librarysarie

Like riding a bicycle

It seems silly, these days, to think of myself as a spinner.  Once upon a time, Stella the spinning wheel lived in a corner of our living room, and so I thought nothing of spending a few minutes with her each day.  Now, though, with a preschooler in the house, things are different.  Stella got demoted to the spare room as soon as Ian became mobile, because, as good a kid as he is, he can't help but want to play with the wheel.  (And who can blame him?  My great-aunt had a spinning wheel in her living room -- hers was just a pretty antique, rather than something that was actually functional -- and that thing was like a MAGNET. Even though I knew I wasn't supposed to touch it, I could never resist spinning the wheel as fast as it would go. What kid could?)  I'm not really too worried about him breaking or damaging the wheel itself, but if I have a work-in-progress on it, I don't want him to mess it up.  The problem is, though, I am very much an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of person, and Stella being stored away means that Stella is ignored.  

This summer, the Historical Society asked me if I'd do the spinning demo at our country fair again -- I've been doing it each year for about five years now -- and of course I agreed.  All throughout July and August, not a day went by that I didn't think "I should really get out the wheel and practice..." but days turned into weeks, and then suddenly it was the weekend after Labor Day and the fair was imminent and I hadn't done a thing.

I went into the spare room to dust Stella off -- literally and figuratively -- and realized that the bobbin of yarn on the wheel was the very same bobbin I spun LAST YEAR at the fair -- I hadn't touched the wheel at all, not even for one little project, for an entire calendar year.  How embarrassing!  That's when I started to worry that maybe the whole demo thing was a bad idea -- that I'd get there and just discover that I'd completely forgotten everything I once knew.

I sent off a worried text to Tamara, who pep-talked me.  "It's like riding a bicycle!", she assured me.  So on Sunday I packed up all of my stuff and hauled it off to the Historical Society.  I got there a little early so I'd have plenty of time to set up my little room, and then I loaded a fresh bobbin on the wheel, drafted some fiber, took a deep breath, and started to treadle. 

And Tamara was right.  It IS like riding a bicycle.

First Day

Despite the fact that my life hasn't revolved around a school schedule in years, the turn of the calendar from August into September still feels like a new year to me in a way that the actual new year in January doesn't. Summer just always feels...different, somehow, and I've always welcomed the return to the normal routine of the fall and winter.

As much as I look forward to autumn, this year I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around SEPTEMBER. This has been something of an odd summer -- we didn't really take a vacation, both of us traveled for work a fair bit, and Jim just started a new job, which meant that the last month or so has been hectic while he overlapped jobs for a couple of weeks, tying up loose ends at the old job while trying to hit the ground running at the new. We had a relatively small list of things we wanted to do this summer -- both fun stuff and around-the-house stuff -- and barely made a dent in either. It kind of feels like the last three months just...didn't happen, somehow, because they flew by so quickly. It's odd how we can be so busy and yet feel like we are doing absolutely nothing.

I love Facebook at this time of year -- seeing everyone's back-to-school pictures just makes me smile. Ian doesn't really get a "first day of school" per se, since he goes to daycare/preschool year round, but Tuesday was the first day of public school in the town where we live, so for photographic purposes I declared it his first day. His very first day of daycare, back when he was in infant, was at the very beginning of September, so if nothing else we can think of it as an anniversary shot. ;-)

He is SO excited about the prospect of taking a bus to school and will tell anyone who will listen that he gets to go on the bus when he is FIVE. To him that must seem like an eternity, but I know that for Jim and me, those two years before kindergarten are going to go by in the blink of an eye, just like this summer did.