A New Season

The Autumn Equinox marking the time of equal light and dark has come and gone. On September 21, the last day of summer, my daughter and husband delivered a healthy baby girl. She arrived safely via a scheduled C-section. Monday she and her Mom went home to her wonderful Dad and three big brothers who are lining up to "keep care of her." When I heard they were headed home, I suggested someone tell Norah to take a deep breath. She is loved to the moon and back. On her first evening at home, the family watched part of a televised baseball game and the five year old wanted to make sure she could see the game.

Our hearts are full of joy, wonder, love, and gratitude. I am so so thankful for this safe delivery and a new granddaughter to add to our fabulous four grandsons. Though as my daughter says, the celebration would have been the same for a little boy. The news came to us early Friday morning and by Friday evening she had a name, Norah Jane. The name Norah comes from a Hebrew word light, as in God created the light. I was surprised and honored beyond measure for her to carry my name. The name goes back at least four generations in our family. I have a niece with the same middle name. And so little Norah brings joy, love, and light to her family. 

While I was waiting for her birth last week, I knit toddler sized mittens and hat. Our new little gal has plenty of warm knits so I plan to donate this set in honor of her safe arrival. The color work was a bit of an experiment and worked out better in the hat than on the mittens. The mittens don't match perfectly although they are the same size. They are soft and snug and will keep a little one warm. I also finished this toddler sweater for later because babies grow. If this child had been a boy, this sweater would have been a gift for someone else. I will pick up three buttons this week.

While I "kept calm and knit on," I finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, character development and narrative of the novel. The writer's comments and asides to the reader were very well done and added to the story. I also read a few poems from Voices on the Air by Naomi Shihab Nye. Recently she read her poems on the podcast, "On Being." Nye and her work are remarkable in many ways. She works with young people around the world. If you need your spirits lifted, read or listen to Nye.

I am joining Kat and the Unravelers this week with my knitting and reading. Kat is working on a mitred cross blanket project, seaming together squares contributed by a group of knitters. Holy cow, that is a big project.

The season is changing. Norah has arrived. Monarchs are fluttering over the zinnia patch. Last week a pair of ruby crowned kinglets stopped in the birch on their way through. When the pesky squirrels aren't chewing on our deck, they scramble up the trees to pad their nests. Soon we will travel to meet little Norah and her family. All is well.

Happy New Year

Sunlight streams from the eastern sky creating shadows on the deck and inside the house. Juncos, finches, chickadees, downy woodpecker, a male cardinal (where is his mate?) a pair of bluejays and a red-bellied woodpecker come to the feeders and yard. The red-bellied woodpecker is a rare sighting here. I watched him pick up a safflower seed and drill it into the birch trunk until the shell opened. I am not sure how the birds keep from freezing in the sub-zero temperatures. They surely need plenty of fuel to keep warm and fly back to safe quarters.

The sum of the last few days includes frigid wind chill outdoors and after-Christmas cleaning indoors. I like to start the New Year with a clean house. I have almost completed the third hat/mitten set for our Connecticut grandsons. They are easy knits except for the sizing. I made them to go with their winter coats and hope they will fit someone. This all started when Micah announced he wanted to wear a different hat every day. He likes them wild and crazy so I made him a hat from variegated yarn. And yes, those are hand-knitted socks on my feet at the bottom of the photo. Wool is a necessity these days.

Instead of New Year's resolutions, I choose a word/ theme for the year. The last few months, the refrain from "Anthem" (lyrics/poem) by Leonard Cohen kept coming to mind.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

So today I choose "light." The word has Germanic, Indo-European, Latin, and Greek roots with many derivations. For example, the Old English leoht, leah, and then lea is a pasture or meadow drenched in light. Luxury and deluxe from luster are American English derivatives. In the English language, "light" may be used as an adjective, noun, transitive, or as an intransitive verb. We can live lightly, a derivation used as an adverb. There are the scientific and spiritual definitions for the word. Light in the sky provides endless beauty. Light allows us to see color. Light creates shadows. All of this keeps my mind busy on bitterly cold days and for the coming seasons.  Slowly, the light returns.

Happy New Year!

Scrappy

Last night I finished eight placemats. This project started with sorting and organizing the chest of drawers that holds quilt projects and fabric scraps. When I was teaching and my children were at home, I bought quite a few fat quarters. They weren't expensive and made me feel like I was quilting when I wasn't. Anyway, the cleaning project turned into a creative mess on my sewing table. Funny how that happens.

I pulled out quilt blocks that were never sewed into a quilt because they were the wrong color or size or just plain wonky. I retrieved a few fat quarters for the backing. As I sewed pieces and blocks into rectangles, I didn't worry about all points and corners matching. I just sliced and diced until the edges were straight and the mats were sort of the same size. In the past, I worked hard to piece accurately because I enjoyed precision. On this project, I cut and sewed to my heart's content and the randomness was freeing. Really, I think I need to break the quilting rules more often.

I finished two placemats before a cataract obscured my vision. On one of those mats, the backing is is wrong side out. I hadn't even noticed. I just left the mat as is, I doubt anyone at my house will turn over a placemat to examine the back side. I never would have settled for such imperfection in my younger quilting days. Another rule tossed aside.

This week I sewed backs to the fronts before hand stitching up the small opening left for turning the pieces right side out. I fused sturdy interfacing to the fronts hoping not to need any machine quilting. The placemats would hold together better if I machined quilted along a few seams. Who knows I may break another rule and leave them as they are now.

Scrappy means made of scraps - bits and pieces. It also means being fiesty or having a determined spirit. Hmm, if the scrap fits, maybe I should wear it. 

Linking up with Kat's Unravelers - not ravelers as I wrote last week. I continue to savor Eleanor Roosevelt's short pieces in My Day.  If ever there was a woman with a determined spirit, she was one. Last night I kitchenered the Shallows Cowl together. This project is that perfect match between yarn and pattern. While knitting, I listened to How The Light Gets In by Louise Penny.

Will Inspector Gamache and his friends succeed in solving the intrigue going on in the Quebec police force? I suspect it might take another book but won't know for sure until I listen to the end. I do love that quote by Leonard Cohen, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."  I'm enjoying both books.

Now It Is February

Some early afternoons when the sun is shining, I take up my knitting and sit in my Great Grandmother's chair in front of a tall window with a southern exposure. While the sun warms my back, I watch the light play with color and shades in the yarn. Light also highlights shadows among the texture. Fifteen or twenty minutes is a nice break in the day.  

I finished the hat and mitten sets for my grandsons and sent them off in a Valentine's Day package. Although I have two other projects on the needles, I returned to these socks. Vanilla socks are comfort knitting.

I bought the skein because I thought the colors were so pretty together. I am not as pleased with the colors as they display in the fabric. Still, the yarn has a lovely hand and who am I to argue with green socks in January. My goal is to create a snug ribbed vanilla sock pattern for my narrow foot. The customary sixty-four stitches in many patterns is too wide while the smaller size of fifty-six stitches is too small. I am knitting a version of a broken rib stitch on a circumference of sixty stitches. The repeat goes like this. Row One: Knit 4, Purl 2. Row Two: Knit. I may try a slightly shorter heel flap on the second sock to see if it fits better.    

I'm reading Upstream, a book of essays by the well known poet, Mary Oliver. She writes prose with a marvelous elegance of language and reverence for natural world. Upstream collects a few new essays with those previously published. Even though I have read many of these pieces, I find something new on each page. Light shines from her writing as well as the cover art.

Now it is February and the quality of natural light begins to shift. Dawn and dusk change while the cycle of seasons remains constant. As we turn toward Spring, I mean to savor the last orange and lavender streaks of winter sunsets.

Winter Poetry

Some years I write a winter/Christmas poem to include in my holiday cards. After working with several ideas that seemed like a muddle of nothing, I decided this was not going to be a year for a poem. After all, we are expecting a new grandchild shortly. I also reminded myself that creative writing isn't all writing and revising, sometimes it requires thinking and waiting.

A few days later, in the wee hours of a mid November night, I couldn't sleep. While wandering around in the kitchen, I glanced out the window to see clouds clearing from the sky. Within a few minutes, an absolutely gorgeous moon appeared. The bright crescent rested in the shadow of the darker but visible part of the moon. Stars in Orion's belt shone brightly. Even through bleary eyes, the sight was magical. Why, I wondered, if the people of the earth all live under the same sky, can't we get along? Growing cold, I went back to bed.

The next morning I carried a cup of coffee to my desk. I looked over some old notes and definitions about light because the light of changing seasons is interesting to me. I love the contrast between the soft yellow gray November skies and the deep reds and browns of the deciduous trees. My notes didn't suggest anything other than rambling thoughts so I set them aside and flipped through a book of writing prompts. Randomly I chose one with the instruction to change forms in an unfinished piece. That is, to write a story from a poem, dialogue from an essay, or to choose a specific format for a poem. For no particular reason, I penned the word luminous down the side of a page and jotted down some words from my notes about light into a rough acrostic. Somehow the night sky and the crescent moon crept into the poem. I worked on this little poem for several weeks before it became the piece I sent out into the world. 

So I am publishing it on the eve of the Winter Solstice. (Copyright belongs to me.) Advent is the season of waiting and the Solstice, marking the darkest day of the year, is about hope for the return of light. Hanukah is a Festival of Light. Many faiths and cultures have a winter celebration around the idea of the return of light and hope. 

Luminous: A Prayer for the Season

Luna casts silver light onto

umber earth, wrapping us in a

mantle of kindness. She

illumines shadows with a

nocturne of peace, an

opus for all seasons. Then

ushers us into winter with

slivers of wonder and grace.



Peace, Love, and Light to you and yours.

  

February Color and Light

January and February is a good time for comfort knitting. I knit a scarf from Shepherd's Wool in a pattern called Danger. While I knitted, temperatures dipped below freezing and remained bitterly cold. In fact, the weather was so cold, I completed the bind-off, wove in the beginning and ending ends, and wore the scarf without washing and blocking. For some reason, the name "Danger" reminds me of the "here be dragons" phrase cartographers of the early 1500's used to indicate danger. As I walked on bitter cold days with the scarf wrapped around my face, I thought, "here be danger." Still on those cold days, the neighborhood is quiet and there is a certain kind of beauty in the contrast of snow and bare tree trunks. As I came home to soup bubbling in the crock pot or carrots and squash roasting in the oven, I savored the peace of winter days. Soon enough lawnmowers and other power tools will disturb the quiet.    

Yesterday was unseasonably warm so I drove out to a trail bordering a wooded area for a walk. Even though I walked in a fleece jacket without hat or scarf, the grasses and adjacent wooded area looked like winter. Songbirds were not visible. Instead I saw only a hawk riding thermals in the wind and two big crows perched in tall elms. On the last leg of my walk, I found this wispy feather attached to the twig of a bush. I wish I knew what kind of bird shed this tiny feather with the splotch of gray along the shaft. After a walk through a monochromatic landscape, the feather made me smile.

February marks the month when the light begins to increase. The change is quite subtle, nevertheless the color of the sunny sky seems different to me. The days of slightly increasing light offer the hope of Spring. I hear more bird song too. I recently read that birds don't migrate based on temperatures but on the changes in light.

Last night I put another inch on the "Current" cardigan I cast on last summer. The yarn is a soft sage green. Knitting an adult sweater from fingering yarn with miles of stockinette stitches is a bit like slugging through winter. I wanted to make sure the sweater was worth my time so I put the body stitches on waste yarn, tried it on, and decided I like the fit. Tomorrow the forecast is for cold and snow but yesterday after my walk, I planted basil and chamomile seeds. The basil seeds came free in the mail. I don't know if they will germinate but I decided to plant them in pots and tend them from the kitchen counter. Any extra green color is welcome. I wish you enough color and light to see your way through the remaining days of February.