Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

When I was eight months and thirteen days pregnant with my older daughter, my grandfather passed at the age of 86. My father forbade me from attending the funeral because I was very close to my due date, so I was at home the night before the funeral when my water broke at almost midnight. It was a period of unexpected, dramatic turns. She was two weeks early. I had yet to pack a bag, which is entirely me not wanting to do it. The car seat wasn’t installed yet. Half of our support groups would not be able to be there at all. Calls were placed to everyone from the doctor’s office to my parents to my mother-in-law, who did not answer, to my sister-in-law, who did. We trotted ourselves off to the hospital full of expectation and worry.

Nineteen hours of labor took an ax to my birth plan. Instead of our carefully crafted idea of what a birth should be, we went with the more expedient proposition of everyone making it out all right, no pun intended. In the end, we got to hold our charming, little daughter, and the world was right. 

She was mentioned in my grandfather’s eulogy as an example of life continuing on, a turn of events that gifted the funeral attendees with the unexpected game of finding the missing granddaughter. There are five of us and only one was missing that day, so people narrowed it down pretty quickly. My parents, sad though they were, were distracted by the birth of their first granddaughter and turned up at the hospital the next day. 

Days later, I went home to get to know my baby and figure out a sleep schedule. My mother went to work quickly breaking up my grandparents’ home and ushering their goods off into the world. With four daughters and seven of nine grandchildren present, there was no shortage of people to claim items and haul them away. I received a small, blue, wooden storage cubby that sat in my grandparents’ entry for as long as I can remember; my grandmother’s book of poetry in which she labeled the poems most important to her; and what must have been one of my grandmother’s most prized possessions: her good fabric scissors that had only ever cut fabric. 

Yes, those scissors. The ones that don’t even know paper exists except as an ugly scissor tale of warning to keep the new scissors safe. My grandmother’s scissors had not been sharpened for years but were still sharp as can be and ready for any fabric related cutting needs I might have. I took these perfect scissors into a house that would soon be occupied by two craft-happy toddlers ready to cut and glue everything. 

Adia, my older daughter, had a passion for cutting things up. She would have been hell on those scissors. She had boxes full of cut up magazines and flyers just in case there was a collage-making emergency, though no one ever had such an emergency until Hannah arrived. Hannah, my younger daughter, turned out to be the collage maker and spent a lot of time gluing things together. Somehow, this says a lot about who they are as people today.

Years of crafting went by, yet my children never even knew my grandmother’s scissors existed. I took my stewardship seriously. I didn’t want my children to be haunted by my grandmother’s angry wraith bent on defending her scissors! One does not cut paper with the fabric scissors, but my little girls were too young to know. I did not, and still do not, need my grandmother’s ghostly form walking my halls moaning this fact into the night. I think her spirit would quickly have been joined by a lot of other grandmother spirits all complaining about injustices to scissors, and I would have had to move. I hid those scissors away, safe in their original box until Hannah started quilting.

My grandmother came from a line of quilt-making women. As Hannah seemed to be joining the family quilt-making tradition, I brought out The Scissors. She claimed them as her own and has taken over their protection. She uses them only for fabric, thread, and yarn. They are still dangerously sharp and reside in their original box for safekeeping. 

I think Hannah will be a better guardian than I would be. She will actually keep them only for fabric; whereas, as time went on and the scissors were out and about no longer fearing toddlers, I will be tempted to just make a few cuts into paper here and there that will turn into opening boxes with those precious scissors. I only kept them safe for the years I guarded them by leaving them in their box, locked away from all dangers. They are safer with Hannah where they will be protected and used. 

I hope my grandmother looks down on her with affection and love as she sees her prized scissors prized again by a new generation of crafters who understand that nobody cuts paper with the fabric scissors.