riffs of color

It's all about orange and yellow now. And intense blue and green. The palette of aspens high up on the mountaintops (photographed from far away), my favorite socks, pumpkins, Dixon's golden apples.
     I remembered a book of poems that was published around 1995 called The Very Stuff. The subtitle is Poems on color, thread, and the habits of women. There it still was on my bookshelf squashed among knitting and travel books. I hadn't looked at it in years. The 43 poems were written by Stephen Beal, a fiber artist, who explores memoir through poems inspired by the colors of DMC embroidery floss. It's a sweet book. At the top of most of the pages and the beginnings of poems, is a small square of color with a number that refers to the DMC floss. I couldn't find a poem that specifically referred to orange but there must be one. If not, I'll have to write it. But not today. After I finish some of the tasks that are clamoring for attention, I plan to find an outdoor table at a coffee shop and spend some time with tea, scone, notebook, pen, maybe the sagebrush silk and cashmere clapotis I love working on but feel guilty about because the Yuletide fair and the unborn baby are looming ahead of me. Whew! Long sentence that tumbles along the way my days are tumbling along lately.
     Still, I managed to peruse the current Vogue. I look forward to that 2-inch thick September issue but this year it seems rather boring. I also occasionally browse a couple of blogs to see what the haute couturiers are up to. And here's what I learned today. Spring fashion will be all about flower prints and color (is this really new?). It will be interesting to see how it's interpreted in new yarns. Meanwhile I'll be right in the center of the fashion swirl of Taos with the Susan Todd knitting bag I bought many years ago and still have. 

Here's an aside for those of you reading this who live in actual cities with actual fashion trends (I know you're out there because I've heard from a few of you): Taos makes its own fashion statement which is, basically, Wear Whatever You Want. We have the Khaki Look (fashion-ready for a hiking emergency), the Turquoise and Feathers Look, the faded Anything Goes jeans look, grunge abounds among the high school set (an everywhere fad? it's ugly). Among other things, we are a fiber town so there's lots of knitted and felted stuff worn around here too. I'm sure if I researched it (how?) it would exceed the national trend which is usually sporadic and unsure of itself re handknits. Does that stop us? What do you think? Just try parking at the Wool Festival next weekend.

this is a color
that is the essence of fall
October yellow
driving chilly with the top down
through the streets of Watkins Glen

out and about

How wintery is this? Another chilly torrential downpour hit us a couple of days ago and once again I was driving through the canyon on the way home from Santa Fe. I snapped this picture through the car window when traffic was stopped while a crew cleared rocks that had slid onto the road. I can't help but think that when the temperature seriously drops in another month or so, that much moisture would probably equal a foot of snow. Makes me shiver inwardly and outwardly just thinking about the dreaded winter. So I will stop thinking about it and enjoy this perfect September day filled with sunshine, lots of green (thanks to the rain) and swaths of yellow aspens on the mountaintops.
     Unfortunately this is also the last day that our favorite coffee shop/cafe will be open. Goodbye to the sweet courtyard, with its tables and umbrellas under the trees, the delicious quiches, lemon cookies, croissants, nice people...you catch the drift. Here in Taos we are always saying hello and goodbye to favorite places. It's a lesson in impermanence. Again. I'm still mourning a cafe called Casa Fresen that closed ten years ago!

So now, after a busy blurry week of successes, conflicts, weird dreams, overcommitment, I look forward to this weekend to maybe reconnect with myself - if any of the loose wires can be located.  I'll read,  take up the Jade Sapphire silk/cashmere clapotis I started in a brief lull yesterday, make a nice light dinner and rent a movie for tonight. If the weather holds we'll take a drive somewhere and revel in the autumn colors.

incense smoke rises
in double erratic spirals
     martyr to air currents

with a little help from my friends

pre-Columbian figure nestled in a courtyard nicho

The last five days are a blur. I'm not sure how or why I got so over-committed. Well, I know why. I thought I had more time. Jack Kornfield said, the problem is, we think we have time. His quote relates to myriad subjects and themes, but in my case it's less Buddhist and more superficial. The weekend was jam-packed (unusual). Two full days spent at an invitational artisans exhibit and sale at the Rane Gallery on Ledoux Street in Taos and a private SOMOS event on Sunday night where I took photographs, hobnobbed, and had a great time.

Whenever I participate in or attend arts and crafts shows I look around and realize that these overstuffed events are the result of creative passions run amuck! Mine no less than others. We can't make one or two pottery mugs, we make 100. And socks? How about two dozen. Fleecy scarves with pockets? 300! Beaded necklaces? Can't even count 'em. Silver earrings? oh my. It was a relatively slow weekend for visitors so we weren't exactly inundated with buyers. I spent time with a group of women ranging in age from 30s to 70s. They are each, amazing, beautiful, multi-talented, interesting. By the end of the day we agreed that it felt like we'd known each other forever and had carelessly lost touch. How cool is that?

Last night I visited a deluxe tree house! It is located on a property with several other remodeled rustic-style buildings set under large old trees festooned with strings of white lights. For each of us who climbed the stairs into the tree house to look around, it was deemed the perfect studio. Many sighs of longing were heard as we trooped back down to the small crowd of people who had arrived. Writers, musicians, photographers, artists, had gathered to honor an author we have all known and respected for decades. Improvised music prompted some of us to sing 60s songs mostly out of key and with occasional lyric memory lapses, wine flowed, and we reconnected with friends we'd somehow gotten too busy to keep up with regularly. I must say that I had the best time I've had in many moons. The late September night was warm, windless and completely perfect for the guests who gathered beneath the trees around candlelit tables and an outdoor kiva fireplace. The night stayed warm until around 10 when I wrapped myself in my cashmere lace shawl and the less hardy drifted home. The singing continued. Today is cool and cloudy and I think of one of the early book titles of the guest of honor - was yesterday one of the Last Beautiful Days of Autumn?

Early dinner is light and frivolous as I anticipate another intense week. This day, though, I have lovely memories and new friendships to ponder.

I open the back door
startling a dozen blackbirds
small wings beating
getting ready to leave again

sona si Latine loqueris

Honk if you speak Latin

Yeah, I know. it's stupid. But one of the reasons I've been away from this blog for a few days is because I'm trying to learn Latin. In all my years of education I managed to avoid it. And now, as a woman past a certain age I've enrolled in a class at UNM. Just attended third session and it seems I'm going to have to study. At the end of class yesterday, a chorus of 30 people read aloud. At the end the professor said, think of it, we are in a small town in New Mexico and people are speaking Latin - not a dead language anymore! it makes me very happy!  Included in this course is lots of mythology - oh my god all those gods and goddesses yee gods! Years ago I often read Edith Hamilton's Greek Mythology. It was most entertaining. I kept a paperback copy of it until recently when it fell apart. Pages drifted around the room like autumn leaves and I tossed it. Now I have to transpose (in my mind) those Greek myths into Roman myths. All those names (Zeus becomes Jupiter - like that) and gods swallowing their children and having their livers eaten over and over, eyes gouged out, and stealing fire and stuff...

On a friendlier note I am preparing for an Invitational Artisan Fair this weekend at the Rane Art Gallery in Taos. At the suggestion of a poet acquaintance who is helping to launch this event, I have knitted a pair of baby socks. She hinted that her 5 month old grandson needed some fun socks and I started thinking about my own great grandson who will be coming along in couple of months and lo, teensy-weensy socks manifested! I'm working on a second pair. Love 'em!

And last, but not least, we drank a Prosecco toast (well, more than one) to our lost friend whose birthday was on Monday. She fully expected to celebrate it but the gods had other plans for her. Here's to you Gayle!

a switch in time

At this time of year in the mountains each day feels like a new season even though we're still in the remains of summer and the lightest blankets are still on the beds. Today is one of those gray cashmere sweater days. Sprinkles of rain on and off, an occasional peep of sun. After three busy days in a row and more coming up, I am happy to have finished at least one project and be at my desk inside as the warm wind whistles around outside.

This project has been enthusiastically embraced and casually abandoned for almost two years. It is a lace ribbon scarf knitted with 2-ply hand dyed cashmere from Jabberwocky Farms that I bought two years ago at the Wool Festival in Taos. This year's event on the first weekend in October is looming closer. Completing projects with yarn bought at past wool festivals erases any twinges of guilt that might arise as I buy more. And these colors are so gorgeously futuristically seasonal that I put everything else aside to finish it. In other words I was highly motivated. Guilt-wise and season-wise. Although I'd like to be a mindful person and try to live in the present moment, the act of buying yarn thrusts me right into the future.

l

Still in an autumn mood (I know it's here because the chamisa is yellow and I can't stop sneezing) I found a project for the Malabrigo sock yarn in color Primavera. The pattern is Ishbel by Isolda Teague. Although I have two skeins of this beautiful yarn, I decided to make the smaller size and use only one. I'm not much of a lace shawl wearer - too short to wrap up in a big one and too old to look cool in it. No matter how the trends have changed, knitted shawls on women of a certain age still  bring to mind grannies and farmer's wives as depicted in old black and white movies. Actually, if you have ever seen Camille (a movie that is older than me), she is wearing, on her deathbed, a hand knitted lace shawl and looks radiant. How else could Garbo have looked? So since I'm not Garbo and like the design, I will make the smaller size to wrap around my neck or drape over a sweater.

I've only finished the stockinette section and an inch of the lace pattern. I began by following the written instructions, but after knitting and ripping in frustration several times, I realized that in spite of being a word person, visual charts work best for lace knitting. This may not seem like news to anyone but me. I resisted charts when they first hit the mainstream. Eventually I had to deal with them because they became the way most lace patterns were written. In time, without my knowledge, my brain made a switch. Good thing too because the pattern so far is humming along and I can't wait to get back to it. On a card I jotted down this quote from an anonymous source.

Truth is about examining, testing,
knowing the actual, immediate,
direct experience of this moment.
                    

a narrow escape

Have you ever had one of those days when it seems that invisible demons are plotting to create conflict every few minutes? That's the way I felt yesterday. Nothing worked, everything I tried to do failed - including conversations that turned into flying fireballs. It was a day when I wanted to unzip and step out of my skin. Perhaps enter my parallel life and hope I was having a better day there. Unable to do that precisely, I gave up trying to accomplish anything in any realm and in late afternoon drove to Wired Cafe. The weather was perfect, shady and cool under trees, sound of water splashed through bamboo onto stones, soft breeze, iced chai, notebook. Inside the cafe a French music CD played and the sound mingled with falling water in several fountains. I stayed for what seemed a long time. Or maybe it wasn't long at all. What I know is that after writing, sitting, sipping the cold chai, I felt I had indeed stepped into a parallel life and that one was demonless. What would we do without cafes to escape to?

Today is stress-free, productive and friendly. The planets must have shifted or something. After breakfast with friends I came home and sorted through my stash of UFOs and possible projects (henceforth known as PPs). I had forgotten about the gorgeous Weaving Southwest Rio Grande Merino Sport in a color I called chocolate and berries (don't know what they call it - labels lost long ago). In a moment of efficiency I'd affixed tags that told me that there is more than 700 yards in that bag! (the color is more subtle and berry-ish than in the photograph - I couldn't tone down the blue that really is soft purple (like boysenberries). Sometimes I do miss my low tech film cameras).

This yarn had been out of sight and mind for so long that it came back to me all fresh and new. Maybe a clapotis? Like the one I made in the same yarn a couple of years ago and gave to a writer friend one late August. She was leaving for Brittany for a two month stay and said, "there's always a chilly wind there". I figured if I couldn't go to France myself I'd send something with her that I'd made. When she returned she said it was perfect! And just this spring another writer friend went off to Nice for three months wearing the cashmere clapotis I'd knitted in shades of red and rust.  She said it was cold and gray all through spring and was perfect! So there. I still love that popular pattern and look forward to starting another. There's lots of knitting to do, the pattern is easy, it's a good portable project. Not to mention that the final product may end up in a faraway place keeping the chill away and looking chic.

And speaking of chic. It's September and time to lose the green toenails.

It was great fun, but it was just one of those (summer) things. In anticipation of a long-neglected pedicure next week, I bought a new color from London called Stiletto Red. I've never worn a pair of stilettos in my life - I'd fall flat on my butt if I did - but I figure the polish is safe and sounds chic (not that anyone will know but me and the Vietnamese pedicurist who won't care).

accidental invention

Soon we're leaving to celebrate a 64th wedding anniversary with friends. He's not well, but his wife is throwing a party at The Living Center where he's staying. I decided to bake a cake using a basic old recipe that I modify for just about every occasion. My mother cut it out of the New York Daily News in the year she was married: 1926 and it's been published since then in a poet's cookbook, a family cookbook, and passed around and used in many forms for generations. What came out this time though was a modification I hadn't expected. Five minutes after I put the pan into the oven I noticed that I hadn't added the egg to the batter! It was already baking so it was too late. I didn't feel like driving to the store and didn't have enough of the ingredients left to start over. Not knowing what happens to a cake made without eggs, I just left it in the oven and sat down to read for awhile. Forty minutes later it came out all baked - a bit flatter than usual but it smelled and looked good. My husband convinced me to cut a piece and taste it and if it was okay it could perhaps be cut up into bars and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Never! it won't work, I said with great conviction. But that's what we did (after eating all the outer edges) and it's delicious. So we're off now to the party.