by Kat | Apr 15, 2024 | General, In This Moment
Hello everyone… I hope your Monday is starting easy!
Mine started with a bit of an explanation point! Yes, just after midnight, I was awoken by the sound of an explosion of hail stones being hurled at the house. It was so loud and the winds were so wild!
That exclamation point was soon followed by more flood warnings as some areas near us were evacuated. April sure as heck has been rainy and we added another almost 3 inches to those totals last night! All this rain has upset my “sweater washing” apple cart… that task might have to move to May!
But… I do have a tulip or four to share with you!
Please ignore the jaggerbush at the top, I did not have a glove handy to pull it out! But it will soon be gone… never fear!
I have never, ever seen such short-stemmed tulips, but I guess in their Tulip Minds, they thought that with the lack of leaves to protect their blossoms, closer to ground might be better…But they BLOOMED!
Tomorrow is a big day for me… and I am more than a bit nervous about it. I go to meet with the audiologist to figure out hearing aids. So if you could send me all your calming juju, I’d be so grateful!
Happy Monday everyone! See you all back here on Wednesday with something FUN!
by Kat | Apr 11, 2024 | General, Poetry
Welcome to week two of Our Great Poetry Exploration! This week our focus is on the incredibly delightful work of Ross Gay. Yes Kym, Bonny, Sarah, (and me!) are all sharing a Ross Gay poem with you today!
I distinctly remember the first time I read any Ross Gay and before I even finished the book, I knew I needed to read more of his writing! He has an incredible way with words… phrases… line breaks… and the way he makes the simple so very profound.
The poem I am sharing today is from the catalog of unabashed gratitude (a very good place to start on your journey with Ross Gay!)
ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt
by Ross Gay
No one knew or at least
I didn’t know
they knew
what the thin disks
threaded here
on my shirt
might give me
in terms of joy
this is not something to be taken lightly
the gift
of buttoning one’s shirt
slowly
top to bottom
or bottom
to top or sometimes
the buttons
will be on the other
side and
I am a woman
that morning
slipping the glass
through its slow
I tread
differently that day
or some of it
anyway
my conversations
are different
and the car bomb slicing the air
and the people in it
for a quarter mile
and the honeybee’s
legs furred with pollen
mean another
thing to me
than on the other days
which too have
been drizzled in this
simplest of joys
in this world
of spaceships and subatomic
this and that
two maybe three
times a day
some days
I have the distinct pleasure
of slowly untethering
the one side
from the other
which is like unbuckling
a stack of vertebrae
with delicacy
for I must only use
the tips
of my fingers
with which I will
one day close
my mother’s eyes
this is as delicate
as we can be
in this life
practicing
like this
giving the raft of our hands
to the clumsy spider
and blowing soft until she
lifts her damp heft and
crawls off
we practice like this
pushing the seed into the earth
like this first
in the morning
we practice
sliding the bones home.
ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt by Ross Gay © 2015, the catalog of unabashed gratitude. Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
You can find more about Ross Gay here or at his website here. And you can listen to Ross read this poem here!
by Kat | Apr 10, 2024 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings Unravelers and Happy Wednesday!
I am happy to say that the clouds thinned themselves down enough for there to be quite an amazing show here in the south hills of Pittsburgh on Monday! We were not a total eclipse, but at 97%, it was close enough! I paced my timing to pop out to see the progression between sourdough coil folds and chicken fajita dinner prep and by the time that sourdough loaf was tucked away in the refrigerator for its overnight rest, dinner was well underway the show was over. The sourdough bread making process is an excellent reminder that slow making is not a bad thing…
Which is a very good thing because this has been a very slow making week here. I am inching along on Sock #2 and I have had a few “starts” for my Valkyrie… a few starts followed by an equal number of ripping out what I started. Ideas don’t always work out… but all those failures sometimes reveal the path to success! Yes, I think I have found what will work and plan to try again this afternoon!
It’s a good thing that the stitching is not having failures! I finished page sixteen… The Selvage Library. Yes, this page includes almost all the selvage’s from the fabrics I used in the book… a sort of bibliography! Haha!
I have been watching with great interest Nell’s progress on a new skirt! I am intrigued and oh my… that color!
It has been an incredible reading week though! I have finished four books and I have even more good things queued up next! My finishes were the soon to be published Vera Stanhope book, The Dark Wives (coming August 27th), The Berry Picker’s, James, and another soon to be published book by Peter Nichols – Granite Harbor (publishing April 30th) which was a fast-paced, edge of your seat, can’t stop until it’s done, one sitting book!
This week I am listening to The Seed Keeper and reading an advanced copy of Valérie Perrin’s soon to be published Forgotten On Sunday (coming June 4tth). It is too early to make any judgements about the books, but they are each off to a good start!
There you have my making this week! See you all back here tomorrow with some poetry!
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
by Kat | Apr 7, 2024 | General, In This Moment
An eclipse is one phenomenon that is actually more impressive from the ground. — Leroy Chiao
There has been so much Eclipse Hype on everything… the local news especially, here in the South Hills of Pittsburgh but I am not sure they counted for grey, cloudy skies… very cloudy skies and rain!
But today, as we creep up to the eclipse, I will be making Mourning Dove silhouette’s to sit on the lines from my backyard. These doves will grace the seventeenth page giving a bit of me to my daughter’s book. I love the doves that sit on those lines morning and evening… they are a constant in my day with their meditative calls and gentle nature. They bring calm to my day… for it is impossible to be angry or stressed with these sweet birds.
Ready for the birds!
I have some bits of fabric that I will use to create the doves from to “perch” on my stitched lines. I don’t know how many I will be able to do in my timeframe… but maybe I can get 6 or 8 of them cut out in 15 minutes today! (And no, I am not counting the drawing time in the equation!!) But this will be a very peaceful way to begin my week! Even a rainy, cloudy, likely to ruin an eclipse kind of day! But I am not going to worry about a potentially obscured eclipse, instead I will keep myself grounded in this Monday… with Mourning Doves and slow stitching!
Happy Monday everyone!
by Kat | Apr 4, 2024 | General, Poetry
Welcome to National Poetry Month and Happy Thursday to you all!
This month, I will be joining Kym, Bonny, and Sarah as we share a poem with you each Thursday.
This week our focus is on poems about peace/humanity… and there was just such an abundance of choices, I struggled a bit with this one. So I kept reading and reading… but one poem kept circling around my thoughts and I knew that it was the poem I wanted to share.
The poet is Laura Grace Weldon and she is a “new to me” poet. I have not read any of her books but I did have fun meandering about her website! The poem I selected for this week is Anything, Everything.
Anything, Everything
by Laura Grace Weldon
“Find everything you’re looking for?” a clerk asks
and I say, “I’m still looking for world peace.”
“Can I get you anything else?” a nurse asks
and I say, “Yes, a safe haven for refugees.”
For a millisecond, their faces soften
as they take a deep breath of imagining
then laugh or shake their heads
or commiserate. For a few minutes
we might even discuss
our planet’s highest possibilities.
Maybe that deep breath,
that imaging,
is a starting place.
Anything, Everything © 2018 by Laura Grace Weldon. First published in Blackbird, Grayson Books, 2019.
Make sure you see what Kym, Bonny, and Sarah have to share today!
See you back here on Monday!
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