knitting a life

I feel lucky to live in a house surrounded by beautiful things.  Especially beautiful things that remind me of places I have been and people I love.

I remember these golden glasses from when I was a little girl growing up in St. Louis and listening to my parents talk about the year they spent in Mexico right after they were married.

This story, as I remember it, began in Iowa City where my parents were living at the time.  They boarded the train there, stopped in St. Louis to get married (never imagining that they would end up moving there only a few years later), and ended up, after 7 months in Mexico City, in what was at the time the small, off-the-beaten-path, mountain town, budding artists’ colony, of San Miguel de Allende.   I don’t know where my parents got these glasses, whether they bought them for themselves or received them as a gift, but they came home with them.

In 1973 my parents returned to San Miguel, this time in a VW bus loaded with three children, two manual typewriters, and everything our family needed for a year in Mexico.  During that year (I was in the 8th grade) I stopped sulking about leaving my friends in St. Louis and learned how to bargain with vegetable sellers in the open air market, how to make tortillas in front of the fireplace, and to love Mexico as much as my mother and father did.

I brought many things home from my year in Mexico; somehow these glasses from my parents’ first shared trip there hold the memories that matter.