What a mild winter it has been so far. I feel a bit complain-y but I do miss a good cold/snowy cozy winter. I hope we still have some of those days ahead. Yesterday the warm sun felt so good and who could resist sitting out in it and basking in it in the middle of January? Certainly not me. I am a firm believer in taking the gifts of each day’s weather. Still it feels unnatural to move from fall into spring. I’m missing my old friend winter, the way she makes us crazy toward her end and ready for thawing soil, spring rain, vibrant color, and the smallest glimpses of new life. It strikes me that maybe we just can’t fully enjoy the glories of spring without the quietude and bleakness of a long winter.
We’ve been back to our usual routines and though there’s always a rub to the mundane parts of life, there is a simplicity to it that feels healing. Our mornings are full of books, writing, arithmetic, our afternoons full of time spent outdoors, music lessons, tutoring, or running household errands. We had a fair bit of rain the last few days, and in the glorious sunshine that follows, I find myself wandering about the garden, starting to think about what we will grow this year. I knit up a pair of baby bloomers for Wren. They are knit top-down in yarn from local-to-me Bovidae Farm, with a sweet little lateral braid separating the rib and the squishy fisherman’s rib on the body. They are simple and darling. Wren seems to love anything I make for her, she loves dressing up and trying things on, so she is always game for new hand knits. I snapped a few pictures of her this morning in the blustery morning air. She was very busy tidying up her little house outside, bringing me all sorts of items the older children had left out there and throwing whatever else she didn’t want down the slide. She is full of big feelings, this little one, one minute ecstatic and the next minute screaming her frustration. In a little more than a month she will be two and I can hardly believe it.
ps. Wren is wearing the wiksten animal bonnet which I knit in naturally-dyed yarn, and in the earlier pictures she’s wearing her flax light sweater from her first birthday. Yes, I’m already contemplating what her birthday sweater should be for this year. 🙂 I’m thinking about another Camilla Babe sweater in my own hand-dyed worsted eco yarn dyed with marigold.
