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2004-03-17 || 4:31 p.m. || afghan i love you || my mother made him an afghan. she put it in the mail and he got it the other day. she goes through these phases. i always forget my mum is a crafty lady, but in the seventies it was stained glass sautered at her station in the garage (i remember her swearing like a sailor and running into the kitchen to throw her hand in the icebox) and quilting through the eighties and nineties. kelly and i have at least four quilts each. both grandmas have them, babies in any way connected to her within a two-thousand mile radius (third cousins and workfriends and neighbors), my best friends from college, strangers in hospitals who found their unspoken requests in church newsletters and by way of mouth to my mum: friendship knots and celtic puzzles and crazy quilts and photo transferred blocks. she has a quilting rack in her room. the walls are covered with patterns and scraps and photos of quilts held up from dining room chairs, her head cut off at the very top by my father taking the picture. last year she got into knitting. she first learned to knit in nursing school in the sixties from the dorm matron who only spoke polish and had concentration camp serial numbers tattooed on the inside of her wrist. when i took an interest in it and asked my mother to teach me she rekindled the knitting fire with yarn and needles as kindling, reclaiming house crafty superiority with perling alacrity (she's very competitive when it comes to needlecrafts and sewing). after three blankets knitted and unraveled several times in the name of tension perfection, she quickly switched over to crochet. her mother crochets. she crochets. mother-daughter crafty competition spans several generations, and on my bed now are two grandmother-made afghans and one mother-made one. she made one for brian. she made several for kelly. she made one for kell's boyfriend. she made one for him. last night she asked if he had gotten it, no doubt recalling the color she painstakingly picked out for him, the size, the way she imagined he would brush it against his cheek to detect softness and my family's good wishes. i told her he had, that he had sent me an email asking why did she do this? 'i like him,' she said. 'he is a wonderful person and i am always rooting for him.' 'why did she do it?' i think he was looking for an answer, a secret not shouted past states in that know-it-all motherly voice but sent in a complicated pattern (yarn entwining yarn, caught in loops and knots and turns), and it's there. you just better send a thank you card. guestbook || notes || archives || profile || photos || d-land |