A Purple Blanket

In January, I went home for a weekend because I found out that Buster was dying of cancer. It was strictly a sort of prescient sitting Shiva, so while I was there I did nothing but take pictures, appreciate Buster's eyebrows and idiosyncrasies, toss the flippy flopper around (he wasn't really strong enough to play fetch, but he wanted to play with it, nonetheless), and knit.

I just now finished the project that I started that weekend. I can't believe that Buster has been gone for six months. It's maddening to think I'll never, ever see him again. But knitting this blanket has been kind of therapeutic. Somewhere in those 61,000 stitches, you concentrate your loss into the creation of something new, however inadequate.

Don't misunderstand and think I'm depressed about finishing the thing or that I knitted it for therapy. After a while, I thought it would never end, and now HUZZAH! it's done, and it owes its existence to the fact that I enjoy knitting. I'm just sort of awed by the difference between the day I started it, with Buster at my feet, in Colorado, and the day I tied off the last strand, here in Panama, half-way through grad school, both of my dogs gone, and my best friend is pregnant with her second baby... life marches resolutely forward, unimpeded by the desires or the disappearance of a dog.

Blackened Rings
By Virginia Hamilton Adair
Once, to come so far

up tilted prairies to the mile-high

beginning of the barrier peaks

was to cry farewell until death do us join

to all the faces

the little fences of the East.

Between the tears on the homespun blanket

and the deafening silence of the stars

the alder-smoke marked time westward:

each blackened ring spelled sleep.

And the day started with a puff of frost

the sigh and sign of waking.

I came, I saw,

but the conquering took a long time.

Out of the bones of young men

the lodgepole pine;

out of the girl who groaned

entering her final stillness

the alder yielded its bark to the winter deer

branches for lonely fires

and a slight song of leaves.

Now to return is not impossible

the slow wheels having grown wings;

but my blood tells me that the trail ends here

at the vast waters of the sleeping sun.

How should I turn again past death

past life, go down the grainlands

to that narrower sea?

finding the dreams have faces

and the places fences

and myself a mere hovering

spun of some traveler’s frosty breath

he pausing

high on the crest

of one of the great passes

looking for the last time

both east and west.