Dealing with Stuff

Plans for permanent house moving in the near-though-indefinite future causes one to look at the stuff in the house that is to be moved on from in a new light.  These stuffs are no longer things you live with and might easily use at any moment (or not), but newly become things that seriously require assessment.  In particular, they need to be judged almost teleologically as to their true and ultimate purpose.  And particularly as to whether they have any such purpose.

Now one way to do this is to think dualistically: save/discard.  But at this point,  I’m not quite ready for that.  Thus, a couple of weeks ago, I was noticing that over the 16 years we have been part-time residents up here in B.C., I have gathered unto me quite a lot of yarn.  Twenty, thirty years in Los Angeles and all the yarn that I owned could have been stored in a small purse.  Here, otherwise.  It’s the weather, of course, that makes the difference.  L.A. is too hot to think about yarn or knitting, even though I’ve always knit EXCEPT when I lived in L.A. (and also in the South Pacific).  New grandchildren required many, many sweaters; cold autumns required many mohair shawls, not only for me but for my non-knitting local friends.  And as a result there are numerous balls of leftover yarn, each of whose diameter is probably less than two inches.  They are all kinds of fiber, all colors: they have no purpose.  They are clearly in the ‘discard’ category, but even the thrift shop isn’t going to have much use for such a large quantity of such small quantities.

I was thinking about what could be done with this yarn, looking out the window, watching the wind blow and the rain start to fall, when my mind urged me to knit sweaters for the trees.  The trees, of course, are not cold, but it would look pretty colorful in the dark of winter and the neighbors might think it was funny and I would like seeing it.  And so I knit about 10 feet of 6-inch wide ‘sweater’ which could be wrapped around the trees once they lose their leaves (which, incidentally, is happening very slowly this year: the leaves are generally still green so there will be ample time for me to get these sweaters knit). 

And then, as in the picture above, we tried it out to check for size.  Well, obviously 10 feet is nowhere near the size that is required for a tree sweater, even for a not very big dogwood tree.  And thus I have kept up the knitting over the past two weeks to the point where I now have about thirty-five feet of 6-inch wide tree sweater.  That ought to be about enough for one tree.  But there are three trees that could really benefit, so I am going about the houses, checking to find further stocks of yarn that might be of use.  My greatest fear is that I will end up going to the thrift store, looking for small balls of otherwise useless yarn.

My second concern is a conscience prick that surely it would be better to be knitting sweaters for freezing children in Africa?  My Berkeley granddaughter recently mentioned to me that she found that question always worth asking, but rarely found it useful as a guide for policy.  I’ll defer to her on this issue, but if the African children need sweaters, tell them to get in touch.  But they will be sweaters of many colors.