Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. Time in person with friends.
2. After the Christmas tree is removed, my usually crowded living room seems spacious.
3. The wall calendar from our alma mater finally arrives. (Rudi also got a calendar as a gift from a friend, so we’ll have two this year.)
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
One of the things I’d like to work on in the first half of the year is to account for and decide what to do with the large number of knitting projects I have scattered around the Burrow in half-finished states.
Here we have Smock Madness, started nearly two years ago. This looks like a pretty easy project to power through in the next few days in order to have our first finished object of the year.
Jane Austen adaptations are also great ways to start the year, and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors was one of my favorites a couple years back. To see that Dev had planned a loose version of all six Austen novels centering around the same extended California clan was really intriguing. I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the Raje family.
Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.
Every few years, I fall down a stupid rabbit hole of googling people I grew up with. I have refused to join Facebook for the very reason of not wanting to be in contact with most of them, so I can’t really give you a good reason for why I do it.
I grew up in a large, mostly white town that skewed conservative at the time. It’s purportedly gotten more liberal since I moved away, but its current Republican mayor was first elected when I was 10.
While Karen and I have stayed friends since our high school days, I mostly let everyone else go pretty early on. We (just) predated the internet and it was easy to drift apart as people left for college. As time has gone on, I’ve kept the distance intentionally, although Karen sometimes shares updates about people we both knew. There was just too much rampant conservatism and casual racism from what I remembered (and what Karen shared about her Facebook interactions) to want to welcome that back into my life.
So, why then do I torture myself by looking up the people I grew up with?
I had a drink with a girl I’d grown up with back before our tenth high school reunion. She had come back to attend; I lived nearby but wasn’t going. I asked her why she wanted to bother and she said that she really hoped that some of the people we’d grown up with had escaped.
I’m a little more forgiving now in middle age than I was in my 20s, but I suppose it comes down to exactly that. I check up on them because in the end I want them to have lived happy lives and to have had horizons that expanded beyond the narrow experience we grew up with.
And just often enough, I discover that one of them has.
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten authors I discovered (and liked) in 2020. Easy, since nearly two-thirds of last year’s books were written by authors I’d never read before!
How about you? Any new-to-you authors you loved last year?
The Christmas tree is out, but the ornaments and decorations aren’t yet put away.
We won’t run out of underwear or masks this week, but I have no clean handknits (including my favorite hat).
I put my knitting away for the night with the bind-off a third done.
My book is further along, but not yet ready to return to the library.
And, my cookies didn’t all get made. But that means there will be warm cookies tomorrow afternoon or evening, and no one will be mad about that!
My garden looks dead, but it is not. I harvested some rosemary today. There is also still lemon balm and peppermint. My sage has some tiny leaves on it, so I heaped leaves around it to encourage it to think warm thoughts. I believe some of my tiny leeks are still alive, and I definitely saw that some of the greens I’d planted were making an effort, as is the omnipresent sorrel. I pulled down the rest of the bulbless onion grass stalks, which are strawlike, and added them to the beds to protect what’s already been sown and might be growing under the leaf litter I leave as mulch. If I’d been smart, I would have constructed a low tunnel or cold frame earlier in the season to see if I can actually harvest greens through the winter. Maybe next year.
This little pansy, which I planted Labor Day weekend, was also still giving it its all:
I also found several fluffy seeds, which I’m guessing are milkweed. They wouldn’t get to stick around in my plot, so I re-sent them on their windy way.
I’ll start to think about planting peas next month. If there’s a warm weekend in February, I’ll get some in then; otherwise, I’ll sow the first round in early March.
I will say that the nice thing about a mid-Atlantic garden is that you don’t have many months where there isn’t something you can harvest.