Snow For Your Valentine

A little more snow, a little more shoveling. We have not tired of it yet, but because the table is now covered with seed catalogs and lists of plants we’ve propagated for the coming season, we are feeling mindful of spring and the promise it brings. Next week, many of the classes we will offer in 2019 will be posted. I know that a hypertufa class will start the season off, I’m thinking April. For those wanting to sculpt some pots and have them cured and ready for planting, this is the class for you!
I have been spending lots of time in the studio, hoping to have some full baskets of handspun yarn to offer knitters this season. And just think, sheep shearing is right around the corner! More wool on its way!
I am including a photo of some socks I made from old sweaters and have now come to the point of needing repair. I really plan on getting the most out of the clothes I wear! Don’t discard…re-make, up-cycle, repair, mend, and patch, I say.

And, why not a poem to celebrate Valentines Day. Enjoy!

To have without holding
BY MARGE PIERCY

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Off To A Good Start

On this first day of a New Year, what do we do? First, we shovel (again) after another good dose of snow, we eat a hot breakfast of farm raised eggs, homemade sourdough bread, and hot coffee, then we ice fish out on lake St. George and bring home a decent size salmon, we tackle a bit of sewing on the quilt that has been sitting for two years, and just before dinner we light candles and listen to Celtic music playing on our local radio station. Here’s to the New Year and ‘off to a good start’.
And…one more thing….some winter poetry by Marge Piercy. Enjoy.

On New Year’s Day

Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover
crying, where I live and work with my lover
Woody and my cats, where the birds gather
in winter to be fed and the squirrel dines
from the squirrel-proof feeder. Keep our water
bubbling up clear. Protect us from the fire’s
long teeth and the lashing of the hurricanes
and the government. Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed.
Keep our cats from hunters and savage dogs.
Watch with care over Woody splitting logs
and mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.

Marge Piercy