Puzzling: legacy story # 2

I am stitching up my purple, Big Sack Sweater, and so far, so good--I'm liking what I see. Really, this is the first pattern I have significantly altered, using what I have learned about knitting to modify the pattern to how I want to wear this sweater. I lengthened the body, knit the sleeves in a tube to avoid having to seam them, and am changing the rolled neck to one that is longer and ribbed. I like a challenge to puzzle out in my head, and making this sweater provided me a fun, winter knitting riddle. I know my tendency to mull things over until a solution emerges comes directly from my father, thus providing me perfect opportunity to pen a logical bookend post to the last one which ended up as a homage to my mother.

An engineer by training and profession, my dad could, as far as I was concerned, fix anything. He wired and rewired our house, designed and constructed a sturdy fence still standing in the yard of my childhood home, even though Mom and Dad moved from there over 15 years ago. Dad repaired electronics, landscaped and maintained the "grounds" of their Pugh Street home, kept the plumbing working, and the flat porch roof and gutters cleared of snow and leaves. He built his adoring (and adored) granddaughter a dollhouse that he designed and painted to look precisely like our 1815 home in rural Huntsville, PA. His workshop was neat, ordered, and magical; frankly, it was a bit of a mystery to me.

But Dad did not only tinker with radios and wood. He baked bread, scrubbed the kitchen floor (on his hands and knees), and ran the vacuum cleaner (all the time!) My fondest memories of him are set in his "study," a bookshelf lined, knotty-pine-paneled room where he spent hours reading, writing, and pondering. Some of my most serious conversations with my father occurred in this room. I have always considered Dad quite conceivably the truest Renaissance man I have ever known.