One thing I have given back to myself is knitting, not nightly, but when I’m in the right frame of mindlessness. I bartered some of the website work with Maxcine, and asked her to knit me a pair of fingerless gloves.

They need washed, and how. I wear them all the time (except while cooking after she admonished me for it). She also sent along skeins of the same yarn, so I can make myself a matching scarf. My lighting is terrible in here, especially at night, so please excuse the golden tint. Pretend I took the photo by candle light in honor of the solstice. Maybe you can make out the lace and bobble pattern?

It’s been so good to have a knitting project to work on again. I love making something that actually takes shape and progresses with every session. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the same kind of progression with my novel? I’ve been working on it a little bit just about every day this month, but it feels like swimming in place while the water gets deeper and my feet no longer know how far it is to the bottom.

Can I tell you what I’m really looking forward to? Next weekend. Having the holiday behind me and the next two months of winter days and nights to work (for pay and pleasure). I’ve scaled the whole holiday thing way back, by about 70% by my estimation. And still, it’s a grind and a pressure and a battle with feelings of guilt and frustration. It still feels like a dance in the land of unreality.

The consumer aspect of this “celebration” hasn’t worked for me for a long time, but this year the shopping and the wrapping and the gifting…no matter how careful I’m being about it, I still feel as if I’m stuck in an old vaudeville reel.

So here’s to unwinding the old patterns, to gathering in the warmth, to the returning light. May your days and nights be some approximation of merry and bright.

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Jennifer, The Baklava Queen is one such almost neighbor, and I’ve enjoyed some lovely email exchanges with her about blog posts, local grain mills, baking and gardening. I’m so happy she took time to write a post on her own blog as a contribution to the Able Hands Photo Project.

“…the philosophy behind the project (at least for me) has a connection to how I approach cooking and preserving food and sharing it with others. Work has so often become a nasty four-letter word for many of us, but there is so much that we do with our hands to make life easier for others or to create beauty or simply to do what we each feel is needful in our own lives. Work can and should be a joy and full of meaning, and that’s what I try to practice in my kitchen as well in other aspects of my life.”

I love this. Check out her link in the quote, which is to another of her posts about the time it takes to make and eat local foods and fresh meals daily. Reading that has me thinking about my role as the keeper of the kitchen and how that has changed for me over the years from one of exclusion to inclusion. I used to hate having anyone in the kitchen with me. I couldn’t think straight or focus on my work, so I would shoo everyone out to play while I worked. But then I would get so spiteful and annoyed at the lack of help and at the sound and sight of the rest of my people off having fun while I toiled away in the kitchen.

Gawd, I was so bitter all the time. I still get that way sometimes, because everyone else has something just as pressing to do as getting food on the table. I sometimes resent the fact that I’m the only one who does any planning for meals — something that has to happen daily, and can get a little boring and uninspired. And sometimes, I just don’t feel like it. Sometimes I’d so much rather sit and read blogs or a good book. But those are pizza nights.

I have learned that if anyone’s hanging around in the kitchen while I cook, they’re fair game, but I’m struggling with the dichotomy between my two kids and the way they regard work. Lila is happiest if she’s given a task to help with and gets so frustrated if we forget to include her in our work unless she’s off playing with a friend. If there are mushrooms to chop for dinner, she’s my girl working the paring knife with precision. If Ty’s the only one around? It’s hardly worth the heavy sighs and leaking air. Ty is a teenager and I don’t know if I need say anything else about that. But I see other teenagers with much stronger work ethics and I wonder if I dropped the ball somewhere along the line with him. I think I did. I think we all did, the grown ups in his life. I think we have all handed much too much to him. While we don’t do that anymore, we missed the opportunity big time during his formative years.

I think when he was Lila’s age, I made every effort to distract him with play or entertainment so I could get my work done quickly, efficiently and without having more mess to clean up in the end. I didn’t know how to deal with “mistakes” he might have made. I wanted things to be as close to perfect as possible. I’m pretty sure that the subtext my lovely young man has absorbed is “why bother? It’ll never be good enough anyway.”

If he saw me working, it was seldom joyfully. More than likely he picked up my frustration and my hurriedness. I know we’re supposed to improve with age, maturity and experience, and I have. I have much more patience this time around (not perfect, but greatly improved). These two kids have very different temperaments and proclivities. But they also have had two very different mothers, and obviously two very different fathers.

I try now with Tyler to talk about my work in a meaningful way, as if chasing behind the damage done, trying to gently, inconspicuously show him how good work can be. How important it is to balance the work and play, to not allow the need for entertainment to take us away from caring for and shaping our homes and our world into a better place. I tell him why I cook the way I do, why I grow food and preserve it, why I write. Why I clean the bathrooms and mop the kitchen floor every now and again (so our feet don’t stick to it and hold us in place so we can be devoured by the ants attracted to the sticky film from the constant cupcake baking frenzy). But it’s difficult and I worry he’s not getting it, or that he’s getting it much too late so that it’s just words bouncing off and him seeing me do my thing and he’s thinking, well good, so let her work. I’m going back to my game.

But I keep at it. Remind him to do his chores. Invite him to help me with projects. There’s always work to be done and opportunity to talk about it.

So how do you think about the work you do?

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If you’re on flickr, I hope join the Able Hands Photo Project Pool and share your photos of hands at work, rest and play.

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Have I mentioned how much I love kneading bread dough? My dear friend Lorin taught me how to bake bread, way back in 1995, I think. She suggested I start with The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown, and I made starter from a helping of her sourdough mother and got busy one afternoon while Tyler roared around the kitchen pretending to be a dinosaur.

When I reported back to her, I mentioned that I loved the whole experience, and that the bread came out almost as good as hers, but that the instructions for kneading just felt so cumbersome. To fold the dough, roll with two hands, turn, fold, roll with two hands, just felt forced and unnatural. She laughed and said she agreed, and that she just did it the same way she kneads her clay (she’s an amazingly gifted potter) with one hand on the dough at all times, and the other hand cupped around the edge to help guide and turn it in little eighth turns.

Now, I didn’t get that lovely two-handed shot because as I said, no clue if I can or how to use the timer on the camera, so the turning and guiding hand was busy reaching back to press the shutter.

So the next week, I tried her method and it was bliss. I overworked the dough because the motion was so bloody therapeutic. Because I wasn’t thinking, oh wait…I’m supposed to turn and then fold…wait…did I roll before I turned…my whole body sank into the motion and I lost myself in the rhythm. But that was 13 years ago and my body hurts more now, so I sometimes employ the dough hook on the Kitchen Aid for the first five minutes, and then finish the kneading by hand. Arthritis runs in the female line of my family, and while I haven’t suffered with it in a major way, my hands, elbows and shoulders hurt quite a lot after physical work.

And, you know, I’m aging. I don’t notice it very often, but looking at a photo of my hand brings it all, please forgive me, into sharp focus. I’m not 25 anymore, am I? But then, I can do so much more with these hands for having had those 15 years pass through them. Time brings such perspective. Many moons ago, an exquisitely dashing young man held my hands in his and swore they were the softest things he had ever touched. I suspect he would revise that statement now that he’s had a child, because we know there’s nothing softer on this earth than the skin at the nape of a newborn baby’s neck.

And all of this to say that I hope you’ll participate in The Able Hands Photo Project.

Send me a photo of a hand or hands, at work, at rest or at play. Your own or someone else’s. Include a few sentences of description. Say anything, I don’t want to influence the shape of the story, I want to hear it. What do you do with your hands?

Photos should be no larger than 500 pixels wide. I’ll assemble them all on their own page as thumbnails with a slide show for viewing. The individual slides will include the story and your name. Still trying to work out having link-backs within the slide show and I may have to list participants in a blogroll format. You’ll also see an album with rotating photos in the sidebar, and a badge that you can download to put on your blog if you like (as soon as I design it). This will be an ongoing project, so no deadline or cutoff.

Send photos to kelly AT herablehands DOT com and put Able Hands Photo Project in the subject line.

Okay, people! Show me your hands!

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ETA: I started a flickr pool: The Able Hands Photo Project for those of you with flickr accounts, so head on over to join and get busy uploading your awesome hand photos!

If you don’t have an account, you can still send your photos to me via email.

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