Jar of Goodness 1.26.25: Cozy Mysteries

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for cozy mysteries.

“Whaaaat?” you say? “Julie, don’t you have a degree in English literature? Aren’t you a professional editor with fifteen years’ experience in scholarly publishing? Aren’t you just a little above mass-market, easy-reading, often-sadly-edited, formulaic, shallow, etc., etc. novels? What used to be called ‘dime-store’ novels? The successors to, say, Harlequin romances?” (Insert retching sounds here.)

Well, I’m coming out of the closet. It turns out I’m not above it. And I have my reasons.

First, I started reading these when Mom had gotten shingles and her vision was messed up. One of her great pleasures these days is devouring these cozy mysteries. (We can’t keep up with her in buying ones she hasn’t read yet. And yes, she says she remembers all the stories, so it’s not like she can reread them and like it.)

So while she was at rehab places, she was already in the dumps because she wasn’t at home. And naturally, we all strive to keep her happy, or failing that, contented. So I found her current book next to her chair at home, brought it with me to her room at Columbia Post-Acute, and read to her, starting a little before where her bookmark was. (This is quality time between us, see?)

It was kind of funny to pick up reading at the midpoint of the mystery novel. Who’s who? Why is everyone looking for whatever-it-is? Whatever does ice cream have to do with this—it’s in the title, right? And why are recipes added in here and there, the way a bad romance novel has sex scenes gratuitously sprinkled throughout the story?

As I read to her, I occasionally interjected: “OH! Mom, I think HE is the killer! He’s GOTTA be! Don’t you think?” Mom would just look at me, smile, and shrug. She’s read enough of these, she can probably figure out who “dunnit” by the time the murder occurs, usually by the end of the fourth chapter.

Anyhow, after we finished that one and started on another, Mom graduated from the rehab place and went home with her books. She got glasses that corrected her off-kilter vision, and since then, she’s reading books herself. (I might be misremembering: she’s been in and out of the hospital and rehab places, I might have read other books to her here and there. It’s hard to keep track of them. They’re like bunnies.)

Actually, I know more than a few professional manuscript editors who like to read mysteries (not necessarily cozies, however). I think it’s that the pace and the content—the puzzle—exercises a part of one’s mind that allows the editor to temporarily bypass the part that notices the sylistic inconsistencies, infelicities of grammar, typographical errors, misused homonyms, and so on. You just kind of gallop through a page-turner. You can enjoy reading again, as long as the book lasts.

I also like it that these sorts of books blot out whatever else is on your mind. Like what's going on in politics. How Mom is refusing to do what she needs to do to help Dad and allow me to keep a job. This form of escape is quite nice when you’re having trouble getting to sleep. I read until the type turns different colors or starts to wiggle around, and my eyes close, and the book folds shut on my hand. Blissful sleep.

Honestly, I haven't cared about mystery novels since I quit reading Nancy Drew books in about fourth grade. What's the point? After my preteen sci-fi craze, I quickly started devouring self-help books and nonfiction natural history books. But I kind of like these cozy mysteries.

Sue and I recently reread Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the one that parodies the “horrid” Gothic novels of her day. In it, although she pokes fun at people devouring stuff like Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (Sue and I read that too, and laughed at it even as it drew us in), she also mounts a spirited defense of the novel as a literary form. In the early 1800s, mysteries and such were viewed as primarily women’s reading, and lightweight, worthless, even degrading stuff. But in such books, Austen pointed out, “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Look, they are fun to read, and the best novelists have the ability to make their characters and plots seem absolutely real. It’s magic.

Mass-market cozy mysteries hardly contain the “best-chosen language,” or (superlatively) the “liveliest effusions of wit and humour,” but they do usually contain some well-crafted dialogue with a good ear for common speech, and the characters in them often are well-rounded and interesting. (Okay, a lot of them have characters that are flat “types,” but many of the books are in the first person, and at least the interior dialogue of the heroine is interesting and relatable.)

These books transport you, too. They all have a certain setting, such as a cheese shop in Sonoma, a candy shop in Ohio’s Amish country, a bicycle shop on Cape Cod, and a Granadian-immigrant family bakery in New York City’s Little Caribbean. I don’t think any are set in a grim apartment complex in a boring Midwest or southern city about a person who, say, edits online content, or works at Walmart for a living.

There are rules about cozy mysteries: no truly gruesome details, torture, or deaths; no slaughter of the innocents (all the victims are generally people who had it coming to them, so there are usually multiple suspects); no explicit sex scenes; the protagonist is almost always a female who is some kind of small business owner living her dream; male friends are platonic friends; male love interests typically don’t do more to advance the plot than be fantastically supportive (“you’ve had a rough day, honey; come home, I’ll make dinner, we’ll have a glass of wine, and I’ll rub your shoulders while we snuggle on the sofa and discuss the clues and suspects, and whatever else is on your mind”). The boyfriends don’t always “save the day”; when cornered or captured, the heroine saves herself through her own wits, cunning, and physical capabilities. There is actually a kind of feminist vision at work here.

You can see why these are so popular: it’s like grown-up Nancy Drew, minus insipid Ned Nickerson and Carson Drew rescuing Nancy and her chums. Don’t you wish you could own a popular breakfast/brunch diner–slash–vintage cookware shop in scenic Brown County, Indiana, and have all your workers and customers be your dear friends and neighbors? Don’t you wish you had so many dear friends and neighbors? Wouldn’t you like having a super-handsome boyfriend who doesn’t get jealous of your success and in fact helps you in all kinds of ways, anticipating your needs? Huh?

The first cozy mysteries I read were the “Spice Isle Bakery” series by Olivia Matthews (Patricia Sargeant), which has a flawed, insecure, self-deprecating protagonist and a family so well characterized they seem truly to live and breathe. The spunky, outspoken granny speaks in Granadian dialect, which is fun. As a culinary cozy, it necessarily includes lots of descriptions of foods and their delicious scents (in this case, Caribbean foods like currant rolls, coconut bread, curry and jerk chicken, and callaloo; and the bakery is always scented with nutmeg, cinnamon, coconut, and butter). And yes, there are recipes.

The series ended with three volumes, but I found I sincerely wanted more. More, more, more!

I’m trying not to descend into the same bottomless well that my mom is in, where she’s reading just about any cozy mystery she can find, that she hasn’t already read. I’m sticking to a few well-established publishers, because I don’t think I could tolerate self-published, poorly edited stuff. I’m also sticking with authors I’ve already read . . . like the ones in these pictures.

So, cheers to cozy mysteries!

Jar of Goodness 1.19.25: Sunshine Warmth, Real and Fake

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for sunshine, real and “fake.”

A long time ago, when we lived in Montana (where the winters were longer, colder, and snowier than here) we figured out how to rig plain, clip-on incandescent shop lights, with a 75-watt bulb, over our kitty beds.

Turns out that cats love, love, love the dry warmth. They just soak it in.

We’ve had about two whole weeks of remarkably cold weather. We still have snow and ice on the ground from the “snowpocalypse” of January 4 and 5. It was impossible to get the inch of ice off our sidewalks when it fell, and wherever it’s shaded, there is still ice and snow on the ground. The lower layer was sleet that got frozen together, then topped with white, reflective snow. We’ve had a few afternoons sporadically when it got above freezing, but not enough to really melt it. If anything I think it’s been sublimating. Cold, grim weather.

Here and there, we’ve also had some cold days when it was quite windy, and our house loses heat quickly on those days. Stucco, brick, and plaster. And the windows leak. The farther you are from the middle of the house or from a heat register, the colder you are.

We wear sweaters and wrap ourselves in blankets. My office, on the third floor, is cold storage for my carcass. I’m too cheap to heat it full-time, and there’s only one heat register up there, anyway. Heat goes up, so it’s bad enough that it gets as warm as it does. And when I go up there, it’s not so bad at first, but when the sun starts going down, I realize I’m shivering, rubbing my nose, wiggling my toes to keep them warm, and when I stand up, my knees ache as if they’ve been frozen.

And the cats try to stay warm, too. They curl into balls and just look . . . tight. Lois is lucky to have a long, fluffy tail that functions as a fuzzy muffler.

Brenda has a layer of blubber, and I guess that helps her. (Funny, my layers of blubber don’t seem to keep me warm.)

But . . . fake sunshine to the rescue!

It’s fun to watch the cats seek the fake-sunshine beds. And it’s gratifying to watch them uncurl after about half an hour, once the warmth has soaked into them. They lay on their sides and let their feet hang out. It’s like a little trip to Phoenix.

I have a shop light rigged up in my office, but although it keeps my head warm, it doesn’t help my toes much. I occasionally get up, walk over to the front dormer, and stand in the sunshine on afternoons when it’s bright.

This time of year, it can really make a difference.

I hope you’re staying warm!

For the record, in addition to Lois, Brenda, and the picture of Mackie's feet, I'm including some old photos of cats that have crossed the Rainbow Bridge. All loved their sunshine, real and fake. From top to bottom: Nikki, Genji, Lois, Brenda, Patches (the original Opulent Opossum kitty), Mackie (feet and tail), and Earl.

Jar of Goodness 1.12.25: Shelda’s Chocolate Party

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for friendship and community.

The chocolates were just the focal point to gather us together, the way a candle, a cross, a mandala, or a swinging watch on a chain serves to draw one’s attention.

The invitation arrived from our friend Shelda via text:

“Chocolate party: Some time back, my friend Jaye and I were discussing how dispirited we were feeling in this new political reality. How could we gather our friends together and have more fun and community? We remembered themed parties we used to have in the 90s and early aughts. And we came up with an idea for having serious (and not so serious) fun. Maybe monthly or thereabouts, but with no obligations to attend each time.

“About that time Jaye remarked that it was time to taste test Whitman Sampler chocolates and compare them to Russell Stovers. Fun on! So being the over-the-top person that I tend to be, we’ve expanded the chocolate field. We have the aforementioned as well as See’s Factory.

“So let the tasting begin! This coming Sunday, January 12 [at specific time and place]. There will be coffee, hot tea, hot cocoa and horchata for your drinking pleasure . . .”

Subsequent texts expanded the competitive field to include See’s (representing Southern California), Fannie May (from Chicago), Lindt (which was imported from France), and Columbia, Missouri’s own Candy Factory.

Shelda had the chocolates all displayed to their best advantage, and she got out her beautiful pink rose-of-Sharon Depression glass plates for us to use.

The chocolates were really lovely, and they all tasted great, each with their own layers of goodness. Of course, some of them were definitely higher quality, with smoother texture, depth of flavor, nuances of fillings, balance of sweetness to bitterness, etc. But others—like the Whitman and the Russell Stover—had different levels on which to base my appreciation.

Like, I’m not a regular consumer of chocolates, but when I was a child, it seems that Grandma Renner, or my mom, would ALWAYS receive a Whitman’s sampler each year at Christmas, and the box would be passed around the room, with everyone getting a piece or two. When I was a kid, that was a huge treat, those grown-up candies. And we all remember the first time we grabbed that colorful Jordan almond, thinking it would be a delectable super-sweet candy, and it turned out to be a nut. Children quickly learn not to make that mistake twice! And I remember being rather skeptical about all the “weird” cream candies. At the party, I made sure to have a few of those, and I lucked out with a strawberry and an orange. Orange! They still taste kind of weird to me, but I appreciate them a lot more.

And it brought back so many pleasant memories. Later, at dinner, Sue and I reminisced about how our families approached boxes of chocolates when we were children. Sue talked about the Valentine-shaped Valentine’s boxes we all enjoyed as children. And later, as teens and adults.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to write this much about candy, because I’m not even that much of a fan of candy. The real reason I’m celebrating was for the community. This group of friends are people I appreciate and admire so much . . . these are women who were just a little older than me when I was in college. They feel like the older sisters I never had. As feminists, they were trailblazers who showed me the way, the ones up ahead in the tunnel, holding the flashlights, taking risks that I didn’t have to take, because they were a few steps in front of me. And they’re still doing it today: Come on, let’s get together and solidify our community and have some fun.

The time passed much too quickly! I hope that by writing about it I can help cement the positive energy into my being. We’re not alone, my friends. We’re not alone.

Shelda had made up score sheets for us and handed out pens, asking us to rank the chocolates, and indicate whether creams, nuts, or caramels are our favorites. But when it came time for an evaluation, we all pretty much said, Who cares? Most of us had lost track of which chocolates were from which company, and we aren’t serious connoisseurs, anyway. We all knew why we were there, and it wasn’t precisely for the chocolates.

It was for each other.

Thanks, Shelda, and bless you for hosting this gathering!

P.S. It was not a category for judging, but for presentation, Columbia’s Candy Factory gets first place in my book: the chocolates were beautifully decorated and had a nice sheen. Second place is Lindt (in part for the packaging and arrangement within the package). Since all the chocolates basically tasted fine (I’m not that snooty about chocolates), the presentation and the “wow” factor is kind of the difference maker for me, since I only buy chocolates as gifts.

Jar of Goodness 1.5.25 B: New Mailbox, Just in Time

At the risk of possibly using up my next-week's thing to feel grateful for, I'm going to double-up and post two gratitudes in a single day. Hopefully there will be something else to be grateful for by next Sunday. Right?

Here's JOG 1.5.25 "B": I'm glad we got Dad and Mom's new mailbox installed (and without any hitches!!!) on Friday afternoon. Sue and I prepared hard for it: make sure we have all the tools we'll need, all the hardware, a board to raise the bracket above the railing where we'd be installing it (so the flap would open), and what-all. Because, you know, these kinds of "simple" things often turn into some kind of production, another trip to the hardware store, whatever. But our preparation was perfect! How about that!

I'd been trying to get my dad set up with the Post Office for door delivery for over a year, but apparently the stars have to align, and you need to be Sherlock Holmes in order to discover the correct procedure for applying for this service. Like, don't bother looking online; just start by asking the letter carrier who comes near your home each day. The stuff online is contradictory, and half of it is hidden in the USPS's puzzle-like website.

Anyway, we got the doctor's letter, I found the official form, I filled it out a few different ways, Dad signed it and a letter I'd composed officially requesting the service, I printed out a satellite view of their house, driveway, street, and current mailbox location (marked with distance my Dad has to walk), and in early November I hand-delivered it all to the cryptic, non-public USPS distribution station (because, of course, you can't mail them the form), and just a month or two later, I discover they've been approved. (The only hitch was that a month ago, they'd called my parents and left them a message saying it was approved, so naturally I didn't get that information.) But I called them to follow up, learned it was approved, so it was time to install the new mailbox by my parents' door.

And just in the nick of time! This snow and ice storm is gnarly, especially since it'll be followed by at least a week of super-cold temperatures. Thank goodness my dad won't be staggering through ice and snow on his concrete sidewalk and steps, long gravel driveway, and the icy road. (Columbia is horrible about clearing any of its roads, much less ones in neighborhoods.) Because yes, elderly people still really do rely on postal mail to get their printed newspapers from their former hometowns, their printed magazines, their tons of printed direct-mail catalogs, their bills, their correspondence, their junk mail, their coupons, and all manner of non-television entertainments.

So anyway, whew, there we go. And their letter carrier saw it as we were installing it and approves of its location, and everything. He'd been notified of their door-delivery status and had already started delivering to their door. Hooray!

Jar of goodness . . . mailbox of happiness.

Jar of Goodness 1.5.25: Snow Plows and Such

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.” Yup, I’m doing that again. Mainly so I don’t go bananas and go on a rampage or something. Or, more likely, drive my car in a straight line away from wherever I am, and not turn back. (Wouldn’t that be nice? So many directions to travel.)

This week, I’m expressing thanks for snow plows and such.

Though the picture above is from Sunday afternoon, this was actually written on Saturday night, January 4, 2025, as our snow begins. A huge swath of the United States is getting a bunch of winter weather: several inches of snow, more than a foot of snow in some places; sleet, freezing rain in other places; in many places (like, apparently, us), it’ll be a mix of snow and sleet and snow and freezing rain, and more snow. Like a layer cake of mayhem. Farther south, they’ll get thunderstorms and maybe tornadoes.

Here's the temperatures as I write this, Saturday night, January 4, 8:15:

Then, on top of the crusty, hard-to-shovel, slip-and-fall-and-break-your-ankle stuff (or wreck-your-car-stuff), we’re supposed to get, like a week or more of super-freezing cold weather. The kind that can kill. Ugh. It’s one of those bad scenarios where the freezing rain, topped with snow weighs down branches, then it gets windy, and the trees break like crazy and strum down power lines. Then ya don’t have electricity, and you wish you’d sprung for the gas water heater last time you replaced it.

As of Saturday evening, 8:15:

I’ve blogged about this kind of nonsense before, because I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I truly don’t like having bad snow and ice, because I truly don’t like the power to go out when it’s freezing cold. You never know when it’ll come back on. It just sucks. And this year I’ve got my parents to worry about.

There will be a fine line between who gets freezing rain, sleet, snow, and total mayhem—and those who simply get a ton of snow. The weather people seem to think the “line” is basically right where we live. Or where my parents live. The weather people give their predictions in terms of highways being dividing lines. Most people basically live in highways, that is, cities. Anyway, it will turn out however it turns out.

Hopefully, my parents will get mostly snow, and their kind neighbor with a snow blower will clear their drive and sidewalk, but also hopefully my parents won’t have to go anywhere until everything is cleared out. Hopefully, they won’t experience power outages. (What a nightmare that would be: could I even make it to Columbia if I had to help them move somewhere?)

Then there’s our own status. It’s entirely possible our power could go out for twelve hours or more.

But here’s the Jar of Goodness: fortunately, we live near the center of town, just a few blocks from the state capitol building, and we’re quite likely to be high on the list for restoring power, as well as for street clearing.

Here's how the roads are looking, as this begins on Saturday night: Kansas City's getting socked! Central Missouri and the eastern Ozarks are next:

Which is to say, that for all the annoyances of living near the center of Jefferson City, or any town, one of the perks is that your utilities generally get fixed quickly. Sure, you have plenty of idiot, noisy neighbors, and you have all kinds of cars tearing up and down the street in front of your house, and every emergency vehicle screaming by with its sirens on, but you also get snowplows rumbling through as soon as the first snowflake falls.

So for however uncertain this bad weather feels, at least I know we’re not isolated. If we lived out in nowhere (where I so often wish we were—it would be so nice and quiet! . . . and beautiful, and relaxing, and private), we could be snowed in for days, maybe a week. We’d have to find someone to plow us out, because we’d have a long private drive from the paved road to our house. If our power went out, too-bad-so-sad. We’d have to have our own emergency generator. Self-reliance is for the strong, the handy, and/or the rich, and face it, we’re none of these.

So, hooray for the public works snowplows! The emergency crews at the power utility. The EMT people. The cops. All the emergency workers who’ll be out there working their butts off in the freezing cold, damn dangerous road conditions.

Glad I don’t have to go out there.

As of Sunday morning, 8:45:

As of Sunday afternoon, 2:00:

Happy New Year, 1950-1951

I’ve recently found some non-recipes among my grandma’s recipe collections.

To distract myself in the evenings when I have trouble getting to sleep, I’ve been sifting through the cigar boxes, looseleaf cookbooks, and other places Grandma stored her recipes. I’ve been trying to organize them, transcribing them, too.

One of these sources is Grandma Schroeder’s copy of My Own Recipes: Loose Leaf Cook Book. It must date to the 1920s or 30s. The pages are exceedingly brittle (especially considering it’s a looseleaf binding), and the binder itself fell apart. Grandma fixed it together with strapping tape. That, by now, is not able to hold it together, either.

The printed pages of this volume are brittle and falling out of the two rings. So fragile.

This notebook, however, is chock full of handwritten recipes, written on index cards, note paper, the backs of envelopes, you name it. Grandma added to this collection her whole life (though later recipes mostly wound up in the aforementioned cigar boxes).

But at the very back of her copy of My Own Recipes: Loose Leaf Cook Book, I found a cute little handmade Christmas/New Year’s card made by my uncle Tom in late 1950, perhaps as a school art project, or perhaps in Sunday school. I think it’s obviously a gift for his parents.

It’s a winter scene, with a church, a night sky, snow, and a full moon. The snow effect was created by spattering white paint using a toothbrush, I’ll bet. The moon in the sky is rather fanciful, since it’s usually not visible when snow is falling, with the sky thus cloudy. In the upper left corner is a miniature, commercially printed calendar for 1951, sewn together in actual pages.

There’s evidence that this little artwork was tacked up onto a bulletin board, or something. Maybe the tack was only used for the creation of the piece, since there’s no white-snow-spatter where the thumbtack had been.

Uncle Tom, born in 1944, would have been six when he made this. And it’s clearly his, with his name written on the front and the back. (It’s hard to write your name in pencil on a piece of black construction paper.)

So even after 1951 came and went, and the little calendar was out of date, Grandma kept this little artwork all these years, tucked into the very back of her looseleaf cookbook.

So, being curious, I had to look up some things. First, the moon amused me. It’s so small. Generally speaking, I think I expected it to be about the diameter of a bottlecap, but instead, it’s not even half an inch wide.

Then I remembered what it was like to try to cut a perfect circle out of a piece of construction paper, using kindergarten scissors, and having no plan for how to cut a circle. My circles got smaller and smaller, as I rotated the paper and trimmed off all the offending pokey-out bits. If I’d traced a circle first, it would’ve been easier.

But it’s clearly intended to be a full moon in Uncle Tom’s artwork. I doubt anyone would have intended it to be, say, a gibbous moon.

And this got me wondering. Was there a full moon at the end of 1950, when these children were all making their little nighttime scenes of the church, snow, and the moon?

With the Internet, you can get this kind of information pretty quickly. And sure enough! The last full moon in December 1950 was on Christmas Eve: December 24, at 10:24 a.m. UTC, or around 4:24 a.m. here in Missouri.

So . . . this was an actual scene from Christmas 1950. How about that.

I’m also tickled at all this line of thinking, because for several years at Christmas, Uncle Tom has mailed us Moon Over Me Magnetic Moon Calendar, Almanac Card, and MoonMaggy Fridge Magnets. The fridge magnet shows all the phases of the moon for the calendar year.

The chart itself, in its geometric form, has an aesthetic beauty to it. And it’s good to know what the moon is up to, even if you don’t believe in astrology. When is the night darkest? When is it brightest? When do you get to see those beautiful “fingernail” new moons hanging over the western sky in the evenings, with the earthshine on the dark portion, revealing its true spherical shape? When will the lunar eclipses be happening?

And that’s really about all on this subject. It was just fun to discover, among all those recipes for cinnamon coffee cake, chow-chow, oatmeal cookies, and Christmas fruitcake.

I’ve found some other interesting non-recipe items, too. Maybe I’ll find time to blog about them, as well.

Big Nature, 2024

The year 2024 has been a notable nature year in several ways. Sure, there were some significant tornado, flooding, and other severe-weather events (some part of Missouri gets those every year); but if you lived in any of the places affected, it was definitely a year of “big nature” for you.

And we had an exceptionally mild spring, which is something, and by fall, most of the state was in some level of flat-out drought. (Which affected fall color in our state.)

In October, the drought stress caused our lilacs to bloom even as our green ash tree turned yellow. It was a really odd sight.

But I want to talk about much bigger nature. Like, once-in-a-lifetime nature. Like, there was that amazingly beautiful total solar eclipse in April (I still need to blog about it). Of course, I didn't even try to take pictures of it, but I sure soaked in the time and place—the way the event felt, and how unique it looked—sunny but shady, at once.

And there was that solar storm that ignited aurorae visible exceptionally far-south in May and October. If you got to see that, or get photographs of what you wished you could see with your bare eyes, then bully for you!

But let’s not forget the coolest nature thing that happened in eastern North America: the coincidental emergence of two big periodical cicada broods the same year! It was Broods XIII (17-year) and XIX (13-year). Realize, every “normal” periodical cicada emergence is an amazement in itself. That these insects can live 13 or 17 years below ground, sucking juices from tree roots, then somehow all emerge within the space of a few weeks, the same year, like clockwork, is a staggeringly cool example of big nature.

The last time the two broods emerged the same year was in 1803, the year the Louisiana Purchase was signed!

As of 2024, there appeared to be nowhere that the two broods overlapped, so it was a geeky thing to geek out over. It’s not like there were twice as many cicadas in most places (indeed, cicadas generally decline thanks to habitat disruption, and climate change is affecting them, too).

So it’s a mathematical convergence. When one thing happens every 13 years, and another thing happens every 17 years, it’s rare when they synch up.

So, when will the two broods emerge during the same summer again? How do you figure that out? Well, here you go: 13 x 17 = 221, and 2024 + 221 = 2245. The year 2245!!

What will the year 2245 be like? None of us alive today will see it . . . but Star Trek at least has offered some suggestions. According to Star Trek, 2245 is the year, on April 11, of the launch of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 (yes, THAT Enterprise!). Its first captain will be Robert April (who appears in later Star Trek series, including Strange New Worlds). James T. Kirk will take the captain’s chair in 2265.

It’s also the launch year of the Enterprise’s sister starships, the USS Cayuga (NCC-1557), later destroyed by the Gorn, and the USS Constellation (NCC-1017), under Captain Matthew Decker; both are destroyed by the Bugles-shaped planet killer in a memorable Original Series episode, “The Doomsday Machine.”

Star Trek canon also has it that 2245 is the year that Pavel Chekov will be born, and it’s the year that Leonard McCoy will decide to pursue a career in medicine.

I love it that these musings for 2024 have started with astronomical phenomena—the solar eclipse, the aurorae—then took a dive underground to consider the years our cicadas lived in soil, then fast-forwarded to the Star Trek universe. Science can predict, even project natural events: solar cycles, solar and lunar eclipses, and cicada emergences. And what do you think 2245 will be like?