the leviathan on my couch
LJ Idol week 30 (2/6): leviathan
There's a leviathan in my living room.
No, I am not hosting a couch-surfing cross-country-traveling cowboy-hat-wearing backpacking-toting sea monster. I'm talking about my first knitting project. The Big One. My mom's now-belated Christmas present.
So I'm running about six months behind. My mother did get to open it on Christmas morning in its' half-finished state, knitting needles still attached to the end. She was excited then. Now she just keeps asking me when I'm going to be done.
Never mind that this was my first knitting project ever. Or that it's as long as I am tall (about 64 inches or 162 centimeters). Or that it's nearly the width of a baby blanket. Never mind that I knit far tighter than anyone ever expected, so it has consumed three good-sized skeins of yarn. Or that, since she lives in California, she only needs a wool scarf about three months out of the year. She wants it now, Veruca-Salt-style. The impatience in her voice is palpable.
Sometimes it feels like this scarf will never be done. Except that it will. Once I bribe a friend to reinsert the needles for me because I can't get them back in without dropping every third stitch. I also got ambitious and decided to learn how to do a scalloped edge, which will make for pretty ends that look finished, but the learning curve was definitely a time-consuming one. Once I get those needles back in, all that's left is sixteen more rows of a hundred stitches each and I'm done. I can almost taste the relief in that word. Done.
After working on something for nearly seven months, handling it almost daily, I'm beginning to wonder how much of myself I've poured into that yarn. How many stories have I transferred from my heart to my fingertips and out the ends of the knitting needles? Will this sea monster of a scarf will whisper to my mother, telling her some of the things I couldn't say over the phone? Will she see the knots and wrong stitches in it and know that that's when I was knitting while sobbing? Will the scarf betray the fact that I'm not taking care of myself because the needles that I used were so discolored and scuffed? Or will my mother read only contentment in that blue ombre checkerboard? I hope my mom sees the beauty in it, because the calluses and curses were well worth it. At the end of the day, my mother will have this scarf that is made of her daughter's stories forever.
Very grateful to vorsaga* for beta-reading/editing plus rearranging so this sea monster gained a great deal more coherence than it had in its' original iteration.
♥ pacing while praying ♥ you are beautiful ♥ digging for buried crap ♥ we should all be narcissists ♥ ˌɪnkənˈsiːvəbl̩ ♥ juicy memories ♥ relax. breathe. bupkis. ♥ a gypsy heart ♥ a month of rain ♥ up is the new down ♥ your words, her silences ♥ ground rules for a hairless housemate ♥ the smell of particleboard in the morning ♥ from an aspiring spinster ♥ scarves & sweaters & shawls ♥ on emotional idiocy ♥ fairytale-maker ♥ betrayal by choice ♥ how to age gracefully ♥ San Francisco's smile ♥ not a needle but a drink ♥ Einstein I am not ♥ searching for ballon ♥ of the earth ♥ becoming Cirsea ♥ hanky panky in the redwoods ♥ something happened ♥ an act of apparition ♥ ray guns & Rocky Horror ♥