Yarn Along

This blue cardigan is coming along.  I’m finishing up the cuff to the first sleeve today.  I was on the fence on how I felt about this coming along, but now that the first sleeve is nearly done, my excitement is completely renewed.  I cannot wait to see this one finished!  My only issue now is that I have enough yarn to finish up the sleeve, and then I have to think hard where I put the rest of it.  It’s not where it should be, and I know I have a few more skeins of it.  This was my travel knitting last spring to Colorado, and I packed some extra skeins along in case I had a lot of knitting time, which I didn’t.  I think it might be somewhere in my bedroom still.  So I’ll finish up the cuff today, and then hunt down the rest of the yarn!

I’m going through a treasure called I Believe in the Holy Spirit.  It’s one of my grandpa’s old books.  My grandpa was a church planter for the Lutheran Brethren Church and was involved in planting over a dozen congregations in both the USA and Japan.  He and my grandma moved in with us after my parents divorced, to help ease the transition, and help out my mom.  That was for 2 years.  Then when I was in jr. high, my family was going to a community (Baptist) church, and my mom really wanted me to study the traditional confirmation studies of the Lutheran Brethren church, so we drove 2 hours north to their house on the weekends so that I could study one on one with Grandpa in his office.

Oh, I spent hours in Grandpa’s office, surrounded by his books, studying God’s word, studying Lutheran theology, asking questions about life.  He’s the kindest man ever, and knows the Bible better than anyone I know, but he’s super tough to study with too.  He insists on memorizing everything, and takes a hard line on the truth.

Anyway, a few months ago, Grandpa had to be moved into a memory unit of their living place, as he’s been losing some short term memory and wandered off once.  So then Grandma moved into a smaller apartment near to him.  They had to downsize yet again, and my mom had the job of going through all of Grandpa’s books.  She sent out a big spreadsheet to the family, with a list of all of Grandpa’s books that they were getting rid of.  Everyone got to check all the ones they were interested in, and my mom went through the request lists and tried to distribute as many as she could.

Last month when my parents were visiting, my mom brought a big stack of my grandpa’s books that no one else wanted.  I’m such a book hoarder.  There are some real treasures in there!  I haven’t had much time to go through the stack though, so I paged through 4 of the books on the stack last night.  This one (translated from Norwegian sometime in the 1930s, it appears) caught my eye from the mere wear of it.  The spine is falling apart, and has been taped several times.  Many pages inside are falling out, and others have been taped in.

My grandpa’s heavy, “flowery” signature handwriting is seen in several of the margins, and he has gone through and underlined several things, several times.  I showed Knut, and he smiled and said sarcastically, “You think he ever used this in his preaching?”  It’s true, some of the things I read in here I’ve heard him say several times.  It’s like he’s next to me, and telling me about God again.  What a comfort.

One of the last times I saw Grandpa when I was in Arizona, he gave me one of his big bear hugs, and looked me lovingly in the eyes and said, “Now are you one of my daughters, or one of my granddaughters?”

“One of your granddaughters, Grandpa.  I’m Gretchen.”
He laughed, and hugged me again.  I pushed further to help him remember.
“Remember Grandpa, when I’d come up to your house in Dewey?  We would sit and study God’s Word together?  We’d talk for hours?”
He smiled, the twinkle still in his eyes, and said, “I bet I would have liked that.”

Linking up with Ginny’s Yarn Along.