The Farmer & His Wife
Anne Taylor is a dab hand with most things, but not all!
WHACK! I brought my hand down hard on our kitchen table. I was frustrated more than annoyed.
“John, don’t do that again!” Anne had been working on her tapestry. She was just putting in a stitch when I made her jump. The needle went into her thumb.
Anne generally has a tapestry in her wooden frame. She picks it up and does an inch or two when she feels like it.
I’ve seen her take over a year to finish a small one . . .
Most of her friends enjoy tapestries, too. But they have more time than Anne has.
“How’s your tapestry going, Anne?” they invariably ask when they come to see her.
“It’s coming on.” Anne’s answer is always the same.
“Is that all you’ve done? When will you finish it?” “By Christmas.” “Which Christmas, though?” But last September, Anne meant it. She was desperate to finish the one she had in the frame by Christmas.
The previous year, one of our grandsons had no idea what to give Granny for Christmas. Then he’d seen a tapestry of a girl’s head in a shop window. It looked very like our only granddaughter.
He’d bought it and handed it over. With a grin, he’d told his gran it had to be finished by Christmas or she wouldn’t look like that any more!
Anne was doing her best, but she wasn’t getting very far. Then one of her really good friends came to see her . . .
“Anne, you won’t finish it at this rate! I’ll do it.”
When she and her husband left Anne admitted something to me.
“I was hoping she’d say that!” It was handed back before Christmas. To this day no-one knows it wasn’t all done by Anne.
So why was I so annoyed with myself that I thumped the table?
Our local paper often has competitions that involve large squares of jumbled-up letters. In that jumble you have to find five or six specific words. They’re usually simple to work out, but that evening there was one I couldn’t find.
Anne looked over my shoulder.
“What word can’t you find?” “Eiffel.”
Anne read the prize. “Would you like a weekend in Paris?”
“No. I’d rather go to the Wye valley any day.”
“Then just forget it.”
But I couldn’t. I sat and puzzled all evening.
And guess what? I finally found the Eiffel Tower!