I was sitting at my daughter's last soccer game of the season today covered with a stripped zig zag afghan. It has stripes of all different colors of yarns, perhaps leftovers from many other projects and its normally on my bed every night. My dear friend Liz gave me this afghan and I love it dearly. Before I took up crocheting (taught to me by this same Liz), I loved afghans and thought they were quite wonderful--but now the blanket takes on a whole other dimension. I've been sitting here tonight crocheting myself, putting in a few rows on an afghan I'm making for my brother's baby boy. He's not born yet, and my brother and sister-in-law live a world away in Mongolia. Every time I take it out, I am thinking about my brother, thinking about the baby and how much I can't wait to see what he looks like, and so forth. Nearly all of the things we wear, the things we sleep on and under, are shot out a million miles an hour by machines in a big factory and I think we loose a little something in the process--take for granted those things that should be special. I'm not finished with my little blanket yet and it already has 6000 individual stitches in it, I don't know how many hours, but 6000 stitches full of my thoughts and fears, my joys or my laughter while watching something on TV, even conversations with my brother on the phone while stitching it. And its only a little blanket, so when I think of how many stitches are in the afghan given to me by Liz, how many hours of her life are soaked into the yarn, how many hopes and fears and joys and laughter passed through her mind as the yarn passed through her fingers--it truly makes the afghan more than just a blanket, its a physical piece of meditation and I'll always cherish it.

I was at the store the other day and I saw this little fairy sleeping in a walnut shell. Cheesy some might say, and truth be told it is not something I would probably normally purchase. BUT (isn't there always a but?), this had a sense of nostalgia attached to it and I'm always a sucker for nostalgia. When I was a little girl I firmly believed in fairies. There was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I believed that if you made them welcome, they would come. So while I didn't build a baseball field, I would build fairy houses. This was less complicated than you might assume, I would simply sit on a patch of well grown in grass and start to trim it down to the ground by hand. In this way I would weed out rooms and hallways. I collected flower petals (violets were always preferred) to leave for them to make new dresses with. But most important was the nutshell. I likely pulled the idea from images of Thumbalina sleeping in a nut shell, but whatever the influences, this was very important. My mom always kept a bowl of mixed nuts and a nutcracker around the house, and there was nothing better for a fairy house than walnut halves for beds. I'd work on my house and lay out the flower petals, arrange the walnut beds, and leave a bit of cake or cookie crumbs and sometimes a shell of milk--everyone knows fairies love this. Invariably, the next day the flower petals would be gone, the crumbs disappeared, and the milk consumed and I would smile through the rest of the day knowing I had made the fairies welcome. Oh, some might scoff, the petals blew away in the wind, and a stray cat or dog gobbled up the food and milk. As a girl I would have sighed and shook my head and felt sorry for those poor people who didn't really know, didn't really believe. As an adult, of course, I know better, and I still sigh and shake my head and feel sorry for those poor people who really don't know.

I think it is a fine and wonderful thing to walk through life and see trees, for example, and enjoy the beauty that they hold just in being trees. I think it is also--interesting--(although possibly also a sign of mental illness) to walk through life and see trees always with faces of dryads and sprites peeking out. For me, the balance comes in walking the wall and enjoying both the reality and the possibility--and that, for those who have asked, is why my domain name is www.walkingthewall.com.