How many more drafts will I start before sending this one?

And what's in progress this winter

This is Clouds Form Over Land, a weekly newsletter about resilience, imperfection, and our relationship to the earth.

Dissimilar metals corrode in a saltwater environment. New bow cleats!

I have a lot of ideas about what to write next week, or the week after.

My draft folder is clogged with disjointed sentences about housework, Spanish class, travel tips, and the moon.

January zipped by with family in town and the stomach flu just released its grip on me. I’m in a mostly contented fog, finding my bearings in this new month.

Solitude has been our default setting since the stay-at-home orders in 2020 and then emphasized by sailing down the rocky Pacific coastline. It’s easy to stay in touch with my inner monologue with little interruption and my motivation to explain and be understood is strong when living far from loved ones. At the moment my cup has been filled with connection. We have six weeks or so until the passage to Mexico. Today is Imbolc, a Gaelic celebration of the halfway point of winter. My friends in the northern latitudes have made it through the ten darkest weeks of the year. I’m feeling some mix of hibernating, thawing, and sweating in the 90-degree heat.

---

Those of us entrenched in the indie knitting world in 2015-2020 are likely familiar with Karen Templer’s blog Fringe Association. For the uninitiated, Karen wrote nearly daily about techniques, trends, history, and her own projects. The regularity of her knit musings was a bulwark and an inspiration during the early days of figuring out who I’d be after college in a new city. If you’re curious about learning to knit, look here and feel free to reply to this email.

My favorite feature from Fringe was the monthly “queue check”, a round-up of WIPs (work in progress). Here’s what is in progress for me:

1. Repurposed knit tank. My sister helped me unravel a shawl in her hotel room while watching new episodes of Vox Machina. Now I’m re-knitting it into an Outline tank.

2. A fish sweater. Melanie and I are having a two-woman, cross-continent knitalong of the Halibut Sweater. Hopefully, someday we will wear matching outfits while bird-watching — a dream of my twelve and thirty-one-year-old selves?

3. Captain’s coat. I cut out an Ilford Jacket in black canvas, wool batting, and olive linen when we were in San Diego to celebrate Scott and his USCG captain’s license. We’ve been nowhere near cold weather, so it has stayed rolled up by my sewing machine for over a year. A trip to the cooler climes of Medellin is on the horizon, which seems like just the thing to dust off this project.

4. Wrap dress. I came across the Essential’s Club YouTube channel over the summer and have been itching to try Maddy’s guided self-drafting style of garment making. Cartegeneros wear a lot more white than people in other places, so I’ll use some white fabric I have laying around to make a garment themed by our location.

Reading: Healing Grounds, Nigel Calder’s Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Passage Prep: our next big move is the thousand-mile sail to the Yucatan. I’m particularly excited about adding shelves to one of our closets and sealing leaks found during the rainy season and wet, upwind passages.

Can Do List:

1. Thank a system in your body that is functioning adequately - respiratory, digestion, etc. Why do I never notice until things go haywire?

2. Take stock of what is in progress.

3. Notice a new tree and make a note to return to it in the spring.

4. Set a timer for forty minutes and sit down with a project that has been stalled.

Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.

Did you try any of these? I’d love to hear about it.