Logic - Grandma Sally Style

Logic…Grandma Sally Style

I’ve been thinking about my dear Grandma Sally a lot today. Grandma Sally was my mother’s mother. She was a career dairy farmer, my amateur-pilot grandfather’s flight navigator, an enthusiastic card player and a card carrying republican. She made a mean ham and an irresistible fudge. She drove a Carmen Gia (how cool is that?!) that had a stick shift case that always reminded me of a plucked chicken (chicken which is what she cooked when she didn’t make ham or fudge). She died when I was in the 7th grade…way too soon according to me but a lot later than a lot of doctors had predicted.

Grandma Sally made a big impression on me and I seem to have picked up a lot of her ways. Like Sally, I’m fond of cheap beer, I have a potty mouth, a bit of a temper and a prematurely deaf husband (hmmm…go figure about that last one, or two) She was also a knitter. When I started knitting my mom dug these out of a box in the basement:




Sally made those for me when I was about 5. There was a matching vest and mini skirt that went with them. Again…way too cool, no? Sally was also famous for knitting my sister and me mittens every year for Christmas that got incrementally bigger as we did, all of the mitten got bigger except the thumbs – Sally was a bit that way (in me, this “quirk” has manifested in sleeves). For my 10th birthday she made me pillows using the mattress ticking and feathers from HER parents’ bed. I hate to over use the “c” word but I must…could she be any COOLER than that?! Those pillows have been with me ever since. She made a quilt for my sister, apparently, using all the material she had made dresses for my mom and aunt with when they were children. I say “apparently” because I always thought she gave that to me but that, well, is a classic example of “Lynn Logic” according to my sister…but I digress.

Sally had an interesting sense of logic, that I also seem to have inherited (or learned, depending on where you are in the nature/nurture debate). Sally used to tell my dad after he finished his first Chief Oshkosh Beer and went after a Pabst Blue Ribbon, “Ohh, Tony! Don’t mix your alcohol, you’ll get sick.” When we were driving in the Carmen Gia and went under a bridge she always insisted that we all duck. Also, in the Carmen Gia, when the gas was running low, she would drive faster.

I finished the second of a pair of socks made from the great Helsinki yarn today. As I was getting toward the end I realized I was knitting faster. In fact with each round I was knitting faster and faster. Then it hit me. My yarn balls looked like this:








Total Grandma Sally logic if there ever was - running low on yarn, knit faster, of course!

Grandma Sally, look! I didn’t run out!



This picture, in addition to the socks, shows what I’ve been doing while David has been out of town. Checkers-N-E -1?