A funny thing happens when someone you love is away and in danger, you tend to have little rituals to keep them safe. Similar to sports players who don’t change their socks to ensure a winning streak it seems like the smallest details of a day, if repeated, might actually keep all the days identical. If you can only hold onto the schedule of each 24 hours and somehow make them moderately the same; then perhaps time will be tricked into working on a loop. And if it was a good day then all the following days will also be good, thus ensuring your loved one will somehow benefit and since they have been safe, they will remain safe.
Or these are the things you tell yourself when you are out of your mind with worry, pregnant and missing your husband of 9 months while you lie in bed and worry.
The first time I heard the song Call to Love by Crooked Fingers was about 3 months into our marriage, I had ordered the CD from Amazon and popped it in the player when Seth was home from work. After listening for a bit his comment was something along the lines of this “I like it! I like especially how they say ‘I’m transmitting the Coordinates’.” Um what? He had distinctly heard Call to Love as Transmitting the Coordinates, which at the time I found endearing and a mark of his military training. But about 9 months later it seemed like much more than just a mishear, it seemed like the most important part of keeping him alive was to transmit the Coordinates of our love, across the ocean and the desert to wherever he was at that moment. That lyric and his misinterpretation became something precious to me in that time a sort of guidebook to navigate a place I never thought I would be in. It became a nightly ritual to reach out with my consciousness, my love, my heart and try to find him, to transmit a message of survival to him and bring him home.
We are now a good solid 10 years past his part in that war, and we have steadfastly refused to let it define our relationship. I can still remember the dreadful keening of my heart in those days, how it feels to have part of your soul so very far away and I am thankful we never have to do it again. Seth and I are two parts of a whole, we are vastly different and yet incredible similar we work together to knit our family into a place of beauty, love, creativity and enduring warmth.
The two colors in this cowl represent our two personalities; he is deep green, cool and mellow like the deepest part of a slow moving river. Powerful in his gentleness, warm in his loyalty and loving in his steadfastness, he embodies the vertical cables of straightforward ideas and thinking. I am always and forever will be orange, bright, loud, creative, zigging and zagging like the diagonal cables, sunny, maybe even a little bit sparkly and certainly sometimes brash and even a little grating. Worked from the bottom up in the round this pattern is a circular knit with mosaic color work on the bottom and cables worked at the top. 2 colors of DK are combined in the perfect marriage for an intermediate colorwork project which is great for someone new to slipped stitch patterning.
