Terrible/Perfect

i heart u

I went to change the little one's diaper a while back and found this on her feet.

They love one another so dearly.

Homebound

I've been doing a very great deal of knitting lately.

I became incredibly ill with the flu a few weeks back (not hospital ill, but bedridden, I-can-see-how-this-kills-people ill) and it's not an exaggeration to say that the experience altered me. Most of us don't often lie in bed for days with nothing to occupy us but our own minds (I was too ill for reading or even knitting); it was, in its way, a sort of retreat. I had time to consider a number of problems, and allow good sense to settle down into some of them, to loosen them up.

In the weeks since I've felt quite calm.

I think the great lesson of parenthood, or of personhood, actually, is fluidity: how to move along with the current of life and not fight it so much. 

You can't fight kids. You can't make them something they're not, developmentally or personally, you can't make them eat vegetables or go to sleep when you desperately want them to or stop a two year-old from making her endless rounds of destruction. You can't force change in a partner, or, say, an overly intelligent dog. 

There is some crazy Zen magic in acceptance, in rolling with it. I am convinced that it's the fundamental source of internal quiet. Having touched it, the complexes built up around the human effort to explain it and transmit it to other people seems very funny and slightly sad: peace, which I think everyone wants whether they can acknowledge it or not, is stupidly simple, it is right there, all the time...but explaining what that means, and how to get there, and how to stay, is extremely hard. I couldn't possibly do it.

But not fighting is a good start. For me, that more or less means not running away from responsibilities, actually physically staying put where I'm needed and doing what needs to be done. Where I'm needed right now is in my house. "Out" with the kids is easy. Home is hard. But I'm accepting that there's nothing out there that's going to change how I feel and how I structure my time and what I accomplish here. And in a larger sense, something is settling down in my gut that hasn't really ever settled before. That sense of searching for some kind of remedy, a fix, has eased up. It's a tremendous relief. 

But back to the knitting.

Having some handwork to sit down with in between the endless tasks of mothering is a huge help: it feels good, physically, to do it. It is something generative, productive, and calming to do in the lulls of the day. It makes home, and all that being at home entails, much more appealing. And it feels like mine. Just mine. That's important.

Square one of Mitered Crosses Blanket, in the gorgeous Cascade Yarns Eco Duo and, as per revelations and resolutions made in a state of fevered delerium, scrap yarn:

It'll take a while. There's a lot of picking up stitches and changing yarns and whatnot, so the squares are time consuming.

I'm not even going to think about all of the ends that will need winding in once all the squares are done.

Later. That's for later.

More new old

Top to bottom: Ball quilted jelly jars with vintage tin lids; linen tablecloth; a set of eight Vera napkins; child's quilt; Pillivuyt teacup; Noritake Hawaiian Holidays "Mai Tai" pattern, probably from the 70s.

I've written about this before, and it's incredibly silly, but thrifting is enormously satisfying to me. These days I don't go as often as I might like, maybe once every two weeks to the Goodwill (these are my only non-food shopping trips) and I am selective; I have a budget, but more importantly I'm aware of amassing too much stuff.

But there are so many treasures that make their way onto the Lysol-soaked metal shelves of junk shops, and spotting them is a tremendous delight. Over the years I have, I believe, developed the eye of a collector; typically, something sticks out to me as I scan the shelves: the particularly delicate handle of a teacup, for instance. I often have no idea if an object has any more "worth" than its special appeal to me, but it often does. Which is...satisfying.

I sometimes think, vaguely, about going into business with a little vintage Etsy shop; it would mean having a good excuse for more frequent hunting, and maybe a little income, but overall, I just enjoy rescuing these castoffs, relics of near history, each little misfit piece unique and, sometimes, incredibly beautiful...if you're the sort that finds beauty in a teacup.

Hello, yellow

I found this gnarly old peeling yellow table at Goodwill a while back and I literally (and I here I do mean: in a strict sense, really, actually) ran an undisclosed number of yards across the store to lay claim to it. I may have draped my body over it as well, and I'm not saying that I did, but if I did, it was in a humorous manner for the benefit of myself and the sales clerk who filled out the sale ticket.

I have no idea how old the table is. It is solid maple, with extensions that pull out cleverly from the sides and have quite a long U.S. patent number printed on the arms of their clever wooden machinery. The yellow paint is peeling in a way that goes slightly beyond what one might attempt to emulate with the sort of genteel roughhousing that Martha Stewart enages her underlings to engage in with furniture, but it is not displeasing. I did battle with a Pollock-esque display of stains and drips and stuck-on paper and reverse-printed newspaper ink on the top surface using a bottle of diluted bleach, and won by a manly, vigorous margin. And still, one leg has been shoddily stripped, the tops of the extensions were, apparently prior to the yellow, slapdashed with a coat of military green, the hardware of one extension needs attention and what happened with both the yellow and the green on the underside of the table is extraordinary.

I. Love. It.

Love.

I want to be home all the time now, sitting at my funny $20 yellow table next to a window hung with a funny old tablecloth, drinking tea and watching my seeds sprout.

Which I am, and I do.

Lace Ribbon

Whew!

This is Lace Ribbon in Madelinetosh Tosh Sock (Cove, I think), an ever so awfully overdue gift for me Mam, as Mr. Terrible called his Mam. I don't have much to say about it, other than it didn't take all that long to knit (except: if you make a stupid mistake in a lace pattern, you spend an hour ripping back and filling the air with obscenities) but it took a year and a half for me to get around to blocking it, which, obviously (I mean, obviously if you are a knitter) needed to be done in a very precise, careful way. That's over six feet of lace. Finding a safe, clean spot in my house to lay it out, stuck through with a passel of motherloving PINS (little hands! little hands!) that need to stay in place for 24 hours or more is no small feat. Ultimately it was the hearth, an old blanket and an entire box of safety pins that saved the day, and accepting that the scarf would have a not-at-all-planned scalloped effect along the long edges. Unplanned, yet not unpleasing.

I like that the scarf does not go with the shirt I'm wearing in that picture at all. I considered changing, but this scarf is for my mother. I don't own anything that goes with it. So you see, Mom, it may have taken me a year and a half to turn that skein of sock yarn into an absolutely ready-to-mail scarf, but it really was you I had in mind when I made it. 

Signs of life

For some reason this year, Big Kid has been crazy about the arrival of spring. I think it has something to do with an upcoming trip to Florida, and something to do with the performance of The Magic Flute that she knows she will be able to attend "in the spring", and a whole lot to do with loving flowers and sunshine.

I can't say that I blame her. Spring continues to surprise me, every year, with its power. In spite of the fear and sadness that seems to be closing in all around, the daffodils show their faces and the sun comes back.

Life is tenacious.