Coming home, I’m always struck by the things I’ve missed, the most obvious first: the salt air, the first flush of green in the pastures, the spring lambs, the exhalations of the damp woods. This time, as I knit quietly on the ferry, I realized something new that my city life lacks.

Behind me were a pair of old timers, heavy men who fill their flannel shirts, with rough, stubby fingers, one with a shining face reddened by a lifetime of sun and wind and probably drink, the other pale and jowly as a basset hound, bristling with whiskers. I listened passively for an hour as they jawed away about classic cars, catching snippets of their talk on the purl rows when I didn’t have to focus on my lace pattern. “I sold him that ’49 Merc back in ’86 for five grand. He drives it in the parade every year. But juice up the brakes and she could still make Seattle.” On and on they chatted, unhurried, steady and gruff as a couple of outboard motors. At some point I tuned in again and they’d made a seamless switch to rabbit hunting. “You gotta get the fur wet first or you’ll have a mess. You get two guys on it to pull from both ends and it’ll come right out of the skin like a salmon, but it’s real tacky under there and if you don’t get the fur wet first you’ll have a mess, all right.”

I don’t hear these conversations in Portland. True, the inhabitants don’t tend to be as concerned with vehicles and varmints (most don’t have garages big enough to rehabilitate fleets of jalopies anyway, and you’re more likely to hear discussions about retro-fitting for biodiesel than which chassis you might substitute to rebuild your truck if you weren’t a purist). But I think there’s something about the urban pace of life and diversity of acquaintance that gets in the way. These island men have known each other since they were schoolboys; who knows how many times they’ve had variations on this conversation. They aren’t under a press of sail to be off somewhere else. They don’t excuse themselves awkwardly from each other’s company when a topic has run its course, but work out variations on the theme like master musicians. It’s an art, this deliberate, hour-gobbling talk. Maybe it happens in Portland, too, but I don’t slow down enough to hear it.

I have also missed the ruckus of spring frogs. The combined voices of the peepers in the marsh at moonrise make a roar audible inside the house. Humans are notoriously noisy animals, but they have nothing on the average courting frog. If all Manhattan poured out into the streets at night and sang show tunes through bull horns, we might hope to equal the clamor of the swamp. We slept with the windows open.

Remember this hat from last October? I knit it as a store sample, and a lot of you liked it, so I thought I’d send out a public service announcement: I was in Knit/Purl this afternoon and saw that the kits are in at last! They aren’t up on the website yet, but I know that Jenni will be glad to send you one if you call them up.

How did I come to be at the yarn store on a Monday afternoon, you might like to know? It’s Spring Break, my friends. And I’ve got a few days of blissful relaxation up on the island planned. There’s all kinds of knitting on the lace stole to accomplish, but a girl can’t go cross-eyed over lace for too many hours a day. And I want to make serious progress on poor neglected Victoria, but if I can’t block the bias out of the top, I’ll need a Plan B. So I’ll be taking this:

Yes, I had to snag a new Ana hat kit for myself! I adored the Fleece Artist Woolie Silk 3-Ply, and this is just my color green. Plus it was surprisingly cold today, and I even heard a rumor of snow on the horizon. It probably won’t fall down at sea level, but it’s always nice to have a stylish hat to pull on just in case!

The Woolie Silk is special stuff, and so I found it worthy of reclining on my new treasure:

A shipment of things from my grandmother’s apartment in Connecticut arrived last week. We scored a fold-out couch for the library/guest room and an extra bureau, but the chief delight was a first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Huntsman, What Quarry? It’s inscribed Rufus from Tad 1939 – a gift to my grandmother from my grandfather in the year they were married. (The endpapers, in a charming non sequitur, bear a genealogy of French kings from Louis XIII to Louis XVIII in my grandmother’s pencil.) My grandparents were always so removed from me in years and geography that I get a particular charge from discovering tastes I have in common with them. I knew they both liked poetry; I didn’t know they admired Millay. Of course she was a celebrity in New York during their youth – somehow Millay’s bohemian Village life never dovetailed in my mind with the G-rated family stories playing out in the East 30s and 40s. But these same grandparents also danced to Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and other titans of the jazz scene all through their courtship. How I wish I could have known them then.

Leafing through Huntsman, I see that Gram made historical notes after poems that spoke to current events like “Say That We Saw Spain Die” (“Spain’s Civil War between the Loyalists and the Rebels has come to an end – 1939”) and the third Sonnet in Tetrameter (“Japan is warring against China – 1939. The peace yet in sight.”) What made her do this? Did she have some sense that her unborn children and grandchildren might read this book of poems, and her schoolteacher’s habits dictated that she pass along her understanding of its original context? Or did she seize an opportunity to preserve a moment in history, hoping to look back at this little book from the other side of the gathering storm of war and remember the world on the brink? She was 97 last September; dusk is drawing down on her at last. I won’t be able to ask her what this book meant to her. But I’ll keep it always, and wonder.

Last day of winter: Drifting Pleats in the fading light.

New York and back is a lot of travel in 59 hours. I was forcibly reminded of my loathing for JFK airport, long taxi rides, Midtown traffic, Delta’s egregious overbooking policies, overpriced airport “food,” the last row of seats before the bathrooms, leg room sufficient only for hobbits, pungent seatmates, in-flight movies, and the wealth of literature on a) strategies for amassing money; and b) strategies for ceasing to care about amassing money, both of which seem to be favorites among American airline passengers. NB: I am the most appalling serial offender when it comes to reading over people’s shoulders. I cannot not read text within my field of view. It doesn’t matter if it’s the cereal box or stock market reports or golf tournament results or the CNN parade of daft and/or shocking headlines. I can’t help myself. All my airplane companions are probably blogging at this very moment about rude people who surreptitiously read their books, magazines, and newspapers.

The good news is that I got to see many friends and relations, as planned. Once President Bush finally stopped holding up traffic at JFK for his exit from the executive helipad, we were able to stop spewing carbon emissions over the poor innocent Pennsylvanians and land our craft. Fortunately, my beloved former coworkers never leave the office before six, so they were still around for a nice catch-up chat. And the Spiders waited for me, although Lisa was calling my husband to make sure I had, in fact, left for New York that morning by the time I blitzed into The Point. Having eaten only a bagel at 7 a.m. and some disappointing stale peanuts, I lost little time in stuffing my face with a delicious pecan bar.

Gastronomically, this set the tone for the weekend. I subsisted on almost nothing but sugar, fat, and white flour for the next 48 hours. I knew the bridal shower was going to be trouble when Marika and Saxton’s neighbor (who threw the party) sent me out to help her daughter pick up NINETY scones and FOUR DOZEN éclairs. Forty people were coming to the shower. And the tables were already groaning under tiers of assorted cookies and sweets. The shower was a beautiful success, but we and the host family were all dying for salad and protein by the end. We spent the evening lolling on the couches amid the heaps of presents, somehow still drinking champagne with our Greek salads and some leftover rice and beans.

So as it turned out, Mr. G. was happy to learn, there was no bachelorette carousing at all. Marika and I may have gotten a little wanton among the discount designer jeans at Loehman’s, a cheapskate’s heaven which just opened about a block from my old apartment. (Guess what else opened a block from my old apartment? A new Jacques Torres chocolaterie. Given that his chocolate factory, where you can watch them actually making the chocolate, is across the street from my former office, this could have been deadly indeed.) Anyway, I came home with two pairs of Chip and Pepper jeans for the absurdly reasonable sum of $71.98. (Okay, this was partly because the sales clerk wasn’t paying attention and charged the second as a pair of lacy undies. And I was talking to my brother and didn’t notice until later that I’d signed for less than I was expecting to. I’m not really experiencing all that much guilt about not having done the honest thing in taking them back to correct the error. Had it been a little store with a direct connection to the designer, I would have done. As it is, well, we all made a mistake, and I scored a nearly free pair of jeans that come with a tag proclaiming that I have a sexy bum. Moreover, I’ll be back for more. I dread shopping for pants, and this experience was painless as can be, even after my anti-svelte sins of the prior day. (All that butter just lubricates the food so it doesn’t stick to your hips, right?)

I was a prize idiot on the way home. I decided, after the incident with the jeans, that I could afford a cab to the airport rather than the A train. (The cab nearly didn’t make it. It stalled regularly in the slow traffic, and my eyes were smarting from the smell of roasting clutch by the time we reached JFK almost an hour later.) I forgot which airline was supposed to fly me to Seattle at 4:30. This meant I had to negotiate the warren of TSA checkpoints going from terminal to terminal. At one point the arrows directed me down a series of deserted hallways, across a parking lot, up a sketchy back stairway, and into a wall. I retraced my steps and found another route. This one brought me sidelong into an empty maze of cordons for the security queue. Happily, I could see the Delta self-check-in area just on the other side. But a fellow in a uniform told me firmly that I could not simply duck under one of his black seatbelty barriers. I’d have to go around. Later I spent half an hour waiting in line for a cold and greasy slab of pizza (you won’t believe me, but this really was the least of available evils), and then found I didn’t actually have a seat on the plane. Only due to the lateness of a connecting flight did I eventually manage to board. (Sorry, would-have-been Norfolk-JFK-Seattle travellers. I appreciate your sacrifice, even though no one asked you.) And then, you know, six hours crammed in with the sweaties and wealth philosophers nine inches from the toilets. By the time I got off in Seattle I was so dazed that I wandered straight into the men’s bathroom. Didn’t even realize my mistake until there was a dude of the masculine persuasion using the sink next to mine and giving me a disapproving look. Scared a fellow on his way in, too. Oh well.

There was knitting accomplished on this trip. I’ll show you soon. Oh, and Theft, by Peter Carey? Great book. I pretty much snorted it like 288 pages of literary drugs. I inhaled it so fast I had to buy Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the airport on the way home, movie poster jacket and all.