Family Links

Bryce Canyon Shawl in Coolree 50% silk; 50% superwash merino

By Verybusymonkey from Ravelry.

For Aunt Geraldine

Last summer I used one of two skeins of Alex McLeod's silk-merino mix to make this for my Aunt Geraldine... For some reason I associate the colour with the aura of turbo charged positivity she always exuded in my childhood mind at least.  

Aunt Geraldine ordinarily lives in Toronto and is the older sister of my mother who is now 86.  At the end of August, Aunt Geraldine came on a visit to Ireland with four of my cousins: Michael, Mary, Anne and Carmel. Her other two sons, Fergus and Connor, didn’t make it this time. I’ve met them all individually in the past, and some of their fantastic children too, but it was a big thrill to meet so many family members concurrently in 2013.

A defining moment I know about in Aunt Geraldine's life, and that of her family, was the loss of her husband at a tragically young age. She still managed to raise her six children on her own - and raise them very well - without losing her sense of fun and very dry wit.....some achievement, when you think about it.  My own memory of my uncle Colm’s untimely death is as one of the rare occasions I saw my mother weep.  At that time international telephone calls were reserved only for very special occasions, such as Christmas or emergency news, which was generally bad. Like my mother, Aunt Geraldine taught for a living – her subject was music and for some reason as fleeting, I'm sure, as her orange aura, I always associate the word “syncopated” with her too.

My aunt is a great and faithful communicator and I have been very heartened to be a recipient of this over the years. In boarding school, both my mother and aunt were trained in the art of regular writing home, and I'm sure that's why they managed to maintain a bimonthly letter exchange for a very long time indeed when communication wasn't so easy as now.  Every fortnight a pale blue letter addressed to my mother with a red-and-blue border and Canadian stamp used to drop on the doormat of our house. And at some point over the following week my mother would sit down at the dining room table to answer on a pale green Irish replica -  This was the workaday air mail stationary of their respective national post offices and entailed self-sealing sheets to avoid the needless waste of separate envelopes.  Every square inch of the flimsy pages was written on, mostly in regular formation, but often there were words and sentences filing neatly up the sides of the letter to last minute postscripts above the "Dear Carmel" or "Dear Geraldine".  The date and home address of the sender,  by the way, were never omitted....   I didn't read the content, of course, but it needed no more than a passing glance to know the format was absolutely correct and nobody involved would expect any less.  

My mother's writing was small - letters printed, not joined;  she also had a tendency to stray into old Irish script (which was one of the subjects she taught, as well as the medium through which they both had learned), and her numerals were always Roman (Latin is her other subject). Aunt Geraldine’s was larger, slanted slightly to the right and fractionally less regular. Both were impeccably legible. They grew up in a small town where people didn’t always mind their own business, so I expect they kept the content reasonably factual.

I hear they're getting some rough weather and conditions in Canada, and while I'm sure they're all more than equal to it, I wish them all well!