When I was new to this whole blogging thing, I remember how thrilled I was when someone I didn’t already know responded to one of my posts. In a blog post that has now disappeared without trace, I’d written something about Mary Magdalen – and M-H commented. I was thrilled, and soon after, as one does when one is eight years old, invited her to my 60th birthday party. She was pleased to be invited, but didn’t come. Instead she knitted me a pair of socks.
They are beautiful socks, and this is just part of their story.
Here they are on our couch, brand new:
Not only were they beautiful, they were comfortable and I tended to wear them a lot. Among other places, I wore them to New York. There, I had driven directly from the airport to a small workshop-type gathering in Brooklyn, where they played a useful social role. I was introduced to a young Korean woman, and we were being very formal with each other, me jetlagged and her very polite. I hitched my trousers as I sat down, and when she glimpsed my socks she burst into peals of laughter. The ice was broken.
I was wearing them when we visited the Taj Mahal, where tourists are required to remove their shoes. Here they are outside the Taj Mahal:
They were on my feet during the Caminho de Santiago in Portugal. Here they are in the gardens near the ancient bridge in Ponte de Lima:
They did good service for more than a decade, but inevitably they grew thin, and their heels gave way. I was reluctant to throw them away and they lay in my sock drawer, beautiful but unwearable, until in a time of Covid, the Emerging Artist’s darning skills came into play, and she spent an episode of Vera playing her needle:
And now, not perhaps as beautiful as when they came into existence, they’re back on the feet, and warm:
A new chapter begins …
Me fail? I fly! 