Well gogo, I can't agree with your poem's sentiments cause I happen to quite like peonies and also the small of some, but I had to laugh at maifleurs response. Perhaps someday you will overcome your peony bias, if not then I guess we'll look for more poetry in the 'tree forum'?

I don't think anyone knows the poem.

Here's one you could paraphrase (sub "friendship" for "marriage" or maybe just leave out the first sentence all together). I'm sure there are some clever ways you could tie knitting and friendship together -- I'm just not coming up with them. Maybe others will have better ideas! Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret

Jankin, thank you for your kind words! I love reading poetry (although not necessarily interpreting what it means), but I cannot, for the life of me, produce it. My attempts are only exercises in frustration, and the only explanation I can come up with is that I just don't have any talent for it. The only poem I ever wrote that was halfway decent was about a cat. Oh well, I have to find another avenue to express myself. Vee, my experience in West Texas is nearly four decades removed, so I don't know how the situation is now, or has been more recently -- what with illegal 'immigration' and a general increase in crackpots the world over. But, at that time, I probably felt the safest in West Texas that I ever felt in any other place I've ever been. That's why I didn't think twice about ranging around the countryside alone in my car, or stopping and getting out of my car: One time I took a nap on a roadside picnic table and didn't hear a single car pass, but evidently there was at least one. I woke up to a man calling to me, "Ma'am, are you okay?" I said I was, so he went on to explain that he was a rancher, living down and off the road a piece, and had passed earlier and saw me, but he kept going. On his return trip, he saw I was still there, so he thought he should check to see if I was all right. I thanked him for his concern and he, with a wave good-bye, drove off. Thinking about this incident and several others, I wonder if I was tempting fate (some I cringe over now if I had done them in any other place or time). Of course there's no way of knowing if I was foolish, but lucky; so all I can say is that West Texans might seem eccentric to people who are more accustomed to trees and lots of the color green, but actual crackpots were (are) far and few between there.