Geraniums for Joan

2022

In early January of 2022 I got covid, turned 25 and learned my grandmother had passed within a handful of days. My response during isolation, knitted tribute to a prodigious woman and her beloved garden.

Featured in Saint’s Press A Geranium Miscellany.

Photographs by Dani Southcombe

It’s a more slapdash affair than my grandmother would have ever done. I sit in the January heat stitching seams while wearing almost half a kilo of alpaca wool. The windows are open for the cool breeze but it means I can hear every passing figure on the street. A troop of teenagers yell as they go past. Someone runs with desperation, then I smell the rain before I hear it. With the lights on and the windows open to the street I feel like I’m performing, a tailor in some scene from a Christmas window.

Now that the stitches are done I’m impatient for the piece to be finished, to wear the weave like a hug for the missing of her. I’m glad the house is empty. I’m glad the rain’s come.