Longing for the new scarf

That clicking you hear in the background is my wife’s knitting needles.
While I’m noodling around on the computer or watching yet another Harbaugh vs. Harbaugh promo piece about the Super Bowl, she’s being far more productive.
Though she has knitted for years, it had been awhile since she’d taken on a project. Then, at some point last year, the needles started clicking again.
The first couple of projects, not surprisingly, were for our grandson. A cute hat and an extremely cool sweater with a “choo-choo” chugging across the front soon were in the mail to Boston.
Then it was more baby bonnets or hats for the offspring of other young people we know. When Connie learned that the father of one little boy was a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, she soon came up with a baby hat in Vikings colors that sported a pair of Viking “horns.”
More projects followed: A baby blanket and hat for the daughter of our friends Mark and Michelle Goldman; a somewhat similar set for our niece who is expecting in February.
None of this should come as a surprise to me.
I knew she was a knitter when we started dating.
That was back in college, and it wasn’t too far into our relationship that she proposed knitting something for me.
A “choo-choo” sweater or a Vikings hat would have been pretty cool, but it made more sense to suggest a scarf.
So that’s what she started knitting.
We’d go out to a ball game, and she’d work on the scarf.
We’d stop by to visit my parents, and she’d work on the scarf.
We’d be on what was ostensibly a study date, and she’d work on the scarf.
Finally, it was finished. And it was extremely cool.
I immediately retired another scarf and adopted the made-by-my-girlfriend unique one as my own.
The nice thing about the scarf was that it was not only warm. It was also long.
The only problem is that it got longer.
As a non-knitter, I’ve never been really sure why. Maybe it was the wrong kind of wool.
But whatever the reason, the scarf stretched. A little at first, but after a long winter the thing had nearly doubled in length.
If I wrapped it around my neck a couple of times, it looked as if I had been put in an orthopedic neck brace after a horrible accident.
If I let it dangle, it could get tangled up in all sorts of complications.
I’m not sure when the moment actually came to retire it.
All I know is it wasn’t my idea. There’s no way the recipient of a gift can gracefully say that it ought to be put away. I had to wait until the creator of the gift acknowledged that the scarf had made the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.
How long was it? By the end, it was well over six feet in length.
I asked my wife the other day how long she thought it had been.
“You could measure it,” she said.
Sure enough, it’s in the house somewhere, a relic from our college days and a testimony to the knitter’s art.[[In-content Ad]]