A Garter Stitch Scarf and Joy Enough

The knitting: a garter stitch scarf

The reading: Joy Enough, by Sarah McColl

My daughter has read the first three novels about the wizards and thought that would be a fun costume for Halloween.  A friend in my knitting group offered to loan us a hat and wand, and I pulled my graduation robe out of my childhood bedroom. Now I'm knitting a scarf.  

The yarn: Loops & Threads Impeccable.  

The pattern: cast on 25 stitches on Size #8 needles and knit 30 rows of one color before switching to the other.  

I am knitting nine stripes. That comes out to 6,750 stitches.  She wants it long enough to loop around her neck once and still be pretty long.  So if I have 10 sections, then that will be 7,500 stitches in Aran weight acrylic yarn and 20 ends to weave in because I don't want to go to a Halloween store or give certain people and corporations my money.  I wonder what my daughter will say about this logic and behavior when she's older.  She doesn't think anything of this kind of behavior right now, and maybe she never will.    

I read Joy Enough because it's finally available at the library.  I first found out about writer Sarah McColl from an article in a long-gone magazine.  Her blog, also gone now, was mostly craft-focused, and I loved her projects and the way she relished the small, lovely things in everyday living--a drink, a piece of ripe fruit, finding vintage ribbon in a dusty old shop.  It was the kind of thing that felt brand new in the mid-to-late aughts, and quickly became ubiquitous and trite around the time I had a baby and stopped caring about whether our apartment with beige walls looked ready for a carefree dinner party with friends (we still had friends over, but it was harder and looked a lot less cute).  I kept reading the blog, though, even though she posted less and less.  She had a job as a Real Writer and her later posts were less about fun DIYs and tended to be about visiting her sick mother. Her mother passed, and she stopped posting altogether a while after that.  

When I got an Instagram account a couple of years ago (I'm a very late adopter), I looked up people I had followed on blogs and McColl was one of them.  She was nearly finished with the memoir by then.  

So I was happy to pick this up last week. I burned right through it.  I have to confess I had been a little curious about the end of her marriage--all of those blogger husbands had seemed so much better than mine once upon a time!--but also wondered how much sadness I could take in a memoir that's about losing a mother while ending a marriage.  It turns out it was a regular amount of sadness that I'm used to at this age.  First marriages end for all kinds of reasons and parents require more care for all kinds of reasons.  It's terrible and normal and everyone's situation is terrible and normal and unique to the parties involved.  This was a wonderful tribute to a mother and her family that she loved so much.  The descriptions of friends and family are full of love and grace, but nothing is glossed over.  I loved the same examinations of small, good things like fruit bought at the side of the road or singing in a car with friends that I remembered from her earlier writing.  It was excellent.