spoiler alert

Spoiler Alert: If you are pregnant and I am giving you a gift, it will probably include a pair of these.

I am enamored with this free shoe pattern I found online a few months ago. I decided to give the little slippers a try this weekend using some great vintage fabric scraps from an antique store in the area. They were rather simple to make (which surprised me) and only it only took a few hours one lovely Saturday morning. In fact, these baby shoes are so cool I am going to endeavor to enlarge the pattern to make a pair for myself! This particular pair is en route to a friend who will bequeath them unto her sister at a baby shower, but be assured that more variations on these shoes will appear in the future.

And now, a poem (in honor of autumn, and of life, and of love):

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.