Gifts, and the grace of friends

It does feel a little like a dangerous game, sending yarn to oneself through the mail. A little too seductively like a gift, and correspondingly encouraging of irresponsible behavior patterns. It’s one of the things – along with the effect on small-scale local commerce – that does concern me about shopping online. Not that I don’t do it: I just do it and worry at the same time. The puritan hedonist at work and play.

Well, today I laid guilt aside in the joy of receiving genuine, delightful gifts from far-away (fairytale?) friends. Firstly there was the truly unexpected joy of an antique locket from my increasingly dear friend the talented knitter/writer Mary in Toronto (an increasing fondness that is coincidental rather than correlated with her buying and blogging flatteringly about my yarn), which I immediately recognized as having come from the charming tiny happy, whom I have long admired, but from whom I have never actually bought anything.  It’s lovely, and somehow gentle in spirit.

Also in the same post I had a package from Vermont.  Sligo, another intelligent, talented knitter I have ‘met’ recently, and who will shortly be knitting me a shawl, in exchange for some yarn I sent her (a tangled web of transactions entirely the fault of the deeply enabling website, Ravelry) has in the meantime gratuitously and generously sent me a phenomenal care package containing fiber, fuses*, and a spindle, as well as some maple candy. I have wanted a spindle for a while, and have been eyeing up the possibilities for making one. I have to say I’m relieved and delighted to have been spared the trouble, and I’m sure I will have better results with this. In a (ahem) twist on the expected course of the afternoon that could surely have been predicted by no-one, I was unable to resist at least one minor attempt at spinning. Now I have a whole ‘nother thing to do while preparing dinner. (And I’ve signed up for a silversmithing class in September). Help!

Balancing out all this generosity, it turns out that the random gift I sent someone else two months ago still hasn’t shown up and must be presumed lost at sea. Pity. And of course the ‘proof of posting’ that I saw only last week has now gone missing.

*As for the ten-amp fuses: don’t ask. It’s part of the tantalizing ‘when I went to the Oscars’ sequence of stories…