Joy of Yarn

Days

A quote from yesterday's article:'We write things down, and hold on to them, for many different reasons. To stop time and keep the “edge of marveling” honed, or at least handy. To create pockets of order. To prove to ourselves that we exist. To be able to immerse ourselves in whatever matters to us but is gone." - Mark Dow

My wonderful husband has been giving me a day out a week, away from the puppy, to go where I please. Some days I've gone shopping or run errands, but yesterday i knew just where I wanted to go.

I phoned Karen from The Village Knitter in Babylon, to see if she'd be in the shop. Fortunately for me, she would be. It's funny how you can work and travel to a place everyday, but when you stop working there, it feels far to drive. I haven't been back to The Village Knitter in a very long time. The shop is now in a new location too. It felt like I had only seen Karen the day before, as if no time had passed at all.

Working in a yarn shop was a warm exciting place to work. First I'd grab a cup of tea and sit at the table in the center of the store. Who'd walk through those doors, a knitter who could play their role as a character actor in a movie?  A new knitter eager to learn the craft? A passerby intrigued by the shop window? Someone just looking to talk? The bells on the door tinkled and you braced yourself for the next chapter. I liked working in a small shop in a small town especially when Fall rolled around. The town was beautiful when the leaves began to change. Yes the pace was slower than my crazy world now. It was a good fit. I liked helping people, talking with people, meeting new people.

The yarns were new too as was the explosion of knitting. Growing up in the house of Redheart, alpacas were like traveling to a distant world, silks to the Far East. I knew the details of every yarn in the store and had fondled each and every one of them. Today, we take more for granted. The silks do not feel quite as rare, quite as precious. We've seen most every variegated yarn. We know that they don't always work up as beautifully as they look in the skein.

I returned home to shortly lose power. The air conditioning abruptly stopped. The house was silent. It was the hottest humid day. After calling the power authority, my husband and I shared our days at the local Panera, where air conditioning was abundant. When we were finished with our meal, he played on his laptop as I read email on my Blackberry. I received a phone call from the utility company asking if we had power as they had restored ours. We returned home where the air conditioning was on as if it never went out.

No Choice About the Terminology - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com

An article I particularly enjoyed:

No Choice About the Terminology - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com.

Look at all the comments also!

Our Town

When days were simpler and the kids were younger, I knew every shop and shopkeeper in my town. Ira and Al ran the penny candy shop where the boys climbed up on high wooden benches to point out wishes in shiny glass apothecary jars. Ira and Al are long gone, moved to Key West decades ago. The shop still stands with the same name, but I haven't entered those doors in years. Last I checked, gag gifts were popular there, and candles. Who doesn't sell candles now?

And then there was the quilt shop run by a woman also named Joy. Fabric prints lined the walls, bolt after bolt of them, arranged by color, with a large wooden farm table in the back sitting on a gleaming maple floor. I'm sure there were quilt samples hanging too, but I remember the prints and floors. Funny. Well Joy was a kind woman with a sparkle in her eye, eager to share the craft passed on by her grandmother. I visited by day and took classes by night. I remember lifting the bolts of fabric and laying them side by side on the farm table, adding more, replacing others, until I got the blend just right. I'd lose myself for hours playing with those fabrics. I remember bringing my older son down as a little guy. Sitting in his stroller with his Halloween costume on. Joy thought his face was bruised until she got closer and noticed they were whiskers drawn on with an eyebrow pencil. No bunny is complete without whiskers. Joy has passed on now, as has her store.

So last night we walked through our town holding our dogs on leashes, down the narrow walks, past the psychic shop, the nail-art shop, the wine tasting shop. There are more empty stores now, more 40% off sale signs. The sweet shop still thrives, but I remember that shop as just a place to get ice cream. We never knew the shop owner so it was as anonymous as the rest of the stores today. Everyone loves a puppy so many people stopped us. Two Goldens attract as much attention as a cute baby, maybe more. But with all the people that stopped us, we knew no one. And that is the thing about our town. It is no longer ours. It belongs to a younger generation, newer residents, with different needs like languishing in a wine shop, tasting, to choose the best for the upcoming dinner party, I guess. So when did the town change? This picturesque town by the harbor. Or did we change? Or did wants and needs change?

So we talk about moving and dream about moving, where? We are not sure. To a place we feel more connected to, with open fields and country roads. To a place where we once again know the names of shopkeepers. To a place where we walk down the street and know somebody. To a place where we hear the birds sing instead of the leaf-blowers.

The Puppy Times

Wasn't sure the bells would work. Would she just chew on their cord? Our home now sounded like a Curiosity Shop whenever you opened the back door.Each time I took her outside, I moved Sydney ahead of Chloe, picked up her ever-growing paw, and ran it along the edge of the long cord. The bells rang sweetly as I chanted "Let's go piddle", halfheartedly believing this could even work. Yes, I had read about this in two books about housebreaking puppies. It was worth a try and I hoped ringing bells could get our attention better than any other subtle signal I prayed she'd bring to us.

Sydney lays with one paw tightly curled under, the other outstretched straight. Her sweet soft puppy face relaxed, with eyes slightly shut and one soft ear flapped up. Her nose and paw pads the darkest black. Pads that look like shiny black stones with buff glistening moss between them. Her fur varying shades of buff and fawn, her ears golden bronze. I watch her gray and pink belly rise and fall with her rhythmic breaths. How contented she looks after her lunchtime meal, a cup of the best dog food we can buy for her, Innova, a few blueberries, some banana, and many man-sized gulps of clear cold water out of her stainless steel bowl. This sweet girl has only been on our earth for fifteen weeks.

Today, for the first time, she rang the string of bells hanging on the back door, to signal that she had to piddle. Delighted, I grabbed her leash and with her pulling me across the deck and down the stairs, we took our step onto the dirt where she did what I hoped she would do. Walking a bit, she carefully chose the best stick in a mass of sticks, and ran up the steps back to the safe place that has become her home. Like it is with a new baby, despite the work, I can't imagine life without this sweet innocent bundle of fur.

And the Living Aint Always Easy

This is a different summer for me than many of them have been. Much of it is because of the puppy. Sydney just does not give me the freedom that I had before her. Tonight, as we ate dinner, we had Sydney in the kitchen next door. Both my husband and I asked the other, numerous times, "Can you see her?" I imagined that if she was our baby, we'd have her at the dining room table with us, in a highchair, nibbling on Cheerios. Sydney is pretty mellow though and often molds her ever-growing body around the corner of the island in the kitchen and peacefully falls asleep. Chloe, on the other hand, stays by our feet in case one of us clumsily drops a morsel of food.

So today was a very hot and humid day on Long Island. I got some spinning done, finishing up some fleece that I had dyed burgundies and purples. There was some old fiber on the spool that my husband had been practicing on. I pulled it off the spool and handed it to her. She had quite a bit of fun, rolling upside down with it in her mouth. It is fun to watch as her body wriggles with sheer joy. Amazing what can bring her pleasure. So I got a bunch of spinning done but didn't start the plying yet. It just looked like an awful lot of work to set up the large plying flyer. Like I said, it was hot and humid, even in our air conditioned house.

My allergies have taken away a lot of my energy. When I am not sneezing, I am running hunting for tissues as my nose drips down my face, not a nice picture. Today I spoke to my doctor and she prescribed Singulair. I had taken it in the past and my husband reminded me that some days I had to take allergy medication on top of it, but so far I'm feeling much better. I can actually breathe out of my nose and I'm not sneezing.

When my husband got home from work, we walked over at Sunken Meadow tonight, well I walked and my husband ran. There was a beautiful breeze coming off the Long Island Sound. It was the type of night that you wish could last forever. We arrived home and I made a dinner with chickpeas, wine, and feta cheese with buttermilk biscuits on the side. The days may be tough, but what a wonderful time we are having.

On Daughters...

This was a week of taking both girls to the doctors, by girls I mean Sydney and Chloe, not our human girls but our canine girls. My husband and I only had boys, grown boys, living away boys, boys with other mates. We often wonder aloud, to each other, what it would have been like to have children together. So these girls are our "children" of sorts, and we just had a new "baby".

I've spoken about getting a puppy for a long while and learned about all the clearances to look for. Chloe, our ten year old has some eye problems, but more about that another time. Anyway, it was an alarm to me that I wanted to do all I could to try to find a good line of Golden Retrievers for our puppy. The breeder, who we got Chloe from, did not have any puppies available that worked with my teaching schedule as I wanted a puppy to be ready for our home at the end of June, early July. I looked for other breeders, conformation or obedience champ lines as I figured though we weren't planning to show, these breeders took the most care with their breeding program. Dogs from these lines also had a good potential to become well trained. Well what I didn't realize is that dogs from these lines also cost mega-bucks, and this was only if they would be willing to sell to me, a non-dog-show-er which sometimes wasn't the case. I went through the whole process with one breeder in Maryland, the application, the phone interview. Heck, it was like an adoption..though I guess it was in a sense. And as I spoke with the breeder, I realized that I did not feel comfortable with this woman, though her dogs looked wonderful. So I disappointingly put my idea of a summer puppy on hold.

My last week of school before summer vacation, when I couldn't imagine the week possible going any slower, I'm reading the classified ads in our local paper and I see an ad for Golden Retrievers with all their clearances. I phoned, we talked, she has females available, I liked the breeder, and the next thing I know we are planning to travel upstate to view the puppies the weekend after the last day of school.

Somewhat like just before a baby arrives, when you tell  delude yourself that nothing in your life is going to change, I really didn't think about how our lifestyle would change, how my carefree summer vacation would be altered....brb...just had to refold and replace a blanket, that I had neatly folded sitting on a shelf pulled off by Miss Sydney herself. Like I said, our life is very different now. But Sydney is a joy despite the extra work and I truly believe that our life is richer now.

Videos

Two videos I wanted to share:

The first was written and directed by my son Ryan. He recently found out that his video is in the top ten of The Mob Wars Trailer contest . Here is his video.

The second is a video that always makes me laugh.

Peeling

I love to peel stuff, sunburns, wallpaper, nail polish. This hasn't just started, as I've loved to peel things since I'm a little girl. To jump back a bit:

Growing up, we hardly had any books in the house. My mother wasn't much of a reader and she set the tone for the household. But the local supermarket was having a special offer. With each minimal purchase, which in those days was probably very little, you received a free volume of the Golden Book Encyclopedia. Each week they offered another volume and my mother made sure she was there to buy her groceries and receive her free volume. She got all of the volumes to complete the set. Now this sure wasn't a fancy encyclopedia like the Britannica or even the World Book, but there were lots of colorful pictures and I devoured each issue from cover to cover, especially because there weren't any other books in the house. One day I realized that I could peel the shiny covering away from the book. Oh boy! I painstakingly peeled the front and back covers from each and every volume. When my mother found out, she told me that I had "ruined the value of the book", something that I found funny even at that young age.

Haircuts continued

So I enter the salon and the receptionist points Rose out to me. Rose is a strong looking dark skinned 30 something woman with hair swept off her face and a long braid trailing down her back. Hardly the woman from Trader Joes, and not looking like she fits well into this place either I'd say. If I had to imagine I'd say that Rose had a few kids back home and she was raising them alone.

I ask Rose if she could match my color. "Yes"  is all she replies. I tell her that I hate this haircut, that it was supposed to be stacked in back with long sides. "It isn't", she adds. So she does my color and as I'm sitting there I suddenly see a baseball-capped face in the mirror in front of me. "Hiiiiiiii", the woman says, in that old friends sort of "hi". "Long time no see", she adds. And I tell her that she must be mistaken as I've never been to this salon before. "No, remember me from MJ?" (only she says the full name of course). And then I remember. She was the woman who gave pedicures in one of those portable foot baths, hardly the pedicure standard of today but this was almost 20 years ago and this was of course the salon that I got those monthly health cuts from J. So we talk for awhile. "How are the boys?", she asks. And she goes on to tell me that everyone, but J, moved from MJ to this salon. "We said we wouldn't leave unless we all left together", She adds. And as I'm sitting there more and more MJ faces appear in the mirror before me, one girl who couldn't have been more than 17 tells me she has two kids now and they all ask about my boys, who frequently came to MJ also to get their haircuts.

Now a little background on many Long Island salons. Many of the women are dressed to the nines with hair in a state of suspended animation. Women abound in tight jeans with teetering high heels, minis and long dresses, tanned skin, and frequently bleached hair. As I'm sitting there, two women who work there begin to talk, "I want to go to an early happy hour." one states. She continues by saying "There's nothing worse than a late hangover." Another bleached blond, when asked how "he" is replies "Well we were together but all he cared about was his kid." "How do you find them?" the other woman asks her. So Rose was a bit different than the rest of them.

So my color is done, I walk to Rose's chair, and Rose tells me that she will "clean-up my haircut", blow it dry and then go back in and re-cut. "It's very uneven," she adds. And Rose snips silently. All I hear is that metallic snip of scissors on wet hair and the chattering and laughter of hairdressers and their clients in the background. Rose does exactly as she says, without a word. She doesn't add a heavy glob of mousse or gel and no hair spray. My hair feels clean and I don't have that frequent urge to run home from the salon and wash all the gook out and re-style it to a less "helmety" style. When done, she tells me "We will let it grow longer." I put on my glasses, look in the mirror, and I like what I see. My hair looks good and I thank her. She removes my robe and walks away.

I love my new haircut. The touch-up matches perfectly. My husband likes my new haircut too. So last night I'm thinking that maybe next time I'll make an appointment with one of the chattier hairdressers that I knew from MJ. And then I ask myself why. Rose gave me everything I wanted, or did she? Oh by the way, J now lives down the block from me with her five kids. She owns a shop in town.

On Haircuts and other random musings

Years ago I found a hair cutter that I loved. I'll call her J. Not only did I love the way J cut my hair, but I loved the way I felt after I left her. Once another hair cutter, who knew J, asked me if I thought J gave a great haircut or just had a great personality that made you want to go back. She made you feel good, always full of compliments, and made you feel as though she cared about what you were saying. I was never sure of the answer. But I went to her every 4 weeks for a "health" cut, as she called them. She barely cut anything off..a snip here, a snip there, but I felt good when I left and felt that my hair always looked good. Then J became pregnant. As usual, J did my hair and I went to the desk to set up another appointment. I was told that J was so booked, that they would try to squeeze me in but there were limited openings and my next appointment would be months away. So much for "health cuts" and anyway, were they really necessary? Well I found that if I booked appointments for many months in advance, I could get those magical cuts. So I would book one day a month for six months and it worked, well sort of. There were times J canceled and I had to wait two months. Now this all sounds pretty trivial, but having my hair in place gave me a sense of order in my life. Ok, I adapted..and then J announced, at another appointment months later, that she was pregnant again. Appointments were impossible to come by and I became angry and complained to J, "What will I do? Can't you just squeeze me in?" She looked at me so dispassionately, this person who made me feel like "an only", this person who cared about me, no? And she told me sorry, she had cut her hours. And I realized that I was a business relationship, a mere business relationship, nothing more.

So I moved on and went through quite a few hair cutters but no one made me feel like J. Some made my hair too light, adding highlights at every visit, some cut it too short, some just weren't pleasant to be around. And then I found T, an outwardly gay male with loads of stories, and he gave a good haircut to boot. So I started religiously going to T. No, he wasn't J, but I was happy especially with my first haircut he ever gave me. They called me Barbie Joy at work. I'd never received so many complements on a haircut, and this one was asymmetrical, a new style for me. So I went to T for years, not every month as before, he was quite expensive, but regularly. I tipped well and complemented him often. I liked T, his stories were funny, he was fun to be around. And then last month I went into T for a haircut. We chose a picture from a magazine together and he started cutting. When he was done, it looked nothing like the picture but I hadn't seen it dry yet so didn't know that for sure. T had gone upstairs as I got washed after getting colored and then we were done. I yelled upstairs to T and thought he'd come down to see the results, but he just yelled bye.

At home I blew dry my hair and realized how much I HATED it. I went to work the next day and my co-workers complemented me on the haircut but I expressed to a few that it wasn't anything like what I asked for, like what the picture T and I chose together showed. Some of my co-worked made statements like "Well it will grow back". And many later admitted that no, they didn't like it either and encouraged me to call T. So I called and told him I hated the cut. He asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him I didn't know what he could do, it was already too short and all that he could do realistically was to cut it shorter. He kept repeating ,"What do you want me to do?" Dispassionately repeated. And finally I asked, "Well could I come in so you could at least look at it?" I heard him flipping the pages of a book and he replied, "Come in at 5:30." And hung up the phone without a "bye". There was no "Oh I'm so sorry you are unhappy Joy." Again I realized that I was nothing but another business relationship. I never saw him again.

So today I saw Rose. I had called a local hair cutting place and got an appointment . They told me Rose would be cutting my hair. There is an older frail woman who works at our local Trader Joes. She's bent over so much that I feel like telling her that I will bag for her and even ring up the merchandise. I feel bad for her that she has to help me. My husband joked that he heard her name is Rose and she cuts hair on the side. I was scared about who Rose was....

Continued tomorrow