Spring Adventure

I've been dreaming and recounting this Spring's roadtrip and wondering where I might go next.  First, on the map was a tour through the pure and down-to-earth Northern California.  And I'm talking North - waaay past the hustle and bustle of the bay area and cities that grow ever together.

 

Where would this lovely bit of asphalt take us?  Callahan's Bar and Emporium, Callahan, CA.  Why?  Because it was off-route and we had no agenda - that's why.  For the pure of love of exploration...set's my heart afire.

And where would we go from here? Ever onward northward...

A sweater two

I only made my first sweater this last winter when I had a few days of solitude to myself.  This one, minus the solitude took much longer, but I am extremely pleased with it.

And it gets quite a lot of wear.  :-)  That, I am most pleased with!

Threads

Every summer we'd visit grandma up on a part of the Columbia  River that was strewn with pine trees, ferns, cold rushing creeks, the flat-slow looking river, waterfalls and soaring mountains and craggy rocks that had stories and legends about them. 

Photo from Oregon Herald www.oregonherald.com

And at her home she had this corner of yarn and lovely colored needles.  It was near a bookshelf and there was a plant that draped all the way from the ceiling to the floor.  The corner held magic.  Pure magic. 

And every summer, like clockwork the whole bunch of us would arrive after a marathon drive and I'd always be drawn to that corner and would ask to be taught to knit.  You see, my mother was a seamstress and crocheter - so I knew those, but knitting was another world.  And so she'd show me how to cast on and would kindly do so for me.  I'd get that first knit row, but then to turn and purl.  That was always awkward and if I dared set down my work, I'd forget which row I was on...wherefore she'd always correct my blems and errors and help me see. 

However, to my little blackberry picking, itching to explore self, I could only really contain myself to half listening (although it was I who asked) and never really finished more than a dozen (high-estimate) rows during those weeks we visited.

But, somewhere, buried deep within my very being - grew this love.  Threads and yarns and hooks and needles and all sorts of the related bits and such.  So now one may find that love which threads all through my life and home is here to stay...

Setting the Stage

My love of adventure started with Westerns.  Truth be told, it probably started earlier than that when Dad was working swing shift and had afternoons off and would pick me up from school, make us a sandwich and we'd watch Bonanza together.  It was great.

Later, my Papa would give us a book titled Under the Tonto Rim, by Zane Grey.  At this early stage in life, I had no idea that Zane Grey was a writer of many wonderfully eloquent and descriptive westerns.  And not the shoot-em-dead varieties - but one fraught with development of a character, full of descriptive scenes of nature.  Beautiful, inspiring and intriguing. 

With descriptions that journeyed through my mind and took me on trails "and across the windy uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze-filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks..."

"...ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered, and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes gleamed like gems...."

Ahh...smell the pine?  The water?  The clear air of the Sierra's?

And down, ever, downward, "sloping to the great decent, where the mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath the setting sun."

And so, with its early beginnings, so set the stage for my love of Westerns, Adventures, and Yarn...(more to come on that)

-Quotes taken from The U.P. Trail, by Zane Grey, 1918
-Photos by me :)