Hi, I’m Angela, and I’m a writer living in the Finnish countryside, trying to figure out what happens when a Southern Californian trades endless sunshine for four hours of winter daylight.

I grew up in Southern California and moved to rural Finland, where winter means actual darkness (and summer never gets dark). I traded year-round mild weather for seasons that require root cellars instead of garages, where “layering” isn’t a fashion choice but a survival strategy, and where the supermarket is twelve minutes away but somehow everything moves slower.

I write essays about the life I’m building here – tending a garden near the Arctic Circle, preserving harvests for six-month winters, learning to knit things that actually need to be warm, making our old farmhouse feel like home, and fumbling through Finnish (seventeen grammatical cases!). Some posts are practical documentation of what’s growing or what I’m cooking. Others are longer essays about the strange, beautiful work of learning to live this differently.

This is a space for thoughtful writing about the messy, satisfying work of building an intentional life – one small choice at a time. Thanks for coming to visit!