My Granny was a wonderful woman who I remember realistically with nothing but love and admiration, but there was one thing she did that used to burn me up.
She crocheted beautiful blankets, and watching her do this while I studied was generally a soothing sight. Granny, slowly rocking in her chair, fixated on thread and needle and stitching, and me, slumped over my books and notes on the couch, alone in my task but not in the room. We would speak once in a while, interrupting each other when the ticking of the cuckoo clock suddenly made itself apparent. Silence was its own sort of monotony, much like studying and crocheting.
But here’s the thing: at some point during these evenings after school, she’d hold her days work up towards the light, and clutching it ever so gently in her fingers, she’d carefully inspect her part-of-a blanket in the light. I’d say, “Granny stop, it’s fine.” She’d tell me with a smirk to mind my own business, and I’d go back to my notes. Just as soon as I’d take my eyes off her, she would spot the wonky stitch and there she would go, unraveling all of her thread, line after line of precisely crocheted stitches just to get to the one bad one, no matter how far down it went. This would totally get my goat, and I’d jump up off the couch, loose leaf papers flying, “Ahhhh Granny! It was FINE!”
Now, long after those precious moments have passed, I sit in my bed with my laptop, carefully reading and re-reading a fresh chapter of my memoir in progress. I am tweaking words here and there, moving sentences around, and checking tenses to make sure it’s good enough for submission to the class I’m taking. 9 people are about to workshop this chapter for me, as I will also do for them, and I can’t stand the thought of virtual red ink all over these pages. So I cut and stitch sentences apart and together, until I’m happy with the art I created. This process takes hours. My daughter looks down the hall at me from time to time to make sure I’m alive, and then she goes back to her screen.
And then, popping out of the dark recesses and files of my brain comes that dear sweet image of my Granny, any one of those times she rocked and stitched, wearing her little nightgown and bedroom shoes, glancing over at me from time to time looking for that one moment she could safely begin jerking all the stitches out without me screeching at her to stop.
A tear and a laugh happened all at the same time. Thank you sweet Granny for being your sneaky lovely you, and for teaching me to care so deeply about my work.
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