sunrise and sunset: I can't come home.

I won't post knitting pictures this time, as the photographed images I snapped are of surprises, for Steven and Hickory. Those I knit during my first--my only scheduled, intended--week in Huron City. But I failed to leave the shores of Lake Huron. I am failing to not thrive. I have to be back in Ithaca by Saturday night, and that may well be when I get back (if I can remember to check the internet late in the week to ascertain when Saturday appears).

Having but little stash left on my vacation, having used most of it for the Baby Lee surprises and an Irish Hiking Scarf, in Berocco something or other with silk that was 50% off at the Knitting Etc Spring Sale, I am now knitting an Alice Starmore Aran sweater in multiple colors, with a fine (and surprise) yarn, one I have about thirteen skeins of, but each skein a different color. I've just built the in-the-round bottom, up to four inches, in Navy; and am taking a break after a long morning's mindfulness (there's not a five-stitch sequence of the same stitch in the whole bloody garment (dash it all for the too attractive picture that snared me: if it's not a single cross cable it's seed stitch or 1 x 1 ribbing or 3 x 1 cabling)).

But I stayed in Michigan precisely for the slowing down, the mindfulness, the solitude. My sister and brother-in-law, with whom I spent a wonderful week walking, talking, reading, and (me) knitting, left on Sunday, when I was leaving. Now I'm left. Now it's me, the three dogs, and the weather.

Ah, the weather.

It dropped from 86 degrees ( a very ominous and sudden 86 degrees) to 38 degrees, in the course of the evening and overnight. That's almost fifty degrees. And now it's about fifty and blowing to beat the band, in a full sun. Weather is a chief occupation up here, in Natechuh. At dawn I was sitting with my coffee at the picture window in the master bedroom thanking the weather tides for lowering the temperature and picking up the drama: big white caps, fourteen shades of gray and blue, something akin to a howl, backsides of baby leaves getting a whatfur.

I've made a fire in the "frpl" (furpull, realtor ad speak). I wore two sweaters, a sweatshirt, and my down jacket, to walk with the dogs up and down, up and down the beach this morning. I'm all for all the weather we can get.

I've read the four books I brought, to prepare for summer school teaching, last week. Our books in the family cottage have been standing here for centuries; well, decades. I've either devoured, tasted, or outright refused each one over multiple years. There'd better be one good book at the Port Austin Library, ten miles away, because I found Waiting--that I borrowed from the family cottage next door, after exhausting my own exhausted book shelves--well, like waiting. It performs what it says it's about. I kept waiting. From the first sentence, the guy is waiting, for the seventeenth summer in a row, for his wife to agree to get a divorce. At the start of the book he's a doctor; two chapters later, he's waiting to become a doctor. Ho hum, don't think I'll revisit that book tonight. Maybe I'll write a book.

Okay, no knitting pictures. But some pictures from where I am, to save me the trouble of finding words to explain why I have not come home. (I'll be back here, in Huron City, for perhaps three weeks in August, with lots of kids, mother, grandchildren, cousins. Now all is quiet.)