Kiss My Knits!

Haven’t updated in a couple of days, so here we go!

Had bad dreams and a bad back last night. This is attributable to too much coffee in the evening and the fact that my daughter bounced a screw out of the leg of my side of the bed. No coffee today and a screw from the hardware store for the bed and tonight should be better. It’d be even better if it weren’t midnight already, but we’ll start small and work from there.

The place we got the screw isn’t a big box store, it’s more of an old-fashioned hardware store, albeit part of a chain, and I had wondered how business was. Looking for a picture to put up here showed me their eBay store so apparently they’re thinking outside the box on how to earn more revenue. Good for them!

I’m always amazed by how knitting in public brings out stories from people. Today my daughter and I sat on a bench in front of the hardware store while she finished a bag of popcorn. (Blackhawk Hardware has a popcorn machine, and you can scoop out a bag to eat while you shop.) A gentleman who must have been easily in his mid 80’s saw me knitting and veered over to sit in a chair nearby. He talked about how his mother crocheted, and how much she did and how well she did it. So we chatted for a bit. I like the idea that long before I was born, this lady was working her yarny magic and now I was hearing about it.

Note: I’m terrible at guessing ages of people over 50 or so. This is because my father looks at least 15 years younger than he actually is, so I have to remind myself that not everyone has his dashing and youthful good looks.

The guy at the hardware store (over 65, I’m guessing, as it was my day for more mature gents) who helped me find my screw was a character, testing out the nut by putting it on my daughter’s nose to see if it fit. She thought he was for real and went along with it, sticking out her face obligingly and noting that her nose was too big when he tried it on. I explained to him how she had bounced the screw right off of the bedframe, and he told a story about how he and his brother had shared a room when they were kids, with beds about three feet apart.

One day their mother had gone off to the store, so they were jumping on the beds, having a pillow fight. Unfortunately, the pillows were filled with down, and broke! They didn’t notice because they had their heads down so they wouldn’t get walloped in the face. What finally made them realize was that it was getting hard to breathe. They looked up and there was so much down they couldn’t see! So they opened their bedroom door and ran out, and the down floated out behind them. This guy got out the vacuum cleaner and tried to clean it up, but he made about two passes before the vacuum clogged. As he said, “We were in so much trouble when our mother got home.” I’ll bet!

It’s a nice little reminder that these things have been going on for generations – knitting and crocheting, jumping on the bed, and so forth. And my daughter is forming memories of that, and of sitting on a bench eating popcorn, that will last for long after I’m gone. Some things never change.