Visiting’s Good for the Knitting

How often do we get to reconnect with friends who came into our lives during our young adult years and then disappeared out of sight for the next thirty? This past summer a miraculous thing happened: four dear friends (not to be confused with casual acquaintances!), with whom I had been out of touch for at least a decade and with two of them for three decades, have reappeared one way or another. You know when you bump into someone and the conversation picks up without missing a beat? That’s the kind of friend each of these women is. So wonderful. On Sunday one of them, Nan, made a detour to NH from NYC on her way back to Cape Cod. She brought her kitty, who is a well-trained traveling creature, and from the moment they pulled into the driveway until they left this afternoon, we have been reminiscing about the wild days of the ’70s, strategizing life changes, and brainstorming entrepreneurial ideas. My sister joined in the chin-wagging festival yesterday while I kept the refreshments coming and the coffee pot brewing.

In case you’re wondering what I served for snacks, it was a fresh Lentil-vegetable soup garnished with chicken sausage with spinach (nitrate/nitrite-free, organic, etc.), slices of homemade whole wheat brioche (fast becoming a hostessing staple here), and farm-fresh Macintosh apples.

So what does this have to do with knitting? Since Nan arrived on Sunday, I’ve knit three squares for the Lizard Ridge afghan and am almost done! The photo at the top of this post was taken last night near midnight (thus the compromised color from the flash), after I laid out the squares in a possible arrangement. I rejected one square for being ‘too pink’ and have since tweaked the order a bit. I’m hoping to be stitching the squares together this Friday while we make a late-summer (early fall?) visit to western NY. Surely the next photo of this project will have graduated from a WIP to FP … let’s hope!