About the Elephant in all of our Living Rooms

 All of us are currently living with an elephant in our living rooms. But like the proverbial elephant in the room, I am going to avoid speaking about it until a little further into this post.

I was about to make some gifts for some people. I decided to go shopping in my stash. I am glad I did. I found a length ( about three yards and change ) of a beautiful wool boucle with a windowpane plaid. I had purchased the yardage at my local thrift. I think that the contents of the home of a serious sewer were donated to the thrift.  There were several lengths of wonderful wool. The black boucle and a heavy white wool coating that may one day become high Holiday Totan mantles came home with me. I left behind a wonderful magenta and green boucle.

I found the price tag on the wool. It cost me less than two subway rides but retail would cost anywhere from $35-$150 per yard. I cut just over two yards of the fabric and then cut the long length in half.

Probably thirty years ago a nice salesman at a fancy fabric store explained to me how to make a man's scarf out of 5/8th of a yard of fabric. I remember listening to his directions carefully despite knowing that his excellent directions were beyond my then sewing abilities.

There are many things that I can never remember. Oddly enough, sewing directions even from decades ago all get neatly filed in my brain ready to be taken out whenever needed. The nice salesman's voice kept running through my head as I made two identical generously proportioned scarves that are large enough to wear as shawls.

I remembered to trim off a couple of inches of selvedge so I could fringe the shawl ends.

I used my specialized tool to pick out the weft threads.

Yes, that is just a big old needle.

Here is the fringed result.

This is a scarf to wear wrapped around your coat to give you an extra layer of warmth and a little bit of style.

I am now kicking myself for not buying more of the beautiful wools when I had the opportunity. I assume that the wools all went to good homes and are giving their new owners lots of joy.

And now for the elephant.Covid.  All of us and by this I mean every person on the planet had hoped, had assumed that by now things would get better. After the horrible late winter and early spring of 2020, the months of lockdown, the months of endless ambulance sirens, of deaths, and of fear....now that we had the vaccines and the boosters we hoped could once again get back to sort of normal.

There are grandmothers who were hoping to be reunited with their grandchildren, parents hoping to visit their children on the opposite coast, musicians hoping to earn a regular living once again. For several months we had the start of life actually cautiously returning to normal-ish. Well, we have all had to pause again.

It's hard. Things aren't as terrifying as they were in April of 2020. But now we all had plans, and hopes. My youngest was supposed to perform with his band. We were planning to host a party for dear friends. For us, none of these plans were huge but we were anticipating re-tasting the sweetness of being among others. We were starting to think about possibly traveling, maybe not in a plane yet but still, that was in the future.

So many of the people I care about are feeling deeply sad right now. We all have to figure out our next steps after facing our communal disappointments. I can't tell any of you exactly how to shift your heads around this unpleasant reality.

As for me,

I baked an excellent loaf of pumpernickel bread with a lovely crust that breaks into shards when you bite into it. It solves none of our problems but it was comforting to eat with a bowl of hot soup for dinner.

I wish all of you the emotional strength and resistance to figure out how to get through the waves of disappointments we all have to plow through in the next while.