What is small and...

tubular and part of a sweater?

A Sleeve.

I am thrilled to bits to be on this sweaters sleeve, and even more thrilled to see it moving along so fast. Its not looking like a particularly fat sleeve, but it is the ribbing doing that. It will fit the wearers very slim arms.

Mr. Needles is away today following his fall pursuits but immediately before he left, he asked me to make him something. This something has warped my world and made me stop and think about parts of a life, and expectations and the funny things people do that you really don't expect them to do.

Mr. Needles asked me to make him a vest. Not only that, but Mr. Needles asked to make him a vest, much like his father had left behind after the last family wedding. He said he kind of liked the way it looked (the article in question was commercially made).

I admit, I did just sit there a little dumbfounded. To say that my mouth was hanging open would have been a little bit of an understatement. I have after all just taken a Fair Isle workshop, and will be taking a second workshop given by Fiona Ellis on colour placement in Fair Isle work. The world obviously has deemed that this will be my path because the vest in question was a Fair Isle look vest and the part he liked was the little designs in it, and I would I need the vest as a pattern, says he.

My being dumbfounded was not only because of the intersection of events, it was more.

Mr. Needles does wear vests, the large down filled, many pocketed vests of the northern outdoorsman, but all our lives he has pooh poohed the idea of knitted vests and cardigans. Those items were for other people, for older people. Not that any one doesn't look fine in vests, it just was the norm in our small town world.

Mr. Needles and I are in the time of our lives where we are unconsciously making choices 'older' people would make. That they are sensible choices does not take away from the breathtaking reality of it all, that one is older I mean. It really is just that the day you realize you are making older people decisions, you really ought to feel just a little more like the 'grownups' we envision in our childhood.

But we don't. We just feel like us. We are older, we both feel warm with the chill off our backs, I in my shawls and him, soon in his vest.

We are in the vest time of our lives. Sigh.