Nothing happens in Ruth Jewell's poem, and that is exactly the point. Its title, "Things I Do on a Winter Day:", ends in a colon, like a promise that a list is coming. The list that follows has no crisis, no journey and no lesson, only a day made of small pleasures. Its central idea is that contentment can be a routine: reading, a warm drink, a few snacks and animals close by. The poem never says "I am happy". It lets the repetition of loved things say it.
The most striking feature is the pattern the list falls into. Books come back again and again: "Read books," "Look for books," "Smell books," "Talk about books," "Read books" a second time, and finally "book in hand." The Chihuahuas arrive in between, as if the day were a slow alternation of two kinds of comfort, paper and fur. Even the verbs are worth watching. "Read" and "Look for" are what we expect of a reader, but "Smell books" is a more private and affectionate act. It suggests someone who loves books as objects as well as stories. "Talk about books" shows the love spilling into conversation. Books fill this speaker's eyes, nose and voice.
The snacks work as a small mirror. "Give Chihuahua's snacks" is followed a few lines later by "Eat snacks," so the dogs and the speaker share the same treat, one after the other. The tea, the snacks and the cuddling all suggest warmth, though winter appears only in the title. The poem never describes snow or cold. It lets us infer the weather from how snugly the speaker has arranged the day against it.
The form suits this idea. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead the lines are short, mostly two to four words, each starting with a capital letter and each sitting alone, with white space around it. That space slows the reader down, much like a day with nowhere to be. The lines have no end punctuation, so they never feel finished. They simply follow one another, the way idle hours do. Repetition does the job that rhyme would normally do. "Books" and "snacks" return like a refrain, and the sound of the list becomes soothing and almost hypnotic.
The spelling "Chihuahua's," with an apostrophe, appears three times where a plain plural would be "Chihuahuas." It is a small slip, but it fits the poem's unpolished, homemade feel. Nothing here is dressed up for show. The poem sounds like a private list, shared almost by accident.
The ending changes the pattern. After eleven clipped lines, the last is a long one, introduced by an ellipsis: ". . . And a Chihuahua by my side, in my lap and at my feet." Here the word "my" appears for the first time, three times in a row. Until now the speaker has been invisible, only a string of verbs. Now we get possession and closeness: side, lap, feet. These move gradually downward, as if the speaker were sinking into sleep. The dog also becomes singular, "a Chihuahua," after the plural dogs earlier. Perhaps the speaker is imagining one dog everywhere, or perhaps several dogs are settled in three different places. Either way, the sentence stretches out where the earlier lines were clipped, and the reader feels the day winding down to rest.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts simplicity. Many poems chase big emotions, but this one is interested in ordinary happiness and treats it as enough. It also suggests that a good day is mostly made of repeated, chosen habits, and that listing them can be a kind of celebration. A reader may smile in recognition, or may start quietly compiling their own list of winter-day pleasures.