Jan. 12 – By Lindsay Martell. January, in all its cold, dark glory, is my favorite month. The hurried, unrelenting pace of the holidays has dissolved into a slow crawl of all the winter things I crave: slow nights, inky dark mornings, bottomless cups of tea, and, this year, binge watching the final season of Stranger Things.

The latter is fueling my fondness for the ’80s and its cartoonish monsters are filling my nights with a weird kind of haunted happiness.

Before the temps took a nosedive, though, I crashed an audiobook walk at Fred & June’s Books in Mooresville. It’s yet another funky twist on book club culture (I wrote about Silent Book Club last month) and I get giddy about events that nurture my geeky, awkward self.

This delightful escapade brought out roughly twenty audiobibliophiles (Oi, that’s a mouthful) to slip in their earbuds, hit play on their book of choice (I was deeply engrossed in The Book Club for Troublesome Women), and walk for thirty minutes down Main Street and through the revamped Liberty Park.

After we wrapped, I hit up Summit Coffee for a matcha latte – a frothy splurge that seemed to fit my post-walk mood perfectly. The caffeine blitz didn’t hurt, either.

And because walking around with strangers listening to books we aren’t sharing isn’t awkward enough, my daughter and I spent some QT with a handful of fluffy, hungry alpacas with an endless fervor for snacks and zero concept of personal space.

We found Good Karma Ranch – a family-run farm in Lincoln County’s Iron Station – five years ago, when the pandemic was still raging, and we were all eager to escape the sameness of our neighborhood. Iron Station is an unincorporated community that feels rural in that cool off-the-grid kind of way, and we dug it – and the farm – immediately.

There is just something about those goofy camelids with their smooshed-in faces and enthusiasm for snacking that made our COVID-weary hearts swoon. They still do. GKR is a yearly pilgrimage for us, and hanging out with floofy creatures will always be a sacred and silly thing we look forward to as the temperature dips.

Although I keep my introverted side fiercely guarded, I appreciate the festive nature of all that winter entails, including endless football games and soccer matches that keeps families huddled around their TVs, or sipping pints in one of the many sports pubs in Lake Norman.

We spent one chilly Friday evening at Jack’s Corner Tap, a favorite haunt, sharing fried cheese curds topped with sriracha honey, and toasting to the winter chill that finally set in. We felt the sweet buzz of happy people around us, reminding me how connection (furry and otherwise) is what allows us to thrive.

For a bit.

But then I craved my Comfy. And my dog. And the flickering lights of Hawkins, Indiana, and the stranger things I love.

Milling About is a column about life around Lake Norman, written by Lindsay Martell. The column name is a nod to life around the lake and our town’s mill history.

Lindsay Martell lives in Birkdale with her husband, daughter, and a scruffy mini mutt named Dug.