life, the universe, and a few-odd other things
A cinnamon stick and a few cloves in water on a potpourri burner. Simmer all day. Usually I don’t start doing that until December, but this year winter hit so early, there was nothing else for it: the scent of hygge to banish November gloom.
Steve got cold. So I made him a sweater. Actually, truth be told, I wanted to practise a few new knitting stitches I just learned off the all-knowing Internet (see below in italics), so I started this knitting swatch** – and then I thought, I don’t want to just make a random useless piece of knitting, so I turned it into a bear sweater. Steve seems to appreciate it.
So, in case you’re wondering, here’s a very rough pattern:
So there you are – now your bear, too, can have his very own stylish winter sweater. For Steve, it was just in time – the thermometer suddenly dropped by some 15° over the weekend, and the winter we thought we weren’t having this year hit us in the back of the knees with a vengeance. Warm sweaters and socks are mandatory.
Life, the Universe, Stuffed Bear Sweaters and New Knitting Stitches. Keep warm out there!
**Another note: so you don’t get the impression that I’m some kind of amazing knit-wit who regularly crafts fantastic stitchery, let me just say that my knitting is haphazard and goes in very irregular spurts. I’ve been known to take years to get a project done, because often I won’t touch it for months on end (I’ll tell you about the nine-year-sweater some other time…). Then suddenly, usually with the onset of cold weather, I might get bitten by the knitting bug, and off I go again for a little while, until my knitting enthusiasm fizzles out for another stretch. Also, I do plain knitting – one colour (or preferably, lots of colours all in one ball of yarn) and as much basic knit stich as possible so I don’t have to pay too much attention. I’m a lazy and irregular knitter – but I have fun with it, which is the whole point. One of these days I’d love to learn how to spin…
Steve is giving me dirty looks, guilt tripping me because I haven’t posted anything on this blog in, like, forever.
Well, my excuse is that I was sick over the holidays. Two nasty bouts of flu in the space of a month. And then, somehow, I just didn’t get back on the horse…
Steve’s having none of it (stuffed bears can be so demanding!). But there I was yesterday, looking out the picture window at the view of the lake, a thick white cloud hanging so low over it it feels like I’m sitting in a kettle with the lid clapped on.
The cosiness of December has given way to cold, muck and dreariness, and it feels like I haven’t seen the sun or the blue sky in weeks. (“There is no sun. … There never was a sun,” said the Witch. “No, there never was a sun,” said the Prince, and the Marsh-wiggle, and the children…) All I want to do is to curl up on the couch with my fluffy reading socks on my feet and my fluffy reading blanket over my lap, reading a fluffy novel.
And then it all of a sudden struck me: maybe that’s just what we’re meant to do this time of year? Maybe so many of us feel tired and unmotivated in winter because it’s the time when we’re supposed to sleep. This is, in fact, the midnight of the year.
Or, rather, winter solstice is midnight. I learned in Physical Geography class some years ago that the hottest time is actually just after the zenith, and the coldest immediately after the nadir. So, the hottest time of day is around 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, and the coldest time of night an hour or two after midnight – once the temperature has had time to catch up with the amount of sunshine the earth got (or didn’t get, as it were). If you correlate the cycle of the year to the hours of the day, then right now, January 18th, is about 1:50 AM.
And what else are you supposed to do at Ten-to-blinkin’-Two in the Morning other than sleep? Human beings are diurnal – we’re awake in the day, and sleep in the night. At least that’s what we’re designed for, notwithstanding Mr Edison and his light bulb which screwed us all over with its perpetual artificial daytime.
And so maybe that craving for fluffy socks and blankets and books is, in fact, quite normal and healthy, and ought to be indulged as much as possible. You know how, when your kids get up in the middle of the night, you roll over and just sort of grunt at them “Go back to sleep!”? Like that.
So bring on the socks and blankets and Pride and Prejudice. I’ll talk to you in the morning – umm, I mean in spring.
Life, the Universe, and the Midnight of the Year. See you when the sun comes up.
I had the flu last week. After an exceptionally busy weekend, bam, it knocked me out. Nothing dramatic – no more than a cold with benefits – but it just really dragged me down. In old books (Agatha Christie, say), they sometimes talk of people going into a depression “after a bout of influenza”; that’s not something you hear about often today, the concept that an illness can do more to you than give you a few coughs and sniffles.
So, point being, I was better by the beginning of this week, but only in a manner of speaking. I’ve still been dragging my emotional butt all week. The sunshine we had for a few days certainly helped (see Wednesday’s “Wordless” post), but then today, as per the promise of the weather forecast, the clouds fell down on us, and it started snowing again.
So here I am, socked in at my house. I can’t even see the lake from the windows, it’s 9° below freezing, and the fine powder snow is relentlessly drifting down onto the world. And thoughts and feelings snow down onto my mind, piling up, pushing down; the ticking of the clock slicing my thoughts into slivers.
But then I reached for the CD player, and I took out the Sense and Sensibility soundtrack, the one from the 1995 movie, the score by Patrick Doyle. I put the disc into the player, pushed “Start”, and let the sound of the violins wash over me. And almost immediately, I felt better. Calmed, soothed, uplifted. The slivered thoughts reassembled themselves into a jigsaw puzzle – or perhaps they didn’t; perhaps they suddenly just didn’t matter so much. The music flowed around them, washing their jagged edges into rounded softness.
The sounds lifted me out of this snowed-in, cold February day in 2017 North America, and in my mind I was in Austen’s (and Ang Lee’s) England, among green fields and sunshine, ladies in soft pastel gowns and gentle men in boots and greatcoats. Patrick Doyle’s musical genius never fails to move me, the half hour of the soundtrack taking me through a speed version of the film, of the story; and when the final, triumphant track “Throw the Coins” surges into its upswing, I know once again that the world can be all right, that heartbreak and darkness make way to love and sunshine.
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said that music “soothes the savage breast”? It does. And it brings comfort to a cold, dark day. A day where now the falling snow outside is once again just cosy, the ticking of the clock a calming heartbeat to my life.
Life, the Universe, and Tunes That Comfort. What music do you reach for on those days?