Yarn and Books ... What Else Is There?

For years I've admired this simple brown shawl worn by Tasha Tudor. It features often in photos in Tasha Tudor's Heirloom Crafts, a book I pull out every summer as my autumn-loving heart longs for the cooler temperatures and crisper air of fall.

She pins the shawl in the front. It's  just a triangle, all knit, no purl. No fancy borders or stitching.

I mentioned a few posts ago about a shawl worn in Lark Rise, and I prefer that longer style that can be wrapped round and secured in the back, rather than Tasha's pinning method.

If you click here, you can go to Ravelry and see the shawl I'm making. I'd lift a photo of it and post it here, but my new photo situation on my computer is a bit more restrictive than before, until I completely figure it out.
I already had five skeins of this yarn that some nice person gave to me, and I like the color -- a deep blue/grey. I'm using it for the shawl.

 To be honest, I usually knit with acrylic yarn and avoid pure wool. I don't like things that itch or shrink. But this yarn is wool, so I'll need to be careful washing it. Since I want to wear it to work outdoors on our new little farmette, I like that the wool will be warm and sturdy.
I borrowed Anna's size 10 circular needles to accommodate the length.

It's coming along nicely, but I'm only on skein two. It starts at the top, at the nape of the neck, and increases with almost every row. A very simple pattern, thankfully. The little black yarn piece indicates that this is the right side of the garment. The white marker reminds me where the center line is, for increases.

And this is the little mobius shrug I mentioned before too. I got sidetracked with the shawl -- you yarn addicts will understand! I'll get back to it when the shawl bores me :)

And books?
At last I finished that book, Crete on the Half-Shell, which is mediocre. I gave it away upon completion to the borrow-a-book shelves at the local marine store. Sailors are always on the look-out for a book to read, but they don't like to accumulate too many on board, so they swap.
Then I started this again. It's been enough years that I've forgotten the specific story, and her writing style is always pleasing.

But then my birthday happened, and my loving mother sent this treasure to me! It's written by MFK Fisher's great nephew, and he addresses the year when the culinary stars converged and the great culinary minds of the time met in France, rather by chance, and what resulted. I love anything to do with Fisher and Julia Child.

I read before bed. On nights when my brain is sluggish and needs a little comfort before repose, I read Lark Rise. On nights when my mind is active and wants to be engaged, I read Provence. Healthy brain diet, you see!
I swiped this little book from my mother's house with permission, a few weeks ago. I love Elspeth Huxley. I love her writer's voice, her style. It's so safe to love a writer's voice. Then you can pick up anything they write, and know you'll enjoy it. It's exactly like meeting up with an old, dear friend, and enjoying their personality all over again. Rather than describing her childhood in Africa, this book is a simple year's diary of her life in an English village.

I had to look up the word 'gallipot.' It's used early in the book (in a quote) to describe the eyes of the local men. I'm not sure whether it's a compliment.
Adam and I took my usual bike ride wending through the village out to Whittaker Marina, to sit on their fuel dock and gaze at the river. We saw something, probably a sting ray, rise to the surface. At first he thought it was two porpoises. It was rather large. We continued to dangle our feet above the water.
Then the tow boat from Deaton's Yacht Service motored past us on its way to save some stranded sailor. It's called the Captain Ralph.

Do you have your fingers into any yarn, or your eyes into any new books? Do tell!

The Faith of M.F.K. Fisher

I've read thousands of pages of MFK Fisher's writings. She is almost like a friend.

As a Christian, I've grieved a little inside, over the years, in my assumption that she was probably not a believer. One should not make assumptions, especially on that topic. But immersed in her words and thoughts as I was, I felt that I knew her. And anything as permeating as faith, I thought, would surely be evident in her books somehow. She seemed to me a spiritual person. But a Christian?

I'm reading a compilation of excerpts from her journals, 828 pages worth. What a revelation! In chronological order, her growth as a human, a lover of food, a student of her fellow men, and a writer is laid bare.  Her final years' writings are taken from her last book, Last House. I'd read that book, or thought I had. I'm at the end now, of these journals, reading her thoughts in the last few years of her life. And I found these words from "My Grown-Up Ears":

"It was in August 1945, and I was sitting in the North Reading Room of the New York Public Library. There was heavy dark rain falling, and the enormous hall was full of the scratchy rustlings and the smell of unaired clothes inevitable when many research workers congregate. I was grubbing in a concordance, looking up some such word as gluttony and thumbing here and there in a very neat practical copy of the King James Version.
And then I was reading:
'In the beginning ...'
"The words came out clear and strong and in a most beautiful order. They were the most straightforward words I had ever read, and although they were familiar to me from my youngest day, I knew that I had never really heard them before. I read for many hours without any knowledge of time or weariness ...."
Fisher tells of her childhood rearing in the church by her stern, dispassionate grandmother, of her own rejection of Christianity and eventual mockery of it, and finally of a drift into agnosticism. But the event in 1945 in the NYC library was pivotal. It shifted permanently her attitude toward faith. She was 37 years old.
"It was not the fault of my grandmother or boredom or my own stupidity that it took so long. I was simply incapable of it, until the summer of 1945. Since then, oh rich fortunate me, I can go almost anywhere in [the Bible]. The violence and the plottings and the blood and tenderness are more exciting than in any book I have ever read, I think, and they are told in a better simpler stle. And the mystery of man and his faith, if no clearer to me, shows itself like a thread of water, forever flowing round and round the world.
"For when Israel sang a little song to the well -- 'Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it' -- and the well did spring up to slake his people's thirst, and when I remember that wandering Arabian tribes still sing thus to their wells, I know more about faith than I ever thought I would, and I am glad of it." ~1989 (p. 795)

I don't presume to know another's soul, and I don't attempt to plumb the depths of Fisher's elegant prose. But it seems to me that God's Word (for such it is) was the tool God chose to change her, to crack open her heart to the wonders of what He had to say. And as a writer, she could not resist such a book, such a Tale-teller. Some may poo-poo her praise of the Bible as the finest of literature, but from a wordsmith like Fisher, there is no higher acclaim. Beyond that, she is transfixed by faith, the faith of humans throughout history, round the world and from ancient Israelite to the modern shepherd on his Middle Eastern hill.

The passage she quotes from Numbers 21:17 is telling. Buried deep in the Pentateuch, Fisher must have been an avid and frequent reader of Scripture to fix on such a verse to commit to her mind. God's people were tired, disobedient, punished, and wandering from place to place. In the span of ten verses, the nation moved nine times. Millions of desert nomads, packing tents and a huge tabernacle. And they were thirsty.

In the midst of this weary, chaotic life, God gives water. Fisher led, in my mind, a weary, wandering life as well. It's a reasonable parallel. But what she seems to love about this verse is its connection to today. Shepherds still sing to wells. The actions of Numbers 21 are still performed. It's a shining evidence to her of how the tiniest piece of the Bible is so very true. The faith rang true to her ear, her heart.

That's why I have hope I will have many years conversing with MFK Fisher on God's New Earth. I believe such a love for God's Word can come from only one source, God Himself. I was thrilled to read this brief account of her joy in the faith of those who trust in God to satisfy their thirst. To the one-time agnostic, the twin spiritual mysteries of Jesus's life and death and the believer's faith in them became things of beauty and wonder, not fairy tales to be reviled. For a woman with Fisher's intellect and worldliness, that is a large leap indeed.

Why I Love M.F.K. Fisher

Fisher as a young woman

I'll begin by saying I've read Fisher for many years, and instead of boring you with opinion, I'll launch right into a wonderful passage from From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher is in her early 30s. She's writing about her sick mother.

"...We came in to find Mother's door open and her in her Chinese robe in the Irish chair. She looked very pretty -- her skin was younger and fresher than it had been for years, and I felt that she smelled better, probably, in her intimate cracks -- and she was playing 'The Pretty Tyrant' as she had not played it since she was a bride, I wager. It has its boring side ... mainly because her twenty-five-year habit of talking anywhere in the house and expecting everyone anyplace else in the house to listen has become exaggerated by her power, as an invalid, so that she talks in her rather weak voice almost constantly and expects us to listen no matter where we are. That may be one reason why Rex is such an accomplished deaf person. Anyway, we are so relieved to have Mother still alive that we submit with fatuous and unbreathed gladness to her coquetry, and only occasionally do we admit to boredom." (477)

I read that, and whispered, Yes to myself. Such a familiar family experience. Such accurate description of both person and feeling. A sad admission that we know people like this, and a fearful worry that we are a bit like this ourselves.

Fisher is more careful and literary in her writings intended for publication. This is an everyday journal intended for the fire, eventually. At 32, she's already published her first successful book, Serve It Forth, but has not repeated that success. Instead she is struggling through the illness that will take her husband's life a few months from this time. Her prose is entering maturity. In a later entry she writes:

"Just now T. and I went out from the warm lighted study and the whuddering firelight of the living room to the porch and watched a half rainbow grow and die against the hills. Sunlight, long and yellow, flung itself against the middle distance of San Jacinto in an intense blot -- San Jacinto hills, not the mountain, which was blue and far from us. The hills showed their folds and meadows like old elephant hide, and in front of them the valley and the little lizard of land blazed with arsenic, Paris gray, as violent as dying California leaves can be, yellow and hideously beautiful. The rainbow curved up, more and more intensely, never higher than the quarter-arm but plainly from Soboba, and then it faded. We felt cold and came into the reassurance of the house. The harsh yet measured beauty of the scene before us was disturbing."  (T. is her husband.) (478)

When she wants to turn descriptive, lovely and literary, she can in a moment. A few sentences later she notes, "I am verbose but uninspired" today. "My mind is full of my own despair, muted fortunately. It is best to write of things like weather and furniture." Beautiful passages like the one above are a second choice to the things that truly fill her mind. She says in the next entry, "My heart is heavy, thinking of my friends in France and of England so hard pressed. I can hardly bear to think of anything at all these days, and dwell resolutely on the growth of a kitten or an acacia tree and the progression of clouds in a winter sky." It is late 1940.

I have loved M.F.K. Fisher for a many years. It is her voice that I love, so clearly and carefully revealing the inner woman, I thought, although her family and friends seem to indicate she kept herself well-concealed. She was prolific, and one could read her books alone for years, over and over. I'm on page 477 of her compiled journals. I have about ten other of her books.

The passage about her mother is wonderful in its honest accuracy, and her crafted, complex sentence structure. The passage about the hills is lovely in description. Some phrases are perfect, like "The hills showed their folds and meadows like old elephant hide" and "the little lizard of land" and "the reassurance of the house." All these are fresh, new, appealing. But "yellow and hideously beautiful" is over-done." I love the word "whuddering," which she seems to have invented, a very useful word for various sounds, like a fan in a dark, warm room, or one's heart swooshing blood around in the silence.

M.F.K. Fisher is an honest writer. I never feel that she's trying to impress me or overwhelm me with her verbiage. She writes what her inner voice has been rattling on about, all her life. Her pen is only the secretary. I may be diving into her books again, and if I do, you can expect more posts about her style. Most people write about her personal life, which was sometimes tabloidal, or her fame as a gastronome. But I prefer the woman as I found her -- stark, beautiful, self-aware and -assured, and sad.