Free-Range Knitter (6 page)

If I just quickly looked at my hands, it looked like my left hand was still, just holding the needle, and that my right hand moved its needle into the stitch, flicked forward to wrap the yarn, then pulled back and took the finished stitch off the left needle. Three steps. In, around, off. In, around, off. That’s all I was trying to replicate. In, around, off. Any idiot could do it, and that’s when I noticed something.

My left index finger. I thought that I had just been holding the needle between that finger and my thumb, but suddenly I became aware that my finger was doing something. As I began each stitch, that finger subtly moved the stitch along the needle to the tip, holding it for the right needle and separating it from its peers. I stared at my hand. This explained a lot. When I tried to reverse my knitting and learn a new way to do things, I hadn’t even thought about this. I had no finger doing this job. I was
just doing “in, around, off.” I stared at my finger. How incredible that this finger had this whole vital knitting job that I didn’t even know existed. Here I am, having knit a hundred million stitches over decades of experience, and I didn’t even know that finger was vital. No idea. I knit another stitch, watching my clever index finger do its thing. I sped up, and so did my finger. Suddenly I noticed that my thumb was active as well; that while my index finger moved the stitch to the tip of the needles, the thumb on top held back the others. I looked at my other hand, and while I knit I got enchanted. I know that sounds terribly self-absorbed, but I can’t help it. All my fingers had jobs. None were entirely passive. It was a beautiful, complex finger dance, and I had been doing it this whole time. I was so oblivious that I didn’t know that the whole knitterly house of cards was going to come crashing down if I changed even one wee thing.

I switched the yarn to my other hand, ready to try again. I got it now. What was going wrong was that I couldn’t just decide to do my finger dance another way. There were a thousand little tiny movements going on, and all of them were minute, intricate, and interrelated. My fingers were obviously smarter than I was, and I just needed to hang in there long enough for them to catch up with what I wanted. Once I knew how complicated the whole thing was, how many things needed to be relearned in another way to compensate for making a change, I felt way better, and I gave myself the time to learn it. Or at least I stopped throwing stuff around quite as often.

After that day, I started watching knitting. The way I knit was all designed by my particular brain and body to do things the way that was best for me, and I reasoned that there was no way that anyone else could possibly knit the way that I did. I was unique, and if I was … so was everyone else. In that instant, my obsession with knitting, as a series of movements, was born.

I took to watching people while they knit. (I tried to be discreet. I may not always have been successful.) I began to investigate theories. What did the way you knit say about you? Do you knit the way you do because of personality traits? Physical traits? Were people who were tight knitters wound tightly themselves? Were loose knitters relaxed? I looked at the body posture of knitters, the way the needles sat in their hands, the way that they wrapped the yarn around the needles, and as I watched, an enormous thing began to reveal itself. No two knitters knit the same way. Even knitters who on the surface appeared to have identical styles—both holding the needles the same way, both carrying the yarn in their left hands, both wrapping the yarn with the same movement—on examination they were worlds apart. One would lean forward over her work with rapt attention, the other would lean back in her chair. One would push stitches along with an extra finger, the other would move stitches with the needle, resting her finger along the back of her work. Alice was quick; Margaret made large swoops with her throwing hand; Hannah scooped up the yarn in a tiny, efficient movement; Genevieve kept her work close to
her because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses, but Jane holds it farther away because she has an ample “front porch.” Ken has no such barrier. They were all unique, their own style grown up from who they are and what they’ve learned and how their own stuff works.

I have been watching knitters semiprofessionally for years now, and I have yet to find any two who knit in a way that is absolutely identical, and that’s pretty staggering, because when you think about it they are all getting exactly the same product. All of them. If I asked fifty knitters to knit me a square of garter stitch, knit at five stitches to the inch, I would get fifty very identical squares. I would never in a million years be able to see the degree of personality that went into making them. I know that I probably wouldn’t even be able to pick my own out of the pile. In the absence of a very personal error or two, they would all be indistinguishable and identical, and that makes me so happy that I almost laugh out loud.

Think about it. People have been knitting on Earth for, at our best guess, about a thousand years. I won’t even begin to try and calculate how many knitters that means there have been, but know that at present there are about 50 million people who know how to knit in North America alone, and we’re less than 10% of the world’s population. Think that over, add in the rest of the world (remember, China is superbig, and knitting is superbig in China), multiply it by that thousand years, and wonder how many tens of thousands of millions of knitters
have all held the needles the way you do today, only nothing like you do. Every single one of them, all knitting. All knitters use needles, all knitters use yarn. All knitters wrap the yarn around the needles and pull a new loop through, all knitters, all millions and millions and millions of them, making billions and billions of stitches that all look exactly the same when they are done, and not one of them, out of all that human history, not a single soul is doing it exactly the way that you do.

I know this, because I’ve been looking. You should, too.

1. Call your modest collection of handknit socks your “real” socks.
   

2. Offer to drive any time you’re in a car together.
   

3. While you’re driving, offer to stop by the yarn store, just for fun.
   

4. Say, “Man, I love the smell of wet wool in the morning” and really mean it.
   

5. Develop a fetish for handwashing things.
   

6. Get a T-shirt that says “Moth Hunter.”
   

7. Claim that you love how cozy your home looks with all this wool in it.
   

8. Tell your knitter that you think knitting charts are not just clever but dead sexy.
   

9. On Valentine’s Day, know that red sock yarn is cheaper than roses and lasts a lot longer.
   

10. Knit, but only a little, and with your own damn yarn.
    

Sitting here, nestled in your warm embrace, I realize that you have come into my life to complete me. There have been so many times in the past when love didn’t work out for me, that I almost forgot that it was possible to feel like this, to know real, perfect love. I’ve suddenly learned that we can look forward in our futures and try to exert control over the way thing go, and spend so much time planning how we will get the things we want, but the truth is that some relationships either work out or they don’t, and a lot of that is destiny, far beyond what I can predict.

Knowing you and the warmth you’ve brought to my life has also proven to me that when things work out, it isn’t only destiny, because the relationship has had enough work put into it that the fit has gotten to be just right. You can’t let the thing get so big that it consumes everything you’ve got and smothers your own self, but neither can you allow it to become
constricting, limiting, and small, becoming a thing that makes you feel like you’re the wrong size yourself. For so many years of my life I have worked to get something just like this. Opening myself and everything that I had to the possibility, trying to get rid of the old patterns I kept falling into, and hoping that this time, when I began a new relationship, it would work out, even though there have been so many disappointments. I knew I had what it would take to make this happen, but over and over I have been so hurt when it didn’t turn out to be what I thought it would be.

It’s terrible to think of, now that I have these days with you, coming out on the other side of all those times the magic didn’t happen, times when I found that something that had seemed so right turned out to be harsh or too difficult, times when I made mistakes and endured injustices that were such an insult to my soul that I was almost afraid to try again. I was so frightened of the cost and wasted time that I had trouble even imagining a relationship that could end up being this deep—rich love that goes so far past a simple infatuation.

None of this is to say that what we have was easy to get. Heaven knows we’ve had our difficulties getting here. I know that you were as frightened as I was a few months ago, when it seemed like everything was coming undone. Loving you has taught me that sometimes you have to take calculated risks, to gauge what is possible. To extend trust to the process that has brought this into being. When I first saw you, I could only guess
at what it could all become; you seemed so strong and sturdy, I wouldn’t have ever guessed that you had such a soft side.

I may be a hopeless romantic, but I am old enough not to be naive. I know how seldom this perfect a love comes into anyone’s life and how lucky I am that it worked out for us. I know, too, that time will pass, and we may someday be parted. Nothing can last forever, and that only makes you more of a treasure to me. You have taught me not to give up. You have taught me to open myself up to the wonder of a relationship that makes me feel so complete and safe when you wrap yourself around me.

Until I met you and learned that I could learn to do this, realized that I wasn’t going to be left out of something I saw other people finding, there was an empty place I didn’t know I had. Until I met you, I was a little cold.

You are really the best sweater I’ve ever had.

Love,
Stephanie

P.S.: Don’t take the new pullover on the needles too personally. I have enough room in my heart for two.

My friend Denny is knitting. I love, with a helpless and unreasonable passion, the way she knits. I just love it. The way Denny knits breaks all the rules about knitting I’ve ever been told or made up for myself. Denny holds her hands, palms down, with her fingers curled loosely under, like for sleep. The needles rest in the curls of her fingers, so relaxed that I am constantly surprised that she doesn’t drop them. The yarn she is using, a softly spun alpaca, snakes up from the handwoven basket by her feet and snakes forward along the line of the right needle toward its tip, passing under her palm and through the curve of her fingers. When most people knit, they tension the yarn somehow; we’re all told that it’s necessary to come up with a system for this, or our work will be uneven or loose. You need to press it between two fingers or wrap it around one of them or do something, but Denny didn’t get the memo, and she doesn’t do anything at all to control the yarn. It just lies there, unbound
and uncontained, under her palms. Her hands rest in her lap, not tense or tight, and until she makes a stitch, it looks like the least efficient or quick way to go about things.

I’ve heard knitting experts say hundreds of times that the least efficient way to knit is like this. Loose, unfettered, the yarn out of control in between stitches. These teachers would have to take it all back if they met Denny. When she makes a stitch, her left index finger moves the next in line to the tip with a movement so petite and ornamental that it seems like it doesn’t matter, then her right hand guides the needle in, and whirl, her right hand lets go, and scribes a graceful circle around the needle tip, taking the yarn that had been resting under it for a ride in the curl of her fingers and snaps back to its original position as if nothing had ever happened. It reminds me of watching a ballet dancer spin in place. Her body whirls around, and her head snaps back to center with each turn to help her keep her balance. Whirl, snap. Whirl, snap. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and that’s just like Denny herself. It’s exactly what I like about her: that the accumulation of her traits shouldn’t work, but it does, and it’s that aspect of her (which is sort of the whole her) that almost kept me from liking her in the first place.

When I met Denny we were both attending a spinning class. (It was spinning on a spinning wheel, not the other sort of spinning class that involves a stationary bike. I assure you, neither of us would be caught there unless there was a hefty bribe.) I’d just gotten a wheel and couldn’t seem to make anything on it
besides knots and alarming wads of wool that could have been sold as artificial bird’s nests, so I was there to learn something that resembled a skill. Denny, well, I’m still not sure why she was there. She was already perfectly competent at the wheel, the loom—everything to do with fiber was already something she was good at, but somehow, and I hope Denny knows what I mean when I say this, I couldn’t tell that.