What I knew when I was eight

Never done: Shadow post
Tshuve: Hula Hoop
Tshuve: Spinning
Tshuve: Knitting

I did something I've definitely never done before, but it is too private to write about here. (I still don't quite know how to navigate those waters, so I am just going with my gut for now, and keeping it private when it seems like I should.)

It was also a day of returning. First of all, I got my hula hoop back out of storage! I have the most beautiful cloth-covered hula hoop I've ever seen in my life. My good friend Jensi gave it to me for my 40th birthday. It's hand-made in Portland, by someone who called her (now defunct) business Hoopla Hoops. She had an incredible warehouse of hoops and fabrics, and invited people in to mix and match colors. Mine is covered in two fabrics: nubbly grass green and furry black and white cow motif. It's 40" in diameter, and it's weighted, so it twirls very steadily for as long as I feel like gyrating. I find hooping to be incredibly relaxing. When I am writing and need to think for a while but don't want to get distracted, I like to hoop. When my body needs to loosen up, I like to hoop. When I want to show off my grass green/cow motif hoop, I like to hoop in public. People who have known me since I was little know that I have always been a perpetual motion machine. I always liked to balance, be upside-down, roll on things, climb, play with balls.... My dad made me a set of stilts that I walked around on; I jumped on a pogo stick and rode a unicycle; I did a lot of handstands, especially after dinner, which was hard for some people to understand; and my favorite toy was an old cardboard roll -- imagine the cardboard core at the center of a toilet paper roll, and now make the cardboard three inches thick, 18 inches in diameter, and 36 inches long. I walked on it like it was a log in the river -- all over the house. Until one day someone tried to tickle me while I was on it (I have always hated to be tickled) and I panicked, and my foot went through a glass paneled door. A trip to the emergency room for stitches, and no more rolling in the house, which I found to be soooo unfair. Who tickles someone who's walking on a river log? For that matter, who tickles people? (I really hate to be tickled.)

I hadn't done a handstand in a couple years, but as I've been gaining upper body strength back, I checked last week to see if I could do one again -- and I can! It's not without repercussion though -- I think that's what flared up my neck, not spinning -- so I am still going to ease into doing them more often. Speaking of spinning, I took another class (worse music, less interesting instructions, better reminders about form, like using my abdominal muscles, and breathing in through the nose, and out through the shoulders.) I think I will keep going from time to time, but probably not 4-5 times a week like a certain buff and obsessed friend of mine. I am also going to try a Zumba class, if I can get past the tagline: Skip the workout; Join the party! Eh.

But maybe the most important return -- tshuve -- came when I went to pick up soup at Abigail's apartment. Her apartment is full of yarn and knitting projects and a loom. And not just any knitting projects and loom -- exquisite knitting projects and a full-sized loom. At the end of the evening, I told Abigail how good it felt to be in her place and see her projects. I told her that I realized I had lost some of myself, and that starting to spend time with people who are connected to their cooking/crafting/art projects is good for me -- and will help me return to this part of myself.

From the time I was about 8 til 18, when I wasn't hopping and jumping and standing and bouncing and riding, I was embroidering. My mom designed crewel embroidery kits and sold them to Custom House. I used to go with her to trade shows, and I used to love to embroider my own designs. I remember bringing my embroidery to class when my third grade teacher wouldn't give me extra work to do when I finished early, which I always did because I had been in a terrific second grade class (taught by Deb Chabot.) I remember practicing the seed stitch, and the stem stitch, and the french knot, and square filet. I remember tracing drawings I liked and turning them into embroidery patterns. Maybe it was another form of perpetual motion, but for times when I couldn't move my whole body, but I at least kept my hands and my mind going.

My mom was also always a knitter, but I didn't learn until I went to college. But once I learned, I was unstoppable. I knit ponchos, sweaters, skirts. I liked to knit in the round, usually playing with color more than stitch variation. I knit pretty steadily from about age 20 to 30. And then I slowly stopped. Before sitting down to write this, I would have told you that New York made me stop. In fact, I think I told Abigail that New York made me stop -- that I don't have enough space, that I work all the time. But as I write this, I realize that I didn't move to New York until I was almost 40, and I had grown apart from my embroidery floss and beautiful wool and other projects about 10 years earlier. Not to mention all the music I used to play, and don't anymore ... which will be a topic of another post. And while I do think New York has a part to play, you know what else it was? The computer. You can't knit and write email. You can't embroider and check Facebook.

Now, I've also become a much more prolific writer in those ten years, and I love using my computer to write. And it is true that I have to work harder to live in New York than I had to work living in Maine or Oregon. But it's also true that instead of spending my free time sitting with friends making things, I sit with the computer looking at things that other people have made. It's a radically different orientation -- and one that I am ready to shift away from.

Even though that was a great place to end the post, and this post is already long, there is something else to add. After my mother died, I had a strong urge to buy a sewing machine and to start sewing. I have never been a strong sewer, except by hand, and neither was my mother, and yet somehow this was the pull. So I bought a wonderful limited edition Project Runway Brother machine. I made several handbags, a gorgeous reversible apron, lots of balsam-filled sachets and flax-seed-filled bags to heat up to keep warm at night. But I only sew in Maine. I keep promising myself I will sew in New York, but I don't make the time. I have some gorgeous fabrics, and I owe my cousin Leigh and my friend Robin each a handbag, and I want to learn how to put in a zipper and make button holes and sew my own clothes. From now on, I'm going to think about the exquisite pair of mittens in Abigail's apartment, and how she talked about the way those of us who did not grow up in a place as vibrant as NYC, with dozens of interesting things to do every night (and I will add to that, the distractions of the internet) learned how to entertain ourselves. I think I've lost the skill of entertaining myself in this way, and I want to get it back. So I am going to ask myself if I really need to check email, or if maybe I would rather make something out of yarn, fabric, needles, and thread.