Yarn Along

Joining in with Ginny's Yarn Along.

Knitting and reading are so comforting aren't they. When the wind is howling, rain is lashing against windows or when things aren't quite going as they should there is a soothing rhythm in the needles and an escape to be found in the pages.

I'm pressing on with my purple basil scarf. You can see it's gone a bit stripey where I've started the new darker ball - two rows old ball, two rows new ball. You will remember that we are calling this a design feature.

I've just finished Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible". Absolutely phenomenal. From the back of the book:

"Told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil."

Leaving America's Deep South, they are completely unprepared for life in a jungle village. Writing through the eyes of the girls and their mother, Barbara Kingsolver relates not only a tale of their daily life in rural Belgian Congo but also a story of the horror of colonialism, the post-colonial crisis and the arrogance of missionaries. It is a definitely a story that needed to be told, and it's a book I can't recommend highly enough. I'll leave you with the first paragraph, which has stayed with me.

"Leah Price

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. 'And heaven knows,' our mother predicted, 'they won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo.' "