January: Welcome back to season two of COVID! It's horrible, honestly just the worst. January is full of terrible news: the long-term care facilities are doing very badly, the schools are closed, the weather is grim. After quarantining for two very long weeks, we kicked off the year up at my parent's farm, which was the right choice. Putting my feet into open-water Lake Huron on January first felt mystical and strange, like I'm a character in a book. The bulk of the month is spent sitting on the couch watching my junior kindergarten student flop his way through Zoom school—zchool?—and knitting.
Knitting project: Nurtured Sweater by Andrea Mowry
February: Uh, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I put a lot of energy into creating a character? I take a crazed six-week-long swing at a grad school application that ultimately goes nowhere? I honestly have very little memory of this month, probably because most of it was just a holding pattern of knitting, cold weather, and Zoom kindergarten. It's a smear in my memory, a blur of short days that feel interminable. It's possible that February is swallowed up every year, but this one is especially gone.
Kitting project: Solasta Sweater from Pom Pom Quarterly
March: My sister moved in with her partner. While I missed her, it was also nice to have the workout space back, because while she lived with us, I worked out in the hallway outside the bathroom. I ran Movie March Madness for the fifth year in a row and continued to really enjoy it. Spring returned, which was a relief. It's weird doing these round-ups in Covid years because really, nothing happened, and I felt every emotion about it.
Knitting project: I designed my own stripey socks!
April: Noah came home and stayed home, which was annoying because I did a lot of paid work this month! We muddled through another half-semester of zchool, which was slightly better—the days were longer, we could all get outside, we took breaks and stopped giving a fuck about staying on top of EVERY session on EVERY day and just let things get a bit loose. I bought a million pink plants and created a kitchen windowsill fit for a hobbit. I emailed my MPP asking to fast-track the school-staff vaccines.
Knitting project: none, but I did get the seedlings started FINALLY
May: My work had a one-day online conference that look literally hundreds of hours to pull off, and it was exhausting. The remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in the ground; I cried for hours. I always feel weird saying that I was affected by that discovery, or by Kent Monkman's painting "The Scream," but really, histories of children being ripped away from their parents to experience brutal trauma and maybe die just...hits me where I live, you know? May was a shit show.
Knitting project: Ostensibly it was the Flax Sweater by Tin Can Knits, but with so many modifications that it's basically my own thing.
June: I got my first COVID vaccine and was a nervous wreck from the moment I booked the appointment to the moment I broke down crying while waiting in line. Medical anxiety is a real bummer, y'all. Anyway, I got it, and it was fine. I also ripped out literal tons of garlic mustard from our backyard—like, probably at least five hundred pounds of garlic mustard. I started going for evening walks with audiobooks and it was amazing; I highly recommend this as an activity, especially in the pre-summer stint when the solstice light is just right and the leaves are on the trees and it feels possible to exhale, a little.
Knitting project: None? I think? Huh, weird.
July: Mike's parents collected Noah for a weekend and we went up to the cottage to help my parents with their renovation: there was much paneling and spaghetti sauce-making, but it was also SO NICE to have a break from our darling, labour-intensive five-year-old. I got my second covid vaccine and felt something loosen inside my soul. Things grew in the garden; we went swimming at the pool; we ate ice cream and played on the skateboard; Noah played with his friends; I read the Percy Jackson books. It was all fine and pleasant. It felt like a regular summer.
Knitting project: Free as a Bird shawl by Andrea Mowry
August: My garden was weird this year. The tomatoes all got blight, the zucchinis underperformed, the bunnies ate most of the peppers (note to self: put them in pots next year!), but the garlic, squash, and pumpkins were all just fine. Gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is a skill that I covet, and over the last two years, I've grown some stuff—just enough to make me anxious about how much stuff I would have to grow if the shit truly hit the fan. We visited Toronto and saw some friends. I sewed a blouse. I heard back from MPP about school vaccinations for staff (see: April), which earned a MAJOR EYE ROLL.
Knitting project: Fluorite Socks by Andrea Mowry (wow, I knit a lot of her patterns this year!)
September: First, we had an excellent Labour Day weekend with The Regular Gang, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly a year. Then: Noah's back to school! God, I love this part. I know Covid is still very much a thing, but sweet Lord, after five months of home school and then summer holiday, my very favourite child needs to be elsewhere for sustained periods of time. With him out of the house, I'm free to start working out again, which I do, and also to have naps in the middle of the day, which I also do. Septembers are always so nice.
Knitting project: Earth and Air sweater by James Watts
October: Work ramped up in a serious way. I got another client, which felt great, but I was also like, "I'm so busy!" and I felt overwhelmed. But the work I'm doing is good and interesting, and the people I work with are so smart; I'm learning something at every meeting (mostly it's just "slow down and be less frantic, you loon"), and so I don't regret it, even though it does feel like I'm treading water. We go swimming at Thanksgiving. I apply for the library board, but ultimately didn't get it. I started doing social media for a local climate-action group, which felt cool.
Knitting project: Pop Radio Socks by Summer Lee
November: I started driver training! After literally twenty years of having my G1, I'm finally ready to start driving, I guess? My classes was horribly slow and most of it comes down to "every other driver is incompetent, check your blind spots, and don't hit anyone" (there, I just saved you $700). I do an incredibly labour-intensive project for my anchor client and it totally burns me out—the debrief meeting is just me and the two other project leads chuckling sardonically at how much goddamn work went into this thing—and it makes me wonder when I will be ready to move on from this job. It's my birthday, I turn 38 on a Tuesday, who cares.
Knitting project: baby Pritchard sweater by Christina Danaee
December: Noah got his first covid vaccine, and things really felt okay...until they didn't. Most of December was wrapped up in rising omicron cases: when I took the train into the city on December 10 for friend-time and shopping, things were just starting to feel tense; when Mike went in six days later, ostensibly leading the way for Noah and me to join him a few days later, I was like, come home today. (And he did!) While we planned to host both sides of our families on Christmas, the dearth of rapid tests and high transmissability and general abdication of leadership by anyone in government—the same people who begged the electorate to let them be in charge!—led us to playing it safe-ish and hosting only Mike's parents for the big day. I did 100% of the Christmas dinner with a raging sinus infection.
Knitting project: Madrigal Mittens from Pom Pom Quarterly
I dunno, guys. We can all agree that 2021 was a weird year? There were some good times and some really terrible ones; we had a full fall semester of school, which was great, but the spring really kicked our asses (and early 2022 isn't looking so hot either). A few people I know went in very weird directions with covid and the whole corporate-control narrative, which was upsetting and alarming, but most people were pretty much on the same page as us: trooping through vaccinations and doing 95% of our socializing outside. I did a lot of knitting and some gardening; I also felt totally overwhelmed by our messy house, which I admittedly did very little to rectify. I got more work than I had in years, and I loved it; it also totally wrinkled my brain. The end of 2021 feels like a yawp into the void, a thousand mothers shrieking in fear and rage and frustration...but there was some really nice days, too, days that felt normal and sweet and funny and comforting. In a bad year, it's sometimes all I can ask for.
