Of Mice and Men

It started with a skein of yarn.  It's been a Whitman kind of week and I'm more full of "multitudes" than even my normal wont, so bear with me.  The yarn: a laceweight of course, to be ordered for the new location when my home base yarn shop moves down a few roads.  Soft, a mohair and silk blend, I think, ridiculously luxe with its scatter of glittering "stars," the kind one goes into a specialty shop to feel up and covet but never actually--gasp!--buy and knit.  Mentally smacking myself upside the head, I set my eyes on a dusky rose.  Even though I had no business thinking about another lace shawl with Project Mozart grinding to a halt and shop samples churning away in baby alpacas and hand-dyed wool/silks and me already far behind on mystery shawl KAL.  I couldn't help it.  My silly lace-obsessed brain started designing.

I wanted to call it "Night Blooming" as a play on the dusky rose with stars colorway.  Like jasmine and other sweet-smelling nocturnal blossoms, and in keeping with a pattern consisting of a flowery Estonian lace border and a body that's essentially yarn-over/k2tog/ssk "stars."  Also in keeping with the fact that, since it starts with the border and works its way up, you get the hard part over with and then start flying by night since your homework is much easier than your classwork.  Speaking as a frequenter of a yarn shop that does classes.

And that was that.  Except, unfortunately, for the poetry.  It's the end of National Poetry Month, and I spent yesterday evening reading Whitman and this morning walking the beach for inspiration and performing something of a brain dump.  But while I love poetry and poets and all that jazz, it occurs to me that if you were to moor me on a desert island with the essentials but nothing but books of poetry for company, when someone finally came to retrieve me I'd have accomplished nothing.  Or close to nothing.  It has to do with literary choices.  I need my stories.

Anybody who knows me or my bookshelves knows I gravitate toward sci-fi and fantasy.  Probably always have and always will.  My favorite movies and TV shows reflect that, as does my list of favorite authors, which includes among them Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and, yes, in spite of the heat he's gotten lately for his sociopolitical rantings, Orson Scott Card.  Ender's Game struck a chord.  I can't help it.  It (and, yes, Speaker for the Dead too), for lack of a better word, spoke to me.  Spoke to the plight of the gifted child who was always bound to be a little bit different, who had the potential to be the loneliest being in the universe.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  I'm no Ender Wiggin.  Everybody knows that.  I was your standard gifted classes socially awkward physically weird nerd kid.  But sometimes I wish I were a bit more like Valentine.  That's right: Valentine.  The turned-over, soft-spoken middle child, the anonymous mover of worlds and peoples, storyteller of an entire species, and above all, even when pressed into service as the mouthpiece of hate, an agent of love.  The character who, I sometimes wonder, might after all be the one her creator identifies with most.  Demosthenes.  Think about it.

Valentine.  My little 18-stitch-repeat lace border naturally wanted to form itself into hearts.  Valentine Wiggin, blooming and coming into her own among the stars.  How could I resist?  And so, if I ever manage to get this shawl designing scheme off the ground, Valentine, this is for you.