Last night I started joining the squares of the Namaqua Blanket.
Forty-eight small blocks in six colours, eight blocks per colour. Four with green centres and four with soft yellow centres within each colour group. Thirteen large blocks, two per colour, with one colour getting a third. Half with green centres, half with yellow. It is a reasonably complicated arrangement to keep track of, and in years gone by, I would have spread the entire lot out on my big dining room table and worked from there.
There is no big dining room table. There is a camping chair, a lap, and blocks stacked in small piles on every available surface around me. I am halfway through the joining. My mind, as it always does when my hands are occupied, went somewhere else entirely.
It went to the table.
The Farm
We bought a small farm in 2015. It had been repossessed by the bank and had been standing empty for some time before we found it. Empty is perhaps too gentle a word. It had been vandalised. It had been neglected even before the vandalism. We walked through every building on that property the day we took possession, some of which had been through a fire, all of which had been through years of nobody caring.
Behind one of the stores, we found a heap of parquet floor blocks. Just lying there, rotting in the open.
I have always dreamed of a house with a parquet floor. Here was an entire floor’s worth of blocks, abandoned and slowly disappearing into the earth. We saved what we could. It was not enough for even one room in the house. So we kept them. One of those farm decisions you make because you cannot bring yourself to throw something away that was once beautiful, even if you have no immediate plan for it.
On a farm, you make a great many of those decisions. The storeroom becomes a thing of legend as a result. Ours was a place that was wonderful to explore and slightly terrifying at the same time. Pandora’s box had nothing on that storeroom.
The Table
We had an imbuia dining room set. Table, chairs, lazy susan, buffet. A proper set, the kind that anchors a home. My son had his eye on it from the moment he first saw it, and made his feelings known on a regular basis. Eventually we gave it to him. We had to replace it.
My husband had an idea.
He found a carpenter willing to take it on. The frame and legs were made from Blackwood. The top was inlaid with our parquet blocks. The floor that never became a floor became a table instead.
It seated ten people. If we really needed, we could fit four on each long side, and three on each short side, making it fourteen! The day it was delivered, we were seven adults, and we genuinely had a difficult time getting it through the door. It was extraordinarily heavy. We laughed a great deal. We were probably also slightly alarmed.
What Happened Around That Table
I remember family meals when all the children came to visit, and the table was finally full the way it was designed to be.
I remember the yarn chaos. Crochet and knitting socials, with the table completely covered and nobody minding at all.
I remember writing my two crochet books. Sponsored yarn spread from one end to the other, half-finished projects in every direction, pattern notes somewhere underneath it all.
I remember quilts laid out flat for inspection, taking up every centimetre.
I remember granny squares, dozens of them, being joined into a blanket across its surface. Properly. With room to see the whole layout before committing to a single stitch.
When we sold the farm, we sold it with the table.
It was too big to take anywhere. It belonged to that place, built from materials found in that place, and it made more sense to leave it there than to try to move something that large into a life that no longer had room for it. I hope whoever sits around it now feels some version of what we felt. I hope the meals are good and the conversations are long and the yarn chaos is spectacular.
We always say: imagine if these walls could talk.
Imagine if that table could talk. Its stories would be something.
Where I Am Now
I am halfway through joining the Namaqua Blanket. On my lap. Blocks stacked around my camping chair in small piles that I have to be careful not to knock over. No layout spread. No overview. Just working from a plan I have memorised, trusting that it will come together the way I have imagined it.
Would a big table make this easier? Enormously.
Do I want to go back? No.
I am, genuinely and without reservation, a happy camper. We are touring South Africa in our caravan, waking up to different views, living slowly and on purpose. This is the life we chose and I do not regret a day of it.
But sitting here with blocks in my lap and piles on the floor, I think about that table more often than I expected.
It earned its stories. I hope it is still collecting them.
