Mama Said There'll Be Days Like This . . .

Here's what happened yesterday:

• I came down with a nasty head cold.
• A rabbit (or something) got into my garden and chewed up half of my broccoli plants and tore up a third of the peas.
• I received the feedback from a writing contest I entered, and one judge was so harsh that I actually laughed (until I cried).
• I realized that I totally fudged-up the cable band in my Zest cardi and had to rip back 27 rows (isn't it a ridiculously cruel trick of the craft that it only takes five minutes to unravel two days worth of knitting?)

I feel congested and yucky today, but I am almost caught up to the place I was before with Zest (I'm nine rows away): 

And I finished a really wonderful book. Last week, I was browsing in the bookstore and the cover of The Fever Tree called out to me from several yards away. I read the flaps of the dust jacket and the first page, and I was hooked. : )  The Fever Tree is the story of a young English woman who finds herself shunned by Society after her father dies and leaves her destitute. Her options are slim: she can live as a servant to her aunt's family for room and board, or she can accept the marriage proposal of a distant relative who is a doctor in South Africa. She reluctantly accepts the proposal, but on the steamship to the Cape, she falls in love with another man. The story moves from the drawing rooms of Victorian England to the South African veldt and diamond fields. I could not put this book down. It is historical fiction at its finest: impeccably researched and beautifully told. The author is Jennifer McVeigh, and The Fever Tree is her debut novel.

I'm also loving the poems and photographs in The Memory of Light, by Sarah Elwell.  I read a poem from it each morning to ponder through the day, and one in the evening to take me into dreaming.

Happy Wednesday!
Susan <3

Special thanks to Ginny of Small Things for hosting her weekly Yarn Along.