A curmudgeonly yarn

    Okay, we have cell phones with processors more powerful than the computers that put the Apollo astronauts on the moon. We can call and text each other from almost anywhere on the planet. A cell phone means that we are never without a camera. So many innovations to make our lives more convenient. Why then is it that no one seems to have figured out a good way to package yarn so that you can retrieve the correct end easily?

    I have wondered this for many years and now I’m just old and crusty enough to complain about it. I’ve recently gone back to crocheting. I did a lot of it in my early 20’s when I spent hours upon hours in the relative darkness backstage listening to string quartets. There are worse ways to spend time but I found the time passed more enjoyably if my hands were busy. I crocheted afghans and scarves mostly. Then I lost interest and gave away all the crochet hooks.

    In retirement a friend took up crocheting and I was reminded of how I really did like it so, I bought a bunch of new crochet hooks and yarn. This time I crocheted slippers, messenger bags and toques using various weights of yarn and different patterns. It was fun and I gave away a lot of what I made. Then I put the yarn and hooks in a box and stuffed them away in the cupboard until a few months ago.

    There was a call from our church for prayer shawls. I’ve made them before, both knitted and crocheted. I had the hooks and the yarn so why not. I dug the stuff out again. Much of the yarn I had I rerolled into balls instead of working it from the skeins. My method of working is pretty simple: toss the ball or skein I’m working from into a shoe box. Put the shoebox on the floor beside my chair and have at it. When the skein gets down close to the end I often roll it into a ball because it is easier to keep together that way.

    Makers of the skeins chirpily tell you that to start a project you reach inside the skein and pull on the interior end. That way your yarn will come out smoothly and it won’t flip the skein around as you’re working with it. It’s a great theory. The problem is when I reach in, all I feel is a jumble of yarn. So I try it from the opposite opening in the skein. Still nothing. I stick fingers from both sides into the skein and root around some more.

    Eventually I get frustrated, grasp what I hope will be a clump near the end and pull. The yarn comes out politely for about a foot and then gets caught. Too late to back out now so I give it a good yank. Nothing. I yank it again and out comes what I can only describe as the yarn equivalent of a hairball. Now I have two blobs of muddled up yarn: the shell of the original skein and the guts that came from the inside. Not an end in sight.

 
    I start gently picking away at the guts, tossing them lightly and trying to get my fingers into the spaces to untangle the mess. No perceptible progress and if I start passing the blob over and under strands of yarn I’ll never get it untangled. I put it down and look at the husk of the skein. As I turn it over I see an end! This is where I’ll have to start. I grab the end and start to wind it into a ball. Eventually that part of the skein has become a ball and as I change from the husk to the guts. the yarn seems to be unravelling smoothly. Keep winding!
  

 Too good to be true. There’s a clump. I tuck the ball into my armpit so it won’t go rolling across the floor as I try to deal with the clump. It’s not a very big one and after a bit of teasing apart with my fingers it droops into a single strand. I keep rolling. There are a few more clumps but nothing that tempts me to just cut it out and knot the pieces back together. That really is a last resort.

    Now after all that fuss I can finally start to crochet the project. I’d like to report that this tussle with the yarn is an anomaly, but it happens more often than not. Sometimes I think any sane person would just rewind the yarn into a ball starting from the outside but somehow, that would be giving up and as I approach each new skein of yarn I hope this will be the one that will present the magical end to my probing fingers.

    In the meantime, I put the ball into the shoe box so it won’t run all over the floor, make a loop, take up my hook and begin to crochet. Surely the actual project will be easier than trying to find the end of the yarn.

Sparrows

Sparrows. My grandfather hated them. He even went so far as to change the words in his copy of the old blue United Church hymnbook. The hymn reads “God sees the little sparrow fall, it meets his tender view.” Pa crossed out ‘sparrow’ and changed it to bluebird.

No shortage of sparrows

I’m not crazy about sparrows either. I know they’re an introduced species and they are ubiquitous, spring, summer, fall, and winter. They don’t have gorgeous plumage although I do admit that there are many shades of grey and brown on their back feathers. Then there is the challenge of trying to tell sparrows apart. My Birds of Western Canada lists 20 different species of sparrow. So far, I’ve identified only 4, house sparrow, chipping sparrow, clay-coloured sparrow, and song sparrow. They are all little brown birds and unless I get a good look at the facial features through a pair of binoculars they are all pretty much the same.

When I see red-breasted nuthatches on the tree outside the living room window I get excited and grin like an idiot. The downy woodpeckers that visit occasionally get the same reaction, and the merlin that paid a visit once had me practically jumping up and down. Sparrows? Not so much.

I haven’t made bird watching a priority in that I don’t get up early in the morning to go to places where there is a greater variety of species. I do watch birds and watch for birds. When we’re out for our walks around the neighbourhood I keep a mental list of the ones we see, sparrows, magpies, pigeons, crows, northern flickers, and the occasional gull. Once in a while we’ll see a hawk, a downy, or a hairy woodpecker. I’m able to recognize the disappearing butt of a flicker by the white patch on its rump.

There is a thick hedge just across the street from us and I think it must be the equivalent of the sparrows’ pub. During the daylight hours there is usually a racket of cheeps and squeaks emanating from the bushes. We pick on the sparrows by sneaking up to the hedge and then saying, ‘woof!’ The sparrows quiet for a few seconds until we are past the hedge and then resume their conversations, complaining I imagine, about the two stupid humans who find the silly trick amusing. Lately, even though we don’t woof at them every time we pass, they seem to quiet as we approach the hedge. The brains of birds are mysterious places.

During the pandemic I’ve spent more time that I ever though I would watching the sparrows. They are constant. They show up around 8 in the morning, noon, and again around 2 in the afternoon. I have a pair of binoculars sitting by the living room window and today I watched 3 of them taking dust baths in the dirt at the base of a lilac bush. They also seem to appreciate the birdbath I made last year and 7 of them have tried to inhabit it at the same time. Some sparrows are better at sharing the space than others and there was one bossy little one who, with an open beak, fended off attempts of others to join him in his bath. The others retreated to a nearby bush until he flew off and then 3 of them got into the bath.

Dust bath depressions

Sparrows also provide lots of practice for me and my long lens. I need only raise the camera to practice capturing sparrows eating, sparrows preening, sparrows bathing, sparrows flying. They are little, quick, and challenging. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time sitting on the step with my camera, I know that they are always there to help me develop my photographic skills so that when a nuthatch, chickadee, or downy woodpecker decides to pay a visit to the yard I’ll have a better chance of a decent photo.

Now I just need to take those few steps out the door. The bird book, the binoculars, and the camera are waiting by the window. I love birds and love to watch them. If sparrows are the only birds whose availability I can depend on, maybe they aren’t so bad after all.