raveling

Pick—

—pluck¹—

—gather—

—glean²—

—cut—

—shake—

—wīnd.³

Twist—

—walk—

—spin⁴—

—clean—

—ravel⁵—

—rest—

—find⁶.

1. I thought there were only a few pears on the tree but when I started picking (full sized but still green so they ripen evenly rather than from the inside out as they would if left to ripen on the tree), that few suddenly filled a box. Then friends asked if I wanted to help them with their abundant prune-plum crop (one of my favorite fruits to dry so the answer was a resounding yes), which means my fruit management skills are now being tested to the max—and my digestive system is confused...

2. We just had our first good frost so I brought my winter squashes inside and gleaned the last of the baby zucchini. Not exactly a winter’s worth of food, but delicious and satisfying nonetheless.

3. wīnd, the word that rhymes with kind—not wind, the word that rhymes with tinned. I put the little line over the top of the i (like thīs), in hope that along with the comic of winding paper yarn onto the niddy noddy the pronunciation would be clear as you read. I now see that it was a silly word to choose since its pronunciation is essential for the rhyme at the end—but I’m going to go with it anyway. Also we had a super unusual intense wind/dust/thunderstorm this week so wind could have been an appropriate word for this list of verbs—except for the rhyme business. Ah well. The English language is wildly windily weird, eh?

4. Spin! Twist! It seems like they are the only things I know for sure to do: milkweed in the morning as I sip my coffee, paper in the afternoon or evening to wīnd down, and wool all day amidst the rest of the life and autumnal busyness. So my life is still a string thing—which is apparently all I get to know for now.

5. I’d been knitting this sweater for most of the summer. The fine yarn (Targhee/Debouillet) and small needles made it portable even as it grew and it was a perfect project to cart hither and yon. It would have been another of my lightweight year round wool shirts but when I finished the second sleeve and tried it on I realized that though perfectly fine it was not quite comfortable enough—and the yarn is too delicious to leave in an unworn garment. Undoubtedly I made a miscalculation somewhere (not surprising since these days I barely calculate anything), but hopefully I’ll pay more attention when I begin again with whatever it wants to become next.

Sometimes it feels like all of life is about raveling and re-knitting—which suddenly makes me extra glad to have devoted so much of mine to making yarn I really like.

6. I needed a word that rhymed with wīnd (see footnote #3) and there, pinned to my wall, was this handy dandy four letter word…I wonder who wove that?