There is a composition of wool and shells and string on a wooden frame hanging on my bathroom wall above the bathtub. I bought it in 1982 in London, Ontario at the Israeli pavilion of what passed for Caravan in that city at that time. For some unknown reason, it appealed to me then and I still like it more than a generation later. It’s hard to believe that much time has passed since I acquired it, but there’s nothing odd about that.
I remember some issue with the method of payment. The artist was charging $80, which was a fortune for a university student in those days (it still may well be). I gave her my credit card to charge and walked away with my purchase wrapped in brown paper. Several days later I got a call asking me if I wouldn’t please come back and pay for it again, as the credit card company was only allowing for purchases of up to $50, which means they should have put my card through twice for lesser amounts. I think I ended up writing a cheque and that was that. But it kind of spoiled an otherwise romantic moment.
The artist told me she had found the wool in a shop and loved it, gathered the shells and shark’s jaw on a beach and incorporated them into the FO that we have before us. Every so often I remember to dust it, but not frequently. I did so for the following photograph, as the sand dollars and starfish were a little grimy looking.
All of the above has been a preamble for explaining the name of this blog. My husband, who is a composer of some renown, wrote a piece for piano, violin and clarinet titled Of Water and Wood for a former university professor who played in a trio of that instrumentation. The finished piece incorporates a folk song, Lost Jimmy Whelan, about a young man who dies while breaking up a log jam on a fast-flowing river. His ghost greets the girl he was supposed to marry, bidding her a final adieu and telling her to get on with her life. It is a beautiful, haunting song and is arranged perfectly in the slow movement of the trio. The other two movements are fast and furious, more like the logs jamming up and then leaping free, flinging the boy to his death. It is quite difficult and has only been played a couple of times, never by the group that commissioned it. They ended up breaking up before they even got to the concert and my husband has always wondered if it was this piece that brought whatever vitriol was lurking to the fore. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
During our early married life, we moved around a lot as he did the sabbatical-leave tour of Canadian universities. During one such departure, while packing up our belongings, I wrapped the above wool and shell artwork in brown paper and wrote with magic marker on the front: Of Water and Wool, showing it to my husband and thinking myself rather clever. I have called it that ever since.
Faced with a text box demanding a name for this blog, the cursor blinking at me as though to say, “Hurry!”, I knew I had to come up with something original that befitted what I want to accomplish here. That meant I had to decide what that was. Blogging is not a new thing for me. I started my first online diary in 2003 and have had several more since. But none of them had been devoted to knitting. Needles and wool found their way into them because they are an integral part of my life, but I didn’t advertise those blogs; in fact, I purposely kept my readership small. Suddenly I felt I wanted to belong to a larger community, to communicate my thoughts on knitting and fibre to those of like mind. There would be no holds barred!
Of Water and Wood morphed into Of Water and Wool and then into Of Words and Wool. It is not the first time a composition of my husband’s has inspired a blog name. Check out Cassandra’s Tears before you leave. Sadly neglected, it contains my creative prose and is named for one of my husband’s violin sonatas. There appears to be a blog here already named “Water and Wool”, open to invited readers only. So I’m sure you won’t get us confused. Everyone is invited to read this blog. It’s a party!
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