I’d never seen a hook rug before, mind you.
Here’s something you don’t know about me: I used to be a wiz at the art of hook rugging, or if I am to be true to its own terminology—rug hooking.
As is usually the case in big families, I was most often the victim of sibling babysitting. It’s nothing short of a hate crime, trust me. Especially when you’re the youngest…and by a wide margin.
I was subjected to any number of embarrassing punishments (hook rugging only one among them) which, by sheer force of being such a young age, they each ran the risk of imprinting. And now, in this present day, rug hooking has become one of my secret hobbies and guilty pleasures well into my 30s.
My first experience with a hook rug involved an afternoon in which Dodie was commanded to drop her plans (which I’m sure involved nothing but twirling a broom in the front yard; she was eager to be on the flag team. Her cheerleader friends were dumbfounded: why would she want to leave Varsity Pep for the Band? There are some questions with answers meant to elude us, I suppose, to help us build character. That’s what my Papa Leon always said, anyway. Of course, he had polio).
Whatever the reason, I quickly found myself forced into completing a hook rug, in the loose shape of an owl. The rug itself with all its accoutrement was kept in an old collapsible bank box and hidden on the top of a shelf in the second hall closet.
I’d never seen a hook rug before, mind you.
I’d never even seen the second hall closet before, for that matter. I mean, inside it. I knew it was there, but it rumbled. It made scary noises, and I’d been told there was no floor inside, either. It was opened straight down to the foundations of the house. For more storage potential, and to give the “devil a way out.” Because apparently, the devil randomly visits Christian houses and you better make sure you behave or he’ll get you.
See, in Mississippi, there’s no need for bogey men, or monsters. We cut right to the chase and have the devil get you if you misbehave.
The things I believed, as a child.
I was, like, the best child to lie to. I questioned nothing. The reason for this is that we always told lies in my family with a tinge of truth, that gave it more of an anchor in reality. Because, lo and behold, the one time I braved myself enough to peek into the second hall closet, sure enough, there was no floor. Instead, there was box on top of box stacked two-dwarves-high, from the foundation of the house straight up.
I can say, without political correctness, the term two-dwarves-high. My Uncle Ran was a dwarf; it’s in our genetic pool, but just in the shallow end, only. I’ll talk about him another time, but you should know he built his own car, drank like a minnow (which in his case was equivalent to a whale shark), and was quite the ladies’ man. Seriously.
Also, he could pick up a dime off the floor using his teeth without bending his legs.
I guess that’s what got the ladies.
So, anyway…back to the story: it’s that afternoon, 1980-something, and I’m sitting on the couch with a sad looking, thick-threaded, half-hooked, barely recognizable owl, with part of a burnt orange wing and a sienna brown and yellow beak.
She’d apparently started this project and…that was all. (I am not surprised by this).
I was daunted, to say the least, but with my usual panache, the roots of which were beginning to show themselves even then at the green age of seven, I took to the rug, and dug around in the box and surveyed the “kit,” as it were.
Now, I don’t know what constitutes fancy in the world of the hooked rug, but the tools were, I would say, rudimentary.
However, I loved the weight of that hook needle: the top-half was covered in a sweet-smelling metal, and had a wooden handle, that bulbed at the end, filling the space inside your palm. Its bent tooth, the hook, was perfectly molded, and reminded me of Aunt Ru who crocheted with such agility, I fully believed her needles doubled as spy weapons.
I thought for years that Aunt Ru was a spy. I don’t know why, I just did.
I also loved the small, baby-sized sheers that came with the kit, in the event that you made a near-fatal mistake with an over-eagerly placed, and thus errant, strand of yarn. And to Dodie’s teasing and amazement, as well as that of her cheerleader friends, I sat there on that couch until I finished the blame thing.
I can only assume my ignorant patience as a “quiet child” is what kept me so enraptured with the process of pulling yarn through burlap-encased plastic molding, but, honestly, I have to say that I do remember enjoying it. Perhaps, Dodie thought it’d be a cruel thing to make me do, but I took to anything assigned to me with the relish of a devoted monk, desperate for a sacred blessing.
I excelled at everything because of this: church, the Lite Brite Challenge of 1988, Frogger, spelling. And it all started because of the hook rug. At its knee, so to speak, I learned determination, fortitude and the wherewithal to “get even” by “getting the job done.”
I also learned the value of subtle humor, which I think fed my desire to study high comedy in later life: Moliere, Wilde, et al. Being a small child, you can imagine the tableau: I was all but missing beneath the weight and size of the rug, but nevertheless, there I sat, calmly sleeping (I to this day tend to nap when a project is finished) propped up by the couch pillows, cuddled under a brown and orange yarn-owl, now completely recognizable as an owl, when she and the other girls came in from the front yard, with their flushed cheeks and the kitchen broom.
I imagine fawning took place. I was a beautiful child…but when I woke up, the rug, the box, all of it was gone. The family had returned and I was nestled gently under an afghan, still on the couch. I thought for a split-second I’d dreamed the entire thing, had it not been for a stray piece of yarn that had fallen between the cushions.
Orange and dangerous, the color of the wings.
The color of flight.
That right there, that idea of flight and freedom, got to me, even as a child.
And, it’s safe to say, on that idea, I was definitely hooked.
Still am.
Related Posts:
You Might Also Like:
- After that, I ate my chocolate cobbler in silence.
- “I’m the freaking boss of TV, just so you know.”
She said tetherball, and I immediately felt sorry for her.
Am I merely a heathen, now? Is that what this heartburn is indicating?
Comments
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Subscribe to the Comments RSS Feed
Advertise With Us
