Entanglings

 

Good morning from the porch, where I am watching new star jasmine acclimating themselves to the fence in back.

Back in March, I'd ordered 6 small ones from Southern States, but it wasn't til yesterday that they called to say they were in.  Not quite what I wanted, they admitted a little sheepishly:  the order arrived in 3-gallon buckets.  I laughed, and told her I'd take two of them.  "Instant gratification!" said the register attendant.  

Well, true.  Already they are spreading themselves out to make a lovely view from my kitchen window, and will curl around for a little porch view, too.

I am happy to grow things from small to large, but this time I won't have to fight the deer off for the tender sprout beginnings, as I have for the chocolate vine babies, the honeysuckle, and the clematis.  I gave the clematis away, but the chocolate vine, though with barely any leaves left on its upper tendrils, is still climbing possessively up the fence wires.  It shows a spirit I admire.  

Meanwhile, the birds seem to be enjoying the looping plant encasing one of the old iron gates at the edge of the yard behind the small patio I built...I can't remember its name...it will have tiny summer flowers.  There must be a nest nearby of red and brown wrens, for I see those more often, along with a bluebird and a cardinal couple, hopping around among the plant and the iron chair and table.

The point I think I am slowly coming to is that, although I talk about my "garden" and the "gardening" I pretend I work at, this yard is a mass of things crunched together, entangled in ivy and vinca in the back, or scattered here and there on the front slope.  Real gardeners might call it a jungle, with good reason.  But because it is roofed from April to late November in deciduous trees (and grows in poor, you could say non-existent, soil), after March and April's energetic planting and weeding and arranging and re-arranging, I let it all go where it wants and will.

I've even decided that this year the wild purple mint that is already sprouting in the driveway can encroach all it wants.  There are other weeds to pull, and I as usual will do a few each day, as well as pick up the endless twigs and branches the trees rain each morning.  Until the mint reaches its 12-inch height, and then I will yank it out where it's getting too big for its roots.

So I apologize if previous posts have intimated that I am more a gardener than I am.  I've decided that I like my jungle of green, sometimes unplanned, often surprising over-growth.  I like to see what does and doesn't make it, year by year.

For instance, the bulbs I planted last year, in what was previously a wildflower garden I thought had failed, came out magnificently in March, but now that they are spent, here come the wildflowers again reaching, pushing themselves through and around the folded-over daffodil and iris leaves. 

 Likewise, the peony I thought was dead by winter has, Phoenix-like, sprung up again, with a healthy bud, maybe two.  

The two small magnolias which have grown barely an inch or two a year since Tom Krenitsky brought them to me from his magnificent magnolia preserve have sent up signs that they might bloom at the top this year.  (Tom advised me just to let them be what they will be, no care needed.)  

So I keep watching them, and others, as they mature, or not, making a wilderness of yard and sometimes mind.  And will do so long after I can't pick weeds anymore.

  

Happy garden to you all, however yours grows.

New windows

 It's deep gray this morning, and my plants and I are waiting for promised rain. So far, it's only come in such light drops that there aren't even puddles forming.  I'm usually a morning person, but except for putting on a wash [I  just broke off to dry them], going for a focused grocery run, and making distracted mistakes with wordle and quordle, I haven't been able to settle into something.

Yet I've had that opening line on my mind for hours now.  I wonder what it is about the urge to write that washes into you, until you abandon everything else on the list. (Though there is the silence, too, when no words come.)

Last week, I had new windows put in the house; they are bright white emblems of what I need these days...a new view on life.  In a few days, I'll be traveling west again for sort of the same reason, a change of scene and heart.  Old friends to see, places to return to or rediscover, new routes to try out of the familiar.  Melding the past and the present, those days away dig themselves in and out of sorrow, a release, a pleasure.  A spur to engage the future.

Like those windows, it's mostly the same landscape I see through them, but by a new configuration, a new brightness.  The season helps.  Spring leaves things underfoot, as it opens up all the color and beauty we have been missing on the barren ground.  Walking along the front slope, I see flowerings I forgot were planted there...or perhaps they arrived on the wind.  It's a haphazardly growing slope, but I enjoy the surprises there.   And in the one sunny spot, at the end of the driveway, daffodils threw themselves up brilliantly. Though most are drying on their stems now, I've still got one pot bright.

The back fence garden, on the other hand, is being newly, deliberately laid out (too early for surprises yet), and so it is, in fact, a new look.  I'm enjoying that, as well, seeing its length not as one long outlook but as separate images through one back window after another.  The surprise there is that, though I didn't plant it with those individual views in mind, it just came to be that way.

My new windows have only one drawback...they've run away with any far travel this year.  Still, it's worth the sacrifice, not only for new ways of looking out, but for the satisfaction that I'm helping ready the house (and myself) for a new stage of life.  Whenever it happens to come for me.

Ought

 

My dear readers,

It's been months since I wrote, weeks filled with all kinds of distractions.  I'm sorry not to be in touch. 

Today is spring, which has been flowering prolifically hereabouts, the daffodils, especially, blooming in waves front and back...including beautiful, complicated ones I planted from a mixed bag last fall.

I did write in late February, but never sent it: all about how I was struggling to puzzle out the back garden.

I'm about to update that today, but before I do, I thought you'd like to see for yourselves what the struggle has been about.

Part I:

February 23:  Ought...as in I ought to be on my way to the garden shop to pick up mulch, paving stones, plants and vinegar for my back garden, standing unresolved since the back fence was installed, defining a space so different than before.  You would think, with a list like that, that I knew what I was doing.

I don't like fences, but this one was necessary if I was to claim that back jungle.  Like the writer who promised his editor that he'd begin his awaited novel as soon as he polished his tennis shoes, this morning I read, painted, checked airline flights (to where?) and even cleaned the bathroom in another attempt (conscious or unconscious) to avoid facing the giant unknown:

I don't know how that back garden should look.  I ought to, but I don't.

It's been a puzzle obsessing me for weeks.  Seeking advice, letting visions of greater grandeur than I can afford...or find tolerable...clutter my thinking. I can't number the times I've woken to an idea and said, "That's it!" only to undo it by improbability (too complicated; too expensive; won't last; won't grow in shade or that down-to-China depth of clay, tree roots and rock) or, like today, an equally down-to-China depth of inertia.  Ought.

It's not that I've done nothing.  I've collected pots and art for hanging on the wire between the fence posts; arranged a small area of stones in the lowest bowl of clay nearest the house; dreamed of star jasmine  that would entwine, elucidate, bring spring and fall shape and color to the landscape there, even bought large bags of potting soil in hopes.

But now I am thinking I ought to go back to the word "puzzle".  Like those 1,000-piecers my sister, nieces and I like to do together (though I am not as adept at them as they are), why not think of that back wasteland as a puzzle put together piece by piece.

Frankly, I have never been much of a whole-plan thinker.  I paint, collage, wire and sew without knowing what image will emerge.  I write by starting with a few words, which engender more words, line by line til I get to a point I might or might not have intended. I make meals by opening the refrigerator and building with whatever occurs to me to use, changing guest menus even at the last second. 

Even my life (a conversation with a friend the other day is reminding me) has been a piecemeal endeavor, each decade or parts of decades looking, if mapped out, like a jumble of mismatched eras that somehow got me here, together in one piece.  After that, the back landscape should be a piece of cake.

Well, all that comes down to what I do next:  hit the garden store.  Maybe with all the pieces jumbled out of the box in front of me, I can begin.

Part II.

Today: The garden store yields more treasures than foreseen.  I wander around, choosing raised garden boxes (no point in trying to grow anything in that clay and rock); dark  grasses to rise stiffly from new pots; and instead of the mulch I envisioned along the fence line, I choose pebbles and rectangular patio pavers, because...

...suddenly I see there should be a path toward the near corner of the fence, where a cluster of pots will brighten the view from my kitchen window.  The picture is beginning to emerge.

I bring them home and, with some help from Joseph to haul the bags of stone (heavy) out of my trunk, we set to work putting down the path.  I've already lay some of the stone, so now the pavers claim the rest.

I fill pots with new dirt, transplant some old plants and dig in new plants, roll pots into place along the fence.  For a few days, I continue this, shifting things around until I am happy with the composition.  My neighbor gives me an old chair I paint turquoise to sit at the end of the path.  It has no seat yet, but it will clearly be a destination for a quiet sit.

At a new garden shop I spend an hour with the helpful owner ("I love listening to gardener's plans!" she tells me as we walk lane by lane through everything) and buy a few more helibores for the front slope and three clematis I want to climb up the fence wires from the raised boxes.  I plant, water, spread organic fertilizer.

The next morning I look out onto my work, happy.  Then I look further down the fence.  Overnight, the vines have turned to spindly stalks.  Deer.

Despite my repellent, despite hair in the dirt, they've enjoyed their dessert in the dark.  One flower remains testimony to its once-potential.

But it's still growing.  I wonder whether to rip them out and try another vine, moving these to a more sheltered spot.  I order three or four Carolina Jessamine, purportedly indigestible to deer and rabbits.  We'll see what happens.

Once bitten; twice shy.  It's warm enough now to plant my Valentine's gift of a raspberry hydrangea outdoors, but I am on the offensive:  in a large pot borrowed from the front steps (once the home of a gardenia that grew too big for itself), I nest the hydrangea where I can keep an eye on its blooms.  Then I fashion a cage of chicken-wire over it (one dessert is all the deer get).

I'm still working, front to back along the fence, but little by little the pieces are falling into place.  Next, more stone winding further back, and then Alexander's tree house...and finally a secret path toward it.

I know exactly where everything will go. 

Wood with a gift for burning

 

Frank Harmon draws and writes this morning about the cold we've had...alligators in the east freezing, children skating on creeks not known for freezing over, and birds going about what birds do, even in this chill.  He is inside with a wood fire burning, about which, he notes, the climate people are confused whether that is environmentally good or bad.  I wrote back to him what first came to mind, and then decided to share it here:

"A wood fire burning in the fireplace.  Warmth of body and soul.  Wish I had one here, too.  Graduate students living in a farm house way out in the country halfway to Pittsboro, we had three fireplaces, one in each downstairs room.  The cozy front room where we built the bookshelves was my favorite.  I burned old wood all winter and sometimes into the spring, and read there."

Do you know that poem by Adrienne Rich, I asked him, and now ask you, about the difference between being lonely and being alone? It's called "Song"; I listen to it often these days.  That last stanza,

If I'm lonely/ it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore/ in the last red light of the year/ that knows what it is, that knows it's neither/ ice nor mud nor winter light/ but wood, with a gift for burning.

Last week, feeling the cold sneak through these old aluminum-framed windows while I sat reading, no fireplace to warm by, I called the window man and ordered new ones.  It's been on my continuing list of things to make sure the house is ready for when I'm old.  As I walk each room, doing what I usually do, I keep an eye on what needs to be changed or bettered (re-fitted, the elderly-care people say) for aging here.  I've kept my eye on such things ever since I first walked into this house, the only one for sale inside the small circle I drew on the town map, outside of which I firmly declined to consider living.

Despite the scepticism of some ("I wouldn't buy it," from my perfectionist cousin), I could see its potential for the long term.  I could spread out in first years, and consolidate in later years, leaving room for others, should I need them (not for loneliness, no...I know the difference between lonely and alone...but for care.  As it happened, theirs as well as mine).  There were lots of windows for light, and being high on the hilled street, walking distance to everything, gave it a wonderful outlook.  I bought it exactly ten years ago, never questioning, and thus began its renovation toward age.

Two weeks ago, I began the 12 months toward my 80th. (There's a funny story about that, but it's for another time.)  The years of the 9's have, historically, not been kind to me, or me to them, although this one began with lots of friendly and loving fanfare and gifts, for which I'm grateful.  But I'm more intent than ever on keeping up with that list.

Even Joseph felt it time to have the talk with me..."But what if...?" he asked me over again, attaching clauses rife with possible crises as they occurred to him.  Thankful as I was, I had to smile...it's a younger person's question, after all.  We who are about to age know it has no answer.  And, anyway, do we really need to know?

Because we can renovate all we want to or can do, but there is a double edge to that word re-nov-ate:  a freedom in knowing the future is wide open to reinvention.  In the last light of the year, ice-fast on the shore, still there, with a gift for burning.

Movie nights and days

 

I've been waking up earlier and earlier these days, my head full of ideas of things to do, changes to be made, better ways of thinking and acting.  January, my Capricorn month, has always been the time of energy mode...papers, shelves, closets and fixit house projects, yard projects, life patterns.  If by February some of those are unfinished, they mostly languish for another 11 months.  But in January, it's amazing what things get done, morning by morning, concept to completion.  Note, however, that "morning by morning" doesn't include much past the second hour of afternoon.  No matter the month, I slump by then.

Waking today, my first thought was to make a list of the movies I watch after that  witching hour when I can do no more...or, more positively put, during those later knitting and tea hours, especially on these cold and (like today) rainy days when a walk is out of the question.  

Except one or two, these won't probably be found on a Golden Globe list.  A lot are quirky, more are lighter than air.  And, also with a few exceptions, the ones I most watch were made before 1950.

I could be defensive and say that I don't watch film the way other people do, but there's no reason to be defensive.  I just don't.

So here they are, stories empty of car chases, guns blazing, cities blown up, mean men acting out political hubris in war and business, and strange creatures with molten heads running the world.  These are watch-in-winter films, in no particular order of importance, except the first.

1. I Know Where I'm Going, with Wendy Hiller (she wasn't Dame yet).   It didn't take me half a second to begin with her.  Set in Scotland during the war, the film has a lot to say about a country's home pride and those who muscle their way into it.

2. The Young in Heart, with Billie Burke and Paulette Goddard. Billie Burke has been a movie idol of mine since, as a teenager, I borrowed a book from the library on her life.  She dated Enrico Caruso, but married Florenz Ziegfield and said she got up every morning before he did, so she could do her hair and put on her makeup.  The next ones won't be a surprise.

3.  Dinner at Eight, B.B. again, with two other comediennes you won't regret watching strut their stuff:  a comedy, with tragedy woven in, it is one of those movies made of a showy extravagance, when people went to see films that for little over an hour could relieve their minds of their economic reality.

4. Merrily We Live, with B.B. and Constance Bennet.  No tragedy in this one. Only slapstick, or what you will recognize as "screwball comedies", with butler.  

4a. My Man Godfrey, in which William Powell deals with Carol Lombard over an ash heap he's living in and becomes their butler.  Don't bother with the one made after 1950.  Lots of re-done film after that time just didn't come up to the original, no matter who got to play in them.

5. Grand Hotel, with some of the same actors from #3 and the brilliant addition of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.  Plenty of tragedy and also redemption.

6. Dancing Lady, speaking of Joan Crawford.  Yes, she really can dance as well as be dramatic.

7. Good Girls Go To Paris, with the wonderful Joan Blondell being her spunky self.

7b. The Stand-In, where Joan Blondell makes her mark again, this time with Leslie Howard on a movie set. Humphrey Bogart is in it, but I watch it for those two.

8. The Animal Kingdom, Leslie Howard here too, with Ann Harding and Myrna Loy (from the Thin Man series, though she plays a very different woman in this).

9. Sin Takes A Holiday, another Constance Bennett...a very old one, in which her diction is quite mannered...not sure who directed her that way, but you can ignore that lapse, and enjoy her weird situation.

10. If Only You Could Cook, with Jean Arthur and a gang of gangsters who save the day.

11, 11a, 11b. You Can't Take It With You, Easy Living, and The More The Merrier...all with Jean Arthur and a full cast of famous people from those other movies above, doing silly, sometimes inspiring things.  If you like movies with seduction scenes, there is nothing better than the one in TMTM.  Easy Living, on the other hand, will have you turning to your calculator.

12. The Rage of Paris, with Helen Broderick, a character actress I'd follow in any film, and also Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. from #2, bringing his comic charm.

,

13. Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday had to have won some major prize for that game of gin rummy she plays with Broderick Crawford.

14. The Philadelphia Story, with Katharine Hepburn and all the people famous from that era.  But that's probably on everybody's list.  Never mind.  Instead watch #15.

15. Holiday, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who's also in #14, but believe it or not, this one's better.  Their acrobatic scene was "borrowed" by Gene Kelly for Singing in the Rain...I spotted that, Gene.

There are lots more old ones in my like box, but in case you think I see only in black and white, I'll put in some newer ones. 

16. The Kindness of Strangers, with Bill Nighy.  Any movie he's in is worth it.  I don't know how I found this one, but I'm glad I did.  He plays a Russian, sort of.

16a. The Last Bus, with Timothy Spall.  He's in Enchanted, too, but you'd never know it by this film, in which he travels with the help of strangers across a country on a very emotional mission.

16b. Finding Your Feet, with three British actors I couldn't live without seeing, including Timothy Spall, who apparently can play anything.  And dance.

16c. Calendar Girls, with all the best British actresses except three, and I'm sorry they're not in it, too.  I would have loved to see what their characters made of themselves in the nude.

17. In Your Dreams.  It's Turkish, and made me want even more to go to Istanbul.  Trouble is, you can't find the film anymore.  All it says is "error" when I try.

18. Still Breathing, set in the King William district of San Antonio, a strange little film, but I like it, and Celeste Holm is in it, and the Alamo.

19.  The House by the Sea. It's in French, but you will recognize the story from old family stuff, I'm sure, no matter who your family is and even if you don't know French.

20. Amour, also in French, a beautifully done, but searing, emotional story we should all watch.

21. Louise en Hiver, about an old woman who is stranded over the winter at a seasonally abandoned beach.  It's a quiet, slow but pointed film about survival, animated in the plain gentle way of children's picture books. 

22. The Women on the Sixth Floor, French again, about class and counter-class with a bemused character who goes between.

22a. The Gilded Cage.  French and Portuguese.  A good story about who we are when we can be who we are outside of who others think we are.

23. Queen to Play, in which Kevin Kline takes second best to Sandrine Bonnaire in the game her character learns.  In French totally.

24.  A Little Game, a charming little New York tale to watch right after #23.

25. A Tuscan Wedding, purely for the fluff and looneyness of it.  It's in Dutch and Italian, believe it or not. "You can smell the Prosecco in the air!" says one of its more pathetic characters.  And she says it twice.  To her dog(s). 

26. Twelfth Night (1996) .  Yes, Shakespeare, and the best film of that play ever done.  I could watch this every week and not get tired of it.  Bonham Carter and her co-stars take over Shakespeare's language as if it were their own.  Really.

27.  The Elephant and the Butterfly.  Another good story about what we learn from others in childlike ways.  See it along with The Sense of Wonder.  Their titles could easily be interchangable, I'm realizing now.

28. The Farewell, with Awkwafina, who made a serious character out of her own life story, I think.  She's the Golden Globe winner for this.

29. This Beautiful Fantastic, one of my favorite garden rescue films.  Tom Wilkinson is in it.  You might want to pair this one with Greenfingers.

30.  Little Forest, about food and the hunger that drives us to it.  No, it's not a documentary...it's a real story.  But like #17, In Your Dreams, it's hard to find any more.

30a. Tasting Menu.  Delicious all around, though it does have a man or two with doses of hubris.

For the travel-hungry, some armchair-travel films...Perfumes and Haute Cuisine and Food Club and A Five-Star Life and Learning to Drive and The Station Master and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and The Grocer's Son and Border Cafe and Bagdad Cafe and My Afternoon with Margueritte and A Man Called Ove (not the later American version) and the Australian Strictly Ballroom...

That should get me (and you) through the last cold day of March, if we do more than one film on a couple of afternoons and evenings.  Which I often do.

Oh:  Here's one for all you Hallmark fans...Chicklit, where the men in the pub go clear off their gourds so they don't lose their evenings of pints.

Peace?

 

Dear readers,

One by one, your holiday cards appear in the mailbox. 'Tis the season for enjoying messages from family, old friends and new.  So many of them, like the one above (isn't it beautiful?), wish us peace.  I have sent my own cards out wishing the same.

Peace, though.  What is that? I have begun to wonder.   Certainly, it is one of the traditional words for these holidays...joy, peace, happy.  We all use them.  We hope for that indefinable mood and in a broad gesture we hope it becomes universal.  Becomes us. But, though joy and happy are easily perceived, sensed, defined, peace, it seems to me, remains a figment of our imagination.

The other morning I made a card (yes, sorry, there are still a few left to do) for two friends I haven't seen lately.  I'd begun to collage it out of a variety of small scraps, when, one by one, it became a house with spire and, apparently (my friend Alice noticed it when I showed her), a kind of angel in the rafters.  It named itself:  House where all are warm and dry and fed and at peace with each other.

That is the longest title I've ever given a piece of art, except those very few which have a poem wrapped in or around them. It may have begun to answer for me a greater  meaning of peace. I don't mean the meditative state we try to accomplish in yoga, but the sense that all is well among us...every one of us...the whole world.  It gives wellness a much greater distinction (and spirit and empowering) than simply the icon of an exercise facility.  It is a travesty that the weekly spiritual chant in some religious houses...peace be with you....goes no farther than that moment.

Why can't we get along with each other? we (some of us) ask, naively, you might say.  But peace among us is more than getting along.  It's more than tolerating, or accepting, more than inclusivity, too. It's more than being neighborly, that cozy word. It's even more than kindness.

To engender peace means opening the mind to the deeper sense of who we are, who all of us are.  It needs an opening of the self, really.  There is responsibility at its core (pun intended):  being responsible for one another, being responsive to one another.  Understanding the bridge that connects us.  Peace is bigger than we are.  I am hoping it is not bigger than we can be.

All these holiday cards, while beautiful, are a welcome but fleeting reminder of what, as yet, we have not reached among us.  I thank you for them.

May you begin the new year bringing with you Peace in all its fullness.

People who matter

Long ago, in one of my too-many board meetings, a new executive director of the non-profit announced that we needed to involve more "people with stature".  I'm sorry, but I can't let a phrase like that go without comment.

I asked him what he meant by stature.  You could count on my neighbor Judy, sitting across the table, to lend her wit to a challenge. "You know," she quipped, "tall people."

The exec, trying not to be annoyed on his first day facing us, explained what /who he valued...wealthy people, primed for recognition, publically known as leaders,  especially in business or the lucrative professions.  But eyebrows were already raised.  This new fellow hadn't quite got it.  People who matter to charities that matter are invested in a physical, can-do, idea way.  They understand from the ground up what that organization needs to serve the people who need support.  Then they go and do it.

Yes, money matters; a network of donors who also understand that is indispensible.  But here around that table were already people you could count on, people with compassion and talent, who opened hands that worked hard, mind and body, and gave generously.  As the exec's eyes went around the table, it was clear that he didn't think we were status enough.  He was used to directing and rubbing shoulders with a room full of big names. (Thankfully, he moved on to a more status place a year or two later.)

I thought about that the other day while I sat in the waiting room of the VA hospital near Asheville where my brother-in-law lay after his heart suddenly failed him.  With me were his brother and wife and his sons...those the doctor had somberly told my sister she should call.  We sat watching for three days as my brother-in-law Jim lifted himself from a heart-stopped 30-minute CPR to three days of worried what now?...and suddenly, on the fourth day, overnight, came back among us.  His own physicians and nurses, excellent caregivers all, are still amazed, as we are, and we are grateful to all of them.

Among the waiters was my sister's sister-in-law, Mary Janine, who with her husband, the patient's younger brother, had flown in from far places.  She sat knitting, cheerfully chatting and keeping us less anxious.  I hadn't seen that couple since my sister's wedding fifty years ago.  But waiting rooms are famous for inviting togetherness, whether you are related or not.

My niece Deanna had also come the first day with homemade soup and crackers and chocolate and tea for all of us; she lived only a few minutes away.  She, too, brought with her a craft she was working on...bags of dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks she was stringing to decorate her house for a holiday spiritual retreat. She told us how much she enjoyed using real, natural things in her life and how important they were to the spirit.  One of her jobs is enticing positive spirit in others.

Eventually, that brought us around to Mary Janine's knitting, and the charity she started nearly 8 years ago to lend support to women whose children were suffering with cancer.

She and her sister began Shrugs through Hugs which provides yarn... beautiful yarn she often dyes herself or searches the world for...to volunteers to make into shawls sent to let those mothers know that someone is with them in spirit.  It doesn't sound like much, but it is a huge comfort, the connection as much as the warmth of their knitted shrugs.

Mary Janine and her sister work hard at not only themselves making the shrugs, sending patterns and materials to other volunteers,  but also knitting other beautiful items to sell at select museum shops and boutiques...that's to raise money to buy more yard for their mothers' project.  

Her creativity made me smile.  Since Newport is her special place, she takes the colors of the famous historic homes for her wares and teaches a little history in those packets she sends out.  On their website, they write:

"The idea for our charity began to take shape during the winter of 2016 in Newport, Rhode Island.   Our love for this wonderful city is reflected in our Newport-inspired yarn and shawl collection.   Postcards from Newport highlight some popular points of interest.  Our Gilded Age yarns and shawls honor the strong women behind the Newport mansions while supporting the brave moms we serve through our mission."

You can find her on  https://hugsthroughshrugs.org and on instagram [#hugsthroughshrugs], where the photos of her work and the places they reach are inspiring.  Over the few days we sat getting to know each other, I listened as she recounted how, in fact, other women inspired and taught her craft, and how hard she works to coordinate knitters and find places to sell her yarn to support those mothers' gifts.

 I'm a terrible knitter, myself; simple knit and purl with maybe a little edging is what I keep to.  But even I would try to make shrugs to send her for those mothers.  You can hear and see her whole heart in it.  And you can also see what it takes them to keep it going.  I call Mary Janine and her sister people who matter.

It may have been dire circumstances that brought us together, but I am grateful for the chance to know yet another person who matters and allows others to matter, too, in the best ways.

And here's Deanna's retreat, in case you need a day of renewal at the end of the year, a chance to invoke the kind of spirit that opens itself, hands and mind, to others' needs while it opens yours.

                                                                                                                                                                            

May hope and dedication light your holidays all, as it will certainly light ours 

as our first candle glows for Chanukah.