From One Fall to the Next

‘What on earth are you doing?’ the husband’s voice came from somewhere behind me. I was hunched up over the bed, trying to seam two lines of crochet squares together. Straightening myself to look at him was not in the realm of possibility just then.

‘Where have you dug up that thing from?’  I could bet the husband was wearing his best disapproving face. If only the back of my head could see.

‘What month is it?’ I asked patiently. Secretly overjoyed at the attention from the husband. When was the last time he’d spoken two consecutive sentences, unpunctuated with quick glances at his phone, to me? Of course, he might still be doing that. Looking at his phone, I mean. I couldn’t see, could I?

‘October,’ he said suspiciously.

‘Season?’ I asked, drawing out the patient mode.

‘Autumn? Are the clocks going back?’ I hissed my patience out of the window. It was a Sunday in October, but not the Sunday when the clocks fell back. Was that so difficult to remember?

‘It’s Fall,’ I said, ‘with a capital F, and this is my Fall Blanket. And I’m trying to have it ready for the Fall.’

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‘It’s been in the closet for two years.’ The husband’s face wore a dubious expression. He had long maintained the colours on that blanket were too many and too bright. I did not agree. But his repeated declarations had created doubts enough for me to relegate the granny squares to the back of my closet.

That and the thought of spending hours bent double, seaming one hundred and fifty crocheted squares together. Confession: My crochet projects are prone to growing in size and ambition as I go along. Optimism wins over planning every time. The Fall Blanket had begun life as a throw, hit puberty as a single blanket for the husband, and matured as a blanket for our double bed. In the initial euphoria of crocheting so many wonderful colours, I had pushed aside that little matter of seaming them together.

But squares soon get crocheted. Seaming loomed. Procrastination seemed to be the way out and I grabbed it. For two years. Now, it seemed, D-Day was here. But one look at the metres of squares laid out on the bed and my scoliosis reared its head in fright. If my back could speak, I would have heard a loud and firm ‘No’.

The son called. As he does. Quite often. ‘Why so quiet?’ he asked somewhere in the middle of the call. My heart swelled with maternal love – my baby boy! He’d actually noticed I too was in that call.

‘My back’s killing me!’ I whined to him. The husband was evidently given his orders at that point. I was too busy gulping down ibuprofen.

When I woke up the next morning, it was to a new world. At least, a new desk. It was bare. Shorn of all the bric-a-brac I am wont to surround myself with. My laptop had been pushed to the back. And my blanket adorned the empty swathe of space before it. The husband had been hard at work, it seemed.

And that’s how my Fall Blanket was finally finished. Alternating Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval with ibuprofen.

Two days ago, I came in from my walk. ‘That cold wind from the Atlantic,’ I began. Then stopped short. The husband was sat swathed in my Fall Blanket.

‘It’s quite nice,’ he offered weakly by way of explanation. Well!