Passing the time

Elliot’s picked up a phrase from one of us, he’ll snuggle up to me and say “Grammy, shall we read a book to pass the time?” or “Poppy, do you want to build a tower… to pass the time?” or “Auntie Banda, do you want to colour to pass the time?”

I love this idea he has of time – that every day we get up and we do things as time passes, and then we’re out of time for the day, but that’s cool because you have a tower, a book, a picture. He must think this way because one of us presented time like that, asked “what shall we do until it is time for the next thing to happen?” This fits too, since Ellie has only a limited concept of time in general – he’s still only four so benchmarks work better for him. He’s more likely to understand that something is happening after lunch than to grasp the concept of two hours. If you ask him what time it is he can tell you the numbers on the clock, but if you ask him what time something will happen he’ll say “3pm.” (We are all unclear on the significance of 3pm, but everything happens then.) If you inquire about how much longer until something happens he either tells you “a few minutes” if it’s soon or “Seventy twenty hundred” if it’s going to be a while. (These are not exact numbers. Sometimes soon is “seven minutes” and once in a while an event will not be going to occur for “nine and fifty years!”)

Last year at this time I decided on a year long project, a big theme to help pass the time. A long range goal, something that would carry me month to month with a sense of continuity and movement, no matter how weird the world around me got. My knitting serves a lot of purposes in my life, and I was comitted to working all the angles. I wanted it to be the perfect project for the year if restrictions lifted and I started travelling for work again (Oh, the innocence) and the perfect project for if – well I didn’t know what the year might bring so it was something that had to be really chipper. I decided it would be sock based, because I’ve always though that no matter what happens to you a knitting a pair of socks seems to work out fine – and since I thought this year would be the year of our rainbow baby (the baby born after pregnancy or infant loss) that a rainbow theme would be perfect.

It turns out that this wasn’t the year for our rainbow – and I almost lost my cool on this big project when that pregnancy was lost but it turns out that I was super clever when I picked it, because this kept feeling right, and hopeful and positive and like… Like things have just got to change eventually. Truly, it is hard to be down about your life and its direction if every project gets you one step closer to a rainbow colour-wheel of socks. Every pair not only passed the time, but felt a little bit like building something, and that felt pretty darn good for this knitter, even on this little scale.

I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to add another pair to the pile as the year wore on, I’d giggle as I laid a pair on the stack and while away some time deciding what colour was missing or what I should knit next.

When I was done, I took it apart and mailed it away in bits for Christmas gifts- and people I love are now wearing parts of my privately constructed rainbow on their feet as they all walk forward into next year and thinking of that makes me smile. I knit a walking rainbow. Take that, pandemic.