Cow Warming

Continues very cold here.  I look out at my warmly wrapped dogwood tree and its partially wrapped neighboring fir, and am grateful that my mother took me, in 1943, to weekly meetings of the Red Cross where I knit little khaki-colored afghan squares ‘for our boys overseas.’  I think that it taught me not only to knit, but also to associate knitting with helpfulness or charity work, anyway, which may or may not of course actually be helpful.

When I started knitting the tree scarves, I knew about ‘urban knitters,’ which group includes women/artists/activists all round the U.S. (and indeed the world) who knit scarves and the like for trees and stop-sign posts, park benches and buses.  One woman for the past 6 years has been crocheting amazing ‘tree cozies’ for very large trees. So I didn’t think of myself as doing something unique, although the urban knitters were not my inspiration.  I was inspired by a woman named Christine Oatman, whose work I saw one Christmas in Los Angeles, around 1978, at an annual Christmas art show called ‘The Magical Mystery Tour.’  She made temporary environmental structures, and then photographed them before or as they disappeared.  One of her pieces involved her knitting neon chartreuse and neon orange lichen for trees.  Thirty years later, she seems to have been teaching at a California college and not getting enough work gallaried to get on the net, but she made a big impression on me those decades ago.  So, these tree sweaters are for you, Christine.

When I was doing the knitting, I worried that once I had used up most of the yarn, I would begin to long for more thrift store yarn to fill up the void.  And, indeed, one day I found myself in a B.C. thrift store that was having a half-price sale (a sale at a thrift store always stuns me!), and sure enough there was a terrific and sizeable bag of various amounts of maybe a dozen different kinds of red yarn.  Different reds, different yarns.  For fifty cents, it was mine.  And a wonderfully invested fifty cents it was.

Looking at it, I thought not about Christine Oatman’s own tree scarves, but about the fact that I was working to get Christmas presents done in time to mail them here and there in the U.S.  And I thought about who, not normally on my list, might need a really nicely varied red scarf for Christmas.  And without much wandering around, the face (or at least the form) of Drewhenge’s iconic cow came to my mind.  So I took to knitting a 10-foot long red scarf for Ms. O’Holstein (as her owners like to call her), while also finishing the tree sweaters.

Yesterday, we walked over to Drewhenge to make the presentation.  But, to our shock, there was no sign of the cow.  Of course, it was 18 degrees and I couldn’t really have explained why there was any sign of me outdoors in that weather, the less so, perhaps, she.  We trespassed for awhile around on the lawn (the owners did not appear to be in residence that day) and eventually found her behind the barn/shed, her nose just barely peaking out from the building’s rear wall.

So we made the presentation and Ed took the picture and now Ms. O’Holstein has her Christmas scarf, which features bells on one end and fringes on the other.  And a good upcoming Winter’s Solstice to her and to us all!