A Year and a Word

We woke up yesterday to find our  backyard blanketed in many more inches of snow than we had expected.  It was the thick, heavy snow that bends small trees to the ground and breaks off large limbs from the great white pines.  It also temporarily turns our funny little garden shed into an enchanted fairy tale cottage.  

Earlier in the week we'd walked the icy trails at Gilsland Farm, seeking quiet amidst the chaos of the season.  This year's holidays have felt even more tumultuous than usual.  I think the news of the world after this long, often terrible, year has left many of us exhausted.

In the face of unrest and suffering in the world, I've found myself turning more and more to the wintery landscapes and seascapes of my home state for solace.  It's there in the bone-colored branches of birches, the grey ocean waves laced with white, and the dry tufts of frozen grass in open fields that I look for the escape my heart longs for.

I haven't become a complete hermit, I promise.  I welcome the cries of seagulls as I walk the cobblestoned streets of Portland, the rush of winter robins' wings overhead in the trees, and the laughter of school kids swooping down hillsides on makeshift sleds.

And the companionship of loved ones.  I'm not always up for talking these days, but I am almost always up for a walk, and a shared cup of something warm when we return home.

Choosing my word for 2017 was easy.  I didn't even think about it.  I just knew: peace.  That's all I hope for this year.  Peace for those I love, for myself, and for the world.  Over the summer I taught myself how to play ukulele, and one of the first songs I learned how to play was John Lennon's "Imagine."  As I learned the chords and gradually discovered how to weave the words in as I played, I found myself experiencing the song in a new way.  I've always loved the lyrics, but each time I now come to "Imagine all the people, living life in peace," I feel it so strongly that I often have to stop playing for a few moments.  Peace is what I hope for, for me and for you, my friends.  I will do my best to help make it happen in the tiny ways that I know how.  Wishing you a year of joyful adventures, truly funny moments, inspiration, love, and peace.  xo Gigi

October

I have been a thousand miles away--for real and true.  There is much to tell, and I will, but for now there is October, the clear light it brings, and the days that disappear to dusk when I look away, when I take a breath, when I least expect.

Each leaf that shifts to gold on the maple outside my window is another blessing.  We will rake them, pile them out behind the shed, let them take their sweet time to turn to magic for the borders and the raised beds.  And there are bulbs for planting.  I'll haul out the barrow and the heavy spade, dig troughs for crocuses and daffodils.  There will be whole hills and mountains of snow between now and the next full bloom, but gardeners bank on hope, and October's sunlight gives just enough to keep me until spring.

Picture This

Special thanks to Shutter Sisters for featuring this photo on their Instagram Feed last week!

Picture This

You live in a foreign country,

except to you

it isn't foreign

because it's where

you were born

in this, a different life--

imagine--

pears grow there

on your very 

own tree,

or maybe--get wild--

they're figs,

and you can use

the word pluck

for the first time

in your whole life,

at least this life,

but in that one

you pluck practically

every day:

harp strings, heart 

strings, whole mornings,

and the figs, of course--

but only what you need.

You never horde.

Imagine--

each fig is the first,

the last--

pollinated by the tiny moth

that has climbed inside

the fruit's tiny mouth,

laid her eggs

and waited 

for her prince to pluck

her out.

Imagine--

inside your mouth

for one moment

you hold seed

and flower

and egg,

all that you 

could ever want,

the world--

its birth,

its death 

inside

your mouth.

Copyright 2009 Gigi Thibodeau

Today I have reposted a poem I wrote back in 2009.  My life was headed in a very different direction then.  I was the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; I'd just had a collection of poetry published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and had just won a couple national writing awards; I was preparing for a more permanent position teaching poetry writing and children's literature at UML after having taught these and other classes there for nearly a decade as an adjunct professor.  I knew who I was, where I was going, what I would do when I arrived there.

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain / For promised joy" (Robert Burns, "To a Mouse"). 

And then, everything that was supposed to happen did not.  Namely, I lost the newly created position at UML--in the most spectacular and ugly way--due to hideous campus politics.  I lost many friends and colleagues.  I lost all belief in myself.  Every last bit of it.  And I lost all sense of who I was.  I had been a teacher for a very long time, not just at UML, but before that, too, in many other places.  Suddenly, I felt like that life had been a lie.  

This lie brings me full circle back to the poem.  I'd crafted it while I was writing my Kerouac lecture and poetry reading.  It was full of hope and excitement about the future.  When I read it now, I feel empathy for the woman who wrote this, for what she was about to experience.  I also feel a small sense of relief that nothing I hoped for came true.

Instead, with the support of my husband, I picked up the shards and shattered bits, and I began again.  We moved back to Maine, the place we both loved.  I started working one-on-one with writers, helping them shape their work and their words into stronger and stronger finished drafts.  I began selling more and more photographs.  My own writing grew richer.  The whole world split open.  Isn't that always the way when we keep our commitment to the muse, even in the midst of despair?      

We rented an apartment for two years while we saved our pennies.  Then we found a little cottage with enough land for gardens, and we scooped it up as quickly as we could.  We'd learned after many trials and disappointments in life to act quickly when it feels right in our hearts.  Here over the last year we've dug and planted several gardens . . . and have plans for more.

And we bought our first fig tree.  A Brown Turkey, it's called, and it's not cold hardy all the way up here in Maine, so we will have to coddle it, bring it in each winter to go dormant, coax it back to life each spring.  Already it's been fruiting like mad, though, and, yes, that photo above is of our very first ripe fig.  
And, yes, I plucked it myself.

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

~Emily Dickinson

Just bought another bird feeder today.  Plan to fill my gardens with hope. 

Happy National Poetry Month, my friends.  

February Crushes: Dreaming of Roses in the Dead of Winter

As I type, the snow is falling again.  No, not just snow, and not just falling.  It's sleet, and it's slicing the night air, encasing the trees, and leaving the snowbanks, roads, and sidewalks coated with a slick skim of ice.  We've had one record-breaking snowstorm (32") in Portland this winter, followed by several smaller ones.  Mr. Magpie and I have become intimately acquainted with the fancy ergonomically designed shovels we bought for the new house, which, for much of January and February, has looked like some version of these photos I shot earlier in the week:

Yes, it's sweet, and don't get me wrong, we love our Little House in the Snow.  I love pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder as I put another log on the fire or tunnel my way out the back door, and Mr. Magpie loves chopping wood and practicing new ways to tie his wool muffler, but I'm not kidding when I say we are ready for the Big Shift.  If you live in a place with real Winters with a capital W, you know the shift I mean: that palpable change, that first day when you walk outside and realize that the sun has risen just high enough in the sky and lingered just long enough at the end of day to begin to warm the ground.  There might still be snow, but beneath it is the soil, and you know this for one reason: suddenly, you can smell it.  

And there's the air, too.  Even though it's still cold as hell, there's a slight softening.  The wind doesn't whip at your cheeks, the cold doesn't sink into your bones.  Maybe you even leave your parka unzipped as you shovel the slushsnowice from the driveway.

Then early one morning, you spot a Goldfinch on the bird feeder, and he has shed his drab winter coat in favor of brilliant spring gold.  And a week or two later, you catch sight of that first scarlet flash of a redwing blackbird.  Snow or no snow, Spring has come.  The first flowers can't be far behind (let's hope a few of the crocus bulbs I planted in the grass escaped the greedy clutches of my friends the squirrels).

Two days ago, I was in the yard scolding chatting with the squirrels when I sensed the first wee hint that spring may be on its way.  As I watched the sun fall behind the white pines, I actually felt the warmth of its rays.  This was all I needed.  Back inside I went to pore over my garden catalogs.  I'm obsessed right now with roses, everything from my favorite rugosas, to classic climbers and David Austin English roses.  

David Austin Carding Mill

In my last garden I grew several kinds of roses, including a deep pink wild one that seemed to volunteer itself in gardens all over the neighborhood.  Here at the new house, I have certain roses in mind, like "Carding Mill," pictured above, but I'd love to hear from you about some of your favorites, too. 

And just because I need a little Summer beauty during Winter's home stretch,I thought I'd share a few photos of roses I've taken over the past three years.  Those of you in colder climes can think of them as armfuls of summer's beauty and scent from me to you.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gigi Thibodeau

Peaks Island Maine, Gigi Thibodeau

London, Gigi Thibodeau

At Borough Market, London, Gigi Thibodeau

St Paul's Cathedral, London, Gigi Thibodeau

Peaks Island, Maine, Gigi Thibodeau

A Year and a Word: My 400th Post

I awoke early with the cats this morning and watched the light outside my kitchen window shift from deep blue to grey-blue to soft white as I ate my steel-cut oats and almond milk.  It was a morning like any other, except this one was the last of its year.  I had some thinking to do.  What would be my word for 2013?  I still hadn't decided.

And then I was smacked by a stomach bug.  It's one that I think I've been fighting since Christmas Eve.  It finally won, and I climbed back in bed, where I was joined by wild dreams of traveling to Paris, only to find that I was in a high school gymnasium and I had to cheerlead again, decades after my cheerleading days.  I had, of course, forgotten all the words and motions, and everyone was furious with me.  Not a promising sign for 2013.

And yet I woke up with the word for the year in my head.  "Persevere."  I've had to persevere through some pretty terrible times over the past several years, and I've managed to do it, but I have been wondering whether I could do it this time.  I must persevere as a writer now more than ever when I have two manuscripts trying to find homes and a whole bag of worries and fears to carry with me as I move forward.  

"Persevere" is not as pretty as "inspire" or "grace," my words from 2012 and 2011, but it is real, and it's what I tell my students to do all the time.  It's also what I need.  Perseverance gets harder for me as I grow older and I fear I won't achieve many of the things of which I've dreamed.  I am not as patient in the face of rejection now, something I see loads and loads of as a writer.  I see successes, too, but I don't linger on those.  I tend to linger on my failures.  "Persevere" will require a whole slew of other words like "hope" and "optimism" and "try" to come along for the ride.  

As Samuel Beckett writes: "Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."

Here's to 2012 and to failing better.  I wish you all love and adventure and a dose of perseverance in the coming year.  

xo Gigi 

On Teaspoons and the Blue Moon

I saw this weekend's blue moon rise through the skylight of our new bedroom as I rolled a fresh coat of paint over the ceiling's slope.  The radio was playing "Tiny Dancer," and I was belting out my best Elton John impersonation for Mr. Magpie, "Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band . . . ."  My own jeans were spattered in shades of Mountain Peak White (BM), French Gray (F&B), and Palladian Blue (BM).  Every bone and muscle in my body ached from the past week* of painting, cleaning, hauling, weeding, and mowing.  My shoulder protested when I swiped the roller yet again over the ridges in the paint tray, but as I glanced back up at the skylight, the moon stared right back at me.  I shivered.  Suddenly it hit me: I was home. 

And then again yesterday as I alphabetized spice jars and sorted through teaspoons in the kitchen, I felt it.  All around me loomed the chaos of boxes and tables and chairs piled in precarious pyramids, yet I knew just where my favorite teaspoon was.  Somehow this knowledge translated to something bigger; I knew just where I was, too. It's atavistic, this sense--as primitive and visceral as the feeling of sharing a meal around a campfire.  

I've lived many places, but not all of them have felt this intensely like home, no matter how lovely the floors or sturdy the walls.  For a few years before we moved back to Portland, we lived in a beautiful loft in an old mill beside a canal.  It certainly looked like a home, but for us it had become a prison, simply because of the circumstances of our life at the time.  When we had the opportunity to move, we seized it with both hands.  We knew that meant renting an apartment for a couple of frugal years rather than living in our own home, but all that mattered to us was the chance to rebuild our lives, to start making a new home within ourselves.

I believe a place can save you, if you let it.  This city where we met a lifetime ago as students has always called to us to return.  When we finally were able to, we did so with our hearts and eyes and minds wide open to the changes this return would bring.  Have I ever told you Portland's city motto?  Resurgam, "I will rise again."  It refers to the four devastating fires the city has survived, especially the great fire of 1866, which led to the building of Portland's famously beautiful West End.  We have always found that motto fitting for our own lives, and I suspect we are not alone.  This city at the far northeastern edge of the US is a good place for starting over, for rebuilding, and for making an even better go of things a second, third, or fourth time around.

Over the past two years we have revisited our favorite haunts and discovered countless new ones, mentally bookmarking certain leafy neighborhoods as we went. And now we are here in one of our favorites of those neighborhoods, in this little house with its maples and white pines and its gardens full of hydrangeas, lilacs, and nasturtiums.  I know that like anything real and good, home is a feeling that grows over time, but it has already begun to take root, and I think this is the realization that made me shiver as I watched wisps of clouds drift past the moon's surface the other night.

I like that a blue moon is rare.  I like that we must remember to pause and look or else miss it and have to wait years for the next one.  The past couple of years have been a lesson in taking the time to pause and look.  This means noticing the moon rising as well as the sun setting.  It means listening for the sound of a fog horn on a damp night or watching out my window every morning for the baby herring gulls to take their first flight.  And it means searching through the piles of moving boxes for the one marked "silverware," so I can find my way home at last. 

    

*Note: We got to close on the house a week early, so we've been here since the 23rd.

  

Grace

Some heartaches last longer than you think you could possibly bear--longer than you can count or measure.  And yet, you find yourself months or years later, still bearing them, and maybe even thriving.  "How can this be?" you wonder.  The ache hasn't lessened with time; no, that hasn't changed at all, but one thing has changed.  You have grown stronger.  

You are the plant that bloomed once--a million petals thin as dragonfly wings--and then when the last of the blooms fell away, a gardener cut you all the way back to your stump.  To the passerby you were dead--or worse--you'd never even existed.

The snows came, the rains, the ice; dark clouds loomed low over the garden's dark crust.  Nothing changed.  At least not on the surface, but roots do their best work with no one but the earthworms for an audience.  

And when the sun returned, you were ready.

This post is dedicated with love and thanks to an old friend who give me a big gift yesterday. 

P.S. I have questions that need answers over at The Magpie's Pen today!  Hope you'll stop on by.  xo

The Magpie's Pen

Okay, my friends, it's up and running!

From now on, The Magpie's Pen will be the new home of Freewrite Fridays . . .

. . . and much, much more,

all designed to keep your pen moving 

and your fingers typing.

I hope you'll fly on over there for a visit.

The Knot

I'm working on a difficult piece of writing that I want to share with you, but it may be some time before I can.  Once when I was having a tough time with a piece of writing in graduate school, one of my professors told me, "Put the problem into the poem."  She suggested that I write about what exactly wasn't working in order to find my way into the heart of the piece.  

To do this feels a bit like trying to untie a particularly nasty knot with your eyes blindfolded.  At first, it seems an impossible task, but as you gradually begin to trust your fingertips, you feel the contours of the thread, and what you learn as you tease out the loops and twists is that the center of the tangle disappears at the very moment it reveals itself to you.  Where there was once a knot there is now a long line running through empty space, which feels like possibility, a string to follow back out of the maze, a thread to weave, a rope on which to walk across a treacherous river.  It's not a guarantee of safety or comfort, but a guide through the hardest parts of the journey.  

I find that I can't untie the knot without trusting myself first.  Tonight, I don't feel it.  Putting the problem in the piece takes an act of faith.  For a long time my acts of faith have failed.  I know that is the point.  I know that means I must have more faith--in myself, in others, in my work.  I read that quote from Emerson and I feel it burn like a condemnation.  What if what lies within me is not the long thread of possibility but the empty space through which it travels?  What if I truly am the nothing I feel?

I went to a lecture once that the late scholar Edward Said gave on hope.  Maybe I have mentioned it before.  It stitched itself into my life more than a decade ago, and now I can't imagine myself without it. What he said boils down to (and sometimes I hear it like he whispered it into my ear alone): to create is to hope.  To face the bleakest moment and still put pen to paper or brush to canvas is to hope.  It can be a chicken and egg problem, which is where the faith part comes in.

A few weeks ago I wrote about loving even when we feel least like loving, and I think this post tonight is a mere extension of what I was talking about.  In fact, both posts are just me taking the advice of my wise professor.  I've chucked the problem right into all of my writing for a few weeks now,  and I'm still messing around with the mere surface of a knot the size of those fabled giant balls of string (or tinfoil ) that enterprising and obsessive hermits have managed to turn into tourist attractions out on dusty desert roads.  I can imagine the crumbling billboard: 

FIVE MILES 

TO THE LOST GIRL'S 

MYSTERIOUS AND AMAZING

NEVER-ENDING KNOT 

OF DOUBT AND FEAR  

And yet I'm still writing.  It can't be all bad.  And for you, because you have been kind enough to visit my little roadside attraction--complete with a souvenir shop peddling snow globes, snake skins, and miniature replica knots on keychains--for you I have the gift of a song from the Josh Ritter show we saw this past weekend here in Portland, just a few blocks from my house.  Yes, I know it's pitch black for much of the song, but that's because he sang it in the dark, which is almost as good as a blindfold, and I promise there's a glimmer of light at the end.  

Waking Up

"This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, 

of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile."

~Wislawa Szymborska

Hope you are having many such mornings this summer.  I am taking a short break from boxes and bubble wrap to check in.  One week to the move, and many details are falling into place while others just buzz around my head like nagging houseflies.  If I were a better blogger I'd be photographing the proper method of wrapping a Limoges set for transport or listing 25 creative ways to use up relish and other refrigerator condiments, but I am so not that blogger.  

Instead I'll tell you that I'm praying for a break in the heat before next weekend and that I am mostly excited--alternating with bouts of deep mood indigo and occasional swings into panic.  Ah, moving.  

By the way, the above photo is from a recent visit to my mother's house.  I woke up in my childhood bedroom one morning to see sunlight streaming in.  Contrary to how it may seem, I don't normally sleep with my camera, but it happened to be on the table beside me that morning, so I adjusted the settings and focus as best I could through bleary eyes, and snapped.  It's by no means a perfect photo, but it captures exactly how I felt that morning--and quite a bit of how I feel about returning to my home state to live after almost two decades away: nostalgic, hopeful, relieved, and a little disoriented.  Not quite Alice down the rabbit hole, but not exactly everyday reality either.

Wishing you a day of adventures and enticing charms.  

N is for . . .

New season, new header, and the new outlook I'm trying to cultivate after a long, rather hard winter.  I feel like my family, some wonderful old companions, sweet blog friends, my cats, books, and my writing projects have kept me going.  Another gift is that this dreadful winter came on the heels of one of the best autumns of my life.  I believe that the seasons of plenty can prepare us for the lean seasons, and the lean ones make us appreciate those bountiful ones all the more.

Thank you from the soles of my harness boots to the roots of my highlights for all that you give, all that you share.  So often you do it without a single expectation of anything in return.  I've said more than once this winter that I was having a tough time, but then I haven't gone on to share any details or clarify my remarks.  That seems a bit unfair of me, and yet you haven't complained.  Not once.  That is because you are patient; you understand.  Some encounters, some moments, some life events--even the big ones that shape us in new and completely unforeseen ways--can't be shared, and yet it is good to know that there are friends who stop by for visits or send parcels or write unexpected emails just to check in.  

And then I see someone who is suffering, someone who is hungry or lonely or scared, and my own cares and worries seem petty.  Look at that roof over my head: not a leak in it tonight as the rain clamors against the skylight, searching for a way in.  The seal holds tight.  We are safe and warm inside.  Tomorrow I'll make soup with kale and white beans, and maybe some homemade biscuits.  My husband will tell me a joke and forget the punch line (this is not a vague prediction; I can say this with far more certainty than a meteorologist can forecast the weather).  Someone in my family will call just as I'm picking up the phone to call them.  I possess more riches than I can measure.

Usually I'm a vintage girl, a celebrator of thrift and reuse, a magpie and picker, gleaning treasures from cast offs and long-forgotten troves.  Tonight, though, I sing of the new, of turning the proverbial new leaf, of seeing the world through new, perhaps rosier glasses.  Yet even as I wax rhapsodic about the new, I keep in my sights the glimmer of the past, for it's from the old, wizened stem that a green branch grows, and from this branch a new bud blooms.

D is for Daisy

This sweet beaded daisy was given to me by my friend Marlowe.  I can't look at it without feeling hopeful.  I'm sending it out tonight to her with love and hope and wishes for sunnier days.

Dream Big

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

~George Eliot

I took the above photograph last summer on London's South Bank, beside Waterloo Bridge, just before sunset.  That little girl was transfixed by the sunlight on the water.

Yesterday I mentioned a very special woman in my post on the simple things, but I'm providing a link to her story again today just because.  In my mind, she and this little girl are linked by the word "hope."

The List

I mentioned a couple of posts back that my amazing friend Jackie had given me the Happy 101 Award, and I promised to make a list of 10 things that make me happy.  Recently I discovered that the lovely Luiza has given me this award, too.  Now, you all know that I've been feeling a bit blue, so as tickled as I was to receive the awards, honestly, I was struggling with even the thought of making a list.  At the same time, I really like the idea of such lists, as they can help shake one out of melancholia and other solipsistic tendencies. My own problems and worries, after all, are mine.  And they are tiny in the scheme of things.

Tonight I type at my desk.  Beneath my window, the city is uncharacteristically quiet.  No sirens wail, no car alarms squeal, no men roar with liquor and anger.  The world seems at peace, and yet I know that this is an illusion.  When I climb into bed, pictures of Haiti will stream through my mind.  What can we say or think in the face of such devastation?  My friend Lily wrote a beautiful post about Haiti and about painting and about breakfast and hope.  Her words left me thinking of beauty, and of making something good and true and real in the face of unbearable loss.  Sometimes it's the only way I know to defeat grief.  

and so we paint
and so we weave
and so we plant
and so we read
and so we teach
a child to care

and so we reach
beyond despair

Here's my list tonight of 10 things (in no particular order):

1. Craft Hope for Haiti
2. Doctors Without Borders
3. American Red Cross
4. Heifer International
5. Care
6. World Concern
7. International Medical Corps
8. Habitat for Humanity
9. World Food Program
10. Save the Children

Thinking of you tonight, grateful for what you give the world every single day.

Follow Up: Knit-a-Square

Photo from Knit-a-Square 

First, I need to thank you for your responses to my last post!  After I asked you all about your favorite charities, I received a remarkable email from a woman named Sandy, the co-founder of a group called Knit-a-Square.  I've asked Sandy if it's okay for me to share a bit about the organization, so here are a few details, in her words:

"[Knit-a-Square is] an ephemeral idea which has taken hold and become a not for profit called KasCare in just over a year,  I thought to cast out the idea to the world of knitters and crocheters and ask them if they would send 8” squares to South Africa where we could make them up into blankets for some of the 1.4 million children orphaned by the twin perils of HIV/AIDS and poverty.  Actually I am in Australia, originally from Zimbabwe, my Aunt lives in South Africa and had told us she regularly bought and gave out cheap blankets at traffic lights to cold children.  

We gave up our jobs and work full time now on KAS.   Nearly 50,000 squares, 3,200 items of clothing have arrived from 3,000 members in 34 countries, mostly the States and Canada.  The program is in about 60 schools internationally and we are thinking about how to create a grass roots movement the equal of Roots and Shoots to raise awareness of this mostly hidden but terrible human tragedy, the orphans of Africa."

I thought I'd share Sandy's work here on Magpie's Fancy since I know that some of you are knitters and crocheters, too.  You can visit the site to find instructions for knitting and sending squares.

Here, too, is a poem written by Sandy's husband, Roger McDonald, and collected in his book Heart Yarns:

NET AFFECT

Why knitting? With a thousand things to choose
of graver consequence I would have thought
that fickle and departed tart, my muse,
might have inspired a more enthralling sport.

But no. So knitting it would have to be.
Two sticks, a length of string and endless time
to make some sense of purl and plain. To me
it seemed a vague and lonely pantomime.

Initially, the battle with disease
looked too unequal. How could knitters armed
with nothing more than needled yarn appease
that monster, AIDS? How could it be disarmed?

A million and a half (or thereabouts),
unparented, abandoned and alone,
hungry, homeless, hopeless, cold. My doubts
soon set about knitting themselves a home

in my gut – a useless site to stitch.
Faithless me. How could I have forgotten
the internet’s electric talking which
energises fibre, yarn and cotton?

Now suddenly your knitting is a rhyme,
a hand-sung hymn, a symphony of clicks
performed by nimble fingers (unlike mine),
a wall of hope in wool instead of bricks.

I’ve come to like your craft, when once I fought
my mother for the right to be outfitted
in any form of garment that I thought
a million miles removed from being knitted.

And like it more for what it represents:
the thin, unbreaking thread of simple love
that salves the small and poor, without pretence.
Is this the proof I search for from above?

Roger McDonald, May 2009

   

Whimsy, Beauty, and Friendship

My last post was about hope.  This one is about what to hold onto when hope is nowhere to be found.  It's an important act, holding on.  There are moments when it would be easier to despair, but in the face of those moments, I look to poems or brownies or Moonstruck or whatever it takes.  Sometimes a smile from a stranger can be enough to carry me from one moment to the next.  Sometimes a pink bicycle will do it.  This post is for anyone who needs to hold on right now.  I'm right here with you.  I'll stand up and pedal.  You can ride on the seat, just like when we were kids.

A few things that made me smile or brought me joy this week:  a tenacious October rose;

a gold-leafed pig in the window at Abacus ;

a stained- and found-glass butterfly in a window made by Laura Fuller ;

a butterfly among the last of the wildflowers on the shore of the island;

a silvered pumpkin on the doorstep at Willa Wirth ;

a box of treasures from my friend Marlowe, including loads of vintage goodies, crafting supplies, and the sweetest pair of fingerless gloves made by her mum.  As lovely Christina would say, "bliss."

Special thanks to Tracy for her inspiring post.

Hope

Hope is like a road in the country; 

there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, 

the road comes into existence.

~Lin Yutang