How often do I remember my grandparents?  Points on the timeline of my life are bursting with associations with those dear relatives.  I often find myself recounting stories of my visits to Tennessee, of time spent with them shelling peas and frying pies, choosing catfish at the river, barbecuing hogs in the shed.  My understanding of how things were in the past are based on my firsthand experience with such things as outhouses in lieu of bathrooms, pumps in place of running water; of churning butter and milking cows, of the necessity to be totally self-reliant except for a few staples bought at a small local grocery.

My grandmother was 23 when my father was born, and my father was 27 when I was born.  But these days, I see many, many people choosing to wait until they are in their late 30’s or early 40’s before having children.  The reasons are many and varied. 

It came to me while I was spinning my perfectly-prepared prize-winning Romney fleece– if a parent is 40 years old when her baby is born, and that baby is 40 years old before she has a child, what are the chances that child is ever going to know her grandparents?  Unless people start living (and being alive) to age 100 or over, there is a real and sad danger that many children will never know their grandparents… or if they do, it will be as old people in need of care.

I can’t imagine my life without my grandparents.  They are all gone now, but they live vivdly in my memory.  I am proud of them and their determination that despite their own lack of education (third grade was the most they were able to achieve in those rural agrarian days) their children and grandchildren would graduate from high school and even college.  They were unselfish.  They never complained about having to cook or clean or farm or can or milk or any of the thousands of things that kept them from ever participating in activities that we take for granted.  They never dreamed of borrowing money to, for example, make their house larger.  They built their own home with the help of neighbors and family, and it was practical and solid– and paid for.  They took care of what they had, shared with those in need, and never thought they should live like movie stars or royalty.

With the decline of church membership and community activities that mix the young and the old, I am fearful that even surrogate grandparentship is in danger of disappearing.

Grandparents are becoming extinct.  How do we Save The Grandparents?

One of the stock phrases of the software development world is “you can’t make a baby in one month with nine women”.  This jewel is usually brought out during a come-to-Jesus meeting in the too-small, stifling conference room filled with broken-down chairs,  when a product delivery is way behind schedule.  The pointy-haired manager says “can you help me think about ways to mitigate our lack of progress?”  when he really means “You guys have screwed up and I’m going to get fired if I can’t get this thing turned around”, while the developers are thinking “we gave you the correct estimates; you cut them in half and presented a project schedule that was unrealistic, and now you’re putting the pressure on us to fix it.” 

But I digress.

The Sea Scallop shawl is a project that persists long past its “use by” date.  Although almost to the “only two repeats left, then the edging” point, I weary of the eternity of knitting and purling and knitting and increasing and knitting and decreasing and yarning over and over and over and over.  Almost to the end of the third 150g ball of Kauni, the endless enormity of 1800 yards of fingering-weight yarn having passed through my fingers, around the needle, and into the next stitch, time after time, does not escape me.

Can more than one knitter knit the same shawl at the same time?  Impractical, methinks, but possible.

Seeing my last ball of yarn disappearing into the shawl well before the end, I paid a visit to Village Yarn & Tea to get more of the sainted stuff.  Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and I am overflowing with a mighty, seething contempt of Kauni right about now.  I did not want to walk into this or any other yarn shop.  I don’t need yarn; I have plenty of yarn, I have boxes and boxes and drawers of yarn. I have yarn coming out of my ears and falling off closet shelves and peering out from underneath the bed.  Yet I felt it would be odd to finish the shawl with,  bright pink Kidsilk Haze or navy Magpie Aran Tweed or glittery green Gioella from my stash.

For the first time ever as I walked into a yarn store, I hated knitting.  I hated yarn, I hated fiber, I hated shelves and the things upon them.  I hated needles and cute measuring tape dispensers that look like sheep.  I despised cables and lace and scarves and patterns and samples.  I felt sorry for the chirpy customers oohing and aahing over soft woolly stuff– what did they know?  One day they’ll be me, crankily compelled to finish a project way past its due date.   The heavy snow falling outside the window at the end of March, burying my windshield and slicking the roads,  did not soften my hatred of fiber, nor did the fact that the store did not have another ball of Kauni in the correct colorway.  Instead of silver, gray, purple and black I settled for silver, gray and black.  It will have to do.  I paid for my one ball of incorrect colorway and fled.

It is in this way that finishing a knitting project and finishing a baby are completely different:  When a baby is finished and it is born, the discomfort and time invested in pregnancy and birth are washed away in the joy of the newborn.  But when the last stitch of a shawl is knit, it is a loathed object, one that I desire to fling far from me, never to be seen again.  This is when I must be watched by a trained professional, for this is when I generally give the despicable thing away.

The initiation of both baby and shawl is, of course, quite pleasant– the dreaming, the planning, the consummation.  Even the initial trimester is full of anticipation and happiness, thinking of how perfect and beautiful the end product will be, how it will change our lives and bring joy and harmony into our little home.  After a time it becomes less joyful and more tedious; the weight of the unborn is felt a little more each day, the energy it saps from us takes a bigger toll as the gestation progresses.  And if the little bundle of joy is not delivered by its due date?  We take our frustration out on the pointy-haired manager, whether it be the child’s father or the local yarn store. 

But one day we look at that shawl whose birth was so traumatic and, our memory of labor gone, we see its beauty and are grateful for the sacrifice of time that brought it into being.  We fold it lovingly and put it away with care, glad that we kept it– and glad that it will never have to go to to college.

And– one day– we might actually start another project.