It's not even June and already so much is lush and blooming (or about to bloom, as the very pregnant peonies can attest)....we'll be eating strawberries before the week is out; the potentillas--a housewarming gift from my older son and his wife--are dancing with sweet, small yellow flowers; and there are...roses. I'm not a fan of roses. What can I say? They seem so fussy, so lace-doily-and-porcelain-teacup. I'm a daisy-yarrow-sunflower person.....bright and simple. I don't want pinks and rose reds; I want in-your-face reds, blushing peaches and rival-the-sun oranges, regal purples, end-of-the-rainbow golds. However, the house's previous owners apparently loved roses. I dig 'em up, and they fight back every year, thorny stalks taunting me, but this year there are actually flowers. They have no scent, but I'll admit they're pretty, like a Victorian settee....not inviting, but a glimpse through the keyhole (as my friend from Greece says) into a time past. I'll still be digging them up yet again, but maybe it can wait until they're done blooming.
Another weekend has come and gone. Saturday I took a great Country Wool class, the first session of Beast to Beret (aka Spin to Knit). We washed, dyed and carded fleece, under Claudia's careful and carefree tutelage, in preparation for spinning and eventually knitting with it. There's something deeply, organically satisfying about being so literally hands-on from start to finish, starting with a grubby beige fleece and ending with brilliant blue-green roving (with the potential to one day be a beret) that feels akin to alchemy, metamorphosis--and metaphorical, to boot. That said, pondering the mermaid-undersea-colored fleece drying outside yesterday, I realized that when time is so rare and precious a commodity, one has to choose carefully how and when to spend it. If one is having a passionate love affair, which is the more appealing use of those stolen moments--cleaning the bathroom or taking a long, hot, candlelit bubblebath for two? Gratitude to Goo Goo, the Cormo cross who shared fleece with me--and Claudia who shared her seemingly limitless knowledge--aside, I'd rather--for now--savor the yarns we're spinning together (and the tales they make) in a sunset-bathed room, fondle and caress each other as scarves and blankets and sweaters take shape. Someday, when time is more ally than foe, I'll linger lovingly over wet fleece and dye baths, but for now I'll take my passion a little closer to ready-made, thank you! So I'm opting to skip the Massachusetts Sheep and Wool Fair, but looking forward to class one of the Percentage Knitting class later this week; by the end of Summer I'll have knit a whole sweater! This is one of those looonnnggg weeks of 11 hour work days, but I have a four-day weekend beginning Friday--yay!!!! Tomato planting, here I come!
Yesterday was my 49th birthday. I have always been a celebrant of birthdays; I believe in never going to work on your birthday, making it a day (or as one friend and her partner do, making it an entire week) of indulgence. And age has never troubled me. Age happens. But this year for unknown reasons, I had virtually no interest. My sister called it an anti-birthday, but it was a more appropriately a non-birthday. Cooked much of the morning, did household chores, and was mostly kind of depressed. I requested that it be a no-present day, but my beloved did surprise me with amazingly rich, sweet-with-a-hint-of-tang Dark Chocolate Chevre brownies from the Vermont Brownie Company (a drawing of a smiling sheep serves as their logo!), and I even got her to dance with me for a moment or two out on the porch after a crabcake dinner. But I just wasn't feeling the day. Could it be 50 staring me down now? Am I finally succumbing to a fear of age? Or is it 'just' that the constant battle with time is suddenly feeling personal and becoming hand-to-hand combat?
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