Finish It Friday ~ Infinity Scarf

This shouldn't really count as something that's finally finished, since it took about an hour to make, two if you count shoveling a path to my sewing machine and ironing the fabric. But I bought the supplies last winter, at the same time I bought the yarn for my poncho, which is kind of fitting, since I finished the very wintery poncho on the second day of summer and I made this very springy scarf well into the fall.



Regardless, I've been wearing it constantly, and it's nice to have a bright splash of spring this time of year. It's made of Liberty lawn on one side—a somewhat economical way to utilize that very dear fabric—and peachy-orange voile on the other



I've been trying to up my scarf game, since I own so very many of them (and I do admire scarfy people), but I'm not great at styling them. So for this one, I went with an infinity style to avoid the conundrum of what to do with the ends. It still might look like I have a blanket thrown around my neck, but I like it anyway.

October 2019 Nightstand

I've started but not gotten into enough to keep reading several books in the last month or so. I feel like a cat kneading and kneading a cushion, trying to find the comfortable sweet spot. When a book has stuck well enough for me to see it through, it's been collection of shorter works.

Alice Munro's Dear Life has been lurking around the house for a good long while. I have a tendency to buy books and let them ripen on the shelves for a few years before I get around to reading them. But I was trying to motivate myself to write short stories earlier this month, so I decided to read short stories and, of a rather large stack, Dear Life rose to the top. I have a love-hate relationship with short stories (the hate part born, perhaps, from reading nothing but during grad school). Sometimes they're these brilliant little capsules of life, and sometimes they're…WTF? Munro's stories in this collection fall into this former category, most of them little slices of slightly strange, slightly obscure, but mostly ordinary lives of characters living in post WWII Canada. I was particularly fascinated by the way in some cases the stories followed a character through years or over most of a life, in just a dozen or two pages. I always feel the compressed length of a short storie necessitates a short timespan, but I see now that it need not. The book ends with a few sketches about the author's own life, in post-WWII Canada, which are every bit as fascinating as the fictional stories.

I wrote a sonnet once, in 12th grade English class. It was about the first Gulf War and had a rather nice metaphor about war planes and birds in it, and it had only one syllable off meter. I was rather proud of that sonnet, and I'm resting on its laurels nearly 30 years later. Then my co-editor in the Literary Reflections department at Literary Mama had to go and write an entire stack of sonnets and put my small effort to shame. Libby Maxey published her debut poetry chapbook, Kairos, this summer, and it waited on my nightstand, I think, until the world outside matched the cold and leafless but red and glistening image on the front cover. I found myself reading each sonnet two or three times, savoring the rich language and right metaphors, untangling the threads of meaning. The formality of the vocabulary and form gives this collection a sense of timelessness, a faint sepia hue of times past, like a poet from history is whispering the words in my ear, at the same time feel very present, with poems about kindergarten and snow days and looking back at one's naive teenage self. It's a gorgeous collection and I wish my friend all good things to come from its publiction.

Where the poems in Kairos are tightly structured, those in Arrival by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor are loose and free-flowing, sometimes arranged in stanzas and sometimes cascading over the page in widely and wildly spaced words. The words themselves are ripe fruits of Caribbean patois, an accent, a history, an identity, as in the oft-repeated "gyal" (girl). The poems are warm and bright with tropical heat and color, but also achingly real with loss and strained relationships. They tell a story of a life that's rich with varied origins and a winding pathway, one that has been hard and beautiful at the same time.

Wild Wednesday ~ Tiny Things

Yesterday, when walking in the woods with my kids, I came across something I've been hoping to see for years: green stain fungus.

Okay, actually I've seen the fungus, Chlorociboria spp., many times, in the form of chunks of wood stained a lovely dark teal. But I haven't seen the fruiting bodies, which are known as green elf cups. And then there they were on this little chunk of wood near the river.


I didn't have my camera or even my phone with me, so I brought the wood home and left it outside under a tree overnight. After a solid soaking from an all-night rainstorm, the fruiting bodies doubled in size, from pin head to peppercorn. I imagine they'll keep growing until they develop the classic goblet shape that gives the species its common name.



In other tiny fruiting body news, today I found on our driveway this dead aspen branch that came down in the storm.

Closer inspection revealed that it was colonized with all kinds of life. Each of these orange blobs of jelly fungus was about the size of a currant. I think they might be very tiny specimens of witches butter, Tremella mesenterica, another type of fungal fruiting body. 

And all over the branch grew this bright golden lichens, which is also fruiting, and I think may be Candelaria fibrosa.



Those round disk thingies are the apothecia, or fruiting bodies. Everyone's getting in on the fruiting act it seems.



We've also had a very tiny visitor to our sunroom this week, who I was going to release outside when it got warm today, but the darn thing went and hid on me. Hopefully I'll find him in time for the next edition of Wild Wednesday.

Time Management Tuesday ~ Prioritizing Myself

There was a question on last week's time management post about how I tracked my time. This is what I did: I made a spreadsheet with half-hour increments down one side, 12 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. and days of the week across the top. I kept the file open on my computer, and throughout the day, as I switched from one task to another, I filled in how I spent that time, trying to stick to broad categories. It got harder in the evenings and on weekends, when I don't usually use my computer. I'd try to hold in my head how I spent those hours and pop into the spreadsheet and fill it out as best I could at bedtime on weeknights and a few times throughout the day on weekends.

After one week, I really didn't think I'd want to carry on with the tracking. It felt way too neurotic, and I also felt like someone was looking over my shoulder, making sure I didn't waste any time. But I also saw the value of knowing how much time I spend writing, and how quickly I write. It was also helpful to know how much time I spend editing, so that I'd be better able to estimate how much to charge if anyone were ever to offer to pay for my services. It's also good to know how much time I put into my volunteer activities, so that in the future, I'll know where to draw the line. So for now I'm carrying on with the tracking, but only during "workday" hours and anytime I do work outside 8-5.



I don't always sit down and work on either writing, editing, or volunteering during working hours. Sometimes I go hiking. Sometimes I have appointments or errands to family things to deal with. But, when I do spend the day on my laptop, I try to follow a rule I put into place earlier this summer: do my own work first. For a long time, I'd clean out emails and approve essays and write things for other people and try to make sure everything I had to get done got done before I started working on my own, personal writing. The trouble with this technique is all that stuff is never, ever done. New emails pop into the inbox every second. There's always a backup of deferred tasks. I could very easily give all of myself to others, my family, my nonprofit organizations, my rare paying clients, and never get anything done that I want to get done.

I've read in several places about being clear about what's important versus what's urgent. There are always urgent things that want to command our attention—other people's needs and priorities—and it's very easy to continually triage so that the urgent tasks always slip ahead in line in front of the important things. The trouble is, there will always be more urgent things to take up your time and space and attention, and if you let them, they will completely crowd out the important work of writing that memoir or starting that novel.

So now I try to give myself an hour and half to two hours every morning to work on my own stuff, and even if it doesn't look much like work, as I page through old journals in search of material, and a full inbox is calling out for my attention, I stick to it. And do you know what? All those urgent matters are still there when I'm done, and they get taken care of in a reasonable amount of time.

Finish it Friday ~ Jeweled Scarabs Cowl

When my parents came to visit last month, my mom brought me a two-year-old issue of Knitting Traditions magazine, one with a scarab cowl on the cover, knowing I have a thing for Ancient Egypt and Victorian lady Egyptologists, including one who inspired this pattern. We also visited a lot of yarn stores while they were here, and in each of them I kept my eyes peeled for just the right yarn for this project. I found it in Camden, two skeins of luscious alpaca-wool-silk blend, one in midnight blue, the other chartreuse, one of my favorite color combinations.

It's been a while since I knitted in two colors, and I was a little worried about the tension, but it came out beautifully. And I forgot how much I love this kind of knitting (is it Fair Isle? Or does that need to have those stripey patterns with the exes?). It came together super fast (and gave me an excuse for extra TV time), and I finished in just over two weeks, a record for me, I'm sure.

I knitted a little faster than normal toward the end because, as I neared the top of the cowl, my balls of yarn were shrinking at an alarming pace. I was afraid I might need to get more, and since E and Z had a cross-country meet in Camden that Friday, it would be very convenient (other than the fact of having to buy yarn for two inches of pattern) to get it at that time. So I was trying to either finish or run out before the time came. I didn't quite make it, but it was clear that there wouldn't be enough blue. The green was a little iffy, but to be safe I bought a skein of that, too.

Turns out I didn't need the green after all (just barely making it to the end without running out), but since I have most of a skein of blue yarn anyway, I might as well keep the green and knit something else, since the color is go gorgeous and the yarn so very soft. A pair of fingerless gloves, perhaps?

Pattern notes, such as they are, on my Ravelry page.

Among the Birds and Butterflies

After a warm, dry, sunny September, October took a firm hand and reminded us all that the party's over, with gray skies, rainy days, frosty nights. Any mention of wool sweaters, warm hats, or woodstoves has me wanting to make like the woodchuck, tunnel underground, and hibernate until the sun comes out again next summer. Don't even say the words "pumpkin spice" in my hearing.

But back near the end of September, when the sky was still blue and the air not out to kill you, I got to spend a glorious day on the coast with my favorite birder. We went in search of rare birds—oddities that drop into Maine only during migration or that have veered north from their usual territories.

We saw the birds we hoped to see—American oystercatcher, royal tern, Capsian tern, and black skimmer—plus we got to observe some of the more typical shorebirds from amazingly close range. And we enjoyed a beautiful day outdoors, with no expectations or obligations.

As we moved around to different bird viewing locations, I couldn't help but notice other creatures on the wing—monarch butterflies. Wherever asters were in bloom at least two or three butterflies hovered, tanking up for their migration ahead. This abundance meshed with my observations of more monarchs this summer, both around our house and, especially, near the coast.

As we hiked along a trail that led to a point of land, we passed a native plants garden, mostly growing tall New England American asters, and there, fluttering among and dangling from the purple blossoms were more monarchs than I've ever seen in my life—dozens of them. Sharing the blooms were several painted ladies as well. Drunk on nectar, the butterflies let us walk right among them, completely undisturbed by our presence, more interested, I imagine, in imbibing the calories needed for their 3000 mile journey to Mexico. 

Just a couple of years ago, I feared I'd seen my last monarch. The caterpillars didn't appear in our fields in the numbers they had in previous summers. At least one or two years went by when I didn't see a single orange-and-black butterfly. Like all wild creatures we share the earth with, monarchs are struggling with habitat loss and fragmentation and a changing climate, and milkweed, the caterpillar's food source, has been disappearing from prime breeding areas in the Midwest thanks to pesticide use on roundup-ready crops.


I don't know what this roost of several dozen means for the future of the monarch butterfly, and I don't want to trade in false hope. But to have witnessed that big little gathering of an astonishing creature was a gift, one I hope that humanity doesn't squander.

This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.

Wild Wednesday ~ Playing With Words in Nature

Today I got to spend a lovely couple of hours outdoors with a group of high school creative writing students. We practiced using all of our senses to describe a place, wrote a praise poem about a small natural object we collected, and then we took a walk along a poetry trail created by our wonderfully talented and energetic hostess, who happens to be the students' teacher. She's made beautifully decorated pieces of wood painted with lines from the Mary Oliver poem "Sleeping in the Forest" were mounted to trees along our way, and I gave the students the assignment of choosing a line that spoke to them and using it as a jumping-off point for free writing.



The line that struck me was "pockets full of lichens and seeds" and went a little fanciful with my free write:

Autumn trips across the land,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
She casts acorns in a game of dice—
snake eyes mean winter's on its way.
Where her toes touch down,
mushrooms spring up—pink, gold, purple, cinnabar—
peeking through their coverlet of leaves.
The mosses, though—sphagnum, cushion, club—
resist her touch, glowing emerald green
in the slanting sun.
And the tiny white pine, its wiry needles
gray-green but defiant.

That's all I had time for before we had to round the students up and herd them back to school.