Connecting with Friday

Another week gone, and another 5-minute Friday is upon me.  We faithful visitors to The Gypsy Mama's weekly meme pause the rest of life, and our own self-criticism, for 5 minutes out of our week, and let the words flow.  Or hope they flow, anyway.  I begin at 12:55 a.m. (of all unholy hours of the night to still be up and writing) to discuss "Connected".

Two weeks from now, I will arrive at the one-year anniversary of my mother's death.  A fortnight ago, HER mother, my grandmother, died.  And for the first time in nearly a year, I picked up my crochet hook this week.  My mother taught me to crochet, and her grandmother taught her.  She was left-handed, and I am not, so we had our challenges, but eventually we figured it out.  For some reason, though, she could never convey to me how to accomplish a "granny square".  She said it was the easiest thing in crochet that actually involved a pattern, but I could never seem to master it.

This week I dived in, determined to get it right.  The picture above is my handiwork thus far, and now I finally see what Mom meant.  It really is easy, you really can just disengage your mind and enjoy the peaceful rhythm of wrapping, looping, stitching, yarn over, slip stitch, 1, 2, 3.  Every stitch connected.  Every time I loop the yarn around my hook and twist it once again into the piece I'm making, it becomes something new.  And it can be unmade at 1,000 times the speed at which it came together.  If pulled on, the entire thing can vanish so quickly.  Where once was solid fabric, just one long string, like the peace after a tornado miraculously blows itself out.  Life is fragile.  I am fragile.  And with every twist of string, I reconnect myself to my past, hone my skills to teach them to my daughter in the future, and keep the thread of the family running through my hands.