Coooold!

Yesterday was the coldest day of our winter here. Cathy called to tell me it was "bitter cold." In DC, that means it was about 25 degrees ABOVE ZERO and windy. That sounds like the merrie month of May where I grew up.

But even I admit it did feel very cold. My glasses fogged up whenever I entered a building, too! So after hanging out at the National Gallery, I went home and put an extra blanket on my bed and thick L.L.Bean socks on my feet.

I also mended the cricket holes in my favorite sweater. My mother taught me to darn socks when I was a kid. And as a postulant and novice in the nunnery, I mended "our" socks during the one o'clock lecture--the after-lunch period during which our novice mistress read aloud to us while we stitched. She picked her readings from some spiritual tome, often by Romano Guardini, who was very popular in the 1950s, or even C.S. Lewis. She, the novice mistress, was quite literary, and so we escaped the readings the following class had to endure. They were read to by a different and more than slightly pietitious superior from books like Jesus of Nazareth, which had statements like "Jesus is called 'the Lamb of God', because who doesn't love a woolly little lamb?" (Right. Not so much with the wool, though. I much prefer garlic.)




I still love to mend socks, but I've gotten over the need to use the same color or type of yarn. Too matchy! I mend everything now with embroidery floss. It's colorful and sturdy, and it always feels very good to put on something I've mended with my own hands rather than thrown away. I'm very fond of my turtle socks, and one hole in the toe isn't enough to wreck them. [A nice photo of a mended turtle sock is on its way, but it's taking EVER SO LONG to arrive, zut alors!!] [added later: And here it is. I had emailed it to....mad, hysterical laughter....earthlink!]