I cannot stand the sight of this sock. Though not pictured, there really is another, matching one.

When I met my husband, he was wearing these hand-tooled Italian shoes and grey and light blue striped socks. It was an odd combination and one of the things, frankly, that made me fall for him. I was young. These things happen.

Fast forward many years. The socks are long gone. I discover knitting. I see everyone knitting socks and loving it. I figure that I can knit socks and love it. I buy some grey and blue self-striping yarn and open my Ann Budd handy guide to knitting lots of stuff and get to work.

Well. I hate the yarn. Hate. It feels like plastic. It squeaks. I hate my needles. I keep snapping them (I'm knitting dk yarn on size 2s. maybe that has something to do with it). I buy bryspuns. I like them a little bit better. I knit the first sock, with much agony, and start on the second. The second ball of yarn is full of knots. So I painstakingly snip, measure, find another repeat of the appropriate color, and splice together yarn, damned near every color change, the whole damned sock. So much for 'self striping' yarn.

I snap the bryspuns.

I toss the socks in a corner and ignore them.

Now I'm knitting my husband a sweater. He loves it. He's happy. He's already requesting the next one. He remembers the socks.

I pull them out, reluctantly, and find that all that's left are the toe decreases. A year wiser, I whip out my addi 40" 2s and magic loop the toe, finishing them off.

They're too big. They slouch. I made a mistake when knitting the gusset - I decreased every round instead of every other round, making a tiny gusset, and a weird tight-yet-slouchy part at the ankle. He loves them. Which is all that matters. Kind of. Because now, when looking at his stripey feet, instead of my heart skipping a beat, I cringe a little. Am I really considering making another pair? Do I really believe a better yarn will help? Do I really think that I'm smarter now?

Or, do I dig deeper within myself and figure if I was able to learn to live with the imperfect owner of the feet, that I can eventually learn to live with the imperfect socks? I mean, the relationship has made it a decade. I doubt the lousy socks will. Will they?