“Nice sweater,” says my friend.
She's right. It is a handsome sweater, though maybe a little incongruous on me, who generally wear black: hand-knitted Icelandic wool, cream, with russet yoke and bands around the wrists and waist, outlines in dark chocolate, and hodden green highlights. It's also very warm.
I gave it to my father one year for Yule. A little Icelandic woolens store had opened up downtown on Nicollet Mall. This particular sweater caught my eye: it had a certain monumental quality to it, architectonic, even. Not once on any of my visits back East did I ever see him wear it. Oh well, I thought, a little sadly: too showy for him, maybe. It certainly wouldn't have been the first disconnect in our relationship, nor the last. It took us years to learn how to communicate with one another. Maybe there was just too much to be said.
Going through the photos after my father's funeral this summer, I noted with surprise that in picture after picture, he was wearing the sweater.
“Oh yeah, that was dad's favorite sweater,” my sister told me. “He wore it all the time.”
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What a bittersweet story that shares so much in such a short space.
