Wool - Gathering

        Our teacher Margaret came back to Portland after visiting New Zealand and told us of the work she’d done, the different culture she had experienced. When she said that she had sheared sheep there, I asked her if the clothes made by wool there were cheaper, and she showed me a pair of woolen socks that she had bought for $26. I thought that was very expensive though they were very soft and smooth, but she liked them very much, said that they were very comfortable.

        After the class, I was still thinking about the cost of the socks and it reminded me of a pair that I had had:

        When I was a teenager in China, we all wore school uniforms with long white cotton stockings, but I had heard that English men always wore white woolen knee socks with the kilts they occasionally wore, and I thought it would be interesting to were a pair of those stockings while I was home. They were very popular but much too expensive for me, so I knitted a pair with cotton yarn. They were the same as the men wore but much cheaper. Then I made some for my brothers and also taught my mother how to make them.

        Winters were very cold in Shanghai, so I eventually started using wool, as they were much warmer.

        Later the school’s rule about stockings was changed and the girls were permitted to wear silk stockings. Most of the students, however, continued to wear long white cotton stockings as they were less expensive. Few of the families could afford to buy silk ones. I only had two pairs of them and they were always getting runs. All of us learned how to repair them so they’d look like new, but it was time-consuming, and I decided to go back to wearing the white cotton ones.

        When I became a teacher, I no longer had a problem with what to wear on my feet; I could afford anything and chose to wear woolen socks in winter and cotton ones in summer as we wore pants and whatever we wore was scarcely visible.

        One of the students had discovered that she could knit stockings using double threads, and she felt that was much cheaper than buying ready-made ones. I told her that if she would add in the time taken to knit them they would be more expensive, but I didn’t convince her.

        In the 1960’s, my husband worked in Guilin for about two years, and as I was unpacking his suitcase when he returned home I discovered that his socks had many spots on them. The white socks had black spots and the black ones had white spots. All the spots resembled sesame seeds, but I thought that he just hadn’t washed them properly. I was surprised that he hadn’t noticed that they didn’t look right; he just didn’t seem to be that kind of man.

        I scraped on the spots when he wasn’t watching, but I couldn’t move any of them. Looking at him with a smile, I said, “Did you eat so much sesame that you got it stuck on your socks?” His response was that the spots weren’t sesame seeds; they were stitches. It was then that I looked carefully at the spots and saw that each one was a little stitch. He had been very careful in repairing them. I had to apologize, but couldn’t help asking why he hadn’t used the right colors. He just smiled and said that using a different color had been helpful because of his myopia. He was quite proud of himself for thinking of doing it that way. He claimed it was an invention.

        Those times of mending socks are part of our past now; when we get a run in a pair of stockings, we just throw them away.

        While I was thinking of my involvement with stockings through all those years, I was wakened from all that wool-gathering when the door bill rang.

        That brought me back to my present life once again.