Knittin' and pickin' or dreaming in a different direction
In the run up to coming over here, Beth and I indulged in some pretty expansive dreaming about what where we might travel once we got to France. It seemed at the time to be a perfectly reasonable notion, to take advantage of being over here to springboard around the continent...Italy, Morocco, perhaps the Adriatic Sea, not to mention Provence, the Alps, and Paris and possibly even Ireland...
From our current vantage point however all those places seem perhaps a little more remote to us. As you can probably imagine, it's not a funtion of distance but rather of money. The financial realities of life (a sixpack of Corona costs 12 euros for chrissake) have inexorably impressed themselves upon us to the point where we now have begun dreaming in a different direction...home and hearth.
You can call it plan B if you like, I call it knittin' and pickin'.
About three weeks ago, I touched my guitar for the first time since hauling it over here. It was Beth who prevailed on me at the last minute to bring it...I was in the grip of a "travelling light" mindset. I am so grateful to her now for insisting that I not be too practical.
I think this winter is going to a good time to get reacquainted with my acoustic...already the callouses are coming back on my fingertips.
I've got the guitar set up in the living room now so it is the easiest thing in the world to just pick it up even for a couple of minutes. Colm likes strumming while I form chords on the fretboard. We can bang out Old MacDonald together now.
Meanwhile Beth has taken to knitting scarves, a winter ritual for her. The other day Tess demanded to be shown how to knit...Beth cautioned her about it being tricky and taking time...but Tess can now often be found on the sofa quietly working a pair needles...it looks like it could be scarf or something someday.
So as winter literally blows in (this evening,the ping pong table blew off the backyard terrace- that's the third time since we got here), we are all about beguiling ourselves with lyrics, melodies, fingering the warp and weave of our nights and days, teasing out of steel strings and wool thread, something soft, something sad, something to keep us warm...all the while dreaming of Morocco.
K
From our current vantage point however all those places seem perhaps a little more remote to us. As you can probably imagine, it's not a funtion of distance but rather of money. The financial realities of life (a sixpack of Corona costs 12 euros for chrissake) have inexorably impressed themselves upon us to the point where we now have begun dreaming in a different direction...home and hearth.
You can call it plan B if you like, I call it knittin' and pickin'.
About three weeks ago, I touched my guitar for the first time since hauling it over here. It was Beth who prevailed on me at the last minute to bring it...I was in the grip of a "travelling light" mindset. I am so grateful to her now for insisting that I not be too practical.
I think this winter is going to a good time to get reacquainted with my acoustic...already the callouses are coming back on my fingertips.
I've got the guitar set up in the living room now so it is the easiest thing in the world to just pick it up even for a couple of minutes. Colm likes strumming while I form chords on the fretboard. We can bang out Old MacDonald together now.
Meanwhile Beth has taken to knitting scarves, a winter ritual for her. The other day Tess demanded to be shown how to knit...Beth cautioned her about it being tricky and taking time...but Tess can now often be found on the sofa quietly working a pair needles...it looks like it could be scarf or something someday.
So as winter literally blows in (this evening,the ping pong table blew off the backyard terrace- that's the third time since we got here), we are all about beguiling ourselves with lyrics, melodies, fingering the warp and weave of our nights and days, teasing out of steel strings and wool thread, something soft, something sad, something to keep us warm...all the while dreaming of Morocco.
K
posted by K at 1:24 PM
1 Comments:
Such a warm and fuzzy feeling reading your words about the coming winter. You'll fare well with your knittin 'n pickin.
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