I've been holding out on you!

There are some bloggers, it seems, that when the going gets tough, the fingers get typing. With me, it seems to be the opposite! The more I have going on, and have to say, the harder it is, in the end, to get it all in the blog. (I suppose it doesn't help that the latest edition of Blogger's posting feature is really, really slow on my computer. As in, type a key, wait a second for it to appear, over and over.) But I won't hold out on you any longer...

Be that as it may, I have some pretty fiber pictures for you, because otherwise you'd see pictures of books moved into boxes and of all the random things we're trying to get rid of (old furniture, random appliances like a breadmaking machine, microwave, yadda, yadda, that we won't need at our new place).

But on to the pictures! First, the second half of my trip to Massachusetts (a week and a half ago, now):

We stopped at WEBS. Yes, I bought yarn. (If I remember, I'll try to take a picture of the booty). I felt a bit silly, posing with my sock outside this shrine of sheepiness, hence the lopsided smile.

After that, we moved on to one of my favorite places ever: Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in Lenox, MA. I spent 2 months there in high school, studying the french horn, lying out under the trees on the lawn and listening to concerts while deciding whether to go to a conservatory for college, or to a liberal arts school. I chose the latter, based partly on that summer.

Now whenever I'm there, I'm transported back to a magical summer full of teenage angst and self-discovery. During that summer, I realized that I didn't have the drive, the will, that would be necessary to succeed (to master those high notes, that lip trill), as a professional hornist. Many of my other colleagues were much more competitive, though, and no doubt thought I wasn't terribly good. Once I realized I didn't want to compete with them, that I was (for once in my lifetime!) all right with being myself, it didn't matter that they were better than me, that they didn't think I was even good enough for second horn.

Maybe that's one reason why I like visiting Tanglewood so much, that by some strange act of sympathetic magic, I think that returning again to a place of importance will somehow bring back that same sense of equilibrium.

Of course, I like Tanglewood for other reasons: magnificent music, its beautiful grounds, stately trees, the variety of fanciness or simplicity with which people picnic on "the lawn," the surrounding mountains, the memories. This time, though, in addition to that and to hearing Sibelius's Second Symphony (which "my" orchestra played during that unforgettable summer), there was knitting:

(Monkey socks!)

Everything cycles back on itself, or at least, that is how I find myself thinking about life, the past and the present each commenting on each other and helping prepare for the future. Going back to Tanglewood before leaving the northeast was Coffeeboy's idea - and I'm so glad he suggested we do it!