I’ve been down with another bug (chills, vomiting, and diarrhea), and before that, I was doing some high speed knitting for a friend, so I feel a little disconnected from my writing and from this blog.
That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. A clear head will help me with the last few poems of the book, and once that’s out of the way I can focus on fiction for a while and start planning the next book of poems.
The knitting episode did keep me from becoming discouraged about the book. I was making a shawl for a friend who is having a vow renewal ceremony this weekend. I wanted her to have it before the ceremony in case she decided to wear it, but I only had four weeks to get it done. That first week, I made good progress, working up between 100 and 150 grams of sport weight yarn. Then I didn’t work on it for another week because I got sick, then again for another because I was cracking down on the poetry. Finally, I picked it up again, and I knit morning, noon, and night to get the remaining 250 to 300 grams in.
The last couple of skeins were hard going, The shawl was in the Faroese style (triangular beginning at the center top), so each row got longer, and by the end, each skein covered only two repeats of the pattern stitch. I kept asking myself whether I really wanted to give my friend this gift, whether it really had to be this size, whether the vow renewal wouldn’t work just as well in August, whether I couldn’t keep the damn thing since she didn’t know of its existence. I’d sit and knit and think that the pattern stitch was unattractive, that the work was uneven, that the fabric was too drapy, that giving the thing away was embarrassing.
Then I finished, and I put it on, and my mother said it was beautiful in a tone that sounded like she really thought it was, and I believed it was less ugly. I called my friend right then to let her know I’d be dropping it off later in the week so that I couldn’t chicken out and hide the thing, and today, when she received it, she sounded pleased with it too.
I thought—hope—my book would be like the shawl, awful in that final stretch, but worth the effort in the end.
Puntitas reads _In the Wake of the Plague_ by N. F. Cantor.
