Rules are made to be, sorry… what?

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way –  but doesn’t it seem like there’s something wrong with the flow of time? Here in Toronto we’re still waiting for the world to open up a bit. A few stores have opened, those that can meet the strict health regulations,  but except for those for those few people and our essential workers, we’re still in our homes, still missing each other, and it makes time… weird, doesn’t it? I feel like there’s not that much to do, but somehow the days are both long and short at the same time,  blurring and evaporating.  The way spring has come here makes it all the more strange.  Just two weeks ago I was watching the snow fall and cursing this northern wasteland and it’s eternal winter, and now the lilacs are out, everything is blooming, and we’ve just had three days of our first heat alert of the season.

It makes it hard to know what to knit, doesn’t it? It makes it even harder to follow the rules – it rained the other day and I almost got out the spinning wheel, but it’s summer rain now, and that means that the sky opens and dumps 43577 million litres of water, and then by the time I’m standing in the stash trying to decide what to take down to the wheel, the sun is out and the birds are all laughing at me. I only had time for a brief conversation with myself the other day, and it went like this:

Me: Oh! It’s raining. Let’s spin!

The me in charge: Okay. Sure, that’s the rule. What would you like to spin?

Me: A gradient! To make a shawl. A lace shawl.

The me in charge: Okay, sure – I’m sure we can find something like that in here, how about…

Me: AND IT SHOULD BE PINK LIKE FLOWERS. Maybe with some yellow, and little bits of blue like the sky and

The me in charge: Listen, we don’t have that. You hate that. Look at this nice one that’s the colour of…

Me: Winter. That’s the colour of winter. I won’t spin it. I want PINK, and lilac and daffodil and grass green and warm sand and…

The me in charge: I can’t work with you when you’re like this.

That was the moment that I knew that I’d tipped over the edge, I don’t know if it’s our recent loss or the soul depleting nature of a winter, or the sadness and perpetual weirdness of navigating a pandemic, but suddenly I couldn’t cope with one more thing that even remotely looked like the season we’ve just limped through. I powered though the last few things on the needles that seemed ridiculous.  Mittens? What kind of fool am I?*

(Pattern, if you are inexplicably in the mood, is Signal Hill – the yarn is my handspun from the last time it rained and I was obedient.)

Fingerless mittens? Those will come in handy. (See what I did there?)

(Pattern, should you live in Australia, is X-Mitts, the yarn a particularly cozy and warm discontinued beauty from Dirty Water Dyeworks.)

Warm, winter spice coloured shawl?

What was I thinking? What was my plan? When I decided to take that out two weeks ago where was my head? What about the impending summer spoke to me and said “cashmere.” I mean, it’s lovely (you can’t tell because it’s taking a bath in the sink, but it is all the gorgeous colours of the fall and coming winter and wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, it’s raining again, and I’m not spinning.  No, no.. because there is nothing in the spinning stash that is the pink of hydrangeas, the purple of lilacs, the yellow of forsythia, the viridescent sparkle of fresh leaves.  I’m putting shorts and changing the channel.  Someone get me some *&^%ing sky blue.

*Yeah. I know. I’m Canadian. Winter is coming – it’s not like this won’t all be used in about 15 weeks, but couldn’t we pretend for a day that it’s never coming back?