Square 69: Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for.

The gift of two unique and beautiful daughters. Being in love with a man with whom love-making has never—not for an instant—been boring. My dad being alive and well and happy.

My laptop, my camera, my apartment, the new houseplants I’ve kept alive for the few weeks since I moved in.

My cottage, especially my cottage when the sky is clear and the lake is warm, the water blue from above and golden underneath.

The two aunts who encouraged me to bring Danny to my mother’s memorial, the cousin who has cheered me on, my friends.

The places where I like to hang out and write like the Red Brick Café and the Green Room. Community hubs like Out On The Shelf, the Rainbow Chorus, Writers’ Circle and Rainbow Knitters.

The insight that allows me to derive my own meaning in a universe that is inherently meaningless. Depression that taught me to treasure each day. Creativity that allows me to create treasure. Eyes to see beauty, ears to hear music.

Especially Sibelius’ Symphony Number Two. Also Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Rachmanninoff, and Vaughan Williams.

The intimacy that comes as two strangers learn to trust, the joy that comes from trusting myself enough to be alone and enjoy my own company.

Computer games that distract me. Good food that gives pleasure.

Being in love with a patient listener.

Losing my temper. I mean really losing it, for so long that I could almost forget the feeling of uncontrolled anger. The challenge of calm and simplicity that somehow elude me but draw me ever higher and onward.

The words of Stephanie Dowrick, Natalie Goldberg, Annie Dillard and Ursula K. LeGuin; the worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; the imaginary characters who have kept me company; the real friends who replace them.

My 1920s oak library table.

A grandfather who liked to tell stories and nibble my toes.

All the stars in the universe, meteor showers, the planets, all the things we have yet to discover, all the mysteries that keep us humble, a universe that is far too complicated for us to understand.

Oh yeah, and nature, how could I forget my favourite herbs, shrubs and wildflowers? Let’s start with lilacs, lavender and lemon verbena, the fringed gentians the bloom in August at Singing Sands, magnolias and old-style, fragrant yellow roses, lady’s slipper orchids, sundews and pitcher-plants, the fragrance of a pool of violets in spring, the radiance of a meadow of asters and goldenrod in autumn.

There’s also the birds, especially cedar waxwings, eccentric and gregarious, but also catbirds, all the warblers I learn to identify by ear.

I mustn’t forget pianos, radios or CD players. Cars.

Grocery stores full of familiarity and discovery. Peaches and apricots, mushrooms, shellfish, all kinds of cheese, red wine, liqueurs, pesto, dark chocolate.

My kitchen, my bed, the shower, the windows where sun shines in.

Hardwood floors and stained glass windows, pipe organs, bookstores.

The Eramosa River, Lake Fletcher, Lake Erie, Georgian Bay, Hockley Valley. Towns that enchant and cities that engage.

Live theatre, symphony orchestras. Rufus Wainwright and k.d. lang. Her voice, yes thank you for her voice.

That early memory of running barefoot through the grass with the drone of cicadas in the air.

The memory of my last evening with Mom when we had the conversation I never expected to have, so full of forgiveness. The full lunar eclipse on the night she died and all the full moons since.

The fellowship of lost friends as long as it lasted.

A quiet place on rocks by a stream, deep in the woods, just sitting and watching.

Walking on a winter night on the ice under a full moon, or walking under no moon when the Milky Way is so brilliant I can feel the distance and depth of the stars. The forlorn call of a loon at night, the blinking of fireflies, the choir of toads by a river in Guelph on a mild May evening, the way nature fills more of my life when I let it.

The special way I have of seeing colour and putting different colours together. The way photography, writing and fibre seem to play off of one another.

Square 68: Fall

It's the Sunday morning of Thanksgiving weekend at Lake Fletcher. Hard frost during the night. Mist rises from the lake, and long beams of the rising sun highlight brilliant maples on the far shore. The dock is slick. Each leaf fallen there is beaded with pearls of ice, or laced around the fringes.

The air is perfectly still. Leaves sift constantly downward, tickling their sisters, whispering, “Come with me!” Two chipmunks chase one another through the undergrowth of bunchberries. A pair of nuthatches visiting the feeder utter soft, staccato syllables to keep in touch. There is no other sound.

Square 67: Meteor shower

I had a childhood friend named Morgan Lewis. She lived with her parents in Huntsville, Alabama, but every summer she and her sister, Gillian, came to visit her grandparents, who had a summer home down our road. We were both interested in books and nature, and would tape mock radio broadcasts to entertain our families.

Her father, Chuck, worked for NASA, and I will never forget the night he showed us the Perseid meteor shower. The day before, we made a map of the night sky showing major constellations, so we could chart all the meteors we would see. After dinner we went for naps so we would be able to sit up well into the night, but I couldnt' sleep.

Around 11 p.m. our families gathered on the edge of the golf course across the road. There were no large trees around, so we could set out lawn chairs and view the entire sky. It was a clear night with no moon. Mr. Lewis knew more stars and constellations than anyone I had ever talked to, and he identified them for us. I have remembered many of them, like the Summer Triangle: Deneb, Vega and Altair. Deneb, the brightest of the three, is 70,000 times more luminous than the sun and 1,550 light years away.

At first we saw a few small meteors. Mr. Lewis had a good reason for teaching us the names of the stars and constellations, because whenever we saw a meteor, people would call out where it had appeared in the sky, what direction it had taken and how far it had travelled. Morgan, Gillian and I would plot them on the map we had made.

After midnight, as our place on the planet turned to face its direction of travel, the meteors became faster and brighter. Some were distinctly coloured, and some left a momentary tail in the sky. We marked them down furiously, and had to start skipping some of the fainter ones.

In the wee hours a brilliant pink meteor appeared from behind some distant trees and slowly traversed the sky, leaving a long, scintillating tail. It must have taken 10 seconds to cross, finally disappearing near the western horizon.

Our group slowly dispersed to sleep, first my parents and then the Lewises, but Morgan and I stayed out all night until the pale edge of dawn appeared. We had seen hundreds of meteors. Our map showed that most of them appeared to originate near the constellation, Perseus, and radiate outward. This perspective is an illusion caused by the Earth's movement as it passes through a cloud of debris stretching along the path of Comet Swift-Tuttle.

The Perseid meteor shower can be viewed every year around August 12. I have watched several times, but never seen such a spectacle as that night with Morgan and her family. A few years later I visited Huntsville, and Mr. Lewis gave me a tour of Marshall Space Flight Center. I have since lost contact with Morgan, but maybe sometimes we are watching the same stars. I hope we reconnect someday.

Square 66: Elderberry

Across the road from our house, my parents owned a vacant field that verged on a marsh. There I planted several native shrubs, like snowberry, in hope of attracting wildlife. Then I discovered something growing wild there, one of the things that birds like best: an elderberry bush. I tried making jam from the berries, but it failed. It was full of the seeds, and the sugar crystallized. I didn't make successful elderberry jelly until many years later. But this plant remains for me an icon: nature feeding us, feeding itself, sustenance, sweetness, the cycle of life. Coincidentally, the dark purple Cascade yarn I chose to use as a common thread throughout this blog blanket is precisely the colour of ripe elderberries.

So it was with particular guilt that I cut down an elderberry bush at Danny's house yesterday. In this small Toronto backyard it was not just growing, but burgeoning, taking over its corner, threatening to shoulder the house aside. Elderberries favour moist, rich soil, and I think this part of the city used to be part of Lake Ontario, so the roots must have lots of rank, dark, dirty depths to thrive upon.

The birds came to feed on the berries every summer. I've made jelly from them, and Danny has dyed yarn. The greenish-grey fibre in this square came from that dye pot. So we owe that shrub a lot of thanks.

Instead, we cut it down. Sometimes plants get in the way. It's a fact of life in the city, where space is limited.

When I approached the shrub with gloves and saw, I startled a robin and some white-throated sparrows (Bill has also seen a tribe of Baltimore orioles there). They hesitated to fly away, hovering around as I began hacking at the branches. They couldn't believe it. But by the time the brush all lay in a pile, they had given up and gone away. Later in the afternoon, a forlorn wood thrush appeared on the fence and looked around, casting a mournful, beady glance in my direction, flicking its rusty brown tail in indignation. It circled the yard once or twice before fluttering away in silence and despair.

Guilty. I am guilty.

But as a phoenix rises from the ashes, so a hacked elderberry will re-emerge from the muck, if not here then somewhere else. This particular plant has been cut to the ground several times already. Our world will not soon be rid of them. Ontario will have plenty of fruit for jelly and dye, and for the wild ones to eat.

Square 65: Progress report

When this idea started to roll, I was fresh with enthusiasm and pumping out four squares per week. I planned to make a full-size blanket, perhaps five by six feet in dimension, and calculated about 14 by 17 squares would be about right: 238 in total. It would take me well into next year.

Then full-time work started lining up and I became busy with other things. I couldn't keep up the knitting pace. At the current rate it would take several years to make that many squares. I balked. I wanted to stop and finish the blanket right away. I was ready to give up.

But new stories kept suggesting themselves. I realized I didn't need to have a definite time frame; I could work until the blanket told me it was ready.

A few days ago when I had completed 63 squares, I laid them all out, nine by seven. It was a great size for a wall-hanging. Once again I contemplated making just a few more squares to round out the stories, finishing, and moving on to a new project.

But whenever I start thinking that way, the squares tell me, "No, we still have more stories to tell." It is like any pilgrimage. It is like life. You can't see where you are going in detail, because you have never been there. You don't know how long it will take, because you can't predict what will happen along the way. But the destination matters less than the journey itself.

I've learned a lot from this trip. I had never used more than two different yarns in one project before. Now I routinely use nine or ten in a single square. Knitting has evolved into a way of painting a landscape, a dream, or a thought.

I have explored the way colours interact, and it's different from coloured pencils or paints, which you can combine to create any colour. The colour of the yarns is immutable, but I am beginning to discover how to use similarities and contrasts to draw out highlights and undertones. A variegated yarn looks very different whether laid alongside a deep red or a muted red.

Perhaps the most obvious change has been the shift from cool, dark colours to neutrals, and warm and bright (inspect the gallery). This is not just superficial. My favourite colour has always been deep blue, followed by green and purple, but I am actually becoming enamoured with orange and its allies. This blanket began as a way to use up yarn in my stash, but has evolved into an excuse to acquire single skeins of anything that catches my eye. This square incorporates several new acquisitions.

I don't regret that, because I know they'll all come to good use over the long haul. Long after finishing this blanket, I'll continue using yarn to tell stories. Hats and scarves will never be the same.

Square 64: Writers' circle

Someone said it's easy to write; you just open a vein and bleed. I did a lot of my writing longhand until the recent purchase of a laptop, and often would imagine the thread of ink across the white page was not really black, but crimson. The best writing comes when I do not hesitate to plumb my deepest, most difficult thoughts and emotions.

I've been writing all my life, but have experienced a mini renaissance lately. After long years of wishing for writing companions with whom I could meet and share encouragement, in 2007 I took responsibility for my own need of community and started a writers' circle. It meets every week at Out On The Shelf. It took a long time to get going but during the past year it has come to life, and the meeting is one of the highlights of my week.

The most important friendship to emerge from this has been with my writing partner, Sarah. For many months the writers' circle included just the two of us. That evolved into a weekly "business meeting" when we talk about our creative processes and challenges, and set goals for the time ahead. No other habit is more potent in propelling my ideas forward.

Recently I have had trouble with fiction writing. The stories won't move easily from the shadowy recesses of my mind onto the page, and once there they don't seem to communicate what I want them to. I tell myself I must cross this mountain to achieve a higher plateau, perhaps a better quality of prose, but without Sarah and the writers' circle I would probably lose courage and lapse into months of not-writing. So this square goes out with gratitude to them; with ink, blood and the richness of colours we strive to pour out of ourselves.

Square 63: My cottage dream

I had a brief retreat at Lake Fletcher this weekend with Danny, Brenna and her friend, Anika, and Dad has his friend, Betty. The fall colour was surprisingly subdued for the end of September (this square captures it pretty well), which means it will probably hit its peak when we're back for Thanksgiving in two weeks.

The cottage is about a three-and-a-half hour drive from home. If I go by way of Toronto and Port Hope to pick up loved ones, it takes roughly seven hours. So we arrived around midnight on Friday and had to leave after lunch on Sunday. It is such a long way, and yet it's worthwhile to spend one blessed day and two nights in the deepest sanctuary I know.

My dream is to live and work there. I could spend the week in creative seclusion, returning on weekends to the city for culture and community. That's backwards from how most cottagers live, but the good thing about creativity is you can drive against the traffic if you wish.

If I had the courage to take hold of the writing life and squeeze a living out of it, I could do this.

The vermilion and sage green rows here are newly-acquired Qina yarns from Mirasol Peru. They're 80 per cent baby alpaca and 20 per cent bamboo, so soft to the touch I want to melt into them. The variegated autumn-coloured yarn from Wellington Fibres is one of my old favourites. These colours, delicious to see and touch, remind of the bliss I would like to achieve. The main colour, apple green is unidentified.