A sketch for Green

A quick sketch for Project Spectrum in a park

Trees on a stormy day

Trees on a stormy day

Originally uploaded by rjknits

This whole week has felt like this photo. Gloomy, filled with overcast skies, and then rain. It’s reminded me of when I lived next to a creek and as I would drive home at night during heavy spring rains, frogs jumped on my windshield and then jumped into the dark fields nearby.

My environment isn’t that rustic now, but I have the excitement of avoiding pedestrians who are darting back and forth on the yellow line in the middle of 4-lane highways. In pitch blackness, it’s a challenge.

These days I’m fascinated how light catches the bare trees and outlines the bark so you can see it from a vast distance. Sadly, I’m normally without camera when this happens. Just as I was without a camera when I saw a double rainbow and 3 turkey vultures serenely flying over a parking garage in a suburb of DC on Tuesday night. And then the skies opened up and there was golf sized hail on my windshield (but no frogs or pedestrians, thank heaven)!

Just Call Me a Tinker

I just tinked back to the 2nd row of the pattern on the Honeycomb sweater. I couldn’t keep going forward without fixing my error. The only other vaguely interesting thing I did today was a morning spent cleaning up the yard and pulling out English ivy (darn invasive plant). So I’ve been filking along in my head with “Tink so good. C’mon baby let it tink so good. ‘Cause sometimes knits don’t go as they should so baby, rip so good.”

I know this is riveting stuff.

First Music

I remember sitting on the floor, wearing a buckled shoe on one foot and on the other a sock. In front of me was a square tin box with yellow, red, black, and blue diamonds painted on it and with a handle made of metal and a ball of wood. The square box was a hard thing for me to struggle with, holding it steady while I cranked the handle to listen to the creak of the mechanism and the galloping tinny sounds of “Pop Goes the Weasel” until the lid of the box flew off to reveal a clown made of crinkly paper with a bobbing, heavy face and outstretched arms.

If I dig further back, I remember being tucked into bed with a teddy bear that played a lullaby. The clockwork ticked away underneath the bear’s body until the key on its back when still. The bear broke when I was very young, and it was featured in photos from my first Christmas. I certainly have other memories, of people singing and playing the piano (my mother) or chanting silly rhymes over and over again (my father, who can appreciate music and sings quietly among the congregation at church, but rarely sings solo).

In each of these moments of memory, I’m rewarded with a reminder of how tactile music can be. It’s not just the sounds, but also the biting sharpness of the edge of a jack-in-the box as you crank the key ["Brahms' Lullaby"]. It’s the woolly warmth of a soft baby’s toy that’s meant to encourage drowsiness. It’s the melody of a folk song ["Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley"] with the smell of chocolate cake in the oven and a bowl to lick. At live performances, it’s the feeling of being swept off your feet by the vibrations of the pipe organ behind your chair ["A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"]. Or the swoosh of air moving your hair as singers rush past singing the opening song of the second act [a medley of songs from Hair, including "Let the Sun Shine In"].

It’s this tactility, of acting within the moment of the music, that makes me join up for chorus and daydream about taking time off to catch a musical in NYC. To me, there are no performances of music that are just about the music. If nothing else, there is the feeling of open space and the hushed motions of listeners in the audience. So how about you? Do you find music to be just purely an effect of sound? Or do you feel as though you are living more deeply within life’s experience while singing, playing, or listening to a musical piece?

Bye, Mr. K.

Thanks for 30+ years of memories, listening to the game on the car radio or watching it on TV. Your voice reminded me of lemonade, lazy days down by the lake, and arguing baseball with my cousins.

Happy Spring

Wishing everyone a Happy Easter.

Or a happy Passover, fertility festival, or just general walk in the park to celebrate there being a wee bit more sun in the skies.

Me, I hope to be together enough to go on a little tiny road trip with the Gardener to hear good music (hopefully) and sing along with some hymns. Barring that, I’m going to go on a 1 mile trip to a public garden and sit out on a park bench for a while and pretend it’s warm enough not to wear a coat.

Utilitarianism and Green

The color green was popular, back before my Grandmother removed the paint and refinished the family antiques. (Anyone who watches the Antiques Roadshow knows that’s a no-no, but my attitude is — it wasn’t as though it was “antique” when she first owned it.) I can’t quite figure out if the color green was a fad in the Victorian era, or if people from later eras wanted an inexpensive, tough paint color to use to decorate their houses’ exterior woodwork.

On the streets of Baltimore, there’s a lot of green trim. It goes well with the red/orange brick houses you find throughout the city, so it seems to dress up and soften the brick. This is a great image to keep in mind when selecting colors that go with burnt orange. What do you think?

Time Travelers

I was driving up a one way street in the evening, past the Basilica, when I stopped for a red light. A movement on the left, from behind the Basilica, caught my eye.

He came down the access alleyway, an African American man on a bicycle, possibly coming home from a late night at work. His mouth was set in a line beneath a pencil thin mustache. He was wearing a dark grey tweed driving hat, dark pea coat, a scarf, and slacks the color of the charcoal night. He seemed to have spent more care on his appearance than is common now. As though he was going on a romantic assignation, or merely wanted to connect with a more genteel time, without looking overdressed.

I sat and watched as he glided silently on his bicycle toward the stopped traffic, passed the black gates with gold tips, and turned right. As he glided off the wrong way on the one way street, I sat and thought about how timeless people could appear, as though equipped to step across the frame of forward moving time.

And then the light changed, and I drove off toward the moonlit streets and flowered trees of the park in front of me.

Green world

Green world

Originally uploaded by rjknits

The grass is up, and it feels like Spring outdoors.
Photo taken in Bel Air, MD, at a graveyard, at around 1 PM (you can tell by the shadow).

Today was the first day spent wearing a short sleeved sweater. Yesterday was spent discovering the Montgomery County Women’s Farm Cooperative in Bethesda, and shopping at their farm stand. Really tasty Turkish food, and a welcome place to go indoors out of the 40 mph winds.

New Photo of an Old Project

Leaf Lace Shawl

Revisiting an old project can be wonderful. This was my Olympic shawl challenge back in 2006.

Stats:

• 1 skein of Blue Heron Rayon Flake yarn bought at Vulcan’s Rest Fibers in Chesapeake City
• 1 pattern by Evelyn A. Clark [Leaf Lace Shawl]
• 1 month of dropped stitches during the Winter Olympics

Results: lots of compliments, a respect for the slippery nature of rayon lace weight, and something that triggers memories of 2006, when we lived in the old house.