Notes from Manchester, NH

......and from the Granite State, these remarks: We drove TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT yesterday, from roughly Cleveland to New Hampshire, and I must say I thought it was the last day of my life. You do NOT respond as well to that kind of unbroken drive when you are 65. You really don't. Don't let people tell you otherwise.

The drive featured some particularly gorgeous landscape 'paintings' (I always think of the eastern 19th century painters when I make this drive) in the Berkshires and in the area just after the Fingerlakes, though here and there, picture-postcard panoramas appeared elsewhere. The Mohawk and Hudson Rivers will never cease to fascinate me: I can almost see the New Amsterdam planters with their four-square houses (and their slaves, sadly enough) plying the very lazy Hudson especially -- flatboats, keelboats. The Hudson somehow seems flatter than rivers can be -- it's always preternaturally STILL, as if someone airbrushed the surface.

At the Radisson Manchester, we set up our double booth -- I then went to the knit and crochet awards ceremonies and was astonished to win one prize in the Crochet Guild contest and two awards in the Knitting Guild contests. My my my. For crochet, the winning entry was my Corktown cardigan, which I would NOT have chosen. For knitting, they liked the Soho felted bags and the Bemidji pullover. Both will appear in the Yarnmarket catalog. ASTONISHMENT -- not to mention two nice big Yarnmarket credits and a hefty check.

But today was not entirely rosy. When I returned for the opening of the marketplace, the well-coifed booth of memory had disappeared. Yarn everywhere. Larry and Katherine had witnessed the complete collapse of the central wire cages -- thousands of skeins once neatly stowed were in a heap in the middle of the booth -- people due in the marketplace (for the opening) in fifteen minutes. So we didn't open -- it took an hour to get the cages rebuilt, and another 45 minutes to restore the yarn.

You DO learn all over again how nice fiber people are. The people from the Crochet Guild booth leaped into the fray and helped us resort all the yarn. My dear old friend Jane Schwartz (who I met years ago at a Stitches Camp) also leaped in and helped right up to the end. And now it's all back together, sort of. So maybe tomorrow won't hold any kind of disaster. I won't mention the fact that the hotel by mistake charged (actually charged) my debit card instead of my credit card for a week's worth of hotel rooms, which had a disastrous effect on the account.

More later.

svb