Curlicues and smiley faces

Did it again. (As always, don’t miss the captions.)

I think this is like how, when I was a kid, I picked up the habit from my friends for a time of dotting my i’s with smiley faces, practicing a great deal on the sides of my notebooks so they wouldn’t look like grimaces. Sometimes I added curlicues sprouting off all kinds of random places on my letters as if to pull attention to the words themselves, wanting to shout visually, I wrote this! I put language into effect, I made this marvelous tool of writing carve beautifully ornate statuary out of my thoughts, come see!

Oh. Wait. That’s what a blog is, too. Never mind. Well anyway.

I often, when I get to the end of a shawl, leave the cast-off, just the cast-off, to do the next day. I have no real reason for that. It’s as if it were to flourish and curlicue and smiley-face it into an exclamation point: I did it! Look at this, totally effortless!

As if the one final row were what creating the whole of it had been about or the whole of the effort involved. C’mon. I can’t fool me, not that easily.

Or maybe it is that I don’t want the shawl to have any whiff of a slogging, endless grind attached to it. Rather, to have it be like a young girl holding it over her head, running into the wind with it Superman cape-ing behind, or her twirling around and around with it till she gets dizzy and falls down laughing, the silk turning into a landing parachute settling down around her.

I think I’ll run the last end in tomorrow.