Before Spring

Before Spring

The name of my monthly knitting group is Whiskyknitters, although I myself never partake of anything more muscular than pear cider when in attendance.  I have a long drive to the pub and besides, despite my Scottish heritage, whisky tends to render my pale visage redder than a longshoreman’s and make my arms feel long.  Doesn’t matter though, the conversation around the table is stimulating enough even for a teetotaler. 

We are a collection of women with interests as varied and divergent as the colours in a crayola box.  Just this week, while working on the back of a sweater and sipping my cider, I listened as the English professor spoke of needing to be home grading essay papers, the title of the assignment being, “What Can You Do to Make the World a Better Place”.  Boy, I’d love to read those.  I saw another woman actually get tears in her eyes as she spoke of the duck confit she’d finally mastered the previous week.  “It was just so beautiful”, she said.  She’s on to pancetta now.  One lady is planning to welcome two Angora rabbits into her household as she’s recently taken up spinning her own wool.  I see lots of Angora sweaters, and probably lots and lots more rabbits, in her future.  In our number we have a ukulele player, a woodworker, teachers, writers, singers, gardeners.  One woman has a doctorate in erotic literature, another has a flock of chickens.  It’s impossible to leave our monthly gathering without at least entertaining the idea of learning something new.  And honestly, what better time to do so than February?

A friend once told me that I am the sort of person who “hears things in the silence” which at the time I thought, frankly, made me sound a bit dotty.  But just now, this month, I think he may be right.  For the grey blanket silence of February is deceptive and if one listens closely one can almost hear the stirring of the earth. Though they now appear still as winter stone, already, deep within the maple trees there is a faint quickening of green, a longing to stretch their cold limbs up and out towards a warm blue sky.  We still have a few more weeks, but the murmurings are out there.  

  As Keats once said, “ he is awake who thinks himself asleep.”

Spring will be here soon.

In this “grand old poem called Winter”, as Thoreau so aptly phrased it, we are now in the final stanza.  Though still blustery and cold, in but a few weeks now, February will begin to loosen his grip on the land, one chapped finger after the other will start to give way, releasing the daffodil buds and waking the rose.  It’s the time of the year when I am the most anticipatory.  In the chilly air, I feel it.   Something is about to happen and I need to prepare.  These are the weeks to plan summer gardens, to rifle through untried recipes.  I want to learn something new, brand new, and now is the perfect time.

  Before the warm days steal all my hours and magic away my thoughts. 

 Before the arrival of Spring.

  I once knew a lady who took up tap dancing in her fifties.  No one but her husband was prouder than she when she took her place alongside the youngsters in her class for the graduation recital.  Though now well into her seventies, I’ve heard she still dances regularly.  What fun.

A dance class, a painting class.

  Yoga, or embroidery?  

In these few fleeting days that remain of Winter, what is percolating in your mind?  

What would you like to do this year that you’ve never done before?

Or, as the grand poet Mary Oliver once asked, 

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Doesn’t this look tempting?
How many classes would this require, do you suppose?