Primavera

In quitting my job, I've ensured that I will accomplish at least one New Year's resolution, Must Knit More From Stash. Add to that the need for a birthday present for a mother who loves knitted dishcloths, and you get me furiously knitting on a Mason-Dixon Ballband Dishcloth jag. This one I made with some blue Cottontots and white from a giant cone of Peaches and Cream that I'm certain I'll never ever use up in a million years. Don't you wish you were a tiny fairy-sized person and could curl up under it like a buttery soft blanket? I obviously do.

There is much to love about this pattern, not least of which is the fact that it is interesting enough to keep me actually wanting to knit it, but simple enough that it just ticks along and basically knits itself. Of course, I love the idea of making something humble and useful from bits and balls of leftover plain cotton. There's something grounding about making something so ordinary, yet so special, because no one but a knitter would ever consider putting a couple of hours into actually making one's own washcloth.

My only problem is that the yarn-thriftiness turns into yarn-lust when I see that I have the white cotton, and a lovely greyish bluegreen, which would look fabulous with a bright red, which I don't have. And my brain says, Must remember to pick up a ball of red....but then I begin to violate the no-yarn-buying rule, and before you know it I'll have bought 18 different colors of kitchen cotton with the excuse that it will help to use up the one cone of plain white.

Which is why the Ballband dishcloths should probably be put on hold for the 3 sweaters, two hats, 2 scarves, and eighty thousand socks that are already on the needles. Nevermind the mountain of FO's that only need sewing up or ends woven in.

I think the problem is that everything on the needles right now are wintery, wooly things, and my spring fever is beginning to set in. The Burpee seed catalog came today and so I've been dreaming of summery veggies. Purple carrots and peppery basil and juicy red tomatoes as big as your fist and fried squash and big green and silvery Charleston Grey watermelons. And lettuce so mild and buttery (everything's buttery today, isnt it?) you just eat it by itself, fistfuls of it with no dressing, with a little taste of dirt still on the leaves. And wild onions. And blackberries. And polk salad. And sucking honeysuckle nectar out of the little white and creamy-orange blossoms.

And of course, cotton washcloths.

I have this urge to run, to go wild, to get the hell out of Dodge. I'm craving Eureka Springs, that perfect little stone haven of light and darkness, of love and light and haunted hotels and Rainbow people playing guitars in the street. I want to be dancing in Chelsea's bar to a hippie jam band, no bra, my blue mermaid skirt swishing, tossing my hair in some beautiful hippie boy's bearded face. I want to be picking mint in the ditch for mojitos. I want to be smoking a joint under a canopy of oaks behind Spring Street with people who have names like Raven and Fish and Porkchop. I want to rename myself after some kind of animal, and grow my hair, and eat calamari and fettucini primavera (everything primavera!) at Cafe Soleil. I guess what I really want is for things to be the way they were this summer, when things were crazy on the surface but somehow okay as long as we had a bottle of cheap wine, and a good song on the radio, and we could yell out into the warm nights. Seriously!

I think I'm just feeling too quite. The proverbial calm after the storm. To tell the truth, I'd love nothing more than to be on the front porch, watching the lightening in the green sky, that eery feeling in my gut. I like big dangerous things that make me feel small.

That's all. For now anyway.