Ada

Recipe

AdaReading

One cozy dress. One green rocking chair. One great picture book. Stir until just combined for a plum mid-morning moment.

Our friend Meg sent Pelle’s New Suit from the other side of the world as a gift for Jolly when he was new, and while Elsa Beskow may be better known for her mushroom-capped elves, this unassuming hundred-year-old story of a boy seeking help from his community to transform his lamb’s wool into a fine new suit for himself is tip-top. Pelle tends the animals, weeds a carrot patch, minds his baby sister, stacks firewood, and more in trade for the carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and tailoring, all of which are illustrated with historical accuracy and obvious knowledge of the crafts. This book is a favorite in our house right now; Ada will soon have it memorized and Jolly chimes in with farmyard noises for atmosphere.

Winter Garden is in heavy rotation and needs a bit of de-pilling on the bodice where Ada’s wool coat has chafed it. But the way my girl loves her dress—she tries to choose it to wear to school nearly every day—I’ll knit her a new one if this model doesn’t last until next winter. She’s worth it, my little mirror, so like me and yet entirely herself. Oh, she knows how to try my patience. And then she knocks me right over with her spontaneous sweetness and good sense. “Well,” she said to me, patting my shoulder consolingly when I made a gloomy remark about the towering laundry pile. “After Jolly and me go to bed, you can just take all our clothes and put them right in the washing machine, okay? That’s a good plan. First you make a good plan and then you can just do it!” Or, making amends after I flashed out at her noncooperation in dressing for school: “Do you feel so much happier now, Mama? Did you hear how I was just singing la la laaaaa la-la la la to make you feel better?” Three and a half. Maddening and sublime all at the same once, as Ada would have said last year.

Another recipe:

Work finished early. Three balls of teal green wool. Size 8 needles. It’s time to start the next design.

mcmanus_swatch (1 of 1)That’s if I can set aside a mad itch to rush to IKEA in search of proper storage for the playroom, anyway. You see, there’s a landslide of puzzles, blocks, and toy animals blocking my access to the yarn cabinet. I think we all know this situation is not tenable.

Off-season

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Credit for all the photos in this post to my father. Thanks, Dad!

The midwinter shore is one of my favorite landscapes. I wonder if coastal folk all over the world feel this — the summer people retreat, the weekend visitors trudge home to their elsewhere lives, and the beach is starkly itself again: no longer a strip of fire pits and driftwood forts and picnics luring yellow jackets to gorge on sandy watermelon rind and half-eaten hot dogs and warm beer, but an ecosystem once more. Of course the locals savor the warm days as much as the visitors and can be just as careless or careful of their footprint; the summer beach is everybody’s playground. But when the air and the sea are equally cold — and sometimes, it seems, equally damp — a visit to that shifting edge where the land plunges under is an act of desire not to enjoy ourselves but to enjoy the place.

Enjoy it we did. There were loons diving near shore and gulls relishing the rotting delights of the tidelands, and the thin sunlight was welcome, if not warming. I was sorry to have to keep the little ones out of the waves on this occasion; I didn’t think soaking in the winter ocean would aid their recovery from lingering coughs. Jolly was particularly indignant at my interference, but soon busied himself throwing pebbles into the water, investigating the textures of kelp and bladderwrack, and practicing locomotion over this challenging terrain. Ada devoted herself to throwing sticks for the dogs, braving the showers as they shook off the sea and soaking her mittens without regret. (This labrador does retrieve, but is mainly in it for the chance to paddle about and doesn’t attach much importance to the actual hand-off, so if you thought the child looked like the one fetching the stick in that first picture you weren’t far wrong.) Of course there was an inevitable mouthful of sand…

JacksonsBeach114 (3 of 6)… but a few swipes with the back of a woolen glove and all was well again. And the key to happy endings for winter beach outings? Dry pants and wool socks waiting in the car. Steamed milk and Felicity’s pumpkin bread at the bookstore afterward.