Lifescapes

Blue Diagonal Scarf

I love anything that will allow me to play around with my stash--and the diagonal scarf pattern is a wonderful playtoy. For this one (actually, I did two, although they're not much alike) I put all my blues into a big plastic bag and dipped into it as I knit, pulling out whatever bit of handspun or novelty seemed to "go." Easy as pie, too: cast on 20, knit all rows, increase one at the beginning of each row and decrease one at the end. Change colors in the middle of the row so that the colors blend.

Reading Note. From Yarn Harlot, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (visit her blog for more great writing): I love knitting because it's something that can be accomplished no matter how poorly it's going at any given moment. It's a triumph of dexterity over string. I can't make my kids turn out the way I want; I have no control over my editor; world peace remains elusive despite my very best efforts; but all of that be damned--I can put a heel in a sock and it will go exactly the way I want it to go. Eventually, at least.

Endings and inevitability

DAGGER is coming along. Slowly. Usually, when I get close to the end of a book (say, around 75,000 words), it comes in a rush, not because I'm so excited about it (except that I'm always excited at the prospect of finishing the blasted thing) but because the ending is fairly inevitable. When I start a book, China has a universe of choices. She can do practically anything--well, not quite. She can't have an affair, for instance. She can't rob a bank.

But the minute I start putting words on the page, the options begin to close. By the end of the first chapter, the universe of the book has been reduced to a galaxy. The world is still China's oyster, but it's narrowing down fast. Once past the middle, the options have been reduced exponentially, and the last ten thousand words is a working-out of the consequences--the coming-to-terms, if you will--with all the choices made by all the action characters (as opposed to the "color" characters, who function more like setting) earlier in the book. The world is narrowed down to a continent, to a region, to a few blocks of Pecan Springs. This always feels like a kind of inevitability to me. It's the sort of feeling you have when you've been working for months on a giant board puzzle and you're down to the last two dozen pieces. Things "fall together." It all "fits" very vicely, as if it were planned that way from the very beginning by some omnipotent story goddess in the sky.

Which always leaves me with a feeling of unease. Life isn't like that, and as novels (yes, even mysteries, that most conventionally-patterned fictional form) become more like life, the artificiality of the "all-wrapped-up-and-tied-with-a-bow" ending bothers me. A lot. The day in my life when everything is all concluded is the day I have died and "the end" has been written to the story of my life. And even then, there will be all sorts of loose ends: bills I haven't paid, emails I haven't written, I-love-yous that haven't been said. Life is untidy. Life is full of unpuzzled riddles.

That's one of the reasons why I'm tending more and more these days to the sub-plot that isn't concluded. One story works its way to the inevitable conclusion. The criminal is caught and entered into the criminal justice system (although we never know whether the jury might acquit, or the defendant might appeal a guilty verdict, or the convicted killer might live for thirty more years on death row). The mystery is resolved, the questions answered, the riddle unraveled. It's all inevitable. It's all foregone, from the very first page. If you want to see justice done and loose ends tied, you have it.

But if I've built a bridge to another story, there's an openness about the ending. I like that. There's a promise (for me) of another story yet to be told. And in that story China and any of the other characters involved have a universe of choices, not yet narrowed to a galaxy, a planet, a continent, a few square blocks. I have a year to wonder how that's all going to work out, before I start the next book.

Which is why I like book-bridging plots. They're risky--reviewers always like to find something wrong, and an open-ended ending is an invitation to criticism--and I like risk. They offer a greater challenge, and having written fifteen books in a series, I'm ready for anything that changes the equation, even a little. And they're more like life, which is fine with me.

Back to DAGGER this morning, to work out more of the inevitabilities, tie up more loose ends, unriddle more puzzles. And contemplate the plot thread I'm leaving untied, deliberately, as an invitation to my imagination--and to yours--to play, to create, to wonder, to be surprised by something that doesn't feel completely inevitable.

Reading Note, from Room to Write, by Bonni Goldberg. Endings are the hardest parts to write. This is because they are false. Nothing truly ends; it transforms. Still, the novel must have a last page, the poem a final line. So it is helpful when writing ends to remember that you are really constructing a passageway, a birth canal, a place where the writer lets go and the work becomes part of the reader's consciousness, understanding, and imagination.

Cold cow

The temperature has been in the 20s for the past couple of days, with windchills in the single digits. You can't see it in this photo, but Texas, our longhorn, was really cold, and shivering. I'd never seen a cow shiver before, and was mightily impressed, even as I resisted the urge to find a cow blanket for her (which would last about as long as it took her to buck it off). As you can see from the various cow piles in this picture, she has been taking shelter on the leeward side of the barn, out of the wind.

Texas is an old cow and is enjoying an honorable retirement from life as full-time mama (the rancher who gave her to us says that she's produced some 15 calves) to life as a mowing machine. Yes, those are really long horns. And yes, those are really bony hips and thin flanks. But both are typical of the breed (the hips are not a sign of malnutrition). Texas is about as healthy as you will be when you're in the last third of your life. The cow candy she's chowing down in this picture is a mix of "sweet stuff" (a molasses supplement), cow pellets, and corn. In winter, she gets her snack every day, to supplement her usual meals of winter-killed grass. In summer, when the grass is green and tender, she gets her own groceries, with an immoderate enthusiasm.

I love watching Texas, her calf, Blossom, and her mascot, Mutton, as they go about their work of mowing the meadows. They pay a single-minded devotion to particular kinds of grass, know exactly where to go to hunker down against the biting wind, and greet us with unfailing cheerfulness in even the worst of weathers. These generous meadows have supported grazing animals--deer and bison--for eons. Our trio is simply the latest in a long history of creaturely occupation of this place, as am I. I don't earn my food from this soil, but it feeds me nonetheless, just as it feeds the animals I care for and the wild animals that share their habitat with us. It feeds my imagination, my spirit, my hopes and dreams for a way to live that is rooted in the land.

Reading Note, from Writing From the Center, by Scott Russell Sanders. The effort to know and care for and speak from your home ground is a choice about living as well as writing. In that effort you are collaborating with everyone else who keeps track . . . We might help form the conscience of a place, and that seems to me ambition enough for a life's labor. Trees tap into the soil, drawing nourishment and returning fertility. Capturing sunlight, breaking down stone, dropping a mulch of leaves, replenishing the air, trees improve the conditions for other species and for the saplings that will replce them. So might writers, through works of imagination, give back to the places that feed them a more abundant life.

Frost Flowers

This lovely tracery of feathery ice is a "frost flower," one of the many spun-sugar beauties that the dogs and I discovered early this morning, decorating our woodland. Its delicate ribbons and whorls aren't frost at all, but frozen sap and moisture, extruded from the stems of dead plants like toothpaste out of a broken tube. If there's enough sap, and if the temperature is cold enough, the frothy ribbons can be several inches long, delightfully twisted and curled. The plant that produced this particular frost flower is a white crownbeard (Verbesina virginica). It has earned the common name "frostweed" for this artful wintertime blossom--it blooms in the fall, too, with a cluster of nondescript white flowers. The Chickasaw Indians called it squaw-weed and used it (could you guess this from the name?) as an abortifacient. Creek and Chocktaw Indians used it to treat venereal disease, and other tribes employed it as a kind of all-purpose internal medicine. I'm content just to look at it and enjoy the intricacies of its winter bloom.

Reading Note, from My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany, by Sara Stein.  A gardener who knows his flowers and is ignorant of weeds now seems to me to be like half a coin, a tail without a head.

Brrr!

We don't get a great deal of cold weather here, although the thermometer has been known to occasionally drop below zero. When that happens, my rosemary shrubs are all in peril! The rosemary will be okay tonight, but it's plenty cold out there: 28 degrees at 5 pm, with an icy rain falling and the temps bound for single digits overnight. We're not supposed to have a serious ice storm, thank goodness. The last one, in 1997, took out our electricity. It was a cold four days without power! The neighbors had a week-old baby. The grandmother told me that she turned on the gas oven, wrapped the baby in a blanket, and laid it on the open oven door. Mmm.....

But just in case the power goes out, we've stocked up extra water (our pump is electrical) And we have plenty of wood for the fireplace. When I took this photo a few weeks ago, Bill and I had just finished hauling this load of logs in the back of our pickup, from the stacks stashed up the road: oak, mostly, but also cedar and hackberry. Bill cuts firewood from our woodlot and stacks it to dry for a couple of years. When it's fully dried, he splits it and we haul it to the house. "Stored sunlight," Aldo Leopold called what is held within these logs, and of course it is: the tree's mass, nurtured by the sun for tens of years, released by the match to flame briefly, to transform itself into heat and light, then fall to ashes.

Days like today, we keep the fireplace going all day. Makes for a warm, cozy living room, so as soon as I finish this entry, I'm headed for my chair, a book (I'm reading John Dunning's The Sign of the Book), and my knitting. A good spot for a wintry night, with the cat curled up beside the fireplace and the dogs sprawled on the rug. Is the fireplace the heart of our home? I'd say so, on this winter's night.

Reading Note, from "Our Homebuilding," by Antoinette Rehmann. It is pleasant, when you have been out, to feel the hominess of your house as soon as you open the front door. It is a kind of daily house welcome. . . It is for that reason that our log fireplace was put opposite the front door. Our fireplace has a shelf above it with Bruges pottery and Munich brasses and some copper plates we made ourselves. We love these things, but above all, we love the logs. The log fire is the poetry of home.

Another Knit Scarf

This knit scarf was one of my holiday projects--it's that terrific little diagonal knit, easy and fast garter stitch, with a stripy sock yarn that looks a lot better around the neck than on the feet. I'm not sure who's getting this one, especially since I love it with my green sweater (the photo doesn't do justic to that pretty green). If I have time to whip up another one before the holiday, this one will be mine.

Tonight, I'm doing permissions for the UT Press book (LAND/STORIES). Aargh. This is the part I hate hate hate. Happily, of the 90+ authors, only 26 (the Big Names) have so far demanded permission fees. But there are several outstanding requests (these publishing houses don't answer their mail!). Altogether, it's a first-class headache. Ten more minutes, and I'm retiring to my chair in front of the fire, with another scarf on the needles.

Reading Note, from Elizabeth Zimmerman: Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence.  Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

Thanksgiving at Coyote Lodge

We spent our holiday at our house in New Mexico: Coyote Lodge, named for the coyotes who serenaded us on our first night there a year ago. We took all three dogs this trip--they love to travel almost as much as they love to eat. Since it's an eleven-hour drive, they had plenty of travel to enjoy. Our big project there was stretching the carpet in the loft, which had developed an interesting corrugated look. Bill created a home-made carpet stretcher that did the job. We could have rented one, but what's the fun in that?

Having two such different places is a challenge (where did I last see that book? where did I leave that half-knitted sock?) but also an enormous privilege. Our Texas hill country house looks out across a small valley to a hill about a half-mile away: the horizon is near and seems to hold me close, comfort me. We've lived here for nearly twenty years, and so I know the seasons, know the colors of the grasses and trees, and have a strong feeling of home, an awareness of the human history of the neighborhood, a sense of established relationship to the land.

New Mexico, on the other hand, is still very new to me. The log house looks out across a wide valley filled with grazing cattle to a sweep of foothills, some nearer, some farther, rising to a mountain horizon--the Sangre de Cristos--some fifteen miles away. I cannot reach it. I am still learning the light, the seasons, the always-changing sky, the plants, the birds and animals, the history of human settlement. I have not yet found a way to define myself in terms of the landscape, the weather, the history. I am not yet placed. I have years of exploring to do.

The houses are different, too. The log house is not much bigger than this house, but the living area rises to the rafters, and the logs have a chilly feel. I am learning to use colors and textures and patterns to reduce the scale, make it more human, warm it up. Here in Texas, with our hot summers, I use lots of white, mono-colors, few patterns. I want the house to feel cool, in spite of the clutter created by two active people: books, projects, dogs. Here, I have a sense of myself-in-place: the house and its interior, the landscape, the weather. Here, there is comfort, and security, and questions answered, riddles resolved.

But always, beneath all this, is the sense of gratitude, even sharper this Thanksgiving, when so many people's homes around the globe have been disrupted this year--not just our US hurricanes, but the tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, the awful war in Iraq. Those of us who have homes have a very great deal to be thankful for.

Reading Note, from "Home, Reach, and Sense of Place," by Anne Buttimer. I suggest we think about places in the context of two reciprocal movements which can be observed among most living forms: like breathing in and out, most life forms need a home and horizons of reach outward from that home. The lived reciprocity of rest and movement, of territory and range, of security and adventure, of house-keeping and husbandry, of community building and social organization--these experiences may be universal among the inahbitants of Planet Earth.