dog rose jamming

ordinary rocks worth stopping for on a bright and beautiful day

wild rose dog berries

spells and mixtures
When I left this morning for the farmer's market I noticed the wild rose bush behind my adobe wall and how it was decorated like a Christmas tree with red hips. Usually we leave them for the birds (and bears?). This day though, they looked so glorious in the sun, and there were so many, that I was compelled to do something about them. So I donned leather garden gloves, a pair of clippers, and with curious Spike an inch away the whole time, picked as many of the hips as possible without exposing myself to zillions of tiny nasty thorns, knife-like yucca leaves, and the low reaching arms of the apricot tree (still full of yellow leaves). All of these things are thriving in one modest square of space and it's dangerous! An hour later, a bit scratched and with a few thorns stuck in my sweater, I assessed the harvest.

About a quart's worth. Don't know if I'll be able to successfully make jam. (I could string them and wear as love-attracting beads). I tried making rose hip jelly once (I already had the lover). It was many years ago in Naragansett, using wild beach rose hips. The recipe came from an old reissued 1939 book filled with quaint centuries-old lore. Months later, we opened one of the jars when we stayed at the cottage, and the jelly was watery and tart. But now I've found a 21st century recipe that incorporates an orange, a green apple, sugar, water, butter, and hope.

What I did learn from the olden times recipe book is that my particular thorny bushes are called dog roses (Eglantine) and the pulp should be removed with the aid of a bodkin. Princess Alexandre Gazarine (1924) wrote that dog roses are best for jam. And that roses planted in the garden attract fairies, and are said to grow best when stolen. So there. How can I fail?

There is a bit of magic in the air this late afternoon and my mood swings from joy to gloom, from enthusiasm to laziness, clarity to confusion. The sun is low now and filling all the rooms with buttery light. Anything is possible.

antidote for hysteria?

cozypants

The visual tranquility of teapot, artificial flowers and colorful/cushy finished socks is slightly not a true picture of my life. As November 1st looms, I find myself preparing for a non-stop busy time that may include a trip east and/or southwest, and will certainly overlap into early January. Not due to the coming holidays and assorted family birthdays, although they play a part, but due to a plethora of drop dead deadlines.

resolved:
this will be the last year I do the Yuletide Craft Fair because on top of all the other deadlines I now face production! On one hand it's sheer insanity. On the other it's the push I need to finish UFOs. Things that I've lost interest in will inevitably interest someone else. This I've learned through the years. And isn't it better to part with what I no longer love so it can be infused with new love? For example (and I think I broke a procrastination record here), last night I finished a pair of socks started approximately ten years ago. That's what I said, dear reader. Ten years!

Here's what happened. There is a yarn shop in town called The Yarn Shop. In the past (two owners ago) I often traded knitting samples for yarn. I'd discovered socks and loved the new self-patterning yarns. Most at that time came from Regia. This one was called Special Effekts. I knitted a one sock sample that sold lots of yarn, and completely lost the desire to knit the second. A few years months later, the shop changed hands. I reclaimed the sock and tossed it into a storage box where it languished until my recent declutter campaign. Not only was the sock there - looking quite fresh and perky - but so was the yarn - all neatly bundled in a ziplock bag. The very fact that so much time had elapsed and the project was still viable, propelled me to finish. Voila! It's actually quite nice and will make it's belated debut at the Fair. This started an insane trend and now there are three more sufo's clamoring for new life in the light.

"a distinct virtue"
A miniature book published by Running Press around the time I made that striped sock, contains quotes and historical facts about knitting. I don't remember how I acquired the book, but it resurfaced with the sock. Aside from facts about Eleanor Roosevelt's bulging knitting bag, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury got involved (quote above), I wonder if this still works:

The quiet, even, regular motions of knitting
were prescribed as an antidote for nervousness
and hysteria in the nineteenth century

deep, dark & other stuff

Since it's getting close to Halloween I thought I'd share a picture of this house perched high on a hill overlooking the Pacific. I passed it on my walks a few weeks ago. I'm sure it's a lovely place, not a haunted mansion (it's actually quite a modest size) but it sure looked spooky on this day. So let your imagination fashion a story of your own. Today's weather perfectly fits whatever creepy story you do concoct because it's snowing on the mountains (hidden behind clouds) and raining cold rain down here. Gloomy. And cozy. When the sky cleared briefly, it was no longer that blue I've been waxing poetic about, it was silver and gray and moving fast toward the mountains.

Perfect day to finish a special knitting project (and try to deal with an unrelated unexpected problem). Why aren't our stresses meted out gradually and balanced by an equal measure of joys? Never mind.
This makes me happy.

Dante's b-day hat and mittens (a Morehouse yarn and modified pattern). Those little thumbs were hell to knit and the touches of felt and beads for lips and eyes (that I didn't add) were over the top for the smallest size. (Have I told you that I hate sewing?) I can't imagine that these mitts will stay on tiny hands either. So I'm about to start a pair of thumbless mittens as a backup. I tend to avoid making tiny toys, ornaments, animals or other cute stuff. I once made a tiny toe-up sock for a workshop and it nearly caused me to quite knitting altogether.

approaching the edge of sanity
Which I can't do at this time because I made a commitment to participate in the Yuletide Craft Fair on Thanksgiving weekend and need to have enough knitted items for three full days. Here's a sneak peek at one of a series of small felted bags that a psychic acquaintance told me I should be sure to include. She said they would serve as talismans to those who bought them. Interesting concept, eh? Who am I to doubt her word.

eat the sky

Like a living kaleidoscope, my small world of color has gone from predominantly yellow and blue to orange and blue. The cottonwood leaves along the Rio Grande are deep burnt orange, as are the swaths of aspens on the mountaintops. Each warm sun-filled day is more precious than the one that came before it. It won't be long now. We try to own the feeling. My friend puts aspen leaves on her kitchen windowsill. Outside she is drying cosmos and marigold heads for their seeds (and I forgot to take some home with me).

Can any day be more perfect than this one? (yesterday? tomorrow?).
John Nichols wrote a stunning book many years ago called The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn. It is filled with photographs, stories, humor, love for landscape and its species of inhabitants. In it are heart-stopping descriptions of Taos in autumn. Elusive and vivid. Scent of cedar woodsmoke in the air, flocks of birds on wires and trees. I've always remembered one particular line from the book. He wrote that the sky is "so blue you could eat it with a spoon". Today was one of those delicious sky-eating days.

under the orange brolleys
Maggie and I ate a lovely long lunch outside under orange umbrellas and blue sky. She's about to leave for winter in England and we had a lot to catch up on before she is gone. She is also a writer, knitter, photographer, so you can imagine the territory we covered - I don't think we took a breath for two hours.

charlie brown lives!
And then I received this very orange, very dear, phone photo of Dante's visit to a pumpkin patch with his grandmother. In a day or two I'll show off the things I'm making him for his first b-day in a few weeks. But at the moment I'm just nostalgic for the days when I took my kids and grandkids to New England pumpkin farms in Octobers past. And I send my love to the boy who is too young to remember me and who doesn't know yet that there is one more person in his life, far away, who loves him (and is madly knitting stuff for him).

Blue mountains white snow gleam
Through pine bulk and slender needle-sprays;
      little hemlock half in shade,
      ragged rocky skyline,


      single clear flat nuthatch call:
      down from the treetrunks


      up through time.

(excerpt from Old Pond by Gary Snyder)

burning desire

Everything I write is true. But I don't write about everything
These words were written by Dominique Browning in her essay "Burning the Diaries" which appeared in the New York Times on September 30. That sentence refers to her published memoir and her blog. But she wrote about "everything" in 40 years worth of diaries that she burned one day. I was inspired. Browning started keeping diaries when she was 14, I started at 40. Whatever diaries I kept before that time were regularly disposed of, thinking they contained secret thoughts I didn't want anyone else to know. I realize now there were no real secrets in those books, just private thoughts that in retrospect weren't of interest to anyone but me. My books are divided into three categories: early spiral bound notebooks with masked versions of the truth, current journals with stark truths, and so-called "workbooks" which contain fodder and junk and can occasionally be mined for a nugget or two. Whatever. There are a lot of notebooks.

My hero Edward Weston wrote in his Daybooks regularly. It was his photography and honest words that inspired me to start writing my own journals. I bought my first blank notebooks from a Job Lots store in Naragansett Pier, Rhode Island. They cost 25 cents each and had turquoise blue covers. Those worn out notebooks are still around nearly 30 years later - much worse for wear and full of the beginnings of repetitions that haunt today's books. How much do we really change? How does one measure self-growth? Do I really want to keep those notebooks?

Weston's entries were intimate and frank and in 1925 he threw three years' worth into the fire because when he reread them he was "revolted by all the heartaches, headaches, bellyaches".

Many mornings I wonder why I even start to write, 
with nothing worth recording in my humdrum existence. 
If it were not for my pot of coffee I am sure there 
would be no inspiration.
     Edward Weston, 1927

chop, haul, knit, purl

What's better than getting into the car on a gorgeous October day of vibrant color and soft breezes, popping a Segovia classical guitar CD into the slot, lowering the windows and driving alone to Santa Fe to spend an afternoon with a friend I haven't seen for awhile because we've both been too busy. We walked, talked, ate late lunch outdoors under the trees on Canyon Road.

last harvest admiration

 a less-than-Edward-Weston type pepper

She asked me to bring new socks for her. And showed me the heap of well-used pairs I've been supplying her with for more than a decade. We reminisced about when and where. Patterns and colors I'd forgotten about but that instantly triggered memories of where I was when I worked on them. They were less garment and more grimoire (book of evocations). Tangible clues to our pasts. Most of her socks are still in great shape and she said it's like having a drawer full of art. Way back in the days when I first came to Taos she encouraged me to write and to enable that, bought my hand knits to keep me going. Another friend (since moved away) also amassed socks. Once they had a friendly argument about which one was the bigger collector. No decision. And now my daughter has joined their ranks with her own growing collection. I guess I'm one too - a collector of yarns to make the socks to warm the feet, to be here, right now, in this moment.

all over the place

danger! danger! will robinson!
I began this post 4 or 5 hours ago and was happily typing away when my laptop got extremely hot. To hot to touch. Then it stopped working. We managed to remove the battery and disconnect everything and I made an emergency call to the computer guy who suggested I buy a fan at Walmart. Then remembered that HP had sent a notice a few months ago. Something about a battery recall...and danger...and fire. Uh,oh. Once I saw, in a Napa Valley gallery, an old typewriter with flames rising from its platen - I imagined how my laptop would look as flames engulfed it. Not a pretty sight. So now I'm safely typing away on my cheap/reliable netbook and hoping things will turn out okay. Tomorrow is another day.

back to the sea?
My father's greatest joy was fishing and he kept a little hand written sign pinned over his desk:

red sky at night, sailor's delight

red sky at morning, sailor take warning

I remembered it at dawn this morning when the eastern sky was ablaze. I didn't think it applied to the southwest mountains the way it did for northeastern waters, but by afternoon our gorgeous balmy weather had turned to a cold gusty tempest with skudding clouds and fading sun.

over the top?
Preparing for Santa Fe tomorrow for a visit with a friend and a showing of some handknits. It forced me to open the box I've been tossing finished socks into all year. Twenty-one pairs! It seems I'm already prepared (sockwise) for the Yuletide Fair at end of November.

To Do lists are cluttering up the desk and kitchen table and Ron is watching a Dracula movie and maybe I need to join him and use it as an excuse to settle in, get scared, and finish the mate of the single sock I photographed on the Pacific beach two weeks ago. Where did the time go? When will I return? Too many questions tonight. Too much uncertainty.

the attention we pay to the small, often mundane tasks of life
can make the difference between a life of drudgery and a life of joy
(slightly paraphrased from Bernadette Murphy, Zen & the Art of Knitting)