A much needed office clean out uncovers all sorts of little goodies like these hats, among other knitted gems. People used to wonder and ask me all the time, how I had the time to "make all this stuff". I now wonder that myself. How in the world.
I've slowed down and moved on to other things, but the knitting hasn't gone away completely.
I'm in the midst of a custom order, two hats, one with a Porsche, the other with a Holstein cow, not kidding. People know what they want.
I'm making raglan-sleeved sweater for daughter #3 with plans for one for daughter #2 right after.
Will there be one for myself? That remains the unanswered question.
The nice part now is there's no pressure. No shows, no market, no late nights. My own pace, on my time, what little there is of it.
These past six months have been some of the most difficult, knitting if anything should be a comfort rather than another added stressor. I know I will look back and it will all make so much more sense than right now when I'm still standing right on top of it. Looking forward.
I think it must be hard sometimes, to be the youngest, to be the littlest of three. I've always joked she's not only my littlest but my loudest, ensuring she never gets forgotten. But more than that she makes her presence known much before the other two.
She is glued to me, sitting at my feet as I type, talking incessantly until I remind her the 300th time to focus on homework. It is nothing I planned for, but then all of this has been so unexpected in so many ways.
She melted down yesterday twice, consumed with tears over her sister's piano lessons, the focus on someone else besides her. And while on the one hand I have to remember the egocentricities of the child mind, how all life is somehow about her at every moment in time, I couldn't pass up the teaching moment with a long, deep snuggle in a big oversized chair, while thumbing through magazines for distraction.
I laced up my running shoes again after taking a couple of weeks off to nurse a little injury. I'm surprised I could start again so soon and hope my ambition doesn't get the best of me. There was a sudden "POP!" and a hobble, and fire and loss of use and that sudden feeling of old that accompanies injury. I really hate it.
"Your body is trying to tell you something" a good friend offered as he shared his marathon training stories and weekly mileage.
"Said the preacher to the choir," I thought and kept to myself. Frustrated. Old.
I'd only just bought these shoes, my favorite kind that I buy year after year so I could throw my trashed ones out. I had just started having racing visions for the first time, but now....
Time will tell. Time and ice and perseverance and a whole lotta stretching beforehand. I'm just glad to be back out there on my trail.
My brain wakes up when I run. I write in my head as I go. Sometimes it is prayer. Yesterday, I asked for forgiveness, for the ways in which I am hurtful, yet do not see it. A good run.
We pulled the music back out yesterday, me and the kids, a whole great big stack of it. Mostly things I can't believe I used to play, case in point, the piece above. I used to play it flawlessly, without a thought, without thinking it was any big deal at all. Only now do I realize what I once had because I've lost it all. All that breath, all the tone, only the memory of how to play the notes still lingers, indelible in my brain and fingers from so many years of playing.
But the music will be with me forever, stirring in my head, I am drawn to it, I rise and fall with the melodies, they bring back memories and feelings long forgotten.
Frustrated and dissapointed I picked up the guitar instead, a softer, gentler sound and deep. My fingertips are numb today from plucking along with youtube, and I marvel at how easy it is now to access a simple lesson. I am not good. I am a novice with an ear. It's a place to start.
The girls marched around the house the rest of the afternoon with the mouthpiece of my flute, trying to see if they could produce a sound other than a squawk, surprised that their mother knew how to do more than make dinner, do laundry and apply band aids. And I have come to know myself in a different way too, regarding something I never took the time to look back very closely upon but knowing always that it was there, this other side, this other world.
So now I try something new, it's never too late they say, but of course what I'd really love to be able to do is play like this...
