Relocating

Le Lauragais, in the Midi, in France. Walking across vast meadows, cut once in late May and now covered with a short gruffy aftermath, again offering visual protection for field mice darting through the new growth of grass and weeds, I think of the seasons passing year after year, eternally changing, coming and going, surviving us all.

A deer feasting on fresh green grass

I see the deer stepping out of nowhere, feeding on the new grass in the coolness of the evening. A summer meadow flower smell fills the air. I feel acutely homesick for the landscape although I have not even departed yet. I miss the feeling of belonging to this place we will have called home for so long - while I am still there and departure is but a remote day away. Ambivalence might come close to our state of mind.
There are not enough words to describe the feeling of loss and how I dread the time when for inevitable reasons that loss of our paradise becomes real and inevitable. I wish....     Cut.

Salix integra ""Hakuro Nishiki"; Harlekinweide / Zierweide, Saule

Relocating, again. Physically and mentally. This time it is different, circumstances dictated the move. We are heading for a life - a different life - in a city, in Berlin, one of the largest capitals in the world, a sprawling city of more than 3.5 million people, one third of its territory covered by forests, parks, gardens, and rivers. I am discovering private and public  gardens and consider them mine for the viewing.

Bridges: scarf with drop stitch ladders connecting cables

Garden flowers, so different from the wealth and unbridled abundance of wild flowers, so colorwheel-composed and arranged and yet not conveying the same impression of nature's harmony. Tamed for a purpose. Different. Bits of nature parcelled out to alleviate concrete monotony. Showcases in most places, gardeners tending designed gardens, meadows turned weedless lawns, wild flowers replaced by suitable soil and climate-adapted flower arrangements. But still - flowers and 440.000 trees, lovely boulevards and a surprising number of smaller parks contributing to the "green lung" of Berlin.

Bridges: scarf with drop stitch ladders connecting cables

Reapproaching textile work  - it is difficult these days. The now omnipresent conflicts in the world, the wars, and flight and plight of the refugees streaming into Europe, the rising of nationalistic parties in many countries, the presently apparent political chaos caused by the nation-splitting referendum in England - all of this makes it difficult to settle down to something seemingly inanely normal such as textile crafts, I almost feel guilty sitting down with my needles and yarn and concentrate on lacy pattern with a more or less intricate repeat...

Above: An off-white scarf made of ivory-colored mohair and the finest Chinese natural silk and Moroccan embroidery silk, three cables connected by drop-stitch bridges. Just right for days in spring with a northern breeze.

Moroccan Embroidery Silk - adding hues of color to other yarns

Below: Dipping into my huge stash, the approaching summer called for an intensely colorful scarf. It is knit lengthwise. CO on a multiple of 18. Roughly following a Feather and Fan pattern. Meanderings in bright colors and crazy lacy stitch patterns, alternating needle sizes and yarn gauge. If you are uncertain about gauges, this is a good site to get acquainted with yarn calculations. Color mix: of course nature is way ahead of me, could have added a million more colors! Just follow your mood...

Glitzy freeform wrap / scarf for Hélène

Britzer Garten (Berlin)

I thought it might be interesting to introduce a number of famous Berliner personalities:
1) Journalist, writer, author, satirist: Kurt Tucholsky "The New York Times hailed him as "one of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany. He was a poet as well as a critic and was so versatile that he used five or six pen names. As Peter Panter he was an outstanding essayist who at one time wrote topical sketches in the Vossische Zeitung, which ceased to appear under the Nazi regime; as Theobald Tiger he wrote satirical poems that were frequently interpreted by popular actors in vaudeville and cabarets, and as Ignatz Wrobel he contributed regularly to the Weltbühne, an independent weekly that was one of the first publications prohibited by the Hitler government."

 

This is from a poem (1924) on travelling through places and times: 

Die Kinder lärmen auf den bunten Steinen. 

Die Sonne scheint und glitzert auf ein Haus. 

Ich sitze still und lasse mich bescheinen 

und ruh von meinem Vaterlande aus.

Children play noisily on the colorful rocks.

The sun is shining, rays glistening on a roof.

I am sitting quietly, basking in the sun

and take a rest from my fatherland

Sizing Down

Sizing Down - this does not refer to reducing my pack-rat yarn stash, oh no! And books cannot be thrown out anyway, they have an invisable pass-on label stuck to them right at the time of their purchase.

But I am actually disposing of things, passing them on or channeling them to suitable recycling places: stacks of decades-old newspaper clippings with then important news. Recipes I never made. Letter openers. Old calendars. That magnificent pen that doesn't smudge but has no refill, unless I use it to make a more hand-friendly crochet hook. Fabrics I had saved for decades to make just that dress. My first ca. 1950 camera, an Agfa Box, in perfect working condition but no available films any more, such as with our Polaroid camera from the late sixties - the production of suitable films ceased this year.

Sizing down a library - almost as impossible as reducing my yarn stash. There are antique books, classics and modern literature. There is National Geographic, every issue since 1965. I set some books free on Bookcrossing but sadly the finders did not continue the thread - now I will take some to the Village of Books (Wiki). Favorites will go into the library of a friend who is planning his years of the third life-cycle - for him I create a list of all books I want to donate. And many will find a home with family members.

And while noting down title and author I noticed that so many books claim "The Greatest Novel of Our Time". Our time, a vague and continually changing concept. Many great novels of their time remain as such only in the minds of their also aging readers. For everything there is a season...

Sizing down on china - now that is a really worthy project! All those candle stick holders, small vases, little pots of enormous variety, the umpteenth coffee mug, all precious and wonderful gifts from dear friends and nice visitors. How to keep all this? Downsizing gifted things is most difficult, 40 years of hanging on accrued substantial cubics of items. And alas, once we have passed away that little crystal-cut vase for violets will not be remembered as a special birthday gift from my mother who sent it to me when I was an Au-pair girl in England. The postage itself was so high she must have thrown all thrifty thoughts to the wind at that special moment when she mailed it to me.

So I am leaving small vases, little pots, candle stick holders, mugs and the odd cup and plate on the vendor tables during the occasional flee-market, vide-grenier, Flohmarkt for others to pick up and have their own story behind their finds. I leave them on park benches with fresh flowers in them or gift-wrapped and filled with flower seeds from my garden. I ask family and friends to take their pick - and so the china stash lives on somewhere else!

I am also adamant, or at least try to be, about NOT buying any more things that I do not REALLY need to STASH - with the yarn and book exception, of course.

Clothing: T-Shirts - just how many do I wear in comparison to what I have? Heavy Jeans a tad too big - will I grow into them again? I doubt it. Age-shrinkage has set in. Shoes: a big foot size with a yearning for elegant heels... long since given up and passed on to ladies with a penchant for balance.

Definitely living on with me are those shawls and shrugs and wraps that defy style, age and fashion. They are indeed ageless and never go out of style and fashion, at least if they were not made under the constraints of an annual fad. A perfect example are freeform garments, on the forefront of those the lovely non-patterns by the Queen of Free-Spirited Colors, Jane Thornley.

Pictures and photographs - now there are difficult decision to make. I started putting names and dates on the back of old family photographs, lest I forget or the children have no notion of who that person in the picture was and what was the occasion. Unless they are in scrapbooks, pictures of general interest simply go into boxes, labeled year-wise, or approximately so. Pictures that would mean nothing to anybody else but me find burial in the paper bin.

Why downsizing?
An age process, I suppose, of which one becomes more aware with every year past 65 or so. Starting to seriously face the prospect of eventually leaving a larger space in exchange for various and continually smaller ones. So I am parting with things the way I want to, a slow denuding process to be sure, but bit by bit... The pack-rat behavior of a child having grown up during war and post-war times, when one just hung on to everything irrespective of its inherent worth, has changed to the desire to do without.

On travels one now commits impressions only to memory, knowing full well that this is and will also be a transient process. But what more vivid impression is there to take but a 360° view of a wonderful landscape? The green lushness framing a waterfall on the Big Island of Hawaii? Listening to baroque music played in a park on a summer evening? The sight of Indian women walking along village streets wearing nivi-style sarees of stunning colors, the enrapturing red color scape of hues of a sunset on the walls of a village in Morocco... all this would be hard to capture with a mere picture anyway, as all these events touch all senses.