As I hinted yesterday, there’s a new sock on the needles and photographic evidence that he exists.

If you fell overboard, surely you’d like someone to throw you some knitting while you waited for rescue? Mind you, the fingers would numb pretty quickly in the waters of the San Juans. Winter temperature is about 45 degrees F., which gives you 15-20 minutes to climb out again undead, or so I’m told.

The best thing about this particular sock is that I only have to knit him once. He is a sample and a test knit of the gentleman friends of my secret red socks. He’s also my first taste of the new ShibuiKnits Sock color Man Blue. I love it. I loved it better when I thought this little sock fellow was going to be 80 sts and the denim hues were distributing themselves heterogeneously, but at 72 sts I have a nice steady spiral going on, and that doesn’t bother me too much.

Can we talk about US #2 needles, though? My fellow American knitters, we really must get on board with the metric system. I was going to knit this sock on two circular needles, but found that the new #2 Addi Lace needle I’d bought was 3mm, while the old regular Addi that I’d sized as a #2 on my Susan Bates needle gauge was, in fact, more of a #1.5 – only 2.5mm. (We can talk about Addi’s lamentable failure to come up with a permanent ink that doesn’t let the markings wear off the cord, or to engrave the sizes into the metal, some other time.) This would never do, and so I had to run out and buy some Japanese Clover dpns in US #2 = 2.75mm. This is as large as I’d care to go for ShibuiKnits Sock, which is a slender weight like Koigu. 3.0mm would produce too open a fabric for my taste in socks. The good news is that the Clovers are 5″ long, which is my ideal dpn length for socks, mittens, etc. They fit nicely in my hand without snagging their tail ends in my cuffs the way their 6″ brethren do, but they’re not so short as to be always bluntly stabbing me like the horrible 4″ Addi dpns, which no one should ever, ever buy. I would happily lead international days of protest against the Addi dpns, which are a stain on the escutcheon of this otherwise fine needle company.

The Man Blue sock enjoyed his nautical environment. He reminds me of the blue socks so ardently knit for men in uniform throughout our history. Jo knits blue stockings in Little Women, do you remember? These are dressier than anything knit for speed and function would have been, of course. Thinking about the history of blue socks reminds me — have any of you encountered Susan Strawn’s new Knitting America: A Glorious Heritage from Warm Socks to High Art? It has mixed reviews on Amazon, and my passion for history in general and the history of the knitting craft in particular makes me want this book to be good. No Idle Hands is a thorough and scholarly history, but there’s room on my shelf for a more approachable book with lots of photographs and vintage patterns.

Dear Readers,

While I was escorting my sock on a little adventure around the ferry (for it is an active, manly, nautical sock that didn’t want its picture taken among the flower pots or lolling in a sunbeam – I’ll show you tomorrow), this gull eased up to assess the situation. Since tourists often lob chips and sandwich scraps over the rail for him to snatch out of the air, I’m sure he was hoping the sock was something tasty. I disappointed him.

But he makes a striking evocation of my home, in a wet and broody mood. And I think he’s a good symbol of one facet of my interior life. It’s a photograph I could meditate on to center myself if I were feeling out of kilter. If you’re in a contemplative frame of mind or short of blog fodder or just want to flex your photography muscles this week, maybe you’d like to share such a postcard of your own? And then come back and leave a comment to let me know so I can take a look.

Cheers,

Sarah

Coming home, I’m always struck by the things I’ve missed, the most obvious first: the salt air, the first flush of green in the pastures, the spring lambs, the exhalations of the damp woods. This time, as I knit quietly on the ferry, I realized something new that my city life lacks.

Behind me were a pair of old timers, heavy men who fill their flannel shirts, with rough, stubby fingers, one with a shining face reddened by a lifetime of sun and wind and probably drink, the other pale and jowly as a basset hound, bristling with whiskers. I listened passively for an hour as they jawed away about classic cars, catching snippets of their talk on the purl rows when I didn’t have to focus on my lace pattern. “I sold him that ’49 Merc back in ’86 for five grand. He drives it in the parade every year. But juice up the brakes and she could still make Seattle.” On and on they chatted, unhurried, steady and gruff as a couple of outboard motors. At some point I tuned in again and they’d made a seamless switch to rabbit hunting. “You gotta get the fur wet first or you’ll have a mess. You get two guys on it to pull from both ends and it’ll come right out of the skin like a salmon, but it’s real tacky under there and if you don’t get the fur wet first you’ll have a mess, all right.”

I don’t hear these conversations in Portland. True, the inhabitants don’t tend to be as concerned with vehicles and varmints (most don’t have garages big enough to rehabilitate fleets of jalopies anyway, and you’re more likely to hear discussions about retro-fitting for biodiesel than which chassis you might substitute to rebuild your truck if you weren’t a purist). But I think there’s something about the urban pace of life and diversity of acquaintance that gets in the way. These island men have known each other since they were schoolboys; who knows how many times they’ve had variations on this conversation. They aren’t under a press of sail to be off somewhere else. They don’t excuse themselves awkwardly from each other’s company when a topic has run its course, but work out variations on the theme like master musicians. It’s an art, this deliberate, hour-gobbling talk. Maybe it happens in Portland, too, but I don’t slow down enough to hear it.

I have also missed the ruckus of spring frogs. The combined voices of the peepers in the marsh at moonrise make a roar audible inside the house. Humans are notoriously noisy animals, but they have nothing on the average courting frog. If all Manhattan poured out into the streets at night and sang show tunes through bull horns, we might hope to equal the clamor of the swamp. We slept with the windows open.

Remember this hat from last October? I knit it as a store sample, and a lot of you liked it, so I thought I’d send out a public service announcement: I was in Knit/Purl this afternoon and saw that the kits are in at last! They aren’t up on the website yet, but I know that Jenni will be glad to send you one if you call them up.

How did I come to be at the yarn store on a Monday afternoon, you might like to know? It’s Spring Break, my friends. And I’ve got a few days of blissful relaxation up on the island planned. There’s all kinds of knitting on the lace stole to accomplish, but a girl can’t go cross-eyed over lace for too many hours a day. And I want to make serious progress on poor neglected Victoria, but if I can’t block the bias out of the top, I’ll need a Plan B. So I’ll be taking this:

Yes, I had to snag a new Ana hat kit for myself! I adored the Fleece Artist Woolie Silk 3-Ply, and this is just my color green. Plus it was surprisingly cold today, and I even heard a rumor of snow on the horizon. It probably won’t fall down at sea level, but it’s always nice to have a stylish hat to pull on just in case!

The Woolie Silk is special stuff, and so I found it worthy of reclining on my new treasure:

A shipment of things from my grandmother’s apartment in Connecticut arrived last week. We scored a fold-out couch for the library/guest room and an extra bureau, but the chief delight was a first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Huntsman, What Quarry? It’s inscribed Rufus from Tad 1939 – a gift to my grandmother from my grandfather in the year they were married. (The endpapers, in a charming non sequitur, bear a genealogy of French kings from Louis XIII to Louis XVIII in my grandmother’s pencil.) My grandparents were always so removed from me in years and geography that I get a particular charge from discovering tastes I have in common with them. I knew they both liked poetry; I didn’t know they admired Millay. Of course she was a celebrity in New York during their youth – somehow Millay’s bohemian Village life never dovetailed in my mind with the G-rated family stories playing out in the East 30s and 40s. But these same grandparents also danced to Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and other titans of the jazz scene all through their courtship. How I wish I could have known them then.

Leafing through Huntsman, I see that Gram made historical notes after poems that spoke to current events like “Say That We Saw Spain Die” (“Spain’s Civil War between the Loyalists and the Rebels has come to an end – 1939”) and the third Sonnet in Tetrameter (“Japan is warring against China – 1939. The peace yet in sight.”) What made her do this? Did she have some sense that her unborn children and grandchildren might read this book of poems, and her schoolteacher’s habits dictated that she pass along her understanding of its original context? Or did she seize an opportunity to preserve a moment in history, hoping to look back at this little book from the other side of the gathering storm of war and remember the world on the brink? She was 97 last September; dusk is drawing down on her at last. I won’t be able to ask her what this book meant to her. But I’ll keep it always, and wonder.