rummaging and meandering

My cousin is getting married in a few weeks. A couple of months ago, when she told me, I SQUEALED into the phone in delight. I didn’t know I could make a sound like that. Or that any human being could. They’re coming up with all sorts of fun things for the wedding, including a sort of costume element—the female guests are encouraged to ALL wear wedding dresses. You can’t imagine the flutter and fun this crew of women is having trying on their old dresses, discovering crazy poofy dresses at the thrift store, excavating ancient dresses from female ancestors past… Maybe it’s a girl thing.

Anyway, Paul and I got married on a beach, just us, a couple of witnesses, and the JOP, a Mr. Fletcher. Here he is, making us official.

Mr. Fletcher turned out to be an old acquaintance of my father—rode the bus to school with him when they were kids. Small world! On the phone, when I spoke to him to set the whole thing up, he told me in his gravely voice, “You’ll need a license, $50, and a man.” Doesn’t take much to get married in NC.

At any rate, with such humble beginnings, I don’t have an old wedding dress, not really. I do have the dress I wore, but…I’m not sure it really suits the spirit of the party at hand. But I went rummaging this morning to find it anyway, wanting to try it on and see, and, instead, I found this other thing, the tank top I knitted to wear to our wedding party—the part of getting married that we actually invited folk to.

Here I am wearing it:

Yes, those are bubbles.

Here is the pic I just took of it:

I cannot BELIEVE I once knew how to knit like this. Look at this pattern! How did I ever have the PATIENCE??

Finding this old tank top made me rummage even further back and and I found this, the VERY FIRST THING that I ever knitted, seven years ago, a fisherman’s gansey for Paul.

He still wears it, so it remains one of my most successful knitting projects.

I bought the yarn from Alice, this great old bird and the owner and proprietor of the local knitting shop, the “Knit-a-bit.” (A friend of mine at the time said, “If I was going to have a knitting shop, I wouldn’t call it the Knit-a-Bit, I would call it the Knit-a-Whole-Assload. Hey, I’d shop there.) Alice taught me the basic knit and purl stitch, and I guess I figured that was enough, even though a gansey is the epitome of complicated knitting—it has armpit gussets for heaven’s sake! No simple scarves for me, apparently I’ll just jump into the knitting deep end. I’m nutty like that. My friend, Priscilla, told me once that she was certain I could build a nuclear bomb from a instructions in a book. Thanks, Pris. I think.

This picture of the gansey also has my old cat, Goober.

And then next to that pic was this one, Goober and my wonderful old dog Kodiak, hanging out together on the landing of the stairs in the old farmhouse we lived in, pre-yurt. I miss Goober! He was the friendliest cat you ever saw.

And Kodiak! A samoyed, a fabulous dog—he had this low Woo-ooo! howl and a perfected “I’m not begging right now,” face.

Kodi got Paul and I together. We’re both convinced this is true. An acquaintance of Paul’s at the time abandoned Kodi before leaving town, and I had a dream where Kodi was talking to me, telling me these amazing things. When I woke up, I called Paul and told him “go get that dog.” So we took him in. He was forty pounds underweight, but had the sweetest disposition and a heart the size of a planet, and in the process of caring for him, Paul and I ended up moving in together. Maybe we would have gone our separate ways over this or that crisis, but then who would take Kodi? So we worked things out instead. Thanks, Kodiak.

Ten years later, shortly after Sophie was born, Kodi died of old age.

Here he is in his last Christmas with his Christmas present. What a great dog….

I was about to keep rummaging—who knew what I would find next!—but the kids found me amid the piles of clothes and photo books and miscellany and,

“Mommy, why are you crying?”

“Oh, I’m just looking at these old pictures of Kodi and Goober and my wedding and—”

“Who is that?” “This is when you married Daddy?” “What happened then?” And a million more questions, all the while they were rapidly putting on my old clothes, and laughing.

I was surprised they were so interested. We ended up going through the old photobooks and trying on my old clothes. What started out as a tiny search for a dress ended up an hour of history and story and play. They loved hearing this stuff, like hearing fairy tales, only they knew some of the characters personally.

I highly recommend meandering and rummaging with your kids.

Followed by lunch.