November 10, 2007
Saturday

Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially since they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.
                    — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864
                        American novelist, from The Marble Faun, 1859

I’m knitting again.

Like many young girls, I first took up the needles because my mother did. But I wasn’t a child, I was twenty-three. That was in 1970. In June that year my mother suffered a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine. Advised to give up smoking, she turned to knitting as a way to occupy her hands. She dispatched me to F.W. Woolworth with the directive to get a simple pattern, needles in the size suggested, and some inexpensive yarn. I can still see her in her hospital bed, bent over the lime green Coats & Clark knitting worsted I’d chosen, casting on a long row of stitches that would become an afghan. I knew so little about the craft that I bought the first several skeins of yarn I came to. When the piece was finished I saw the subtle but unattractive color change where a different dye lot had been introduced.

My mother knitted all that summer. Everyone she knew got an afghan, including a college friend who spent two nights at our house while he was in town interviewing for a teaching job. He wasn’t even a boyfriend. He didn’t get the job, and I never saw him again, but he departed Camp Hill the possessor of a fine acrylic afghan in rainbow chevron stripes.

Gradually, as she began to feel better and prepare to go back to work, my mother’s interest in knitting waned. Although she didn’t give it up entirely for several more years, she did slow her production, and she started smoking again. By that time I had become interested. Knitting and crocheting were fads in the early 1970s, and I’ll confess that I made up and wore at least one crocheted vest with multicolored fringe as well as a peasant style cardigan with bell sleeves and a matching babushka. One boyfriend got a scarf made of two panels of garter stitch joined by a section of stockinette. The second garter stitch panel was noticeably too short because I ran out of yarn and they didn’t have any more of the right dye lot (see, I’d learned!). I gave it to him anyway.

By the early 1980s the fad had crested, and I wasn’t knitting anymore. I was sewing couture clothing and home furnishings and doing crewel embroidery and counted cross stitch instead. And then it was 1985, and Lynn was born, and I put away all pursuits that required intense concentration and lots of small parts. When she was old enough that I might have gotten that stuff out again, I went back to school for another master’s degree, and devoted my creative energies to writing instead of needle arts.

In August of 2006 a hank of yarn hanging in a craft shop in Vermont caught my eye. It was one long pour of color, jewel tones of jade and magenta and sapphire like iridescent waves. When I caressed it, its smooth cotton sheen seemed to caress me back. I plunked down $65 and left with it, with no clear idea what I wanted to do with it.

It took me all the spare time I had during the writers’ conference to wind the 500 yards of beauty into usable balls. At home I started knitting a scarf. The yarn did not work up into nearly as gorgeous an object as I’d anticipated. Plain red and green seemed to take over, obliterating the turquoise and the fuchsia. I stopped work on the scarf and left the wound balls in a basket in my study, where looking at them continues to please me.

But now I was engaged by the craft again. I’d read about the meditative aspects of knitting, and I knew about knitting ministries, where knitters hold in prayer a particular person while they knit something that the person can use. Because the people being prayed for are often in crisis, dealing with cancer or a seriously ill baby or some other life complication for which they could use some comfort, a shawl is often the object that results.

Sometime between my sojourns in January and April at the Jesuit Spiritual Center in Wernersville, an idea came to me, sparked by a line from a song by Death Cab for Cutie: “You’ll be loved by someone you’ve yet to meet.” I would hold in prayer the young people in my life, Lynn and those like her, now in their early-to-mid twenties and standing in the doorway of their lives as independent young adults and forming what we hope are lifelong mutually sustaining relationships. And while I prayed I would knit them something they could use.

Most of my young friends, especially the young men, are not the shawl type. In March I visited the first apartment of one such young friend, sparsely furnished with little more than a futon and a kitchen table. Decorative pillows, I thought. Or afghans. My mother might have been on to something!

And I do feel at home in my own heart when I am working on a piece in the silence of contemplation. Knitting in the morning, before I pick up the pen and dive into the task of taming the swirling thoughts in my head, helps center me for the day, and I find myself calmer and more productive than when I do not take that time. When I finish a piece and send it off I feel a little sad, even though I can still continue to hold the recipient in my heart, and I have plenty more to work on. That I have so many young people in my life to do this work for is a blessing in itself.

When I got to Vermont this August I bought some locally produced yarn and began a pillow for the person whose bare apartment had given me the idea. I knitted not only during my morning C&C (Coffee and Contemplation), surrounded by birdsong out on the porch of my little house, but also during the readings and the lectures and some of the long conversations about craft that I had with writers both famous and as yet undiscovered. My young friend is a writer himself, and I thought that infusing the piece with all that literary atmosphere was somehow appropriate. I finished it in time for his birthday.

It can be awkward to present such a gift in person. You never know how someone else might react to being told they’ve been prayed for, especially when you’re not sure what their understanding of it is like. My spirituality has developed over a little more than twenty-five years now, since I stopped fleeing Him down the nights and down the days and down the arches of the years. When I was the age of the young people I pray for, it was buried pretty deep and quite well ignored.

“How long did this take you?” he asked of the pillow.

Six weeks and all my life.

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