3.27.2007

Spring has arrived. It has been in the 70's and 80's for the past few days. Spring rains, thunderstorms, warm breezes you could drink as well as many sunny days. I love Spring. Flowers are starting to come out and I planted some new things on Sunday. Just wonderful.

Last week, last Tuesday, was a gorgeous day. I went to the playground at a nearby park on my lunch. I was finishing a knitting project and an Eastern Indian woman sat down next to me. Nothing unfamiliar. I work with a lot of Eastern Indian families. There is a large population of families from India in the quad cities. This woman did not speak much English at all so we just sat next to each other; she was watching me knit. After a few minutes she reached out her hands to my knitting and I handed it to her. She began finishing what I was working on and she was quick! I held the yarn for her, feeding it when it got too tight. I eventually took out another project and worked on that for a while. So we were two ladies knitting in the park. It was really enjoyable. I'm not uncomfortable with non-verbal communication. Anytime I travel, this is bound to happen - that I run into someone that can't speak English - so I've become acustomed to finding ways to interact with people without necessarily speaking with them. So had this woman. She could probably understand more than she could speak, but her vocabulary was not wide. It was really enjoyable, though. I'm not a "women's place is in the home" type of girl, nor am I a raging feminist, but I do appreciate these sort of things that seem to fall most often into the category of "women's work" and it was really quite nice to be two ladies sitting on a park bench knitting.

It got me way farther with my hat project too.

2 comments:

DangerousWomen said...

this makes me want to take up knitting again - since the christmas scarf marathon a couple years ago, i have even forgotten how...

a nice story about us humans...thanks for that. :-)

Rebekah said...

leaves a picture in my mind! isn't it cool how we can "talk" without talking. bet it meant a lot to that lady who was far from home to share that with you!