When I was a wee girl, I was shy. And I liked to spend all of my time reading. I remember reading everything and all of the time. My son is doing it now. Every new sound he can see let's him into a world that he was excluded from previously. Shampoo bottles, road signs, tags in clothing all have new and curious meanings.
For me, with adolescese came impatience and a creeping sense that reading and pretending just for the fun of it were not the normal things to do. I was self-consious and nervous. Around this time, I met a once-in-a-lifetime friend whose family raised sled dogs and lived primitively in the woods without indoor plumbing or television. Her name was the same as a slain lover in a Johnny Cash tune and was therefore much weirder than mine and hard to pronounce too. We were natural allies. I escaped with her as often as I could.
We were brave while we drug buckets of water and food through the snow toward the howling, wriggling dogs. We slept in down sleeping bags that kept out the subzero temperatures. We woke with frost on our noses and dressed by the woodstove. And it couldn't have been more perfect. Adolescent superficiality was meaningless there, where there were real-life adventures to be found in the snow-covered pines and on the back of a sled pulled by dogs.
Knitting, sewing, sketching - handmaking of any kind is connecting me again to the kind of quiet work that I did when I was a little kid. Eowyn Ivey's novel reminded me of who I was as a young woman in the woods.
I will not spoil it for you here because if you haven't read it, I think that you should. If you're curious about its content, I shared an excerpt from the book here. And if you do decide to read it, I hope that you'll share it with your nieces and daughters. There are some fierce women in this tale. I think you'll agree that they deserve a spot in your imagination.
This is my son in the photos. His hat is the Garter Ear Flap Hat from the Purl Bee. Full Ravelry notes are here. I'm joining the Small Things readers and knitters today. Head on over there for some very inspiring knitting and book recommendations galore:)
