices and fixing those mistakes and trying again after those failures is so important: because there’s something bigger than just our own little individual self, and that something is worth fighting for.
Project Hail Mary was the bright light I needed this month. With everything else going on it’s been easy to forget that I’m not alone in this, but sometimes you need a five-limbed alien to yell “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!” until you sit up and listen.
As it turns out, working anywhere from 80 to 100 hours a week for a solid four months is kind of a lot for one human to manage.
The good news:
I finished my Advanced EMT program with high honors and have my National Registry exam coming right up to get my certification and license.
I’m working full-time in dispatch, and I do EMS and fire on a part-time and on-call basis, but I am trying to keep it to between 36 and 50 hours a week.
Now that I’m done with class, my brain is finally able to work on books again. I’m into the revision stage on my non-fiction, Love You, Mean It, and making strong headway on my novel Walk Her Home. In addition, I’ve started the drafting process on a baby book and will be spending some quality time with water color paints as I work on illustrations.
The hard news:
In addition to an insane work load since the beginning of the year I’ve been dealing with health issues. I had a miscarriage in January, and another just before Mother’s Day; the physical strain and toll from January resulted in a couple visits to the emergency room as well. I am finally getting back to my usual self. I’ve been careful and gentle with myself over the last few weeks, and I’ve got good people in my corner taking care of me as well. It’s been a hard year, with a lot of death and sorrow and sadness. Despite it all, the flowers are blooming and I am still here. Today can be good and tomorrow can worry about itself.
I’m enjoying a slower season these days. There is a lot of knitting and writing and walking and sleeping and reading. I am feeling myself grow and deepen and change, too, with the weight of motherhood thus far unrealized. I cannot control what happens next, but I can control my own actions and my own choices; in this in-between space I am settling down to work so that I am better prepared for my own little ones. I am slowing down and learning to pause, to sit with my thoughts and to be patient with myself and with others.
The summer stretches ahead of us, warm and bright and full of promise. I don’t know where it will lead, but I know that I am here and ready to enjoy the journey, even in its beautiful chaos.
The grocery store is unexpectedly packed. A random Monday afternoon, lines backed up to the freezer aisle.
The woman behind me makes small talk. “It’s not even a holiday weekend,” I tell her.
“I know! I don’t know why it’s so busy.”
The man behind us rests his basket on the edge of the display bin and sighs. His eyes are bright in the wrinkles that line his face; he has a familiar air around him, but I’m sure I’ve never seen him before.
“You’re very quick,” the woman in front of me tells the cashier. The cashier is young, wide eyes behind round-framed glasses, a cheery smile reaching all the way through her eyes to her heart.
“I try,” the cashier says, scanning items and bagging them with a careful efficiency.
It’s my turn then, and she scans my cheese and my pasta and asks if I want a bag.
“Yes please,” I say, and she adds my things to a brown paper bag and hands me the receipt.
I step away from the register and pause for another woman pushing a cart. “Oh I’m so sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to barrel down on you.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “I saw you coming.”
She smiles and I see that her smile, in a sweet tired face, reaches up to her eyes too.
I was at a school earlier in the day. A little boy watched me take my camera out of the bag and wipe the lens clean.
“My mom has a camera,” he announced. “But it’s in storage.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah.” He nodded emphatically and bustled off outside to join his class.
I had a meeting tonight. I was there to observe and document, not participate; I tucked myself away in a corner and pulled out my notepad.
And then I watched.
The folks there milled about and talked amongst themselves. One couple stood out; both white haired, he’s serious and she’s sparkly, but they stood close together, a complementary pair. When she stood up to speak she rested her hand easily on his shoulder and he softened into her touch, still focused on the conversation. They exist with the ease of long familiarity, like they’ve known each other since before time began.
And there are others, too. They divide themselves into little groups, occupying the same spaces, but all so very different.
I’ve been around hundreds of people today in a very few hours, all things considered. And on my drive home I got to thinking about all the stories each of them hold inside them.
I am a passing flicker in each of their stories, if they even noticed me. And in a few months I probably won’t remember them.
But I’ll remember how I felt. I’ll remember how they made me feel: safe in a sea of strangers.
This piece has been sitting in my drafts since June 2023. I don’t remember why I never shared it, but I am choosing to share it now, with no editing or revisions.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be invisible.
I’m so glad I’m not.
I was having a real tough time a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sleeping, and the panic attacks were bad, and it seemed like nothing I could do was helping.
I didn’t know what to do so I picked up the phone and called my best friend.
“I just feel like I have had no control over my own life for my entire life. Every choice I have made was for someone else.”
I went over everything.
Everything.
When I was 21 years old, my entire life changed in the space of one night.
There’s this line in my mind when I reflect on my own life. There’s before, and then there’s after.
Before, I was navigating through some traumatic experiences and dealing with undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder and undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I was terrified of everything and everyone. The dreams I’d once had as a little girl, of being involved and present and connected, were pretty much dead. My ideal future was to be invisible.
After, I was different. I had to become an advocate, a caretaker, a parental figure. I went in a complete 180 spin from the invisible kid to this woman I still don’t always recognize.
I did what I had to do for my mom, for my baby brother, for my family.
But I still felt like every single decision I had made since that night when I was 21, I had made for other people. Even things like moving into my own space (so I had some space away from my family so I could actually care for them more efficiently) and joining the fire department (so they would pay for my EMS training so I could better advocate for my mom) were choices I made for other people.
I did what I had to do for other people, but where was I? Who was doing what was necessary for Annie?
My friend let me cry for a bit – she’s good at that – and then she talked.
“You still made those choices, Annie.”
I made hard choices in impossible situations. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to have to do the things I did.
“You chose to do all of those things. No one made you choose that. You could have chosen to walk away.”
Reader, I had forgotten that walking away was an option.
I am standing in the emergency room. I hate that I am doing this; I hate that I keep seeing red after I throw away the gloves; I hate that I wash my hands dozens of times and the red in my mind never really goes away.
I had forgotten that doing less – even doing nothing – was a choice I could have made.
“You have been in control, Annie.” My friend kept talking. “You couldn’t control the situation but you have always controlled how you handled it.”
That was something I needed – desperately – to hear. I had felt powerless in my own story. Isolated, small, just a tool for others.
But my friend reminded me that I couldn’t control the situation, only my response to it. And all of those things that had been weighing me down for just sort of melted away.
Because in every situation I had the choice to walk away.
I didn’t walk away because that’s not the type of person I want to be. That’s not the way I want to do life. That’s not the best Annie I could be.
So in a very real sense, while I was doing what was necessary for others, I was also doing what was necessary for myself.
I needed to realize that I’ve been moving forward this whole time. And that I’ve been working on being the human I want to be.
Because when I was a teenager, I wanted to be invisible because I was scared and hurt and lost.
I never really wanted that. I wanted to be Annie; sunshine and bubbles and open arms.
Today, I went to the Annual Town Meeting in my hometown. I went in the wrong door and showed up at the ballot clerk’s table flustered and laughing at myself.
“I know you,” one of the clerks said. “You’re the happy girl.”
And then I spent two hours running the microphone around the floor so people could make their voices heard.
Reader, half a dozen people have stopped me to chat this afternoon while I rummaged around town doing weekend chores, to ask if I got a breather after running the mic, to tell me that the sunflowers in the back window of my car are pretty.
That night when I was 21 I had the choice to walk away. To do nothing. To be invisible. I had impossible choices to make and I could have chosen the ‘easy’ way out.
But I made the choice I needed to for my own sake.
And realizing that made all the difference.
I may not see every battle you face or every choice you make but please know that I am so, so proud of you. It matters. It all matters. And I am here, cheering you on.
Love you. Mean it.
– A
💛
If you enjoy my writing please consider following my blog, buying a coffee, or signing up for my Butterfly Mail through Patreon.
I’d just arrived home after being on the road for several hours. As I climbed out of the car, slinging my radio strap over my shoulder and conducting a mental inventory of the fresh veggies I’d purchased at roadside stands on the wandering drive home, a movement at the front tire of my car caught my eye.
A butterfly had fallen to the gravel and was fluttering feebly, unable to right herself or to fly away. Her wings were horribly mangled, the upper wings immobile and the lower flapping wildly. I’ve seen this before; she had been caught up in the grill of the car at some point on the drive home, unable to break free.
I stooped and lifted her gently. Her upper wings, outstretched in my palm, drooped. Iridescent glitter brushed from her wings onto my skin, leaving blue-black bruises that caught the late afternoon light.
I watched, for a little while. She had no movement in the upper wings, but paced across the mountains of my palm in agitation.
I had to make a decision.
She would not fly again. This much I knew. She would die, and sooner than later, and she would struggle to the end.
My heart broke over this tiny winged creature, this little fingerprint of God, who’d been the victim of my clumsy human actions, caught up in the mess of my world.
She should have been flying in a meadow somewhere, flitting from flower to flower. But the world is not always safe.
I had, now, a choice.
I could leave her where I’d found her, where the hot sun would burn until dusk, where the tires would move around her.
I could set her in the garden where she would stagger about in the leaves until an animal or another insect or a careless movement or the slow march of time ended the fight.
I wished for a gentle end for this poor injured creature.
But I was a farm girl once and I know that sometimes, the kindest thing is not the gentlest thing.
I made my decision. I set her on the ground, raised my boot, and the world stopped spinning.
To do all things with love and kindness is not easy. For that butterfly, as little as butterflies feel, the kindest thing was to release her from the struggle. The gentle thing – for me, anyway – may have been to leave her in the garden, surrounded by flowers, knowing that the inevitable would happen, but taking no responsibility for it and having no hand in her death. This would have been permissible, but would it have been right?
This is not a decision I have to make often, for which I am thankful.
My first instinct is always to heal. I am the girl with bandaids and waterbottles, the one with a dab of honey on my hand for the frost-nipped bees in late September. I am the girl who made friends with the feral cats and gave them spaces to call home.
What do you do when healing is no longer possible? When suffering is all that remains?
And who gets to make that decision?
I felt a stab of guilt as I looked down at the crumpled butterfly. I had done that. I had taken action and caused irreparable harm and certain death to one of God’s creatures.
I felt the same grief staring at a bowl of chicken soup made from chickens my friends raised, the fluffy and friendly hens I’d made friends with and handfed vegetable scraps from the garden.
What an awful thing to be a human, to be a steward of this world. And what a wonderful thing, too, to have the space in my heart to care.
Years ago, I held a bee for the last hour of her life. She, too, had been injured. But with her, there wasn’t a struggle like this. She was not dragging broken wings, fighting to fly away. She rested in my hand until the end.
Neither the bee nor the butterfly were wrong, and I think I was not wrong in how I handled each. The bee asked for comfort, for warmth. And the butterfly was fighting a battle that was already long lost.
We have an obsession with life, sparked by a deep fear and misunderstanding of death.
But death is also a part of life. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done to save someone. We do the best we can, and that is all that we can be asked to do.
If we wish to live in a world full of kindness and love, we need to let go of that fear.
Fear has no place in the garden of kindness we are growing here.
I lifted the crushed dead butterfly and carefully buried her in the garden where she will become a million tiny atoms which will then become something new.
And I lifted my face to the sunshine.
When the end of my time on this world comes, however that journey ends, just like the butterfly my body will become a million tiny atoms and then become something new here in the mountains that made me. And my soul will go home to the place I have longed for: to a cabin in the woods at the foot of the mountains, with the sun setting over the lake, with Somebody good. I hope that the journey is long – but I am not afraid of the journey or of the end.
Love you. Mean it.
– A
💛
If you enjoy my writing please consider following my blog, buying a coffee, or signing up for my Butterfly Mail through Patreon.
I usually pick up a new crafty project around the new year. This year, I’m working on a baby blanket.
I couldn’t decide what color yarn to get, until I spotted this sunshine yellow yarn tucked away on the back of the shelf.
Sometimes, you just know.
We are not looking to have kids for a couple years still, but for the first time in a really long time I’m actually seriously talking about having my own children and raising my own family.
It’s a dream I thought had died a long time ago.
Funny things happen when your brain isn’t on fire anymore, ya know.
I know nothing is guaranteed, but for the first time in a really long time, I find I can explore the future and chase my dreams, and find ways to make those dreams come to life.
So, I’m making a baby blanket. Not for anyone else’s baby, but for the maybe-someday of my own, and for the bright little future I see.
The future is beautiful.
The future is sunshine yellow.
Love you. Mean it.
– A
💛
If you enjoy my writing please consider following my blog, buying a coffee, or signing up for my Butterfly Mail through Patreon.
This series is musings and ramblings more geared towards fellow writers, although I certainly welcome anyone to read through and to share your thoughts. We are all made up of stories.
I am tired of stories where the heroes only die.
I love a good superhero movie but lately I only watch the early stories, the beginnings, the “this is who I am” stories. It seems to me that the farther in the storyline you get, the worse it gets. There’s always a bigger, badder challenge, and someday our hero dies on the battlefield in a blaze of glory.
Is that the best way to tell the story?
We already know the hero is willing to give up his life to protect others. We have already seen her take a bullet meant for someone else – a teammate, a stranger, even an enemy.
“Greater love has no man than this, that he gives up his life for his friends.”
There are some stories where this needs to be the end, when the hero’s death gives the resolution to the story. Ironman dies, the once selfish man making the ultimate sacrifice to save those he loves and the world he finally sees. The Apostle Paul, too, dies in service to his Lord and faith.
Sometimes, when the hero enters the story clutching selfishness and greed, the way he finds redemption is by giving up everything he holds, including his life, for the sake of others.
Yet are our heroes willing to live for others, too?
Does our hero train up others to fill his role? Does she take a long step back and breathe? Does he address the systemic issues that contribute to the battles he fights? Does our hero recognize the scars and wounds, and does our hero learn to live with peace? Living with peace, learning to be comfortable with the silence in your head outside of an adrenaline rush, finding ways to put battle-earned skills to work in other areas – these are not easy tasks, nor glamorous ones, but they are so important.
I grew up with Tolkien, so I think about Frodo, who lived with the never-healing wounds from the Nazgul blade. He lived, you see. Never the same, but he lived to tell his story. Or consider Aragorn, who brought the hands of a healer to his new role as king. There’s Faramir, who found love in spite of everything.
And there is Eowyn – the warrior princess who did not know how to live outside of the battlefield, who had to learn to embrace the goodness she fought so hard to defend.
As writers, storytellers, we miss an opportunity when so many of our heroes die, even when they die nobly. We miss the chance to reach our readers about living. About healing. About embracing the world we’ve fought so hard to save.
We sort of let them off the hook. Our readers, I mean. We teach them to find something worth dying for and we never teach them to find something worth living for.
When our stories end in death, it can be hard to teach about life. Highlight the healers and gardeners and songwriters. Show the way the sunlight filters through the trees and dances over the raindrops on the grass and wildflowers.
If we only teach people to find something worth dying for, if we only show them heroes that fight every day until they die, do we give them the right kind of hope for tomorrow? Do we encourage them to put on their gloves and their good shoes and go do something to make the world better? Do we teach them that sometimes making the world better starts with making ourselves better first?
Do we show our readers the difference between a garden and a graveyard?
Do we encourage them to find something worth living for?
If you’ve enjoyed my writing, please share! If you would like to support my work you can check out my books, visit my Patreon page and subscribe for exclusive content and Butterfly Mail, or buy me a coffee.
I started developing my favorite cookie recipe when I was twelve, baking cookies to sell for 25 cents. I tweaked the recipe around until I got it pretty much perfect, but I never wrote it down. It’s just ratios and measurements, mix and bake.
A couple years ago I baked a batch for my department. I ran out of vanilla so swapped it out for rum extract and accidentally made a superb cookie.
Recently my sister-in-law and I found vanilla bean paste in the grocery store so when I baked this most recent batch I used vanilla bean paste as well as the rum extract, and it was just amazing.
So, by popular request, here’s the recipe for what I am now calling firehouse cookies. They’re soft and a little chewy in the middle with a thin caramelized crust. A good dark chocolate and a little extra sea salt just layers the flavors together nicely.
Photo: Annie Louise Twitchell
Recipe: Annie’s Firehouse Cookies
1 cup softened butter 1 cup dark brown sugar OR maple sugar 1 cup white granulated sugar 1/4 cup neutral oil (avocado, vegetable, etc) 2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste 1 teaspoon rum extract
2 large eggs
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons sea salt
2 cups chocolate chips
Cream butter and sugars together until fluffy. Add in oil, vanilla, and rum extract and beat until combined, then add eggs and beat until light and fluffy.
Add flour, baking powder, and salt; stir to combine. Add chocolate chips and mix until just blended.
Scoop into desired sizes and place on baking sheet. Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until golden, 10-12 minutes depending on size.
