poetic & passionate

reality is fine with me
Yesterday we traded in my beloved ten year old red Toyota RAV4 and drove home in the rain in a brand new dark metallic gray Corolla. Not the most exciting car in the world but affordable, new, reliable, comfortable, fast, and good on gas. It rained from Santa Fe to Taos, on and off all night, and a light mist is still falling. Itching to try out the new car alone, early this morning I drove up to the Ski Valley where it was mysterious and moody. And cold! 48 degrees at 9,000 feet.

Muffled sounds. Hardly anyone around. A raven. Low clouds you could almost walk through. No coffee to be found in the closed up cafes.

Tops of mountains invisible (if you can't see the mountaintops, are they still there?).  Scent of wet pine, earth and aspens. River water rushing ice cold through trees and over rocks, down and down.

The whole time I drove I listened over and over to Billy Joel singing "New York State of Mind".  I love that song. It fit the mood so well. The lyrics mention evergreens and the Rockies and letting reality slip away.

all those amber needles! dear me!
After the intensity of the last few weeks, it's a pleasure to be enveloped for a day in clouds and rain; to enjoy wearing a sweater and wool socks, no matter how brief. Indeed, knowing it will probably be hot again tomorrow, enhances the experience. And I can look forward to knitting with my friend Mag who informs me she will be visiting again in a couple of months and that she already started her winter sweater in San Francisco. I'm just musing over mine. A cardi, I think. Thick and light. Maybe Lopi? The Wool Festival of Taos is happening in less than a month, will something special speak to me? One night that same weekend, Storied Recipes will be launched at a book party. Wool and yarn and wine. Sheep and words and food. A super-busy weekend, but in a nice way.

I always knit in the wintertime, and I can't endure doing that in the summer! But as soon as the days grow shorter, I hunt for my bag of wools and all my amber needles, and I am perfectly content to sit in the window and knit and knit and knit and ponder and remember and get into a kind of even rhythm of thinking, feeling, breathing, knitting; that is, somehow, a very satisfactory activity, like a dance, or like the slow, sure motion of a constant star.  Out of this purring intensity there are produced many little sweaters.
                      (excerpt from Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos, 1935)