An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
I took guitar lessons in my teens, and that was a long time ago. The late 60s. I still have the guitar, an unusually sweet Aria nylon-string that I haven’t played in fifty years. Gary cares for it. My lessons from Cathy Mack at Shoreline Music focussed on Childe ballads that Joan Baez was singing. I could finger-pick along with singing “The Trees They Do Grow High” and “The Cherry Tree Carole.” Anyone could play “the House of the Rising Sun” and pretty much every garage band of the day covered that one, though it really only made sense with a woman singing it.
Somehow, that brings me to “Jolene.”
Here are the skeins for the next warp I’m winding. The “Rose Petal” warp is Koigu, which, despite my efforts to find something else, works best as warp and fringe. I’m not sure where that leftover bit of bittersweet orange will land. The weft will be almost entirely handspun. My goal over the last couple of years has been to weave down my stash. I had eight medium bins and a large one. I now have just two medium bins left plus handspun, and I am highly skilled craftsperson in my weaving, not an artist.Continue reading →
I had thought I would stop running after last year’s Bridge run—a 10k over the Columbia River. But even before I completed that run, slower than I’d hoped, I knew I wouldn’t stop. I love running and I’ve missed it terribly in the past when injury kept me walking. Then, after nearly four years of perfect health, Gary and I went to a movie in a theater last month and caught Covid. Coming back has been tough. So I began to wonder if quitting was coming up on me, like it or not.
I got my regular 2-mile Friday run last week in Portland. More than half that run is downhill, but though my route varies it generally begins and ends on an uphill slope. That was the second time a homeless Black man has paused long enough to tell me “good job!” He said he’d run marathons and missed running but had injured out and most recently been told he would be able to run again. I hope he does.
The poet William Stafford made a 3-mile run part of his morning writing routine. He’d run, come home to write, including an aphorism and a new poem every morning, and then use the rest of the day to revise and do whatever we people do all day. I used to hold out his example to myself. Stafford didn’t write a good poem every day of the year, but by the end he had 365 drafts to choose from and the odds were in his favor that he’d find good ones worth revising. It’s one reason he was as productive as he was with 20,000 words of daily writing and a truly astonishing list of publications. Wikipedia: “The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, ‘ “You don’t have to / prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready / for what God sends.” ‘ ” Have a look at his book about writing, Writing the Australian Crawl. I have it somewhere here or there and first read it in 1990, three years before his death, which reminds we that I wasn’t yet running in those days.
Running is easier than waiting, and right now I am waiting to hear about my novel submissions. I reordered and revised that novel three weeks ago, six years on since I began writing it. I informed two presses that I had a new and better draft to share. One promptly wrote back: Yes, please! Then I withdrew all the submissions I could find a way to withdraw. A handful are still out there. I have a half dozen presses on my to-submit list when they open to submissions. One of those opens in January of 2025 and it is a favorite small press from way back. Another closed to submissions for this entire year and I don’t know when or if they will reopen next year. A friend in Seattle is a few months behind me in the same process.
It all takes time.
On April 1st, a crew is coming to tear out a wall of our bedroom condo as part of the process of repiping our entire building. The work won’t be completed before summer. In the mean time I should be knitting but I have recently spent hours completing the “Dusk” warp in two distinctive shawls.
Here is the most recent work from my loom: Two shawls woven on the same hand-dyed Canadian Merino warp. The one on the left has a weft of handspun alpaca and handspun wool with some silk. The one on the right has a particularly delightful hand-dyed yarn with a handspun/hand-dyed that provides the color shifts. Both are soft, but the one with alpaca is more subtle in color and thicker and it blocked out wider than the other.
I should never have mentioned that very popular pop star. It led to frustrating exchanges until I took the post down. Today began with positive covid tests. I am not in the mood.
Ten handwoven wool shawls folded above. I have these ten and six others elsewhere and the ones I use: three blankets and an afghan made by seaming lengths together and the three shawls I use myself—one because it was flawed and (honestly) the other two I just grabbed because they were handy to use on a cold day and they became mine to keep.* Continue reading →
When you live more than five miles from the nearest small and overpriced grocery store, fifteen miles from the nearest full grocery store (also overpriced), and thirty-five miles from Costco, shopping during the pandemic simply played on your habits of shopping rarely and large.
Shopping locally in our tourist economy meant the our monthly drive to a large city farmers’ market and even the city stores considered overpriced were relative bargains for us. Whole Foods prices were in line with or lower than what we found locally and better quality and more variety.
Now that we spend nights In Portland, we have three or four favorite grocery stores within easy walking distance. We love New Seasons, Fred Meyer is cheaper for some things, and there’s always Zupans when we want something special. But the habits of nearly forty-five years without easy access to such stores are still a powerful influence. The toughest to overcome is the most recent: ordering online.
Buying too much and ordering online are hard habits to break. Yesterday I made a vegetarian lasagna that turned out really well. I’m not pressed for time as I was when I was teaching and I am not cooking for two growing boys as well as ourselves. That lasagna will provide meals for Gary and I for three days…
During the recent perilous weather in the Pacific NW, we stayed home and I cooked from what I had in freezer, fridge, and pantry. I also ordered the organic whole wheat noodles I used for the lasagna. I have five more boxes of flat noodles in my drawer and six pounds of whole wheat angel hair pasta. I’m set for a while.
I finished a warp this month and plan to begin another this week. The overall goal is to use up much of my yarn stash, but then I ordered a skein of yarn a couple weeks ago. That gorgeous bright handspun fits in with a warp I was planning, but interferes with the important goal of cutting back my yarn stash.
406 yards Handspun SW Merino/Silk (75/25) in “Color Blast Fun Run” colorway from Etsy. $49 from MimiHandspun and worth every penny. I don’t make money weaving with yarn like this, but it is a pleasure nonetheless.
I need to buy less.
It feels like I’ve done this before. Haven’t I vowed to cut back on purchases? Haven’t I actually done that from time to time?
February needs to be a no-purchase month. Food is okay. No clothing, no yarn, no fabric, no books. I have plenty of everything. I can afford to swear off all unnecessary purchases. It’s a short month. My pantry shelves look leaner and tidier from not shopping much this month. My beach closet is very lean from a recent culling. I need to continue making progress with the yarn and quilting fabrics. I can resist Liberty cottons and batik’s for a month. I can. I probably can.
I’ve had almost everything here for several years—not at long as what is shown right which dates back decades.I wear only the black dress on left and the purple velvet dress (for special occasions) but love the kimonos/
Cutting back on purchases is like cutting back on food. I can recall eating as a child until my stomach hurt. And I was a thin child because I walked and ran everywhere. It’s different as an adult. It’s different as a retired adult in nasty weather where I go out but for an hour instead of three hours, and I eat because I cooked too much. I learned when I shifted over my diet to a healthier balance in 2020, that feeling a little hungry is a good thing.
There are projects waiting for my attention, and I really could learnt to cook for two if I troubled to do it. I have more books in my to-read stack(s) than I ever have had in my entire life. I can cut the shawl to make a pillow cover. I can put on the neutral warp. I can cast on the sweater I promised myself a dozen years ago—the yarn is right there. Ideas for quilts swimming about in my head do not require any fabric other than what I have stored.
April will be Camp NaNo and I will work on short stories. Between now and then I can make progress on projects: three more warps if I am quick, a knitted something, and two sewing projects. With discipline, I can avoid purchasing anything other than food for four weeks. That’s what I’ll do.
I will not buy yarn, a rosebush, black wool pants, more socks, food in bulk, magazines, books, fabric even though it love it and it’s on sale, a new chair or two, a used table for Gary’s coffee (he’s using the window-ledge in the new living room configuration), knitting notions, or anything I cannot consume within a week. I promise.
In a two-year-old article, Ann Patchett explains that as a teenager she did not consider cream soup spoons essential when she bought sterling flatware as a 14-year old. I do. I will say that I already gave away all the family silver and have bought only odd pieces which I intend to use daily in the new year—using her sterling was something my grandfather’s third wife, Genevieve, did too. Patchett wonders what to do with her dozen champagne flutes that will never find a dozen people wanting champagne, but we have kept fourteen flutes purchased over the years on anniversaries. Though we have no better idea when or if they might be used, they line a high shelf and give me pleasure every time I take down a plain water glass. Throw them on a beach after I die.
Fabrics sorted for a quilt I made for our oldest grandchild a couple of years ago.Continue reading →
“Janet Sobel (May 31, 1893 – November 11, 1968), born Jennie Olechovsky, was a Ukrainian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter whose career started mid-life, at age forty-five[2] in 1938. Sobel pioneered the drip painting technique that directly influenced Jackson Pollock. She was credited as exhibiting the first instance of all-over painting seen by Clement Greenberg, a notable art critic.”—Wikipedia
When her father was killed in a pogrom, she, with her midwife mother and siblings immigrated to the United States. Here she married quite young, raised five children, and began painting at age 37. In the following years she created a revolutionary way to paint and to approach painting.
Two problems with this. The easy one; I did in fact know Janet Sobel’s name, though I am inclined to misspell it and like generations of students taking Art History in college we never studied a single female painter. The stickier issue is that a someone already wrote this essay.
I am not going to share the cover design, but I cannot resist sharing the painting that inspired me. It is the painting that matters:
Woman In The Weeds (2023) by Ruth Hunter
Thank you, Ruth!
Ruth Hunter is a painter in oils and cold wax who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. I first met her and fell for her work in the Waterstone Gallery earlier this year. She has chosen to allow me to use the image above—a generous choice. To me this woman sitting patiently in the weeds is Gena, my primary character in All the Daughters Sing. I love Ruth’s work, from the first one I saw to everything on her website, but this one… pure magic for me.
Go have a look at the work of Ruth Hunter. She has a show coming up next month (November 2023) in the Citron Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina. Wish I were there.
I have received three cards and a Rubic’s heart [below], which was a little scary but I figured it out. Wish I could figure out who sent it! Both sons deny knowledge. Seventy-one today.
I was working on this shawl during the gallery opening. It has a really lovely handspun in the weft. The next one that I am working on now is more toward indigo and has already been sold. Fingers crossed for me because I want to buy a painting if I make enough to afford it.Continue reading →
A slice of my weaving is second from the left. Unfortunately, if you went to the CBAA website this week, you will not find this image. The shows being promoted on the home page did not include what was opening yesterday evening. I worked on my loom in the gallery most of yesterday, 2-6pm and got a lot done. I enjoyed talking to visitors, but no sales at all [Sad face].I have fifteen weavings and a quilt and my loom in the show. It was 82° yesterday—miserable for me! I will be weaving most days the gallery is open, though not tomorrow because of my run. Today a high of 71° is in the forecast—thank goodness!My little island of workspace at the back of the gallery. This was Wednesday as I was warping the loom—most of the way through the reed. I began weaving on Friday afternoon.Early yesterday on the beach. Color over the ocean!My favorite blue.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 