We write for fun
A couple of examples using the title: A Stitch in Time:
A Stitch In Time (By Lindel)
When grandmamma fell from her plum tree, as old and gnarled as she, she didn’t fall far; her petticoat snagged on a branch and slowed her crash. It revealed her pink knee length bloomers, making her laugh at the theatre of it, not the under garment. She had no reservations and none of the tiresome mores of her age. Half Victorian, half Edwardian, she had been a great beauty, in music hall in her youth; and of course theatrical forever. When she landed on the tussocked grass, she curtsied and declared she was now abandoning her circus high wire career, and would take up "rag rugging" instead. All visitors, and there were many of them, must bring offerings of wool and snippets of material, of any colour as long as it was not brown.
”My plan is to make a runner for the stairs up to my deathbed, before I climb into it finally.”
There were twenty-three steep steps.
Of an evening she would sit with her feet on the fender, her leather sandals with holes hacked out to give her bunions freedom, listening to the wireless, and busy with her crochet hook. The rag rug grew. Step by step. Stitch by stitch. We, some of her many grandchildren, would hand her the randomly chosen, coloured wool lengths, and eat toast and plum jam, preserved in not quite clean jars, saved year on year. She would sing verses from her stage days. Some bawdy, some downright rude, catchy tunes, and a fine education.
"It’s the rich what gets the money, it’s the poor what gets the blame.” How true.
She was always on stage, we learnt never to sing higher, never to interrupt. Her wit was as sharp as her jam.
Nothing in her house was thrown away, except her husband of course. Charming, handsome, and a cad. He made the mistake of gambling away the housekeeping money once too often.
The carpet grew, stitch and step, onwards and upwards. She had a birthday; same old jam, same old songs. She showed us brown photographs of all her sons and daughters, ten of them. Each conceived after reconciliation. Except the oldest, who arrived from an act of love. Walter, Phyllis, Edgar, Victor, Hubert, Marjorie, names of an age. All on the stage, glamorous, funny, and coughing. Lots of them dead, war, consumption.
"Caught, from the props basket costumes that travelled with the players," she said. "Weston-super-Mare, Morecombe, Liverpool. Everyone hacking and wheezing, not a healthy time. But a great life, if you didn't weaken!”
At last, at the last, the runner was done and won the race to the top of the stairs. Tacks tapped home. The last stitch in time, just in time. She took to her bed and died.
She left us an envelope telling us that we were not Scots as she had always affirmed, but we were Sardines as the gambler had run to Glasgow from the Sardinian Mafia before they married.
A final joke?
She had us in stitches.
A Stitch in Time (by James)
I'm sewing as fast as I can. But I just can't keep up. The stitches are unravelling as quickly as I can repair them. No, that's a lie. They're coming apart more quickly than I can possibly sew. It's looking like a patchwork mess from where I'm standing. But I guess you see it differently because of the perspective. There's just not enough light for me to line up the seams properly. Everything is starting to overlap and intermingle. The tears are enlarging, the holes are widening, the threads are just splaying around out of control.
I cannot understand how this situation was allowed to develop. The whole picture was so beautifully constructed. Yes, there was disharmony here and there, and to be honest nearly everywhere, but all concerned had to admit in the end that it was a pretty astounding achievement. The way the colours swirled around, and even black became something beautiful. And it was so vast I couldn't believe how I had allowed it to go on and on and on. Maybe that's where the problem started. If you stretch something too far, if you put too much tension into the material, if you forget about the basic reasoning and the well tried and tested procedures, well, something is bound to give at a precious point.
I became careless. I overlooked the small strands, the little bits that drifted away. Never to be seen again. No amount of repairing can replace the irreplaceable. Once a strand has disappeared from my view there's nothing I can do to get it returned. I shouldn't have turned my back. I shouldn't have thought they could all cope with the myriad of minor problems they kept creating. But I was so confident the initial plan had been flawless. I didn't envisage this situation could occur. I thought I would always catch a thread in time, put in that stitch and no-one would notice because nothing would have slipped away or been irreversibly changed.
But I missed it. The final tiny, tiny, miniscule little piece that eased itself away - I missed it. I was preoccupied with something. I was dreaming of bigger projects. Yes, even bigger than this one. Something to really leave my mark behind. My eyes were closed, metaphorically speaking. And my ears. That little bit, it floated and twisted and dropped and rose, and fragmented, and pulled other pieces with it. The unravelling just gathered so much pace. When I did notice it I panicked, patching here, there and everywhere, with no order, no plan, no control. And the unravelling has its own momentum now.
Just think. One stitch could have been enough to save it all. If I had caught it right away. One stitch would have fixed it. No-one would have noticed. But look, there goes another cluster of threads, I'm losing great chunks now. Wafting off into nothingness.
The universe is unravelling before my eyes, and I, the creator, cannot stitch it back together again.