Years. It's been years, hasn't it? Years and pages upon pages of a still
unfinished book, three animals gone, two new cats, a girl growing up entirely
too fast, an alcoholic father-in-law who gives curmudgeons a bad name, and a
new obsession - weaving.
In terms of
fictional time, I'm on the last twelve hours of the main plot. Really, it's time to just write this bitch
and be done with her, right? I'm
thinking probably so.
Tinker's
gone, from God only knows how many things, but the pneumonia - and the
underlying cancer that caused it - was the last straw. After three days of feeding him with a
syringe and sitting with him in the middle of the hall where he refused to
move, I took him to the vet for one last visit.
We buried him in the backyard.
Sheba's
gone. She was blind and mostly deaf, and
after Tinker died, I think she lost a sense of familiarity that made an
enormous difference in the quality of her life.
She would still come up to the car when I came home every day - every
single fucking day - stinky and adoring as always, but when I saw that she
wasn't able to lay down to sleep anymore - and sleeping was one of her all-time
favorite activities - I knew it was time.
So I gave her half of my dinner, which she scarfed down in her typically
greedy fashion, and took her to the vet for one last visit. We buried her in the backyard, next to
Tinker.
Chloe's
gone. Her passing was the hardest. Still is.
She's - had - always been plagued
by one health problem or another - gas (oh God, the flatulence was beyond
toxic), skin problems, allergies, arthritis, spay incontinence. We had her on I forget how many medications
to manage all this craziness. We really
aren't sure what happened to her at the end.
We didn't get her to the vet in time to find out. The night she died, she was listless and
bloated, and wouldn't eat. She was a
hound dog with gas problems - lazy and bloated by nature - but the refusal to
snap a piece of ham out of my hand was serious.
So we threatened her with the doctor the next morning, only she didn't
wake up the next morning. I don't know
if the vet would have been able to do anything.
A stomach infection from something she ate? Bloat?
I don't know. We won't ever
know. We buried her in the backyard,
next to Tinker and Sheba.
Aeryn, who
is nine now, is understandably traumatized.
(I am, too, but I'm supposed to be the adult.) Losing a pet is never easy - losing three in
three years is horrible. Now the fish -
a magenta-colored male betta called Blueberry (it was blueberry season when she
got him) - is almost four years old, and
every day I'm surprised to see he's not belly-up in the tank. Aeryn's anxiety about his impending death is
compounded by a flood of unwelcome growing-up mood swing hormones that are
wreaking havoc on her emotions.
The new cats
help, sometimes. For Aeryn, most of it
is knowing that they'll be around for a while, since we got them both before
they were a year old. They're getting
friendlier, and they're certainly happier now that I'm playing with yarn. Most times I let them play, too.
Speaking of
yarn, weaving takes a lot of it, and quite a bit of setup time. Once the loom is warped, though, the actual
weaving itself goes fairly quickly. I'll
post some pictures later (once I can find the damned camera; I think Nicodemus
may have eaten it). It's ironic that
I've worked in a textile mill for fifteen years and never shown the slightest
interest in thread outside the plant until now.
An unexpected windfall made it possible for me to get my hands on a
small lap loom, and a friend sent a ton of discontinued yarn my way - so much
that it's hard for me to figure out what project to start first.
I am
beginning to understand why the ideas and images of textile crafting -
spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, et cetera - are so universal. People have been playing around with fiber of
one sort or another for quite some time - what strikes me particularly is the
transformative aspect of the process. A
sheep grows a lot of wool, we shear it and harvest the wool. The wool's just fluffy bits until you put a
little spin on it and a very slight tug to straighten it out and then - what
the fuck? - you've got YARN. One of my
friends spins, and the trick never fails to amaze me.
Of course it
doesn't stop there. You can spin other
sorts of fibers and twist it together with the wool using any number of
techniques. You can dye the fiber or the
yarn. Or you can just pound the shit out
of the wool and make felt out of it. Or
you... well. I digress.
I can
crochet. A chain. That's all.
I've never successfully made a hat or a scarf or anything worth gifting,
and knitting is frankly beyond me.
Weaving, though, appeals to me on a number of levels, especially the one
I've most recently discovered.
Any
experienced weaver will tell you this, but I'm not an experienced weaver. So two weeks ago when I put a lovely
variegated yarn on my loom and paired it with a solid color, I expected to see
something like a beachy sunset come off the loom, in a more or less
placemat-shape.
It looks
like Easter, actually, and it's way too big to be a placemat, and besides I
don't decorate for Easter. But it will
become a tote bag for Aeryn to use gathering eggs this weekend, so it's not a
total waste. And I learned quite a few
things, which allows me to impress my husband by throwing around words like "warp"
and "weft" and "dropped ends" and "picks per
inch" and stuff.
And there's
one other thing I've learned about weaving, and I think it might apply to other
things, too - you absolutely CANNOT RUSH the process. You can take shortcuts, sometimes, and use
whatever ingenious methods you can come up with to fabricate looms, splice
ends, pull yarn ends through, but trying to do any of this when you're in a hurry
is just not going to work.
So while I
can weave without a beer in my hand, trying to set up and warp the loom sober
is impossible. Maybe I'll get there
somewhere. Until then, I've discovered a
bad-ass hard cider that is just about perfect for warping. Pictures later, provided I can extract the
camera from the fat-ass's stomach.
~andi
