Sylvia's Journal

I read (or rather listened to) Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad which lets Penelope tell the famous story from her perspective. Her story is, not surprisingly, quite different from the one that has been told for centuries, his story.

I felt a little like Penelope as I started to unravel a sweater I knitted all through last winter. I got the measurements wrong so I will start all over again. The wool for the sweater, a bag full of Shetland wool skeins, was a gift from Alison who had found it in her mother’s attic after she passed away. The nice thing about gifts, especially unnecessary ones, cousin Nancy wrote me on facebook, is that such gifts remind you of the giver. And so I am thinking of Alison on this nice fall evening.

The unmaking of the sweater is taking a long time. It is as much a labor of love and patience as the making was. Unlike Penelope, the unraveling takes place in clear daylight as there are no suitors to keep at bay. My Odysseus is right here with me.

There is another unraveling that is going on here and that concerns the elections. The foreign news media are reporting on the thousands of complaints that the Election Complaints Commission has received. There are stories about some very brazen and heavy-handed tactics used by the power brokers, government officials and candidate agents, some of them recorded on phone videos. I am beginning to suspect that the official announcement of winners and losers will be more tumultuous than Election Day itself .

There are a lot of loose threads and very little confidence that anyone can tie those up neatly. Re-knitting my sweater will be a whole lot easier.