This story is part of the new fundraiser and submission topic: Cast On!
Lauren L. Zavrel
I don’t exactly remember learning to knit. I had to be about seven or eight, and it must have been in Bend, Oregon, where my grandparents lived in a sizeable house overlooking the city and high desert beyond. As soon as you walked into the house, you could tell a pair on ancient people lived there; the place was immaculate, for one, and for two, it was full of uncomfortable furniture with floral patterns, velvety pillows and no indication that anyone had sat there in the past 20 years. The shelves had little coo-coo clocks and trinkets like ceramic birds and pictures of grandchildren (all six of us) you could tell were taken in the eighties. The floors were spotless like something out of a magazine and the carpets were the original outrageous colors: deep shaggy blue in the formal living room and a shorter thick beige in the bedrooms. Lace curtains, mahogany end tables, lamps from the seventies and paintings of exotic European places, and always, always the smell of flour and dumplings and pies and cotton balls and old sweaters: that’s where I learned to knit.
I do remember that Grandma’s hands were always knotty and gnarled-looking. She had terrible arthritis, but I just thought your hands look like walnut trees when you get older than Mom and Dad. Mom’s hands didn’t look like Grandma’s. Grandma was Irish and had wonderfully translucent skin. She didn’t look her age, but if you watched her try to use her hands for something as tedious as knitting, you could decipher her age in those arthritic fingers of hers. That’s where she put all of her oldness, I thought to myself.
I remember how magical it seemed to me when I finished two rows, one of top of the other, and the yarn turned from string to pattern to some type of mish-mashed cloth. It was as if Grandma had shared some secret wisdom with me, and it made me proud.
I never made much though, after learning. I would pick up the needles now and then and decide I would make a whole blanket! only to find myself distracted a few minutes later and casting the tangles aside.
Grandma died about twenty years after she taught me to knit. I still had my original needles and piles of yarn all tangled together in a box somewhere. Right after she died, my cousin, Grandma’s oldest granddaughter, became pregnant with her first child; Grandma’s first great-grandchild. I did not make the connection at the time, but right around then, I felt drawn to those needles. I longed for the clicking and the endless fidgety movement of the needles; my hands nearly itched for the yarn to travel across them and magically transform from mats of knots and neglected messes to warm hats and scarves and things. I went digging. I had to make a baby set for my cousin’s child.
It started there and never really stopped. Soon thereafter, I learned to crochet. The yarn and I became inseparable. There were days when I would crochet two hats in a matter of hours. Particularly in the winter months, never straying too far from the woodstove, I would curl up with the hook and yarn when my mind was too antsy for a book (which it often was and is) and stitch away until my eyes wouldn’t stay open. Somewhere in that time, I realized I kept at it to remember and respect Grandma.
I do a lot of thinking when I knit and crochet; the rhythm of the stitches traveling over the metal becomes just consistent enough to allow the brain to talk with itself, recall the events of the day, or the year, or deeper thoughts. The act has much in common with writing. It is such a simple thing, yarn to metal, just as pen to paper is such a simple thing in and of itself, and yet the psychology of the modern mind so diligently impedes progress if we are not trained to allow ourselves otherwise. Starting is surely the hardest part, but once we have the rhythm, it is simply a matter of endurance.
So as I think when I write, and the ideas begin to spill their way on to the pages, I think when I crochet. I started thinking once about why I never managed to finish any knitting project as a kid; I thought about Grandma, and all the other Grandmas who can sit, sit alone, sit in circles, sit and speak or sit in silence and create magnificent quilts and sweaters and dresses as if it were nothing. As if it were a task as simple as getting the mail…and then I realized how getting the mail for someone in their eighties may not be so simple. It made me think of how wonderfully happy it would have made Grandma to see her great-granddaughter, Chloe, crawling about in a sweater I had knit for her, because she had shown me how.
With that thought in mind, I keep crocheting; I will keep knitting, so long as my hands look like hands and not walnut trees.
