For the record, yes, I DO know that I am knitting the world’s largest Christmas stocking.  I comfort myself with the thought that I can felt it and it will be stronger and even more beautiful.  But at the current 24″ circumference, it looks like a sock for a tree trunk.

Imagine my surprise last night when I saw, dangling from a spun thread from the ceiling, a spider (not Harry) who seemed to point to a paper on the floor.  I picked it up and this is what I read:

Hmph. Unraveling, indeed. Everybody know’s it’s just “raveling”.

The rain is here.  We knew it would come; it always does.  Right now it is comforting and close, making this a cozy and lazy Saturday in September.  Come December I’ll be wondering, once again, why I choose to live here in the Pacific NorthWet.  Sometimes I really miss big luscious flakes of snow, crisp frost lying heavy on the ground like sea salt, and broad expanses of unmarked white twinkling like diamonds under the morning sun.

We just finished reading Cold Mountain, aloud, again.  Harry was listening to most of it, but he missed the very end.  I like to think he packed his web and headed to the Blue Ridge mountains.  The book is southern writing at its finest; it always brings alive my Tennessee ancestors and makes me long to hear their particular grammar and to return to a simpler, albeit more difficult, time.  The scarcity of tomatoes this year brings to mind the fat juicy abundance of them in my grandmother’s long-ago kitchen, waiting to be canned into soups along with a plethora of other fresh goodness.  The can house filled from top to bottom with jams, jellies, soups, vegetables.  The root cellar holding turnips and onions.  The freezers filled with pork and beef and lard; smoked and salted hams hanging in the barbecue shed. The chicken coops filled with clucking hens and crowing roosters; sows and hogs wallowing in the bottomland.

I don’t think that my grandmother ever read a book in her entire life.  She was too busy.  She read the newspaper and the Bible, and that was enough for her.

But as for the novel Cold Mountain, I cherish it.  It makes me sincerely grateful that in spite of all this country has been through, even to brother against brother, life goes on.  We have gotten too far removed from having to provide for ourselves in a direct manner.  Instead of tilling the earth and harvesting crops, we go to the local QFC and buy substandard flavorless victuals.  Instead of having two or three working outfits and one Sunday dress, we buy an overflowing closet full of Chinese-manurfactured garments and worry that we aren’t fashionable.   Instead of going to visit our neighbors we turn on the computer and beg for attention from total strangers.  Perhaps I oversimplify.

I saw a boy on the university campus yesterday riding a skateboard, his shirt sloppy and open, his pants about to fall off, his boxers nearly showing fully.  I think about my Daddy’s adherence to cleanliness and making sure that wherever he went his pants were nicely pressed and there were no holes or stains in his clothing.  His shirt was tucked in and to be without a belt would be to be half-naked.  To his generation and many before them, the financial means to wear presentable clothing was rare, and he would never shame his family, poor as they were, by not presenting himself in the best light possible. 

This is in stark contrast to many young people of the present and past two or three generations, who consider it the height of fashion to appear as if they can’t afford to look better, who don’t give a thought to whether or not their parents would be shamed by their appearance or behaviour.  I think of it as (naively)  disrespectful to all those people who worked so hard to make life better for their children and grandchildren.  It used to be that the sincerest wish of parents was that their children would have a better life than theirs.  I think this has changed somewhat, though many parents do continue to wish this.  But some– perhaps many– now merely wish that their children will have as good a life as their own.  And I think I see a reversal in children, too; I see children who believe they are entitled to a life as good as their parents; who don’t understand that you do not get this kind of life as a privilege but that you have to put in the time and energy to make it happen. 

I don’t know how I got to here when I just started out talking about rain.  Maybe a little moisture in the air goes to my head.

To bring myself back to a material thought, I will say that keeping in touch with the direct creation of quilts, sweaters, clothes and blankets helps a little to keep me mindful of my ancestors and the many many hours they toiled to make my life better.  They were always so proud of me for doing well in school, for graduating from high school, for going to college.  They never knew how proud I am of them.

It is with great sadness that I report the strange demise of Harry the Spider.  His fate is unknown; I went into the living room this morning to say hello and he was not there.  He and his web were completely and utterly gone.  Not even a shread of a spidey thread remained to testify to his having lived there at all!

Griefstricken, I ponder the possibilities.

Was he in a federal witness protection program, and by posting about him in my last blog entry I jeopardized his secret identity?

Was he convinced by a beautiful Widow to move into her web and leave us behind?

Did a Bad Person come along and sweep him, web and all, into oblivion?

Or did a cat or dog, while sleepwalking and hungry, munch on spider sandwiches in the wee hours of the morning?

My heart is broken.  There is no body to bury; we can only have a small memorial service to honor his life and work.  Poor, poor Harry.

Gone but not forgotten

In 1985 Katy Lee Harbin  of D’Lo Mississippi lost two fingers of her left hand when she inadvertently caught it in an automatic chicken feeder.  When an attorney from Jackson visited her to encourage a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the equipment, she sent him flying,   “It warn’t nothin’ but my own damn stupidity” she told him.

I was thinking of Katy Lee a couple of days ago as I stood at my loom with my left hand inexplicably pinned within the top and bottom bars of its massive beater.

It all started innocently enough.  I had successfully wound most of my warp onto the back beam and was at the point where I needed to remove the pre-sleyed reed from the beater so that I could wind on a few more inches.  I had added extra weight to the ends of the warp by sliding an iron rod through them.  The rod was now up against the side of the reed.

The upper beater bar is very heavy– a good thing in a loom because it packs the weft down nicely.  However, it only slides at two points, on either end of a 59″ expanse.  The chances of being able to slide it up evenly are very slim.  I was grateful, therefore, that the bar slid up fairly easily.  I held it up with my right hand and pushed the reed through with my left.  At that instant, the upper bar decided to come crashing down.  My pinky was caught between the iron rod and the reed; the rest of my hand was between the reed and the upper beater bar. 

My ladyfinger was now part of a finger sandwich encased in a handburger.  I was trapped, and I could not escape.  The more I tried to pull out my hand, the tighter the bar came down on top of it, crushing and squeezing.  I yelled for help, getting louder by the second, thinking about poor Katy’s amputation.  Sherlock came running downstairs to investigate.  He eyed me speculatively and simply laid down in his bed to provide what moral support he could.

Barring human help, my only option would be to pry open the bar with some object, but I could reach no objects.  I couldn’t reach the sticks on the floor, I couldn’t reach the other side of the beater to try to loosen the bar.  I envisioned a life without a left hand.  The One-Handed Weaver, the Sound of One Hand Knitting.  I felt a kinship with the local dog Tripod with the missing leg.  I wondered how long I could stand there being crushed.  How soon would help come?  Minutes?  Hours?  Help was outside painting, plugged into an iPod.  It could be a very long time.

At long last I looked up, and saw the lamm rods that I put through the countermarch lamms to hold them still during warping.  I pulled one out, pried open the bar, and it was over.

I can’t blame anyone.  It warn’t nothin’ but my own damn fault. 

Surprisingly, my hand suffered no lasting effects, but I now have heavy-duty clamps underneath the beater bar at each end so that it can not slip down.