Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.
I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.
Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.
Excuses, excuses.
This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.
I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.
Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.
But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.
After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.