Knitting and Grief

To finish the story of my Grandmother's House and why I remember it when I'm knitting:

When the time came to sell Grandma's House, I was newly married.  I can't say that I have a lot of grief associated with this particular Grandmother, my Father's Mother.  Except the grief of not remembering her.  The feeling that she was in my life for a very short time and then she was gone.  The knowing that I have siblings and cousins that remember so much more about her, and I'm jealous of that.  Now, this many years later, even those cousins are gone or unwilling to talk about such ancient history.

We know that the first years of a child's life are when they learn to make attachments and form life-long bonds.  What about when those bonds are severed?  I keenly remember the feeling after my Father died that everyone I ever loved was dying.  I even had some magical thinking going on, my reasoning being that people were dying because I loved them.  Somehow, if it was known by "the powers that be" that I loved someone, they were destined to die because I did not deserve them in my life.

Since that time, as an adult, I have come to the realization that I was born into a family of older than average people.  While most Baby Boomers were born to young people right after the war, and most of my friends on the tail end of the Baby Boom were born to twenty-somethings, I had been born when my Father was 42.  Compound his age with his birth order and you get lots of elderly relatives.  My work on the Family Tree is leading me to a lot of very enlightening discoveries.  For some reason, I had always believed that because my father died when I was young, my relatives all died young.  Not necessarily true.  Many of them far outlived their peers.  I have to remind myself of this as I age.  The calendar and the clock are not ticking away my life just waiting for the moment I least expect it to rip me from my loved ones.  I'm looking forward to many long years of doing more genealogy research.

And what does this have to do with Knitting?  I've found that if I spend the days that mark the anniversaries of my loved one's deaths by Making Something, I can deal with their loss in a more positive way.  This year as I was remembering my Father, as I spent some time knitting, I purposely tried to remember that day that I spent at Grandma's House for the last time.  On that day, I was not yet an obsessive knitter, and couldn't have known what all the stuff in her stash represented.  I do remember boxes of newspaper and magazine clippings of patterns.  They could have been knitting or crochet or any number of other needlecrafts.  I remember wishing that I could save all of them from the burn-pile and the junk heap.  I don't remember any books on crafting.  Had they all been carted away in the intervening 20 some years? 

Had she ever been able to afford books or had they been available where she was likely to shop?  Or did she just never see the need for anything more than what was published in the paper.  Was she so cutting edge that she didn't believe in using Old information from books that were outdated as soon as published?  Probably not, I think that's a new idea ushered in by the Information Age.  The clippings do seem to show an interest in keeping current and making what's new.  Or maybe it was just a stage in her dementia....

There were boxes of crochet thread and embroidery floss and all kinds of buttons and zippers and notions.  Gadgets and tools that I did not know enough to identify were all mixed in.  Who knows if this is the state that Grandma had left them in, or if this was the result of years of rummaging by the family?  These were obviously the cast offs and the stuff that was not seen as valuable.  The treasured items had been carried away long ago.  Rust and dust and mildew and mice had all taken their toll.  I remember thinking some pretty judgemental thoughts about my older cousins that were too squeamish to reach into a box that might also contain spiders or mouse remains.  Now, I can temper my judgement with the knowledge that this was still the time before really good allergy meds, in a family overwhelmingly predisposed to severe allergies, in the peak of allergy season, in a dusty, moldy, environment.  Some of them were probably just focused on getting done with this chore without an emergency room visit for anaphylactic reaction.  I don't recall that the wasps were very welcoming either.  And if it was probably about 100 degrees outside, what would the attic heat factor be?

So, in my thoughts, I can now have a more positive memory of Grandma's House.  I'm free to imagine her any way I want.

A moment of Clarity

My dear, dear family and DH don't often understand my Hoarding Issues.  And they often ask "Why?", and I've been having a thought on that today......
  Some of you may have grown up going to the library all the time.  I did not.  Our little neighborhood school libraries were a good try, but nothing like what I discovered later.
  Some of you may have had a library in your home, and subscriptions to magazines that came in the mail.  I did not.  Our "family library" was a 3' wide 4' tall bookcase.  One whole shelf was occupied by The World Book Encyclopedia.  I was a voracious reader and read through the whole thing one summer when I was about 12.  There was one dictionary, published before my birth, and one Bible, awarded to a parent for Sunday School attendance in 1934.  While I do think I read the dictionary, I'm pretty sure that I haven't read the whole Bible yet.
  When I started college, we were expected to know how to use an "index to periodicals".  I remember discovering the archived magazine section at the libraries.  They had ancient copies of the most fascinating publications; all bound into volumes by year.  It was like an archaeological find, only not so much dust.  Before then, I had no idea that there were so many magazines on such a wide variety of crafts and arts.  I think I "wasted" a great deal of a year or two of college lurking in the depths of those archives.  That was before my Hoarding got to be a problem.  Everything I would ever need to know was at the library, open almost 24 hours a day, a short walk from my dorm room.
   Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe those archives were a contributing factor to the problem.  As time went by, I learned that my little college library sold off great numbers of books and magazines at a book sale every year.  Their capacity for storage had been reached, and the oldest and least read had to make way for the new and the popular.  At 4 books for $1 or $5 per bag, how could anyone let these precious tomes get away?  As long as they were in the Library, it was possible to go there and see the patterns and read the articles if they were needed.  As they were sold off, they went to live in someone else's stash closet, or horrors! to that new recycling center in the mall parking lot. Then they would be "Gone".  As time went by, the big University Library and the Public Library in the University Town started getting rid of their stuff too, and I was always right there to buy and haul home as many boxes and bags of books as I could afford.  By the time we set up housekeeping, and I was home with little ones, even the small town local Library was getting rid of periodicals over 5 years old.  They were giving them away free!  They, too, had a Fund Raising Book Sale every summer.  It was for a good cause.  And I was giving them a good-ish home.  Right?
  Sometimes, I've discovered that I actually had 2 or even more copies of the exact same issue.  I even spent a great lot of money on magazines on eBay at the height of the problem. 
   In reality, they stacked up in places inhospitable to paper and decayed away in many gruesome ways.  They have taken up space that could have been put to better use.  Space that has been expensive to maintain, hard to acquire, never enough of.  They have required heating in the winter and venting in the summer.  They have been drowned by rising water and roof leaks.  They have been nibbled and gnawed by mice and moths and who knows what else. 
  These collections were read only occasionally.  When I did try to find a half remembered article or pattern, it could never be found in the chaos.  It became much easier to just make up a pattern than to find the one I was looking for.  And now, with the Internet and Ravelry, and all the company websites like Bernat and Lion Brand and Interweave, isn't it easier now than ever to find exactly the pattern or idea that I need?  Without the Paper Overload?
   This may be a breakthrough moment; wish I had a therapist to talk to about it.  Maybe it's time to let more of them go..........