Green week: 4

Today has been rainy and dark, but things will be noticeably greener tomorrow, after this day-long drink. We don't have any daffodils in our yard, but my husband sent me these cut ones today, and I can't wait until they open up on my kitchen windowsill.
I've really enjoyed Shining Egg's Green Week; it has helped me to convince myself that Spring will actually be here in full force one day very soon.

The second photo represents another way of being green--recycling. We're big on that around here. This is a detail of one of two bathroom rugs that I crocheted this week from old t-shirts, using Amanda Jean's tutorial. The acid green stripe in the photo was made from a Big Rock Blue Marlin Fishing Tournament shirt that I bought during spring break in high school. In the days before the Internet, we used to make a point of buying "good" t-shirts when we were at the beach in North Carolina. Most of these shirts had paintings of sport fish on them. I've had a pile of these worn-out shirts in my basement for the better part of a year, so it feels good to finally do something with them, since I couldn't make myself throw them away. I could probably still tell you which shirt each stripe was made of-- I wish I weren't so sentimental about things that really don't matter.

Green week: 3

Green lunch: kale sauteed with chickpeas, onions, garlic and red pepper, with a side of (slightly) gratineed butternut squash with sage. This is a fairly common lunch for me, leftover veggies from last night. We've been largely vegetarian for about a year now and it feels great. But we do eat a lot of greens-- that took some getting used to.

Green week: 2

Today a little indoor green. This is the beginning of the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, from the Fall 2007 issue of Interweave Knits. It has been languishing on the needles for most of the winter. I just love this shade of green, and the stitch definition of this yarn (Classic Elite 150). I've been working on it a little harder for the past couple of weeks, knowing that spring will probably be the best opportunity to wear the finished product.

And another sign of spring. New fence posts mean that the ground is thawed enough that deep post holes can be dug. In time, these will mellow out to the same silver-grey of the ones behind them. Although the posts and poles themselves may look green, too, they're not. The fences at the farm are mostly made from locust, a very strong wood, and one that's hard to find these days. Locust poles must dry out for at least a year before you use them, but then they're almost too hard to drive a nail into, so these fences are also built mostly without nails.

When my uncle Howard died almost four years ago, my grandfather bought the big stack of locust poles that Howard had saved in his barn and had them piled in his own hay loft, all the way to the rafters. The fences at the farm are old and almost continually falling down, so we've blown through the big stack pretty quickly, between wayward bulls and insolent horses*. Now we're down to the huge, thick poles at the bottom of the pile. These must be split and shortened (exposing the yellow "green" wood inside) so they don't pull down the fences they're meant to patch.

Man, looking at those fields is a little depressing-- I'm so ready for more green!

*There was also a little pony named Me Pony (as in, "This is me dog, an' me cat, an' me pony; I own them all.") who didn't know his own size. He constantly tried to jump out of his field over the fence, but aside from one memorable incident in which he jumped two fences in one run, he only succeeded in jumping straight into the fences and knocking them over. His head wasn't much higher than my shoulder.

Green week: 1

Whenever I think of green, one of my favorite colors (and forces), I think of this e.e. cummings poem, number 41 from his 1940 book 50 Poems:

up into the silence the green

silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me) go

out into the morning the young

morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine

sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and

a memory and memory

i)kiss me(will go)

It's almost like a meditation, isn't it? All of the words so simply apt. I'm participating in shining egg's green week this week, so this morning after we rode I went tromping up the 'mountain' to look for signs of spring. We haven't quite reached the spring moment where everything is suddenly green and new all 'round, as in the poem. That green cathedral moment happens for Virginia sometime in late March or early April.

But I love the little green orb of plant life above, pushing bravely through the dead mulchy field. And even though they're green for much of the year in this part of the world, I love the way the twining honeysuckle vines below seemed to be climbing and greening at the very moment that I took the photo. I actually saw this vine on our ride this morning, from the back of a horse. It took no small amount of climbing to snap a photo minus the horse. We also saw another sign of spring on our ride this morning. Not my favorite (green) kind. A mama coyote sat on top of a little hill just below us and followed our little pack (2 horses, 2 women, one dog) with her eyes. The spring is the worst time for coyotes around here. They're a fairly new phenomenon this far east and north, but I guess that's what global warming will bring us. The horses seemed unfazed, but I was worried about my completely docile dog. Gillian said that she had read that coyotes usually have very large litters, sometimes as many as 11 or 12 pups, so I guess Mama Coyote had a lot to protect. More green tomorrow.

PS: Thanks to all of you who left kind comments on my post about my grandmother a couple of weeks ago. They were much appreciated.