Waterwoman Knits

Knits

As you can see from the right image, I decided to jump into Stephen West’s Mystery Knit-a-Long for October despite having four knits on the needles, and managed to make enough misunderstanding of Clue 1 that I’m sure soaking this piece will be essential to stretch out the wonkiness. This is my 2nd October MKAL , the first while recovering from surgery four years ago. I’m not going to lie, this month has been a doozy for me feeling under the weather and burned out, sleeping through my alarm many mornings, so it was fun to work on a bit of the sculptural knitted wizardry that is Stephen West’s designs.

After five years, I finally have been enjoying wearing my Azor sweater!! The lambswool is so light, it’s like wearing a feather that is super warm. Not sure I’ll make a lace-to-fingering weight sweater anytime again soon, because the poor thing was put on the back burner so many times due to spending hours on a single inch of fabric.

The sweet pumpkin will become pumpkin bread soon…

I’ll share a blast of Hallow’s Eve happiness from a local program that brings me joy: SW School Farm. What great painted gourds!

Hunger in America

An issue I care a lot about and am brainstorming how to do a knitted fundraiser for my local food bank. Hallelujah to the City of Seattle for contributing $8 million to bridge a gap in USDA/SNAP benefits. Here are a few stats from the Seattle Times article that illustrate demand: “In Seattle, nearly half of SNAP recipients live in a household where at least one person has a disability. About 50% live with an adult who’s 60 years old or older. More than 1 in 5 SNAP recipients in the city live in families with children. “

One source of information on the folks impacted (every American), I find the Food Research & Action Center to be helpful. Click to read their latest blog.

I recently enjoyed knitting to the entire five-season BBC series Poldark, which is centered in Cornwall, England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Feels refreshing to go the pace of horses in these modern times. The entire series was filmed in the “before times” over five years pre-pandemic. The plight of the working poor in 1700s England contrasted with ruling aristocratic elites placing all manner of ways to criminalize poverty truly starts to feel less in the past than ever. Helped me appreciate how much of the British system was carried over by the first colonists of America, despite their best efforts to free themselves of monarch rule.

Nature’s Intelligence

I leave you with images from my October during the few hours I’m not working or knitting, but hours that save my soul and my life many times over on this amazing planet.

A Halloween Poem I wrote years ago

My time in high school in New Mexico included wearing a back brace, and my very first brace was made on Halloween. I reflected on that experience in a poetry workshop in my 20s, and this was the result.

I am currently taking a memoir-writing class and have a pipe dream of spending a whole month in a cabin in the woods without pressure of paid work, where I can immerse myself to emotionally support and compost the writing of my nearly 6 decades of spinning around in space. I’m seeing glimpses of ways to organize my memoir and the threads that will run through the fabric of a future book.

The Anniversary of My Strangeness

I commemorate the occasion with candy corn
vertebrae on a chocolate cake,
pulled to the side like some fault line
in the frosting; a keyboard snaked like a river
sounding zany, twisted tones.
In visits to the Albuquerque Prosthetic Clinic
men of war needing limbs bought parts
while I stood wrapped in plaster, drying hot,
arms out like a scarecrow, waiting for the saw
to split my casing.
The technician was kind, explaining how a cast saw
stays away from skin, but my stomach
did not know the difference.

A week later I was fitted, the brace
an inch of plastic and Styrofoam,
springing brass brackets and Velcro-leather straps
to be tightened between meals.
An adjustable door in the back pressured
my right scapula to conform
my independently thinking spine.

Four times I completed the plaster ceremony.
My choice: Refuse the brace for the sake of boys
and a swim team, and grow always leaning
or live in a shell to hold my spine in its 35-degree curve
until the bones stop their growth.

Four years spent, twenty-three hours a day in its grip.
I bumped off walls,
got elbowed in a crowd and reveled in surprised glares,
heard every knock-knock joke in the book
by well-meaning friends testing my nerves.

Unable to bend at the waist,
my fingers could dance
between black and white on stage
and people listened, eyes closed.

I could have been the Hunchback of Notre Dame
and the audience would not have seen me or themselves
listening to my sound.

Music poured from my fingers,
washing me, carrying me from my body in its case
two, then four, then six hours a day.
The piano spoke my anger, my tears.
I didn’t know I was praying.

~ Erin Waterman, 1993