This Moment
A neighbourhood.
At dusk.
Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.
Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.
But not yet.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.
Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
- Eavan Boland
I spend all those long summer days dreaming of autumn - of leaves crunching and wind rustling, of bright, crisp afternoons and leaf piles and acorn treasures and pumpkin-scented goodies. And our autumn was filled with all those lovely, russet-colored moments. But it was also filled with trips and deadlines and all the general busy-ness that seems to pick up towards the end of the year.
These photos are from a trip into the mountains with dear friends in early November. The leaves were still clinging and the water was swift and cold and the spice-scent of autumn was still heavy in the air. All that is gone now, of course. The Advent season is here and the winter solstice is just around the corner and, goodness, the year is almost over.
Our Decembers are a crazy collision of birthdays and holidays, plans and hosting and preparing. Every year, I create a long to-do list for the holiday season - crafts and sewing and decorating and baking and whole host of handmade gifts. And every year, I fall way short. Instead of the lovely pieced and quilted tree skirt, we have one from Target. Instead of the hand-crafted, customized Advent calendar, we have the little cardboard ones with the awful chocolate behind the squares (Juni and Owen, however, are huge fans of awful chocolate, so that worked out just fine). And instead of mostly handmade gifts, I will be lucky to finish two, perhaps three, things before Santa comes a-knockin'.
Winter, though, is surely the season for patience and letting go. And so, we will bake cookies and decorate gingerbread houses and sing Christmas songs and talk about Santa and little baby Kings in hushed, awe-filled voices and forget all those silly plans I made in the heat of summer. Perhaps next year.
I am, however, working on Juniper's rainbow blankie for her birthday. This is what she requested in lieu of a birthday sweater.
"Is it going to have all the colors, mama? All of them?"
The pattern is the Forever Baby Blanket from the Purl Bee. It is an easy knit with a nice thick, squishy texture, perfect for snuggling. I'm using some bits of Dream in Color Classy yarn for the rainbow, inspired by Waldorfmama's beautiful garter stitch blanket. And for another lesson in letting go, Juni found a little embroidery scissors a few days ago and snipped the blanket in several places, forcing me to frog back a couple of stripes. Oh, the heartbreak. Now I have seven more days and five stripes to go before my baby girl turns three.
(And because I just happen to be posting about knitting on a Wednesday, I'm linking up with Ginny from small things for her wonderful knitting and reading Yarn Along. I just started reading The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan.)
Excerpts from Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins:
Maybe soon he'd have to face the fact that everything from here on in was going to make him think of Opal. He thought of her whenever he saw light at play. He though of her while he was seining paper for a capture in the fixative and he thought of her when he saw buttermilk-colored moths mirror-flashing through the bluegrass of an abandoned lot.
How can you identify what you don't know if you don't know it? The great Unknown is not a static. It is peopled. Scattered through with specificity. It's a havoc. Knowledge is at large, for taking, like the air. Still, she thought, there was so much she didn't know that seemed to be the common stuff of other peoples' lives. How to know which books to read. How to read for learning. How to write a letter or a sentence which described the world the way the Mr. Frost described a wood. Or Mr. Eliot the state of solitude.