In a recent picture of my mother, I noticed her wearing a sweater she had knitted for me when I was in my teens and that was a second act for this sweater. An aunt had knitted the original sweater for my father as a birthday gift but he felt very weird wearing turquoise blue. It fit him perfectly but the color was not within his small range of comfort and tolerance. I remember him trying it on and thinking how it shakes things up from the black, brown and gray - it made him look quite different and not in a bad way. But that was my opinion and no one really cared. So that sweater was pulled apart and the yarn recovered to make me something out of it.
And so there was this second act - it was a nice enough sweater and I wore it a lot. I am not sure my aunt was happy with how her gift ended up but my parents were never known for worrying about such minor details - they were too preoccupied with their own problems. I for one made it a point not to wear it if she was likely to be around because I did not want to make her sad. So this sweater has a bit of a fraught history besides being terribly old. It has held up for all these years and still does not look very shabby. My mother is prone to wearing well-preserved things from a very long time ago. Some of her saris are over thirty years old and don't look their age. When I see her dressed like a scene from history, I always wonder why she likes staying stuck in time and if her present life does not give her nearly as much as the past did. Reading about this unique and wonderful knitting project brought this ancient and far more mundane one to mind.
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