Seasons of Love

This Noro sock yarn makes a bright shawl.  

This past Friday night some women I work with headed to uptown Charlotte to go to a bar named Howl at the Moon.  The place is loud, where dueling grand pianos, electric guitars, and drums compete for attention on the stage.  It is also a spot where guests, if they choose, can use long neon straws to slurp cocktails from huge shared plastic buckets, or those less inclined to take part in such communal sipping can gulp down Jello shots.  After a week spent cooped in a trailer teaching teenagers, an evening at this loud bar, filled mostly with twenty-somethings, didn’t appeal to me, so I decided to bow out and spend a quiet Friday evening at home. 

Besides, my thirteen-year-old son needed to choose a Broadway show tune for an audition for a magnet high school he wants to attend next year, so I thought I might rent the movie version of The Producers and see if something from that work struck his fancy.  The show is funny and irreverent, and Will Ferrell is in it, factors that I’d thought might make this work appealing to a thirteen-year-old boy.  After showing a trailer for The Producers to my son, who was slouched on the couch with his hair over his eyes, and after listening to his accompanying derisive comments, I decided to change direction.  No full version of The Producers.  Threatening bodily harm, my husband and I did make James sit through video clips of songs sung by male performers from shows such as Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Rent, A Chorus Line, etc. After an hour subjected to youthful sarcasm and accompanying contorted facial expressions, though, I was convinced that maybe going out wasn’t such a bad idea, even if no song had been selected.  So my husband and I exited in a hurry, trying to shut the door as fast as we could on the teen angst, so that it wouldn’t seep out and follow us into the car.  

The Bradford pears were in bloom this past weekend.

The weather on Friday was mild, and daylight savings time had extended the hours of sunshine.  On dark winter Friday evenings, I can be found at home, knitting while watching something on television, or sometimes I read.  Maybe the fact that spring was in the air, more than my son’s attitude, had prompted this decision to go out. I don’t know.  I was still tired, however, so, rather than head for the city, my husband and I drove to a wine bar in Monroe, a small nearby town.  The tranquil little place, Hilton Vineyard, on quaint South Main Street, was just the medicine for this tired teacher and frazzled mother who can’t figure out how to get an adolescent actor  to sing  “Seasons of Love” or “The Rain in Spain.” 

          Changing my usual routine felt like officially ushering in springtime, although now it’s Monday and the temperature is in the high thirties with rain, so that night seems more like a long-ago prelude to the season, a brief taste of warmer, more relaxing days.  My knitting, too, this past weekend was inspired by spring, as I began work on a top-down T-shirt I’m designing using Patty Lyons’s techniques (learned at a class at Vogue Knitting Live), and I’ve also been plugging away a shawl made with Noro sock yarn—in brilliant colors that seem perfect for high temperatures.  Maybe in a couple of months warm weather will be here, the audition will be over, and I’ll have the energy to drive uptown to Howl at the Moon.  For now, though, working on my lightweight knitting and sipping some of Hilton’s plum wine in the evenings seems the perfect activity to see me through the next few weeks until spring break.  

This is some silk yard I've had in my stash for some time.  This top-down sweater starts with a crew neck.