I’ve been traveling every weekend, to Ostara, and Maryland Sheep and Wool, and Beltaine, and next to the river shore with the girls, and then south to see dear friends.  And planting, and moving plants, and having lots of work done on the house.  And, all the while, trying to get my mind back in its own place.  Not reading, and not knitting, and not cooking, and not sleeping, and not generally having the sort of spring I usually have.  Everything will settle down, I’m sure, and I feel incredibly fortunate to know and love the people in my life.  I’ll try to drag out the camera and download some photos to prove, well, something.  To someone.

My spring to-do list.

Plant dozens of pansies:

Check

Wait for tulips to bloom, and rejoice when they do.

Check!

Expand my personal forest:

Delayed by rain . . .

Another weekend camping trip in the valley, and another wonderful family gathering at the foot of Bull Run Mountain, and another utter failure to take any pictures.  There were tiny blooming wild flowers and happy dogs and wonderful friends, but you’ll just have to trust me on that.  And then there were nieces and a nephew and a happy dog who was once so very unhappy, and brothers and sisters and parents and aunts and a new pond and little fish and lily pads stretching their stems up through the water and great food and a lot of joyous laughter.

There are also some amazing new boots, but I bet I can capture those on film since they are attached to my feet every day or two.  And lots of blooming happening in our garden, and a pleasant amount of rain to make sure the flowers look just so in front of a lens.  This weekend we get together with friends to make an album of photos and remembrances for Mike’s family.  Next weekend we gather with everyone we can find to celebrate and mourn him with his parents and family.  I’m just trying to buck up and keep busy.

I’m trying to pick a new knitting project or two to start; I’ve sketched out a great leather-working project that is so long in coming; I’m still stalled on the cat’s paw rug; I’m most of the way through some boring socks; and I can’t really do much reading yet.  I worry that grieving has remained the top item on my day’s list of accomplishments for far too many days, but I really can’t fathom another way to experience the loss of someone as wonderful as Mike.  So I’m trying to take it very easy on myself.  Not to worry–I don’t have my head in the oven, and Scott and I and all of Mike’s other friends and loved ones are bring careful to check in on each other and tell great stories about our guy and know that he wouldn’t tolerate half of our whinging.  I am just very, very aware that all of us who knew and loved him can no longer deny that death is unavoidable even for us and none of us get to pretend that being one of us is any sort of shield, and what makes it worse is that he’s not sticking it out to the end with his tribe to keep us from being morose.

I liked that immortality trip a lot, you know.  The poetry and songs and mythology and the knitting and sewing are all such obvious grabs at immortality and word fame–if I tried to deny that I know a bunch of people who would laugh in my face.  And yet . . . my hardest and most therapeutic activity at the moment is writing a thing I’m writing about Mike, and also about Deri, and Michelle, and Captian Jim, and Uncle Joe, and Grandpap, and my Grandmother, and James, and so many other people I love but don’t get to see ever again.  And the thing I’m writing is actually a translation of a thing someone else originally started composing 2400 years ago or so, and that other someones learned and changed and improved and loved and sang out to their people.   Because I want them to be remembered, but I want to be remembered with them, as one of them.  Someone who you can’t quite distinguish in the fog of time and language, but whose mouth definitely formed the words just so, and whose neck bent like this when she laughed, and whose walk was all the more right because of an old injury or two, which seemed to vanish when she beat out her rhythms on the floorboards, and whose back was strong and whose hands were deft, and whose eyes were just that color, just like yours.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of racing around without managing to take many photos along the way.

I’m trying to do as much spring gardening as possible, partially to prepare for the heavy equipment which will soon wreck our front garden while digging up our sewer line.  Imagine pictures of weeded and mulched beds, pansies, and blooming bulbs.

Jennifer sent along some gorgeous hand-dyed cashmere for me to play with.  I’m still looking for the right pattern, and occasionally nuzzling the skeins as if they were very obedient kittens.

As if that wasn’t enough of a pick-me-up, I found this on the porch the day after the yarn came.

Want a peek?

It’s the first delivery of free audiobooks from a publisher who really wants Books For Ears to review more of their books.  More free audiobooks are on their way to me, and Jeanne has also received a bunch.  I’m still not sure how we  managed to luck into such kind consideration.  But since they don’t expect us to either promise to review all of the books they give us or pull any punches–in fact they contacted us after I’d trashed one of their big recent releases–I’m not going to give it too much thought.

We spent last weekend hosting a big group of our living history pals at the event we run every spring.  I didn’t even touch my camera.  I meant to, but my head was elsewhere.  We had cold nights, lots of friends, dogs and puppies to play with, beautiful days, and lots of fun.  We also had a bit of an informal wake for Mike, which was hard and good, but no real end to things.  His family will be hosting a big memorial gathering in a few weeks, and we’re trying to organize photos and rememberances for them in the meantime.

I’m off to camp again this weekend, and hopefully sing a fair amount.  I’ll try to try to pretend I’m a photo-blogger while I’m gone, but I won’t make any promises.

*Tell me you recognize the title quote, please.

The prizes are done and ready to go to Martha, Shelia, and K.

Things are blooming in the garden.

And I’m puttering away in the studio.

And visiting chickens, and friends, in Lovettsville for knitting photography (notice the “headless hen” trick below).

Thanks for all of your kindness last week, friends. It means a lot to me to know you’re out there.

I spent Sunday with Ruadhan and Jen at the Homespun Yarn Party, and it was wonderful to get out of the house and away from grief. Jen invited me to bring some bags to sell, which was fun. A lot of my local knitting friends were there, and the various vendors were really wonderful. A number of people asked about the pattern for Fand’s Stole, which was very flattering. Jen and I discussed setting up a bag display at Maryland Sheep and Wool, which should be a hoot. I love seeing people walk around with those little treats on their arms.

I’ve spent most of the last week cleaning, sewing, and working on very boring socks. This weekend, we need to shuttle some of our living history group’s communal property from A to B, possibly photograph something for a finished pattern, and try to put life back in order. Expect photos, perhaps even proof of gardening.

The phone rang.

A dear friend of ours died far too young. He was in good shape and he wasn’t stupid about his health, but he had a heart attack and now he’ll never see his 39th birthday. Mike was working late, and he died at his desk.

He was my husband’s best friend. He was the best house-mate in the world. I cried like a baby when he told us he was moving away a decade ago, and we tried for years to lure him back home. He held our wedding rings in his pocket seven years ago, joking that he had known years before Scott and I ever even went on a date that he’d stand up for us on our wedding day. He was one of the smartest, kindest people I’ve ever known. He explained string theory to me over a beer one night in a way no physics teacher ever had. He offered to put on a wig and a dress, pretend to be a short, and take the math portion of the GREs for me, but refused to shave off his beard to do it. He told the truth all of the time, even when it shocked people, but he never did it cruelly. He had a wicked sense of humor, and he was a great swing dancer. He read incessantly, and could always steer a friend away from a bad book he’d read every tedious page of. He was tall and handsome and wonderful with kids. He was the kind of guy you wish one of your friends would marry. I always thought Mike would get the chance to be the wonderful husband and father he wanted to be, and we all knew he was destined to become. Instead, all of our hearts are broken and the world doesn’t make sense.

I’ve been so quiet about my knitting over the last several months because I’ve been working on some new patterns for publication. The first, Fand’s Stole, is now available through Spirit Trail Fiberworks.

It’s a very quick, simple knit, designed to show off Jen’s wonderful silk and wilk/wool yarns.  I made the first one from leftover Spirit Trail silk yarns our friend Rosi put on the swap table at the Knitters Review retreat a couple of years ago.  I was wearing it while working in the Spirit Trail booth at Rhinebeck and a few people asked Jen for the pattern.  So I started over, pen in hand, with a different, gorgeous batch of yarns.

As simple as the pattern is, I have enough yarn on hand to make another one, and I bet I’ll do it soon.  I had a hard time handing this shop-sample off to Jen, and I worry that someone is going to fall too desperately in love with the original, which I wear a few times a week.

For you mythology buffs, Fand (pronounced “Fahnd”) was the wife of Manannán mac Lir, the Irish God of the Sea.  He had a magical Cloak of Mists, which he could use to hide things, or change perceptions, or any number of  other wonders.  When Fand fell in love with Cú Chulainn,  Manannánwas only able to reclaim his wife by waving his cloak of wonders between the lovers so they would be forever parted.

Tags: fand's stole, Spirit Trail Fiberworks

So, I removed my own comment, turned K’s second comment off temporarily, and that leaves us with 29 possible winners. I used the random number generator here. And . . .
5: K
4: Shelia
26 (when K’s second comment is out of the mix): Martha

How fun is this! Congratulations, you three wacky knitters. I’ll compare notes with you about colors and patterns you like best to make sure you get a prize you’ll really like.

For a while there my Google Reader was showing me four digit numbers. I couldn’t read most friends’ blogs from work, and I was working a lot of overtime just in case Scott’s job search didn’t move as fast as we hoped. Last weekend while I was editing the new blog CSS, trying to build a blog roll (still working on that–editing links makes me want to scream) and migrating content, I knuckled down (how sad is it that even blog reading is like a homework assignment to me?) and read and read, and last night my google reader count said 0. So this morning it only says 23. Ahhhhh.

Have you entered the lovely little blog warming contest yet? You should. Lovely prizes, a happy Lanea, a much better design–what’s not to like (and how much do you want another parenthetical aside)?