One Good Thing One Creative Thing Day 3 and 4

Day 3
One Good Thing: After Kevin and Alder went to sleep I stayed up listening to this and knitting by the fire.
One Creative Thing: I spent three hours knitting on a simple scarf, a longways knit alpaca in purple with a diamond pattern (pictures to come when it is finished right now it looks like a caterpillar).

Day 4
One Good Thing: Well really lots of good things. I got to sleep almost to nine. We went out for breakfast to here, and got there just before the crowds. Came home and Alder and I did projects in the wood shop for hours. Made a yummy dinner form things found around the house and ended up with gnocchi with sauce and steamed broccoli. Another night of knitting by the fire until I ran out of yarn.
One Creative Thing: While in the wood shop I started working on Alder's holiday gift. So far there has been a lot of sanding and cutting. Alder hammered nails into a board and drew pictures.


I remember spending hours down in the shop building things. Whether it was the tug boat that my father and I made that still stands on my dresser wit the film canister as a smoke stack or the pencil box that I build and stained myself when I was eleven it was always an amazing space to be in. Even yesterday as I worked on my project I found myself remembering exactly where certain nails were by feel rather than reading the labels on the jars.

There was a special joy involved in handing Alder the child's hammer for the first time, it is an identical one to the one adult one just a little smaller and lighter. Then handing him the cup that says "kid nails" on the outside on tape that has been there since I was a child, so old that it fell off and the glue holding it on became a gold dust on the table. Just like my father I set the nails in just deep enough that they would hold and let him hammer away at the board.



Hammering is difficult for little hands and he soon switched to drawing at the card table as I sawed and sanded, public radio in the background. Here I was an adult showing my own child the same things my father did, handing him the same tools and telling him some of the same stories. Next week when we are all at the cabin I hope there might be a few moments that all three of us are down there working on something, three generations touching the same tools bringing all of us joy in the making.

Who are we seeing this weekend...or how this peaceful weekend turned crazy

Just a few of the people we're going to see this weekend.






Kevin and I were planning on having a quiet week. Sure we were going to meet up with the family for a big sugar shack breakfast on Saturday, but we were really going to focus this week on focusing and simplifying. But then yesterday afternoon Kevin's dad call to say that they have to go to Kansas City and that they might as well drive out and visit us as well. Let me explain that is saying basically that they are turning a 1600 mile round trip into a 4000 one. Not only that but they'll be here tomorrow night.

Needless to say our plans for a restorative and planning week have disappeared. Instead we will be wrapped in lots of family goodness. This does mean that there are curtains to make and corners we've forgotten about to clean. Have I mentioned the bathroom lately? Well that to needs a serious deep cleaning job. I love Kevin's family and can't wait to see them. But his mom is such a fanatical cleaner that I have some work to do.

Mix that in with a Purim Party tonight (I slacked Alder is going in the same costume as Halloween) and an article due this afternoon, I am one stressed puppy (that would be a Kevinism).

Inspired Spring

In Trackless Woods
In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which these trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell-
There's been no roadway.
Not could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pinecone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.
- Richard Wilbur

I found this poem cut out and sitting on a table at the cabin last weekend and promptly fell in love with it. I feel like I know the woods that he was walking through, there just down from here by the "dutch gate' where you can follow the trail along the river until it disappears near the old mill ruins. I've spent hundreds of hours in those woods, not just as a child but as an adult as well.

But since we've been back, even though we're out at the cabin often, I haven't had the chance to just walk my woods. There are people to see or small feet to accommodate. When I do find a few moments to myself I am drawn to quiet corners where I can read my book.

Now that Spring is entering the air I think I need to start wandering my woods. There are so many answers there, when you are there alone. When I was in high school and we would come for the weekend I would be full of internal turmoil and bile only walking alone on unseen trails and old dirt roads would soften my emotions. These are woods where time is not constant, hours may pass while walking for a few minutes or on other days I could sit for hours and come back home only twenty minutes later. But they take the time they need to show you what is needed.

When I was young some of what I would see was not there, like the house I spied from my spot on an boulder. In my mind I was sure that there was a house someone else had built on our land (not all of the land I wandered was ours). Not only that but my imagination let me see the limousine and butler of the owner (himself an evil short man with a black trench coat). I ran back to the house as quietly and quickly as I could, telling my father about what I had seen. Together we returned to the spot, but with him there I looked again and we saw the fallen trees (the house and limo) and the dark brush (the butler).

Sitting here I can smell the damp earth and decaying leaves of the spring melt. I know the feeling of the soft ground interrupted occasionally by hidden slabs of ice and spongy bits where the ground becomes more water than mud. I want to be on that tramp where I know that I will come home with wet socks and pockets full of treasures.

Grape Harvest

My godparents were harvesting their grapes this weekend. The grapes made their greenhouse have a sweet ambrosia smell to it that was intoxicating. We left with sticky hands and a bag full of grapes and grape leaves.









note: I am very happy to have my camera back.

Things that I love

During our trip out east we stopped for a few days at my father's cabin in northwestern Massachusetts. This a place that I grew up spending weekends and summers. It is part of my soul like no other spot in the world. The summers there are so vibrant and delicious. I caught some of the parts that I love best with the camera.