Making Lemonade

Making this:

And turning this:

Into this:

These are both from fiber club shipments by Black Bunny Fibers. Carol does beautiful work. Her shop’s tagline is “Every skein is unique,” and that extends even to club shipments: she asks for a list of each member’s color preferences, and dyes each lot of fiber according to those preferences. Her quantities are generous, too: there will be one more skein of the pink (which is a cabled yarn destined for socks), but I have yet to fix my poor little wheel.

This is an issue near and dear to my heart: the tale of China’s military takeover of Tibet, like the sad fact of the Dalai Lama’s exile, chills me every time I think on it. China is a country with a grand cultural history; but this should not be a part of it.

For more information, see The International Campaign for Tibet. My thanks to PoMoGoLightly and Pippi Kneesocks for promoting this meme of recognition, today, among knitbloggers. My hope is that this helps, in a small way, increase someone’s knowledge of the subject.

So, I just discovered for the first time that a comment I left on someone’s blog has been deleted. That post has also been edited to remove the portion I was questioning. All without any sort of acknowledgment from the author.

If she’d acknowledged my point at all, I was ready to come and link to her post. It’s a good one, especially post-edit. As it is, she deleted the praise I left along with the “Is this really what you mean? Really?” portion.

Ick.

For the record, I value all the comments I receive here, and all the commenters. And my pledge to you is: if I ever have reason to remove a comment that isn’t spam or an outright troll attack, I’ll get in touch and at least acknowledge your existence. Even if I don’t already know you.

Edited to add: I just now read the blogger’s “Introduction” page, which reads in part:

If you continue past this page into the current posts and archives, you are entering my own little universe where I will not apologize for the expression of my feelings. Neither will I justify them; nor does writing them down mean that they will stay that way forever and ever and ever. I retain the right to change my mind about how I feel about something or someone. But I will leave the trace of my feelings up because that is how I grow and learn and yet stay who I am.

I wasn’t asking her to apologize for anything. But she sure didn’t leave “the trace of [her] feelings,” if that’s what it was, up.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll keep reading this blog or remove it from my Reader feed. It’s interesting to read, but now I feel kind of tainted.

“Acorn, if you don’t settle down and go to sleep, I’m going to come in there and take every single book out of your room.”

Acorn’s been having a right proper childhood illness, these past few days. He’ll spike a fever and not feel like doing much, including eating or playing; when we get the fever down, he’s up and about like nothing’s wrong.

Friday morning, he wasn’t feeling well and — wanting to stay cuddled up with Mommy for as long as he could — he started making up reasons I shouldn’t leave the house. “No. Gran-Gran should go, instead.”

Gran-Gran quashed this idea, but Paw-Paw left the house soon after. “Oh. Now you have to stay here, Mommy. You can’t go. Paw-Paw just left, so you can’t go.”

“Oh, I can’t?”

“No. Two people can’t go at once. That would be cheating.”

I was inspired to share by Ian’s honesty over at Sarah and the Goon Squad.

Please, go ye forth and read Rainbow Girl’s guide on how to victimize yourself before others can victimize you! Or at least, her guide to dealing with websites that give what can only with charity be described as misguided advice.

For women only. Because we all know men are the only perpetrators of violence, particularly sexual violence. (At least until they’re in prison. Then we call it “getting what they deserve.”)

***

In all seriousness, if you’re interested in advice on this subject — that is, how to keep yourself safe from not only physical assault but from creeps and stalkers of all kinds — I highly recommend Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear*. May you never have to make use of the advice within: but I don’t know any feeling more empowering than knowing exactly how to defuse the situation when someone’s threatening you.

This actually occurred some months ago, perhaps as long ago as late last summer or early fall.

Acorn is playing with some of his pretend food, feeding me bites of “peas” and “chicken,” which I am dutifully “eating” with appropriate yummy-food noises. Suddenly he holds up a plastic cup. “You want some tea?” he asks.

My favourite drink! How sweet. “Yes, please,” I say.

He reveals a plastic letter T in his other hand. “Ssss,” he hisses for effect as the tea pours from the T. “Here you go!”

His eyes are shining in that way only they do when he knows he’s about to make me laugh.

I was inspired to finally post this thanks to Mayberry Mom, whose own boy is discovering this power of language.

“There are two dogs in a cage in this room.”

My mother tried not to laugh. “Acorn, your preschool does not keep dogs in a cage.”

“Yes, they do!” He seemed not to notice her disbelief, so preoccupied was he with the troubling notion of dogs being kept in a cage. “Weird-looking dogs. Come see.”

So she came and saw.

“Acorn, those are guinea pigs!”

He frowned. “No, Gran-Gran. Pigs don’t look like that,” he explained patiently.

Later, I asked Acorn to show me the guinea pigs. “Oops, we got too close,” he said, as one skittered inside their enclosure. “That one went in their castle. Look, this one’s eating grass. And there —”

He pointed to their hayrack, a round contraption mounted on the side of the cage.

“—there is their spinning wheel. So they can knit.”

The best writing can stretch one’s mind, eliciting emotions that express the full range of the human experience. Here are two such pieces:

From Bitch, PhD, a lamentation on the subject of popular racism in America today.

And when you need to cleanse your mind from the outrage that article will surely enflame, please read Bongi’s story of the stunning kindness of a friend.

When I was growing up, our house was mere blocks from the main street of our little town. The main street, itself stretching only a few blocks from the factory to the high school, was messily bisected by a railroad crossing. That crossing was a prime reason we kids learned train safety before we could read: Don’t play on the tracks. Don’t cross when the lights are flashing. If your car ever stalls on the tracks, get out.

It’s probably also the reason I could count to 1,000 by age four. The freight cars seemed to rattle on endlessly, providing plenty of practice.

The day came, of course, when I moved away. I went away to college in a small city, and then moved to live in quite a large city. And eventually, I moved back here with my son. Back to my family. Back to this land where our roots have grown generations-deep, here between the mountains and the valley.

We don’t live in that house just off the main street any more; but we’re not so far away. So at night, when the town is asleep and the highways still, if I listen, I can hear it: the rattling of the wheels on the tracks. The long, low whistle that swells out of the valley as the train approaches the crossings.

The sound that tells me: you are home.

This post was inspired by Doc and the Thinking Parents wiki.