WOOLY-MINDED
Every night when I got home, I found my mother with a skein of morling wool around her out-stretched arms to allow my grandmother to wind it into a ball fit for knitting from.
One night, I realised that neither of the two biddies knew me any more. Senile dementia was catching, they say, for at least one of them had recognised me that very morning, when serving the Rice Krispies.
But tonight it was all they could do to focus on anything but the spools of wool.
When they both died a few days later, I buried with their bodies the million million balls of wool they had wound; they had not actually got round to casting on the first stitches for my faceless balaclava ... before they themselves were cast off, snap and crackle.
(published 'Purple Patch' 1993)
