Remember?

By in Bookend mitts, Keep Your Hands Warm, Side by Side mitts No Comments

BookendMitts1

Remember when knitters used to blog their works in progress? I kind of miss that. So here’s a good old-fashioned snapshot of what’s on my needles right now. These are a modification of Katya Frankel’s Side by Side Mitts — my third go at this pattern, which tells you that it really ticks my boxes. This time I added length to the cuff, working ten repetitions of the wee cable motif before the thumb gusset. And I decided to pretty up the finger end with an eyelet row sandwiched into the garter and a picot bind-off. I realized afterward that this makes sort of a frankenpattern of Side by Side and the popular Susie Rogers’ Reading Mitts. I think it’s quite a successful monster, anyway! I’ll call them Bookend Mitts… at least until I devise an original mitt with similar qualities for publication and steal that name from myself. I’m using the scrummy Swan’s Island Merino, their worsted weight (it’s light enough to sub for the DK this pattern requires), in the Sky Blue color. It’s dyed with indigo, so it does turn your fingers blue when you’re knitting, but I don’t mind. It’s butter soft and I love it to bits. I wish these were for me, but they’re not. I’m sending them to a friend who used to be the librarian at my school but is now teaching Beowulf and other great English literature to some very lucky high schoolers. She used to be in charge of directing carpool for 190 elementary schoolers, out there in the circular driveway in all weather with her red megaphone and uncanny memory for ever-shifting constellations of kids and drivers and vehicles. I used to lend her the wooly mittens I always kept in my backpack. I thought about giving them to her in remembrance when she left us last June, but then I thought she might well be reveling in having shed that particular aspect of her job and would therefore appreciate something a little more refined for indoor use. Miss you, Maureen!

Respite

By in Ada, House, Island, Jolyon, Outside No Comments

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The last two weeks have been drywall weeks. If you’ve ever lived through drywall construction or, heaven forfend, had to hang-mud-sand the stuff yourself, you know that this is one of the messy parts. Insulation was messy, too, and smelly, but didn’t last for two weeks. When I thought about the children having to vacate their room for five days, when I thought about the last remaining floor space in our pretend kitchen being entirely covered by their mattresses, I knew we could do it if we had to. But there was a more attractive option: head somewhere inviting, somewhere with doting grandparents and beautiful scenery and no sheetrock dust. So I packed up the kids and the dog and we went, leaving poor Mr. G to fend for himself since he couldn’t take the time off work. It was a good decision.

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Family walks are still something of a challenge, and I foolishly left the baby carrier at home. So in between piggybacks from me and his willing Granny, Jolyon studied bryology and learned to eat sheep sorrel and avoid the rabbit turds. Sometimes we opted to stay home while the others exercised the dogs, because Granddad’s mighty fine swing set needed attention.

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And we stayed indoors sometimes, too, playing the kids’ favorite board game. My grandfather devised it and painted the board when my mother was a child. It’s called “Hit the Hay,” or “Hippa Hay,” as it’s rendered by the under-fives. I’m no longer sure of the rules, having played so many simplified versions, but it’s always a good time.

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We came home to a handsome new ceiling in the kids’ room and a lot of plastic and dust and more dust everywhere else. I’m chipping away at the clean-up, wiping down one surface or another any time I glimpse the sponge lying idle. Flooring starts this week. It’s exciting to arrive home and view the progress every evening. I’m still enjoying this a lot. But oh, was it nice to have a shower and a kitchen sink for a few days! Thanks, Mum and Dad. It’s so good to be able to go home.

Of bulbs and bubbles

By in Ada, House 2 Comments

The first day of the early dark. Since it wasn’t quite raining, Ada and I planted the last of the tulips. The bulbs have languished on our front porch for several weeks; a couple of  them had gone spongey and a few had shriveled and furred out in powdery crystals. We planted the spongey ones just in case and put the crystallized ones in the compost. Ada admired the sleek russet jackets of the healthy bulbs and made herself a collection of the skins that peeled off. The box recommended a 7″ hole, which was a real ask as I scrabbled amid the roots with the slim little blade of my grandmother’s trowel. I gave up at about 5″ deep and let my daughter use her tiny hands to nestle the bulbs into their narrow burrows for the winter. I hope the tulips will not be divas about their shallow beds. There’s no room in my haphazard gardening for divas.

Every so often I descend on the perimeter of my home in a burst of energy, grubbing up clots of wild geranium, digging out an invasive common pokeweed—which sounds drab and unassuming but is actually so fantastic in appearance (enormous leaves, red stems, showy white flowers, shiny aubergine berries) that I’d just been watching it all summer to see what it would do next. My friend Barb finally identified it and warned me it was toxic, so I donned full battle array and menaced it with my clippers and shovel before it could drop too many of those berries. But I am an inconstant gardener. The plants I feel most affection for are those that fend for themselves: the Pieris japonica, the lace-cap hydrangea, the anonymous white rose that climbs up the southwest corner, the native redcurrant, the Japanese anemones. The hydrangea and the rose do get an annual pruning, and it will have to happen early in case a window of dry weather should appear, and with it the house painters. A week of dry weather this month is about as likely as a week with no tantrums, so I’m not holding my breath, but I’m going to be prepared all the same. Ada wrote a charming four-year-old autobiography and drew our house complete with its patchwork of red, grey, and brown paint swatches on the south wall. It may well look like this until spring. Sorry, neighbors. It will come right eventually…

My days are a headlong dash of job juggling, school juggling, and haring off across town after things like pendant lights and the right waterproof paint for the leaky basement. I do my knitting in bed—I can feel Carson Demers’s glove across my cheek—or sometimes in the car during nap time. Today Jolly snored serenely through the Prairie Home Companion joke show while I worked a fingerless glove all the way from the thumb gusset to the bind-off row, which would have been a real victory if I could just figure out how to replicate my bind-off for the first glove. After the second ripping my boy woke up and that put paid to progress for the day.

Now I’m home from singing All Saints’ evensong—a Brewer Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis, Schütz’s “Selig sind die Toten,” a Kievan burial chant. I like evensong. It’s a beautiful word and a beautiful service; it feels worthwhile to gather the mind into calm focus and summon up the energy to sing well at a weary hour. The children are asleep, although Jolly sang a goodly chunk of the Music Together canon to himself in his sweet baby soprano before finally nodding off. I’m surrounded by piles of laundry and voting paraphernalia, trying to decide whether a modern-day feminist should embrace an equal rights amendment that’s 90 years late or take umbrage at the implication that she’s not already covered by the standard set of guarantees to citizens. (My voter’s pamphlet offers no arguments in opposition—apparently no one wants to come down publicly against rights for women. Some progress, at least. Brown people driving cars are not nearly so fortunate in this voting cycle.) On this day of honoring the beloved dead, I’ll fill a belated bubble on behalf of my grandmothers. I’m sure the one with the trowel was fierce on the ERA in her time. I’d let my equality-obsessed daughter do the honors with the blue pen if it didn’t constitute elections fraud and if she could be trusted not to fill in all the bubbles.

Bulbs in the dirt. Ballots in the box. What will emerge out of the mud when the days lengthen again? Weeds, mostly. But, with any luck, notes of beauty and hope as well.

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