martinimade

From Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, which I suggest everyone read, even if they don't think they care for the subject matter, which is the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley and despite the fact that Vowell seems to believe that knitting and crocheting are the same, which they are not. (And that loud thump you heard was my eight-grade grammar teacher fainting when she saw the preceding sentence.)

The McKinley museum displays the silk bag where Ida kept her yarn and knitting needles, complete with a photograph of her dead husband affixed inside. That is how she passed her widowhood. She sewed a picture of her murdered spouse into her knitting bag and then spent the rest of her life in a rocking chair, crocheting four thousand pairs of bedroom slippers, seeing her dead husband's face staring up at her every time she reached for a new ball of yarn.
I think about Ida, the constant looping of her hook through the yarn, every time I play with my souvenir from the museum that I keep on my desk -- the McKinley Memorial yo-yo. It is the only yo-yo I've ever seen decorated with the picture of a mausoleum.