what I carried

 I brought a few things back with me from Illinois. 

The biggest of these was something I knew existed, but hadn't really seen. Way back (perhaps even before I was born), my mother knitted my dad a sweater. The original plan was for her to make herself a coordinating sweater but she said she never finished that one

I don't think my dad wore the sweater much - he always ran kind of hot, and eventually, he gained enough weight it would have been too small for him. But my mom packed it away and saved it, and she asked me if I wanted it. 

It's not the best color for me in the world - a red that borders on orange (I look better in reds with a bluish undertone, like cranberry color), but I will still probably wear it. It does have a few tiny holes (moths, I think) that I need to repair. 

But I have it, and I'm glad to have it

The cable-like pattern on the front and at the hem is not knitted in; it's embroidered on. It's not exactly like French-darning/duplicate stitch but it's similar. 

I also thought the photo I had of her knitting - which is probably from the early 1960s, shortly after they were married, and which was taken at his parents' house - was her working on this sweater but on closer inspection, I see that the design is an eight-pointed Scandinavian star, so it's a different knitted item:

Other than that, it was a bit of a melancholy day - I found out a long-time friend of the family (she had been the secretary in my dad's first office at Akron, and she remained friends with us after he moved to a different office, and she had kids about my age) passed away last month. And also that the daughter-in-law of my current minister has decided to end cancer treatment, that she's done, and has said she won't beat it and just wants to have the last however-long to spend with her family. And though I've never met her, it still makes me sad - she has a husband and a daughter she will leave behind.

And yes, also the run-up to Father's Day makes me a bit melancholy. Not nearly so bad as in 2020 when it was still fresh (and other things were making me hurt), but there is a little twinge there when I hear about "gift suggestions" and the like. 

And of course, just everything else in the world. I saw a reference to a poem called "The Two-Headed Calf" and I admit it made me sadder than it probably should have (I admit I'm not really sure what the poem means, other than maybe "even short lived things can experience beauty") and I can tell I'm kind of in a sensitive mood.

I'm trying to decide whether to try going down to Denison on Friday (it's supposed to be very hot on Saturday, and also it's the biweekly Zoom knitting get-together). On the one hand, a day out in a different place would probably be good for me. On the other hand, there's horrific construction on the streets in downtown Denison and I"m not even sure how to get there, and on that same hand, I really need not to be bringing any more crap of any kind into the house - I'm close to having the sewing room/walk-in closet totally cleared, but I still have to do more in the guest room and should tidy and declutter my bedroom before getting someone in. (A lot of this is my all-or-nothing thinking, my brain goes NO YOU CANNOT BUY ANY ITEMS ANY MORE OTHER THAN THINGS THAT GET USED UP BECAUSE YOU ARE LITERALLY HAVING TO GIVE AWAY BOOKS AND YARN TO MAKE ROOM but also I know never going out and doing things makes me sad, especially in the summer when I have very little day-to-day contact with people - only 2 or 3 of my colleagues are even on campus this summer, and one is busy with classes and the other with research)

Summers are just hard for me. They have been for a long time. Part of it, I think, is being out of a regular schedule where I need to be somewhere at a certain time and where I feel like I have a purpose. (This was also a problem during the early days of the pandemic). Part of it is just that I don't do heat well, and the fact that we're supposed to ALREADY hit 100+ F this weekend is not happy news.