the hockey shawl

It was a Friday morning in early October, when the message came through, that turned my plans upside down, and would, in the end, come to define the last quarter of the year. My plan for the day was to write a couple of posts for Blogtober, clean the house ready for the long weekend, bake some goodies for the canteen at the archery comp on Saturday, make sure mr16 had clean clothes, all his arrows, a drink bottle, some cash. A normal Friday.

But suddenly it wasn’t normal.

If you were reading along that week, you would have noticed a quilt pop up on my blog, made on a whim, finished within 26 hours, before jumping on a plane with a last minute ticket and that same quilt in hand. What was’t mentioned, but probably could have been inferred, was that the friend I was visiting was in hospital. There was to be a lot of sitting around, and so I started a new project to keep my hands busy as we chatted; we talked of small things and big things, the hard and the funny, and through it all I knitted row after row of garter stitch. 70 rows I managed that day, though admittedly, they were rather short rows, working from the centre of the top edge and increasing with each row.

I picked away at that shawl the rest of the month, through appointments and school lessons, and for my post-wisdom-teeth-removal rest day. A month after cast on, I was once again visiting my friend in hospital, a closer one this time, knitting in hand.

“If you wanted a knitting update, there were easier ways to ask, you know.”

We laughed, though it was a bittersweet kind of laugh. I think we knew, at that point, that she wouldn’t see the shawl finished. Once again we chatted the small and the big, the now and the ever after, the funny and the increasingly hard. As morning visiting hours drew to a close, I packed up my bag, hugged her tightly, and cried the whole hour and a half home. Less than two weeks later, I was frantically messaging the chat to bring our school friend group home, for one final gathering. Knitting in hand, I sat and powered through row after row as we shared memories and made memories.

Just as I knew, that second last visit, the shawl was still unfinished as we said a final goodbye to our friend. It sat in my trolley, untouched, for the rest of December; I blamed the madness of my advent projects and vlogmas and that it was getting too big to work on in the heat, but really, it was that I couldn’t face it. How was I supposed to make progress on what I’d come to call “her” shawl, when she wasn’t here to see the progress?

Then cometh the plague.

Locked in my room, I worked on the projects I’d fallen behind on. I watched far too much tv. Read far too many trashy novels. And finally, I picked up my shawl. I knitted and knitted and knitted some more, and then I ran out of yarn. Grief makes the most mundane things seem momentous, and I sent a message to my craft chat as I cried. That was the last ball of yarn she saw me knit it, I lamented, it feels wrong to be adding a new ball and moving onto a new stage.

Little bits and pieces got done over the holidays, with my Sydney trip providing ample opportunity for progress, and in the end, I finished it in a rush to get it finished in time for the show. It turned out huge – longer down the centre seam than the pattern but shorter across the top (which I had expected would be the case prior to blocking, with the tension a little tight compared to the rest of the shawl).

The perfect size, I think, for keeping me warm on the hockey sidelines as I watch Beetle play this winter, which turns out to be the perfect use for this shawl, started and named in honour of my friend who once loved hockey herself.