Off to Huron City

Now (Kylie) I'm a bit more back up to speed: four sweaters in the three weeks since I finished, and breathed hard after, the heffalump fair isle. All baby and size four-year-old sweaters, in Colinette Cadenza and Schaefer Susan cotton. Tomorrow I'm off for a week in Michigan, to read, and to knit a Hickory-and-Steven "Little Lee" surprise (it wouldn't be a surprise if I was coding that comment to a certain Zimmerman sweater, now would it? That's not what I'll do on the shores of Lake Huron, by the birch-wood fire, following the lapping waters to set my stitch rhythm; no, something else).

I did a few sweaters at speed, adding a ruffle here and there, a picot neck line, but mostly happy to go fast after the attentiveness of the elephant sweater. Then this fourth Samantha, for a fourth little girl, this one not yet among us.

With my front door and kitchen windows open against the mildness of May, I yesterday entertained a new critter, one who gave new meanings to her name: House Wren. Her first swing through my living room was a mistake, with much snorting and bopping off surfaces. But she liked it, and grew certain of her ways through the house. Since I spent much of the day at my computer in the nearby study, I'd catch glances of her swift departures, hear twinkles of her busyness in the kitchen. Gathering ghosts of old leaves and dried pansy stems for nesting, she and her mate (and two cardinals) were busy outside my study's picture window, nattering about who would build on last year's robin's nest on the front stoop light. Only later in the day did I find that she'd been building her nest in the dog's cookie jar, ajar; laying down a day's work over the Greenie treats.

That's my HOUSE wren. I've had to close those passages: since I'm leaving tomorrow, the house will be shut up, and she'd be a wreck trying to get to her new nest. While the goings and comings lasted, though, I felt ever more a part of the great outdoors, none of that winter shutting off from nature. Imagined I was in a Belize rain forest.