It’s been a funny old week, weather-wise. Arctic air came sweeping down last Sunday, dropping a couple of inches of snow on us and then freezing it solid. Each day would dawn in blue skies and sunshine, just warm enough to melt the top layer of snow ready for it to freeze overnight, when it would also snow again, and so on all week. Come morning it was so treacherous underfoot I could’ve slid gently all the way to work with just a single push at my doorstep. The layers of compacted snow and ice were like varnishing done by Jack Frost. Scenic, yes, I grant you, but when every step you take resembles someone wearing roller skates for the first time it’s a little more hazardous than I could wish.
I know as you get older everything seems to happen faster—time passes more quickly, and seasons can flash by before you’ve had time to get used to them—but I seem to remember spring lasting more than a week. And even then it was usually followed by summer, or what we laughingly call summer here in the far north of Scotland, and then autumn; not by winter. But tempora mutantur and all that, and winter is what we’ve got, after a teasing glimpse of spring the other day: sleet, snow, ice and temperatures hovering around zero. As I leave for work in the morning sparrows glare reproachfully at me as I pass, as if this is somehow my fault, coughing piteously and swearing darkly in birdish under their breath.
I sometimes think that birdsong would probably be a lot less appealing if we could understand it. Mostly I think of it as just a pleasant string of meaningless sounds, the avian equivalent of Italian, but of course to other birds it’s how they communicate, unless they’ve developed a form of semaphore yet to cracked by ornithologists. I suppose the ethereal, delicate beauty of a nightingale singing in the garden at evening would be diminished rather if you knew it meant, “Oi! Turn that bloody light off, some of us are trying to sleep out here, you know!”
To match the weather, here’s a chilly little poem by the Japanese master, Bashō:
These cold winter days
On horseback—
Even my shadow is frozen.
============================
TECHNICAL STUFF
This is always the point where the magic happens and everything comes together. It’s also the time when I put a bit of a shunt in to get things finished. So this week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knit the collar (13 rows of k2/P2, or just about an inch), and picked up stitches round the armhole (124 stitches in total, excluding the gusset, for roughly 16 inches in total). The sleeves won’t be very long—only 16 inches in total—but now I can settle down to the next few weeks of mostly plain knitting, quite a relief after concentrating on such a detailed yoke pattern.
Beautiful sweater!
It’s being northern here in MD. I used to miss the northern weather, but now that it’s happening here, I miss the southern weather. Days right now are light-jacket weather, nights are double-down duvet weather.
Basho knew his stuff.
Hi Tamar, the changing seasons is something I really value about living in Britain, and the Gulf Stream keeping us between extremes of hot and cold. Of course, being in the far north of Scotland means we don’t have to worry too much about extremes of heat in summertime!
Gorgeous gansey! The thought of keeping all those patterns in correct sequence makes my brain ache!
We are battening down the hatches for a nor’easter here. In other words, a blizzard with high winds and heavy snow, often with a mixture of freezing rain thrown in for good measure. On the coast, there will be warnings of high tides and possible wave damage. Good excuse to sit and knit socks.
Hi Lois, I keep a “5-barred gate” score of rows, ticking off each one as I complete it in an hardback exercise book. Every 5 or 10 rows I write the overall row number in the line above, so I always know exactly which row I’m on. I usually have a pattern chart in a spreadsheet, and each row has its number running up one side. This means I can open my iPad, click on the spreadsheet (I usually do this as a screenshot picture, which makes it easier to zoom in on detail), and by holding a ruler underneath the relevant row I can see what I have to in each bit of pattern in each row, and count the number of knit stitches before the pattern starts in a tree or diamond, for example.
It sounds very complicated, but it’s not once you try it! And it means I never have to count rows from the bottom because I’ve lost count somewhere! Though I appreciate this might be too much information… 😀
Cold but beautiful. Sometimes those winterscapes are stunning. I am dealing with the long-ish winter this year by visiting my daughter in Florida. Can you imagine – sandals!
Hi Betsy, that sounds like a plan! I optimistically bought a pair of sandals about 20 years ago, but I could count the number of times I’ve worn them since on the fingers of two hands…