Drip. Drip. Drip.

We're thawing here. You can hear water. There are puddles. It's ugly as sin out there. Everything is wet and gray and brown and dirty green and I love it.

I'm so encouraged, in fact, that last night I unearthed the Endpaper Mitts.

It's not as bad as I remember. I only frogged three rows beyond the thumb gusset. I had it in my head I had lost an entire repeat but (and I find this so exciting), I knew by the chart where I needed to resume. (I know. I know. Small minds, cheap thrills.) Okay, so I picked the wrong place the first time. But I hadn't completed even one needle worth of knitting before I noticed I was repeating the row below. The woman begins to learn to read, not just the paper pattern, but what her hands are doing. She progresses.

And this high-wire knitting is apparently like riding a bicycle. I was afraid I might have forgotten how to carry the yarn in both hands. Or how to pick up the yarn from my left. I was envisioning having to untwist the previous rows knitting in order to get my left hand stitches to orient in the same directions as my right hand. Didn't happen. I even remembered how I'm most comfortable carrying the left-hand yarn. Which is a good thing since it's nearly as idiosyncratic as how I do my right hand carry.

Of course, now that I've worked back to the point of all my previous mistakes, comes the tricky part: the thumb gusset and remembering to mirror image the chart for the third and fourth needles. No. Let me rephrase. That's not where my knitting will get a little interesting. If I'm right about understanding how to work the increases (big if), the mirror imaging should be fine. It's when I go back to the pattern as given that I expect to encounter repeated lapses in short-term memory.

Oh, and lest I give Chicago in mid-February less than its due, "dart [your] sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky."*

If you look up, it's beautiful.

* Walt Whitman. "Miracles" from Leaves of Grass. 1900.