sampling life

My calendar says August 14, but surely that’s a misprint. It must still be July. What happened to June? Where has the summer gone? How is it that I’ve found myself in the middle of August with not a single complete syllabus and classes beginning in just ten days?

I suppose that I could blame the puppy. Or I could curse the house that needed so much love. I could blame myself for driving off to Michigan and then back East for quick vacation with J. I could accept responsibility for planting lantana and clover instead of drafting assignment sequences for composition classes. I could reckon the time it took paint the house against the time I spent at my computer. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll scramble this week and next. I’ll feel unprepared when the term opens and probably still unprepared when I turn in grades in December. Because that’s the way it always feels at a new place during a new year. New students, new problems, new questions, new curiosities. Such, such will be the joys!

Last night I finished up my single needling creation of the entire summer. As I corseted it to the frame, I wondered how it could be that I have not a single knitted gem to share. I guess that’s what happens when a former, hour-long commute turns into a five-minute walk to school, when evenings spent with phone buds in my ears and hands free to knit turns into an actual, live relationship. That might be why I’ve had sheepishly little to share here.

Except this, a late summer foray into crewel, the design by Alicia Paulson. I finished most of it during a long, long car ride East with J behind the wheel. The whole while I felt like I was channeling my 18th century sisters, working our first samplers to practice our stitches and prove our domestic prowess. I’m not sure where it will hang, somewhere, hopefully, where people will appreciate the A, B, Cs.