Unraveling

Hello You,

Happy Friday. Apparently, it is a bit of a special one! it is the 9th day of the 9th month and a number 6 day. Change is on the horizon (again... I am getting a bit tired of the change), also Mercury is going retrograde and Nepture is doing something or other. I think there is going to be a lot of water floating around and that is not surprising as Ireland has returned to its normal pattern of serious downpours!

So, I have a wee story to tell you.

This morning, I did an inventory of my wool stock. If you are familiar with my musings, you will know that I made a list of things I cannot possibly live without and wool was one of them. Like all wool lovers, I have loads of it hidden away in cupboards and drawers.

Anyway, I put all of it on my bed and realized that I had three winter projects that I had never completed. So, without thinking, I sat myself down and started unraveling one of them.

And there and then, a memory of my mother unraveling our winter jumpers came to mind.

Before my parents clawed their way into the middle classes, my mum used to knit our pullovers and make some of our clothes. So, as we were growing more every year, every autumn, she would get our two pullovers out (2 each) and she would patiently unravel them.

She would form wool skeins that she would carefully handwash and then leave to dry. Then, she would ask me to hold my arms out and I would help her unravel the skeins to form balls of wool.

And then, she would knit new jumpers with the old wool and also a bit of new wool to make them fit better.

It would never have crossed her mind to throw the jumpers away or give them to Welfare. That would have been a terrible waste in her world.

As I was unraveling and re-living this memory of autumns long gone, I got to wonder why unraveling has become such a negative word, as in "my life is unraveling, I am losing my mind" or "Europe is unraveling at the moment, people are scared."

Then I did a word search because I love words. Here is the official definition of unraveling/raveling: "to cause to come apart by or as if by separating the threads of."

BUT, what we may have forgotten is that when the thread are separated and safely rolled into a ball, they can be used again to create something else.

I was telling a good friend of mine about all of this today and she said "O it is just like a divorce!" Exactly! You unravel one thing so you can create another WITH THE SAME COMPONENTS and a few added things too.

So, what do you think? Is unraveling worth doing? 

And, do you have anything you would like to carefully unravel so that you can create something else?

I would love to know.

With love

Baya