Category Archives: domestic life

My First Sweater

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My First Sweater Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and heavy and although the sleeves are a little long, it actually fits and the proportions are right –

I’m going to do another one in this same pattern but using Becky Weed’s gorgeous wool she mills over at 13 Mile Ranch. This will be my locavore sweater — the wool was grown and processed just over north of Bozeman — I’ve written before about buying Becky’s lamb and I’ve been wanting to knit something from her yarn for a while now (but I told myself I had to finish the sweater I’d started first). I love that she converted an old barn on her place to a mill, and that she’s working so hard to develop multiple revenue streams for local sheep ranchers. Plus, the wool is gorgeous …

I think I’m going to do this one in a different stitch — seed stitch maybe? With a dark mohair trim and wooden buttons? This is one of those things like learning to sew a skirt, or make jam and pickles, that makes me feel good. I like being able to make something myself, something that doesn’t look like what everyone else is wearing, and that I can tweak so it’s exactly the way I want it. I also take great comfort in not being entirely reliant on the consumerist corporate world for basic things like feeding and clothing myself — there’s some real bottom-line security in knowing that I can take care of my basic needs, that I haven’t entirely lost those skills.

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My Grandmother’s Voting for Hillary

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My 97-year-old grandmother asked for an absentee ballot for the Democratic primary so she can vote for Hillary.

My grandmother has never voted for a Democrat before in her life, but she wanted to “vote for that woman.”

My grandmother was a crack polo player in the 1930s, when polo was a hugely popular public sport (30,000 people took the train up out from Chicago to see the 1938 East-West game, when Will Roger’s team beat the best players from the East coast). Because she was a “girl” my grandmother wasn’t allowed to play — she could play practice matches when someone got hurt, but she never got the chance to compete.

She was also offered a full scholarship to the Northwestern Medical school, which her father convinced her to turn down because she’d be “taking a place from some man who would need to support a family.” Instead, she married my grandfather, and then when he was debhilitated by alcoholism, she supported her family without the aid of anything useful like a medical degree. She was an impatient mother, a woman who would have been much happier running something — a company, a hospital, something other than the Pony and Pet Show she put on with her best friend every summer.

When I was growing up she told me over and over again to stay in school, to get a degree, to go out and make my own money because if you have your own money “no one can tell you what to do.” She told me at about sixteen, long before I even had a boyfriend, that if I ever “got in trouble” to come to her and she’d take care of it. (This from a woman who wanted to abort her fourth child, but couldn’t find anyone back on those days of illegal abortions. My Aunt Molly doesn’t really take it personally, and in fact, she’s the one taking care of my grandmother in her very old age.) And of course, she’s the one who gave me Mrs. Baggot’s ring while whispering fiercely “now you have a really big diamond, and you didn’t have to marry anyone to get it.”

However, there’s always been this weirdly reactionary side to her — I remember her praising Nancy Reagan for walking several steps behind her husband (we mocked her openly for that one). And the only way my mother and two aunts could get out of the house as young women was to get married. But there’s that pissed-off part of my grandmother, the girl who was told she couldn’t play, the woman who had at least two more children than she wanted to, the woman who was convinced not to go to medical school. And that’s the woman who even at 97, is determined to vote for the first woman with a real shot at being the President of the United States. Even if she is a Democrat.

Who knows how many pissed off old ladies there are out there? There’s a group the pollsters haven’t been talking to …

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Knitting as Antidote for Frantic Busy-ness

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I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full time, it’s good to have a real job, especially for a writer — it keeps me engaged with the world outside my little circle of writers and artists and handymen and hunters and ranchers trying to make a go of it selling milk and eggs and wool. There was a piece in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago about telecommuters fighting off loneliness that I found interesting because it’s not really a problem I run into — for one thing, I’m weirdly happy to spend enormous amounts of time alone, and for another, I work with a group of people spread out between San Jose, Miami, Galway Ireland, Seattle and here in Montana. We’re all so electronically connected to one another at my job, that I don’t really feel like I’m alone all day. Between our group instant messaging program, email, and web-based meetings it’s hard to feel disconnected. In fact, when it gets as busy as it’s been the past few weeks, it’s amazing how fried and frazzled and pecked-at a girl can wind up feeling after another 10 hour day in her own front room.

And so, I’ve taken up my long-neglected knitting project again. Knitting and Netflix — a couple of hours working on the sweater that I’ve knit, pulled out, and knit again so many times now (it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to count stitches and rows, what I really like is knitting the big swatches of body parts, not the v-neck or sleeves where you have to pay attention). After a long day of emails and fires that need to be put out and very long technical documents that need to be edited in too little time there’s something essentially calming about putting in a movie, something that’s going to run continuously for an hour and a half or two hours without the interruption of commercials, and knitting. It gives you something to do with your hands. It keeps a girl from surfing the internet aimlessly. It makes you concentrate a little — not as much as working, but just enough to smooth out those jangly places that are left from the day’s work.

And who knows? This time, I might actually get this sweater finished. Considering it’s been ten below for days now, a nice, warm, raspberry-colored sweater would be a good thing.

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Perfect Vacation — at Home

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Inspired by this article in the Times of London, I holed up and took a lovely, restorative vacation at home after Christmas. Christmas was lovely — we all had a great time. There was lots of food and wine and by ten that night we had six kids under five doing the Toddler Disco in the middle of the living room floor. Perfect.

I woke up on the 26th a tiny bit hung over, and decided the tree was coming down. It was a pretty tree and we had fun decorating it — the big girls came over to help me. But I was done with Christmas. I’d done so much cooking and wrapping and festivity in the run up to the big day that by the 26th, I was over it. Plus, I kind of like taking down the tree — it’s quiet, and sort of meditative. Packing everything up again for another year.

And then I started my lovely lovely vacation at home. A dog walk in the mornings. Chores — a little cleaning, some food shopping, a quick stop at Nina’s to see what the kids are doing. Then home by noon or one, and a whole quiet afternoon stretches ahead of me and it’s down into my basement office to work in peace on my new book. It’s been a great vacation — nearly 4000 words and I’ve still got today and tomorrow before I have to go back to work. Then a few quiet evenings in a row to read or watch Netflix movies that have been piling up — after the string of parties before Christmas, parties that were fun but left me feeling all talked out and with that jittery energy that too much socializing instills in me — four whole days to settle back into my book was the best holiday I could have imagined.

Tonights festivities are going to be very low key — dinner with Nina and the kids who are leaving to go back to LA on Friday. We’ll cook some food and then watch the ball drop in New York at 10, and then home. I’m superstitious about the New Year — I hate welcoming a new year hung over. I like to greet New Year’s day bright eyed and well rested — I’ll do a little housecleaning — take the recycling out — and we’re off into 2008. Happy Happy everyone ….

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Creature of Habit …

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The last few months I’ve gotten into a writing rhythm that has really been working for me. I’ve been doing a blog post every day during the week, and weekends have been devoted to my new book. When I decided to get serious about the blog and to write on a regular basis, it was really to bring this little blog back to life. It never occurred to me that the discipline of taking care of the blog would bleed over into my creative work and prove a boon to that, but it has. Because I’ve written something of my own every day during the week, I find on weekends when it’s time to get back to the book, it’s much easier to pick up the thread. So, steady progress has been made, and although I have no social life, I’ve really been terrifically happy about it all.

And so it was something of a surprise how off-kilter I was all last week. LA was great, and I was thrilled to see my pretend children — I didn’t get a chance to blog about it, but the twins third birthday was an all-day affair involving much chirping of “It’s my BIRTH-day!” out of both of them. Three is such a fun age — and although infant twins are something of a logistical nightmare — they’re so funny now that they can talk to and play with one another. Their conversations alone are worth the price of admission — very very funny.

But it got me off my schedule. And then my internet connection was screwy all last week — I had no connectivity at all at home from Tuesday until late Thursday and it really threw me. I had to go out there in the mornings — out to the coffee shop where there are other people, where I had to get dressed in real clothes and where I ran into people I knew. It wasn’t a bad thing, but it did throw me off my game.

And so this weekend was lovely. My internet was back. I had my precious two days of silence, and puttering around the house, and descending into my basement office to pull up the book I’m working on. I did laundry and shopped for groceries and lo! my book had not actually turned into a pile of drek while I was away from it — nor had it gone entirely feral, snarling in the corner of my office where I’d neglected it. I finished a chapter. I started a new one. I read On Chesil Beach. I did laundry (the washer/dryer is in the basement, and I’m afraid I’ve become a little pavlovian in my love for the white noise of the laundry while I’m writing.) I even managed to outline a few topics for blogging this week.

My routine has been restored and it feels like my world is back on kilter. (Michael Ruhlman writes about the importance of a writer’s routine in his memoir House — it’s a terrific story about the importance of a home to a family and to creative work.) I know writers, like my friend Nina in LA, who can get work done among the chaos of family life — but I have never been able to do that. It takes me a lot of silence to be able to hear what’s going on inside my own head again — walking with the dogs helps, as does knowing that on the weekend I have two whole days stretched out before me where I’m not beholden to anyone else’s needs — like I said, I have no social life at the moment. But it’s winter in Livingston, a time when the wind howls, when darkness falls early, and when all the writers in town retreat to their offices and try to make up for the time we wasted playing outside during our short summer.

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