Knit, Purl

I am not an arts and crafts kind of person. Hand-made things that I create tend to look like the projects of a drunken 10-year-old.So you can imagine my resistance when my friend, Jill, wanted to teach me how to knit. I put her off. I made weak excuses. I remembered old wrist afflictions, but she wore me down. Shesat on my couch and taught me using a children’s rhyme that goes something like this: In through the front door, once around the back, in through the window
and off jumps Jack! My first row of stitches was awkward, loose, and slow. This is where I usually quit and decide that knitting/piano lessons/natural childbirth is not for me, but Jill was so excited that I didn’t want to ruin the fun for her sake. You can guess what happened next. I got better. And here is the funny part: I love knitting. I love it like strong hot coffee, Saturday mornings, and fluffy kittens all rolled up together. It’s my new thing.

For the past two months, I have knitted up a storm. At first, all I could do were dishcloths. Then I tried scarves, which are really just very long dishcloths. Frankly, I am still at the scarves stage, but I plan to move onto baby blankets any minute now. I don’t know what is so intoxicating about the process of knitting. The obsessive-compulsive in me loves the rules, the orderly rows, and the repetition. Then there is the joy of yarn slipping through my fingers and around the smooth wood of the needles. And the yarn! I’ve never given much thought, well, any thought to yarn before. Now when I see stacked skeins of yarn I get the rush of a child with a brand new box of crayons.

Speaking of yarn, here is a bit of word etymology: the word “clue” used to be the name for a ball of yarn. It comes from the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, gave Theseus a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Labyrinth after he killed the beast at the heart of the maze. Clue figuratively means, “that which points the way.”

Since I’ve become a knitter, I’ve discovered that there is a community built around our common threads. Now that I can distinguish the difference between a factory-produced or hand-knitted piece, I find that I regularly stop strangers in public to ask about their hat or sweater like it was their new baby. Not one person I’ve approached has found this remotely odd. Last week, my husband stood beside me patiently at the grocery store among the strawberries and the tomatoes as a lady and I chatted about the merits of knitting versus crocheting. We each took a different side, but there were no hard feelings. Needleworkers stick together like that.

I’ve been knitting my way through the anniversary of my mother’s death, the good news of a friend’s pregnancy, and the daily detritus of life with children underfoot. Sometimes I make a mistake and have to unravel a few rows, but I’ve learned that it’s never too late to make a fresh start. There are second, third, and fourth chances in knitting. I don’t know where this habit of knotting together strands is leading me, but I am stitching my way there happily. I know that it fills some fundamental urge I have to construct, to create order, and to commune. Sometimes, it feels like prayer—my hands together offering up the best and worst I have. I find no more peace than this: a quiet moment in the soft grey hours of early morning as I whisper to myself, “knit… purl…knit.”