The week begins

Another snowy weekend, but just like last weekend, the snow mostly melted within hours of its falling.  Today is wintry though.  The sky is a bright white, not threatening more snow, but looking decidedly chilly.  The sparrows form what my friend Annie calls a ‘flash mob’ and sail across the yard to the now denuded bower on the trellis at my office window.  The trumpet vine has only a few leaves left and the hops vine that shares the trellis has dry tan flowers hanging on here and there.  During the green summer and fall months, the hops are swamped entirely by the trumpet vine and only now in the cold beginnings of winter is their tenacity made manifest.  The sparrows don’t linger on the trellis, just grab some seeds from the feeder and hurriedly mob off to god knows where.  The next feeder, I suppose.    

I’ve had a mild cold this week.  Just some sniffles and a low-grade fever.  So, no venturing out into the inclement weather.  Spent most of it in my chair with my crocheting.  I’m working on some hats for a friend’s son.  He’s away at grad school in Hawaii.  I don’t see how he’ll need my hats over there in the sunshine and humidity, but his mom saw pics of them and says he’ll love one, so……….

As I slide slowly into retirement (still work a couple days a week), I’m finding the crocheting I learned as a girl coming in handy.  My arthritic fingers need movement, something they’ve had plenty of in my working years at the computer.  Now that they have 4 or 5 idle days a week, they had started to freeze up on me.  So, I took up the hook and yarn and started making small rugs, antimacassars and armrest covers at first.  Then a beret or two for my mate, then more and more hats for unsuspecting family members and friends and then there were just too many to find heads for.  I took some over to a small main street boutique, knowing full well I’d get a polite pat on the head and a smile of regret, but the owner asked me to leave those, told me to get some cards/price tags made and bring her as many as I could make.  With that, Brigham Berets was born.  She’s actually sold more than a dozen so far and I have an outlet for my finger exercises.  In this small town the market could already be saturated, but we’ll see.

Well, time to get back to my ‘tatting’ as my partner refers to my hat making.