...And by that I don't mean acts of kindness or generosity; I mean gestures by which writers can characterize and illuminate their otherwise uninteresting or unbelievable characters.
I remember in a creative writing class I took a few semesters ago that the professor (a truly terrifying person) was particularly taken with a passage from one of the texts he'd assigned us. He said it was perfect. And he meant it literally and seriously. There was no hyperbole. The book was Denis Johnson's Vietnam era
Tree of Smoke, and the passage dealt with a conversation between a mother and son, the son being one of many protagonists in the book. Over a meager supper, the mother says of her youngest son:
He'll be around. He's always hungry. I lost weight while I carried him to term. I started out one-nineteen, and in my ninth month I was down to one-eleven. He fed on me from the inside.
After a meal of peanut butter and canned soup, over which the son brings up his desire to enlist, the mother asks where the youngest is, to which her other son replies, "He'll come when he's hungry."
"He's always hungry," she said, and began to say all over again the same things she'd just told him, because she was unable not to say them.
The way the professor read and interpreted this passage, the way he described it, reminded me of the way I felt when a read a certain passage in Charles
Dickens' Great Expectations. Dickens, of course was always adept at unique characterizations - dare we say, caricatures. But this passage between Joe and Pip I thought was, in the same way, perfect:
"You might, old chap," said Joe. "And she might credit it. Similarly she mightn't." Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.
Did you catch that? Weakening it by repetition. Because, when you're having a fairly intent discussion, as Pip and Joe are here, and you say something that sounds good - you
know it, right? And you want to say it again, because it just sounded so good the first time.
And yet... It never sounds as good the second time around, does it?
What's even more interesting to me, is that I feel as if the observation doesn't actually come from Pip, but from Dickens himself, unable to avoid a slightly too keen attention to the motivations of others even though he should be speaking through Pip's voice and from his perspective only.
What are some human gestures you've discovered in literature?
Oh, but of course. You're just imaginary.
But I'm celebrating my garden's new year, with a nifty new seed starting idea I picked up off Pinterest. (Where else?) It's also the Pagan spring festival of Imbolc, but I'll talk about that another time. 
The lid of the egg carton will also be used; I think I'll scatter-sow lettuce and spinach and a mesclun seed mix I have left over from last year in that side and either use them as micro-greens or transplant the whole container outside. I shall track this experiment and report back presently. 
So, I find a correction is in order for my previous post. This doesn't bode well. So, I got gifted three bags of fiber from a friend, and in the bustle of our weekly meeting, I forgot to nail down the information on the two animal fibers (the third was a bag of cotton). On the bag of the fiber I chose to spin first was written, "Gray Suffolk," which I find now is NOT referring to breed of provenance, but rather to an arbitrary color grading system. The gray fiber I have is Gray Suffolk, but the fiber is Herdwick. 
Now, as I said, normally Suffolk is not used for fine garments such as shawls, but I have a special all handspun shawl that I'm working on, and I'll be using at least a portion of the Suffolk in it, even if it's just a stripe. Here are some pictures of the wool, both spun and unspun.
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