Nothing like a little compulsive shopping to take the edge off.... here is a resulting object of last week/month's emotional jag - an Hermes silk scarf (with British heraldry). Today feels like spring, smells like pooh, must be a duck, er maybe this means no more snow?! I have about five minutes inpiration/perspiration in me to work in the garden, and lose the stack of winter tires that's been sitting in the middle of gentle flower bed for a year.... maybe I'll still have juice for my little piece of meditative foliage after I've wheeled the tires to the curb. After this, I'll knit on my front veranda contemplating all the garbage that the snow so graciously hid during the winter, greet the neighbours who have been largely unrecognizeable in their cold weather layers, and take a little sun on the face....here we go.

This was my real March break, walking home along the boardwalk in near dark during a sleeting snow storm from a memorial service for an acquaintance of mine who died way too young. He is among four people within zero or one degree of separation who've died or been memorialized in the last week. And I've been on a death watch with Hector. What is going on?
We apparently do have a short and precious spin on this globe after all. Ironic, after the years of youth where I disdained living itself, that I cherish every molecule of experience now. I invited friends for dinner last night. We ate well. I kicked everybody out early, so we could all retire to the wombs of our respective beds, bellies full, warmed by the fellowship of breaking bread together, life lived.
Belly-dancing yesterday just about wore out my hip joints. J was going to be gone next week, and held us closer a little bit longer, with lots of enthusiasm and combinations for new techniques. The meditation yesterday was a wonderful visualization of swallowing the earth, moon and sun, and being one with the universe. The choreography had hippy figure eights, an execution of the infinity symbol with the pelvis as the cradle of life... Later, when I watched the younger dancers, I felt weepy for the life they imbued.
Bitter-sweet days.

March Break 1998 - Knitting in the Caribbean.
Don't gasp... I didn't just knit in the shade slathered in SPF75, covered in a mumu the whole time... I showed some skin, went swimming (a lot)...

The original dead boyfriend sweater, limp dreary reminder of my misery piece of knitting that it was (I still haven't worn it!).

This is my friend T. modelling wristies made from left-over yarn from my "dead boyfriend" sweater. Not that I made a sweater for the boyfriend who left me, but that I made a sweater to commemorate the event, in the depth of depression, in the cry-baby sobbing staring ahead knittting knitting month that followed his departure. My friend is an L.A. babe, and they look so posh on her. I had originally been making them as my Dickensian scribbler gloves for the cold offices I was working out of. Now the job is shaky, the wristies look better on T., it's spring and I'm hopeful, and I'm going to make another pair in my best most vibrant colourways for next fall. ... if I have a job ...assuming global warming doesn't kill next winter... See! The black thing doesn't work on me... I go art school dead poet maudlin in five seconds. Back to colour.