pumpkin time

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and mustache!

doppelganger 2

The sun creeps away sooner and sooner, giving way for butternut squash soup, garlic bread, and hot apple cider with cinnamon sticks. i accidentally dropped mine in my apple cider last night, then kept burning the tips of my already-tender fingers playing a fisherman. I sucked on the end of my right pointer finger, tasting cider, a piece of cinnamon, and a little bit of chalk from training on the wall earlier. it radiates heat, looks red and a little purple on the exact spot where my fingers kept sliding off the sloping hold.

it feels better fast, healed with the feeling of fall and the smell of the pumpkin bread my roommate has cooling on my cookie racks. tomorrow i'm going to roll out dough for almond cookies, cut like ghosts and causing smiles and content stomachs.

i squish down deeper into the couch, surrounded with blankets made by friends that gloriously don't match, a mix of bright blue and green with empty swimsuits dancing clashing with a crochet baby yellow and white wrapped around my feet. you put in 28 days later, continuing our horrorfest to celebrate my favorite holiday. i hide my eyes when the blood gushes, squirming but enjoying the feeling of contentment at sharing a night at home with friends. you reheat another cup of cider for me, ask me if I'll sleep at all tonight.

i'll be fine.

stop bugging me.

he doesn't know i'm leaving the christmas lights on to scare off any zombies.

this morning felt like the opening scene of the movie on my walk for coffee.

the streets were quiet.

deserted.

the gales of november screamed off the lake.

i thought i was alone.

then i passed the empty popcorn wagon and started.

she scared me.

i walked by again, and she drifted by. silent.

i walked closer, and i could see the napkin dispenser through her shoulder.

her red hat blurred off the shiny oven in back.

she looked like me, but she was an echo, an afterthought, a reflection.

or am i the reflection?

the wind wound around the wisps of my braid and i walked away, shivering, trying to keep away the moment of unknown i encountered in the window of the popcorn wagon.

but secretly hoarding the thrill in my torso.

it is, after all, almost Halloween.

doppelganger 1

Saturday night was for Jenelle and Cheryl and me and Dracula, watching a ballerina as Lucy go from white and pure and flow and grace to red and black and sharp lines and quick movements. Girl's Night Out complete with cosmos, high heels, and laughing.

Sunday it changed. My whole body aged fifty years overnight and I creaked and moaned, and my eyelids could feel the heat radiating from my forehead. i'm bad at knowing how to stop, so i didn't try at first. lunch with out of town friends found me nearly asleep on the table between french toast and rubens, freezing with three shirts on under my black dance fleece. i'm lucky my eyes were still blue and my hair was still long and blonde otherwise they wouldn't have recognized me underneath the pale face resembling Lucy. I drifted home; floated up iron stairs and buried myself under mounds of blankets.

Luckily, I had a double that Cheryl made for me.

She covered for me on Sunday. While I wallowed and drank tea and slept hours and hours, shivering and overheating and shivering and overheating, she had on her purple rain boots and her yellow raincoat, dancing under the gloomy sky outside, being the sun when none appeared. not for me, not then, not when my head was too heavy for my neck muscles to support. She tap danced time steps in puddles and let her hair flow around her elbows.

it was nice that i could look at her and know that i could take a day to let my body fix itself. she holds her umbrella high and winks at me, and my pale cheeks flush with a smile and i wink back.

i'll dance with her soon.

maid

The sink is full of dishes again.

three people in an apartment can be full sometimes, with roommates and girlfriends floating around and pizza boxes piling up in the recycling bin and beer bottles collecting on the living room table. a year ago I was more lenient. everything would be clean by the weekend, right? I'll clean the bathroom saturday if you clean the kitchen and you sweep the living room.

then people moved out and people moved in and now I'm living with two boys. Two Boys. Not quite grown up boys. They walk erect and have decent jobs and pay insurance on their cars regularly, but if asked even they would hesitate before attaching the label of Man onto themselves.

why?

it's been happening gradually. i trip on beer bottles as I come in the back door, cursing "merde" and "schiesse" when the sink is so full I can't even drain pasta. posters fill the walls for movies, and i yearn for frames and a clean stovetop and to not be the only one sweeping once a week in the hallway.

am I growing up?

Does this mean I want to be a Woman, not just a woman, stuck in between school and girlhood and i'm now searching for stability and matching plates and a routine i can come back to?

i know what caused this need; i know where the insistent rolling of my gut comes from. i didn't know that it needed you to pull the bottom out holding my pieces together and leave me to pick up the different bits to realize that maybe my puzzle was put together wrong in the first place. before i fell, I found what kind of worked. I used my fist to force pieces in that might fit but really didn't. when you dumped the box of my insides out on the floor, i couldn't do that anymore. they fell out and the only way to really put them back together right is to spend time fitting them together correctly. Grooves fitting together easily, not forced this time.

I'm beginning to realize what I want now.

realize what I lost.

I'm going to take my time reassembling. Because if you help me, I want it to work this time. I want it to be for good.

white

you are so beautiful.

A vision in lace and white and satin and beads. Dress after dress, yards of fabric slipping over your body as you glow brighter than the whitest folds encompassing your body. You're calm, saying yes or no and that you like lace the best but no beads with sparkles even though your smile glows like the sunset. I knew you when we were younger and awkward and stumbling through college meeting and creating ourselves. Now you are growing up, taking steps that integrate you more towards adulthood with that ring on your finger.

You're patient as Dani and I prance around with excitement, stoic as each dress is carefully placed over your head, beautiful in your cheeks when they dimple with a smile.

I can't even breathe when a veil is put on your head.

You turn and look at me and through damp eyes I see a woman. I see a house and something cooking on a stove waiting for warm bellies on a chilly night. I see easy companionship and long weekends. I see love.

The white dresses fade away.

You are exquisite.

color

I tried to run this morning. Tried- past tense, an attempt to accomplish. how can i possibly run forward with blinders pounding feet on the pavement when there is so much color around me?

I stole three leaves from outside. One leaf, two leaf, red leaf, gold leaf. pressed inside English Romanticism, crunchy next to Christabel. Coleridge won't mind. I want to save them for the middle of winter, when the world outside is white and black and 26 shades of gray. By then, the leaves will have been forgotten until they fall in your lap. Surprise! See the change? Pressed and crunchy like corn on the cob but still smell like breeze and chilly mornings and fresh honeycrisp apples and cookies with ghosts in them and handwarmers.

Still red. still yellow. still orange. still gold. still green.

still holding my run this morning, 7:35 am in cutoffs and my old climbing longsleeve.

Press the leaves to my face and remember.

FO: Vivian Sweater

Another break to check off one of my happiest knitting accomplishments right now- the Vivian sweater! The lovely Duluth fall colors helped to show off the bright awesome coloring.

Pattern: Vivian by Ysolda Teague

Yarn: 7 skeins of Cascade 220 in Colorway 9455, Lot 0241- or as I call it, Caribbean blue turquoise!

Needles: Size 8 Denise interchangables

Size Made: 36 Bust (it's nice and snug- no baggy Tshirts under this!)

Made For: Myself!

Time Frame: May 7, 2010-October 9, 2011

Modifications: I added two mirroring cables in the seed stitch on the back, so it's got even more cables, and I increased the width and depth of the hood by increasing the seed stitch on rows 15, 17, 21, 25, 29, 35, 41, and 49. Instead of knitting only 50 total rows for the hood, I knit 71 rows, then worked row 51 on row 72, worked row 52 as written in the pattern, and rows 53-62 became rows 74-83, ending with row 63 as Row 84. I'm much happier with how it turned out with the bigger hood, so I highly recommend doing that.

Worst Part: Letting an entire winter go by and not working on it at all, when it easily could have been done just after Christmas. Knitting-wise, getting the very first row with all the cables established was definitely the worst. From there it wasn't bad at all.

Best Part: I love love LOVE the cabling on this thing- this only solidifies the fact that my favorite type of knitting is that with cables in it. I wore it out last night and got a lot of compliments already- most people can't believe that I knit it, and when they ask if it was hard I usually say as long as you know where you are in the pattern, it's fine. :)

I also loved doing this sweater as a KAL with Red, one of my knitting partners. It was excellent motivation when I heard she was done with the body or arms to really kick me in the butt to get going again. We're going to do a photo shoot with the two of us together in our Vivians sometime soon here, when our crazy schedules finally match up. :)

Until then, I'm happily warm in my bright sweater... maybe pondering what my next sweater will be... this? Or perhaps this?

A Peck

You've been eating all my food.

The cupboard this morning had coffee, rice, Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and 13 packets of hot chocolate mix. No cereal, no oatmeal, nothing resembling food for when I'm yawning and wiping the guck out of my eyes trying to see. The fridge hums when I open it, i'm trying to keep my bare legs from the tentacles of cold leaking out the bottom. No milk- but there's 3 eggs and some cheese and taco sauce, so I have just enough to make an omelet and one hardboiled egg for lunch.

I love biking to the grocery store. My hands are warm in light green handwarmers knit by a friend, and I almost stray off the road as I look around me. The colors are more vivid than they were climbing on Sunday.

I loved seeing the leaves against the black rock against the baby blue sky. Their pigments blinded my eyes, screaming at me RED! ORANGE! YELLOW! The long blue rope matched the sky and I dug my fingers into a crack and balanced on purple shoes on footchips too small to see, but we'll pretend they're there because I can't fit my toe in the crack.

Inside the grocery store, my eyes are blinded again, this time by fluorescent bulbs and neon signs yelling "CHEF BOYARDEE 5 FOR $5!!". Orange pumpkins line the floor, guarding the fresh produce and hoping to soon guard a front door with a scary grin cut into his face. It's hard to pass them, but I'll be making my jack-o-lantern soon enough. Instead, I grab milk, eggs, cereal, and bread before heading to the check out. I pass another sign proclaiming "HOT EATS FOR COOL NIGHTS" and then I see it.

Bushels of apples. Bags of apples. Reds and yellows and greens mixed together shiny and tasty. Bushel and a peck of apples. I love you... a bushel and a pack... a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck...

I can't help it and one bushel finds a spot in my bag and I carefully pack my backpack so they won't jostle and bruise during my ride home. I lock my bike and sit on my front stoop with an open backpack, biting and tearing through apple skin while sticky juices roll down my fingers before I lick it off. Then more apples find their way in my bag for work, and I'm happy because it's the perfect snack, so tasty and fresh and October in every bite.

I leave you plenty, because I know how much you'll like them too. Just make sure to leave me a couple for tomorrow. :)