Two months ago I wrote here about beauty and about the storks nesting in England for the first time in a hundred years. It seems a long time ago.

Yesterday, for the first time in over four months, I ate a meal I had not myself cooked. It was a risk and we will not likely do it again any time soon. Most of our favorite places to buy food are closed (Ove NW and Pearl Bakery) or they have demonstrated a certain level of complacence or carelessness. And I am a decent cook and baker myself. Yes, I can bake a cherry pie starting with a hallock of sour cherries if I could get to the Farmers Market to buy them. I was baking sourdough before the pandemic. Usually by this time in the summer I have frozen pesto and huckleberries and the makings of pies. Instead my freezer looks barren.

I miss the Portland Farmers’ Market. Our whirlwind grocery shopping trips are nothing like working our way around the market stalls, finding fresh masa and produce. I cannot find organic whole wheat flour anywhere. I miss cilantro and parsley. There are carrots and a single bok choy in my crisper. I still have two yellow onions and two green onions. I have more than a quart of salal berries from our hedge. The berries will become freezer jam this afternoon—just a little honey, some fresh lime juice, maybe cinnamon. I lie awake thinking about how to use what I have.

The food reveals a gap in my life almost as large as not seeing family, but that gap feels like one thing and my family is many.

I miss them all.

My weaving comes in furious fits and starts. I wove forty inches the other day, beginning right after our walk and continuing until after eight in the evening to finish the first shawl on the “Strawberry” warp.

I use many colors—more than a dozen different colors in the warp alone. I play dark against light and then repeat the contrast in the colors I choose for the weft. Half the weft in the first shawl is one skein from Slovakia. It is two-ply but very fine and wonderfully and softly variable from palest pink to a true rich strawberry. I played this against a range of palest greens and straw yellow and variable skeins with pale blue and yellow.

The colors never show quite as they should in the weaving picture, but this shawl is sweet and pale and especially dear because of the beautiful handspun yarns I used in both warp and weft.

The second shawl was nearly dark green—not part of my original vision for this warp but I had wanted to make a red and green shawl. I wound off skeins and wove a couple inches and it did not work at all—making a muddy color. The strawberry colors were completely overwhelmed, so I unwove the work, which takes twice as long as weaving it to begin with.

The second shawl was supposed to be very bright, but super-bright colors tend to scare me a little. Nevertheless, I had the colors in my head and it was time to follow through so I wound off more skeins and went to work.

The clear red and the bright space-dyed yarn work just as I hoped they might, forming a clear pattern in tasty colors with lines of candy in the pale. I usually have a pretty clear vision of what I want. Lots of staring at colors until I figure out what to do. Even the hesitation and attempt with green has made the use of those forest colors more clear in my mind. When it is their turn, I will weave with more confidence than I had.

 

Sometimes we just can’t know what we want, not for sure, until we try. When my husband and I first moved to my family home on the Oregon coast, we were not sure we could manage. Work opportunities were severely limited, our friends and family lived in another state, the local community was primarily elderly people and surfers from affluent families. But the ocean . . . the dark sky at night . . . the birds . . .

Perhaps we are managing as well as we do because we never have had a local peer group. We are now the older crowd, elderly by contrast. A friend in Washington State misses movies in theaters. Gary’s high school friend cannot leave Seattle because he and his sisters take turns caring for their 102 year old father. A past student has found a better job working in New York at a nonprofit but sat on the opposite side of the garage while we talked wearing masks. We hear from our sons and others by phone and email. Each of us doing what we can, what we are able to do and need to do, and chaffing against limitation in different ways.

It is the contrast that makes the pattern interesting after all. The mix instead of being all the same. It is true in food and weaving, quilts and people too. Lives. We bring color and flavor to perfection. Each of us contributes a note of tenderness or sharpness, sweet and sour, silence and cacophony. Hear, taste, feel, see, shout us all together.

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The next warp might be browns and blues with a hint of violet. Green will likely follow, but I would like to order black and dark smokey blue-gray . . . these colors on my wall.

The “Soul Queen” painting never was found. I do not have permission to post that image here, but the artist Jeanie Tomanek has sent me a print. As soon as the pandemic eases, I will have it framed. In the mean time another of her works did arrive safely and it hangs where I can see it while I weave. It is “Bramble.”

 

 

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