Summer in SoCal

Even though I left a comment on Camille’s blog saying my favorite season was fall in Chicago, there are things about summer in Southern California I definitely like. As in getting produce from my garden. What could be nicer than making a salad with tomatoes I just picked. And even if the cucumbers look strange (they’re lemon cucumbers) and I thought the plant was supposed to give me cantaloupes, they taste great and are 100 percent organic pesticide free.

Walking Goldy is particularly nice now. We go out as the day is fading. There is no glaring sun, but it’s still light enough to see everything in color. The north mountains are purple brushed with gold. The burning heat has lifted and it is kind of gentle warm. I love to look at everybody’s yard. They are big around here, almost like a personal park. The silk trees have their fragrant pink fans, and the honeysuckle plant one neighbor smells so sweet, I often snatch a blossom and keep smelling it as we walk.

There’s some mystery, too. Something has changed at the remodeled house down the street. I watched the couple move in and redo the house. Months later, I saw them walking with a baby carriage and realized there was an addition to their family. Then there was another addition. I started seeing an older woman walking with them. It was easy to figure out she was the woman’s mother since she looked like an older version of her.

There was always a SUV in the driveway and the house was invitingly lit up at night. Lately the driveway has been empty. Just the other day, the woman was watering with a hose. Even though I don’t know her, I turned to smile as I passed. The look I got back was anything but friendly. Her eyes looked hollow and her face sagged with sadness. When Goldy and I passed the house on our way home, it was dark out. There was only a dim lonely looking light coming from somewhere in the back of the house. It occurred to me that I haven’t seen the man for a long time. Hmm.

I found the perfect sort of thing to crochet in the summer. The expensive, nightmare, silk yarn I wrote about awhile back turns out to be lovely to work with when it’s warm. And it’s not a nightmare anymore. Once I ripped my attempts at knitting with it for the zillionth time and started to crochet with it, everything changed. With the knitting, I kept getting extra stitches and the edges looked wobbly and awful, and it took a thousand hours or maybe it only seemed that way to knit one row. There have been no extra stitches since I started to crochet and no lost ones either. It still takes awhile to do a row because of all the little bumps in the yarn, but it’s definitely faster than knitting.

The one skein is supposed to make shawl, but that was with the knit pattern. Crochet tends to take more yarn, so the shawl might end up a scarf. Since it’s light as air, either way it will work for warm weather.

I like the pattern I made up so much I’m already planning to use it with the apricot colored cotton yarn I bought in Old Town Alexandria.

How do you feel about wearing a scarf in the summer?

And the Living is Easy

I don’t much like summer -- it’s too cold. Indoors, that is. Movie theaters and grocery stores really push down on the thermostat, often to the point where I wish I’d brought a sweater along. But my husband likes it really cool, too, in our apartment. Half the reason I take a nice, hot shower every day is to get warm.

One reason to like summer, on the other hand, is that travel is much easier. No icy roads, no nightfall at five o’clock. So it’s not all bad.

My routine doesn’t much change in the summer. I only rarely make needlework items as Christmas gifts -- my eyes are approaching a stage where I will need cataract surgery one of these days, and so my projects are aimed more learning how a particular form of needlework is done than doing it well, and the result is often not good enough to give as a gift. Well, with one hoped-for exception: I took a class on making Romanian Point Lace in Salt Lake City last month, and I bought a kit to make a Christmas present of it for the woman who bravely and gamely came with me on my Great Train Journey. Nine stops in nineteen days, whew!

I think most crafters ply their craft “out of season.” If you’re going to stitch a Christmas stocking for a grandchild, you must start it long, long before the stores put out their Christmas stuff -- in, say, May or June. (At the rate I work, it would be ready not by this Christmas, but the next!)

My writing routine is basic: sit in the chair, boot up, and write. So the weather outdoors doesn’t affect that part of it. My office doesn’t even have a window, which makes it easier to write a snowstorm into a book in July. But see paragraph two, above, for the part about traveling to interview someone or look at something as research.

Like many other people, my favorite season is autumn; that’s when the flowery promise of spring is kept. I seem to have more energy in the fall, and my outlook is optimistic for some reason. How about you?