Reading and Knitting

January 16, 2024

Beloved:
          When work is done these days, I mostly knit and read, hats and Marilynne Robinson respectively.  The hats go quick and don’t require a lot of counting.
Marilynne’s novels are how I know her best; Gilead is my favorite and positively slays me every time I read it.  Right now I’m working through a set of essays, 
What Are We Doing Here?  “What it means to be American” … “Freedom of conscience” – these are  academic-sounding topics that she works in such a way I have to stop and take a deep breath every paragraph or two.

          These are my reading years, I tell myself.  I still have a good number of my wits about me.  I can both hold a book and see it simultaneously.  I live five minutes from a library with lots of parking, ten from an amazing bookstore.  Besides that, winter is the reading season.  The ground is frozen hard as iron, and I’ve nowhere to go worth suiting up for 6 degrees plus wind chill.  Even the house finches and titmice are snuggled down somewhere out of this wind, so no bird feeder action to watch.  With all this time and motivation, you’d think I’d get caught up, or at least a little closer to moving books from the unread shelf to the read ones.  Alas, but what is a person supposed to do, just walk right past the .50 book table at the UCC holiday sale?
          I’ve decided there are worse problems than too many books.  In fact, there may be no such thing as too many books, not in winter surely, when the power could go out at any time.  I can read and knit by headlamp as long as the batteries hold, and I’ll run out of yarn well before I run out of pages.  I pray you are finding joy that keeps you warm these freezy days as well.