Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Stonehenge

If you don’t know
Whose signs these are
You can’t have traveled
Very far
Burma Shave

The US Highway Department wrote in a report in the 1950s that nothing more reliably slowed traffic than a set of Burma Shave signs along the road.

I’m going to embark on a serious and difficult mission: I’m going to try to knit a rooster.  I have this wonderful book, Knit Your Own Farm, and I’m using it and the other books in the series (Knit Your Own Dog, Knit Your Own Cat, Knit Your Own Zoo) in my book, now underway, Knit Your Own Murder.  The problem is, I’m not a very good knitter.  But there is a lady living in our building who is very good, and she has promised to help me.  I hope we are still friends when this project is finished.

I think I”m still coming down from my trip to England.  Stepping outside St. George’s Church Hall after a vestry meeting Monday evening, I was pushed by a sharp, driving wind and dampened by a light rain – just like the weather at Stonehenge a few weeks ago.  What a mysterious place Stonehenge is!  Huge, flat-faced stones, cut from a miles-distant quary and brought to the site, dressed and stood upright four thousand years ago, so far back that no amount of research can tell what these people were thinking when they built it.  Okay, it appears to be some kind of calendar, marking the winter and summer solstice – and there is even new evidence that it also tracked the moon and could predict eclipses.  Were the sun and moon gods to these people?  Impossible to know at this remove in time.

2 comments:

Linda O. Johnston said...

I enjoyed my visit to Stonehenge many years ago--and doubt it has changed much since then. It's an amazing place. And good luck knitting a rooster!

Betty Hechtman said...

Good luck knittng the rooster. I broadened my knitting horizons by knitting a worry doll for my next book. It was definitely worth the effort.