A Poem For When You Want It To Be Spring

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The opening three lines of this delighted me but this line is the clear winner of them all: “Not even moths in the spell of the flame/ Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!” Amen, Kenneth.

 

Desire For Spring
by Kenneth Koch

Calcium days, days when we feed our bones!
Iron days, which enrich our blood!
Saltwater days, which give us valuable iodine!
When will there be a perfectly ordinary spring day?
For my heart needs to be fed, not my urine
Or my brain, and I wish to leap to Pittsburgh
From Tuskegee, Indiana, if necessary, spreading like a flower
In the spring light, and growing like a silver stair.
Nothing else will satisfy me, not even death!
Not even broken life insurance policies, cancer, loss of health,
Ruined furniture, prostate disease, headaches, melancholia,
No, not even a ravaging wolf eating up my flesh!
I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile
In a new fresh air! I don’t want to hibernate
Between walls, between halls! I want to bear
My share of the anguish of being succinctly here!
Not even moths in the spell of the flame
Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!
Not even the pilot slipping into the great green sea
In flames can want less to be turned to an icicle!
Though admiring the icicle’s cunning, how shall I be satisfied
With artificial daisies and roses, and wax pears?
O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn’t be stultified!
Dear coolness of heaven, come swiftly and sit in my chairs!

Friday Links

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1. Let’s plan a trip to Japan and go to Jeans Street in Kurashiki. “The road is dyed indigo, the color of Kojima’s iconic denim. The red and white lines at the road’s edge resemble the denim’s selvage— the reinforced end of a bolt of fabric that forms the outside seam of high-end jeans.”

2. These hand-drawn data visualizations from mid-1920s Turkey are beautiful:

3. I posted about reading to dissociate from the horrors yesterday but seriously, what would we do without books?

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Wednesday Poem

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In the spirit of focusing on amaryllis buds instead of WW3, here’s a Philip Larkin poem, first posted back in 2016.  Clearly it still speaks to me–I think it’s that first line, figuring out the syntax and then saying, “Oh yeah, that is what the light is doing these days.”

 

Coming
by Philip Larkin

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Slow Pillows & Giant Pin Boards

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Right after I finished the rainbow stripe hot water bottle cover in 2024, I ordered another skein of that magic colorful yarn. I said in the bottle post that “I was leaving it out like another throw pillow” so I thought, “Why not just make a real throw pillow?” I did math for the cast on to get a 19-inch wide piece and then just kept knitting until it was 19 inches tall.

That knitting took, uh, two years…but that slowness worked out because those stripes look great in my new office! A corner of a white room with posters on the walls and a tall shelf displaying LEGO kits. An orange couch is in the foreground with a bright striped knit throw pillow on it.

I blocked the knit square, lined it in scrap cotton, then treated that like one piece and sewed in a zipper. The backing of the pillow is an Anna Maria Horner reprint (I used the original in my first quilt back in 2009).
Closeup of the zipper at the bottom of a rainbow striped knit pillow.

This whole room is just a color circus and I love it. The giant pinboard on the other wall has a few postcards I put up in my locker in high school (!) on it and MOAR color from prints and posters. A desk with a large pinboard over it. The board is covered in bright posters and postcards.

It’s kind of fun to have a room that’s just for me and not visitors or guests or Doc. You might be thinking, “Karen, you’ve decorated the entire HOUSE for you,” and you wouldn’t be technically wrong when I did the other rooms, I tried to keep visitors or guests or Doc in mind and think of what they’d like. This office is just what I like and that’s rainbows and Legos and the lamp from my childhood bedroom and postcards like this: A vintage 80s photo of a woman on a patterned couch with wallpaper behind her. Text below the photo says, "When I looked at the wallpaper and the wallpaper looked at me we instantly fell in love"

Dissonance

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I might have posted that Kafka quote too early last week, because I was really feeling it this weekend:

“Every day I watch the terror grow and every day I have to work, run errands, do chores—how to describe that contradiction, and how to survive it.

Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.” 

Except the modern version of his postscript would be, “We started a war in the Middle East. Hanging art and sewing on Sunday.” 

It’s hard to know what to even say. It’s hard to not worry about, well, everything. It’s hard to take a few pictures because you’re really happy with your new space and then think about missiles hitting cities and destroying someone else’s space.

But I got my amaryllis bulb to send up a bud for the second year in a row? I guess that’s something. A blue pot with a small stalk and flower bud growing

 

Friday Links

Karen

1. The most nostalgic combination of words possible: 1991 California Raisins commercial for the library (via Austin Kleon).

2. I need to print this out so I can remember what’s actually helpful for people going through something (don’t put the burden on them! I speak from experience but I still forget!): A poster titled "9 things to say instead of 'Let me know what you need' " The 9 things are: 1. "I'm running errands later - can I grab you something?" 2. "I made extra food. Can I drop some off tomorrow?" 3. "Want company? Or just someone to sit with?" 4. "Can I take specific things off your plate this week?" 5. "No pressure to reply — I'm just thinking of you." 6. "I'm free this weekend if you want quiet company or help getting stuff done. 7. "I know calls can be draining want me to text instead?" 8. "I'm grabbing coffee later. Can I drop one at your door?" 9. "You don't have to say anything. I'm not going anywhere."

 

3. I’m probably painting the hallway this weekend but what if I took a boat ride in a laundry basket instead? And I were a goose?

 

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Say It Louder

Karen

Journalist Lyz Lenz wrote a column yesterday about why exactly women are so angry about that video of the Olympic men’s hockey team laughing along with Dear Leader about inviting the women’s team too: Because these men undoubtedly think they support women, but no one spoke up. No one walked away. No one said, “The women’s team did great, though.” No one!

As she says, “…it’s not enough not to say harmful things about people; you have to speak up when other people are. You have to walk away. Because if people are saying those things and you stay silent, it’s just as bad or worse. You are letting bad things happen while thinking you are good.”

Lord knows I speak up about it now, and men don’t take it well (I remember a boss in 2022 mocking the intelligence of a woman who wasn’t on the call and how he ended up berating me for 10 minutes after I tried to defend her). But when another man calls it out, suddenly that assumption that this language, this behavior, is OK gets challenged.

Something to think about, men!

Tuesday Project Roundup: FINALLY

Karen

Fifteen months after thinking about it and thirteen months after starting it, my Rainbow Brite/Gap 1999 crazy stripe sweater is DONE. Even better? It’s not itchy!!
A mirror selfie of a woman in a rainbow striped sweater

 

I love this SO MUCH. I haven’t made a sweater since before my mom died, when I realized I can’t wear wool. The yarn I used for this is mostly cotton with some alpaca and is just lovely.

I didn’t get gauge with the yarn, though, and had to do size math. I ended up knitting the largest size and I think the fit is exactly as intended. It’s a little tighter across the biceps than I wanted but that’s what I get for being so swole.

I love how refined the back neck and shoulder shaping are; I’m a big fan of PetiteKnit patterns because the finishing details are just so nice. Detail of the shoulder shaping on the back of a striped sweater

 

Anyway, I love this. It might be the favorite thing I’ve knit in decades.

(Why did it take so long? We’re long out of the habit of watching anything at night, so this was all Sunday family visit and work meeting knitting–an hour or two a week vs. an hour or two a day. Except now I’m so excited I made a sweater that fits and isn’t itchy, I want to make MORE, so maybe I’ll get back into movies.)