All Wound Up (23 page)

It also turned out, when I did try to knit, that it felt stupid. There was no way that you could take a situation in which everything was absolutely crazy and then sit there knitting. While usually knitting helped me feel better, this time it felt like fiddling while Rome burned. For the first time, I looked at knitting and felt like there was no real way that it could help. How, really, could I look at a problem as big as my problems were then and think that yarn would solve it? Was I out of my mind? Did I think that heartbreak could really be solved by merino? How would a simple skein of yarn solve it all? Would it help if I knit anyway?

The answer, of course, was no. In the face of a certain sort of tragedy, the lady sitting in the corner churning out a pair of socks looks crazy, and I could feel that it was crazy. Besides being solitary and meditative when what the time demanded was team effort and focus, it was also that knitting was, even when things are terrible, a comfort. It’s a distraction, a way of not dwelling in the moment, or a way of stepping back a little so you can think. For me, knitting is a huge coping mechanism, and it turns out there are times in our lives when it isn’t right to be comforted or distracted. I’m not saying pain is good; I’m saying that I found that right then, when so many people were hurt, the best thing I could do was feel all the hurt and recognize that this was where I was, and that we would all live through it.

I’ve had people ask me, in my life, how I can listen and talk and knit, and I’ve always said that it is easy. Knitting doesn’t take much of my attention at all. Despite the fact that it looks like a lot of my energy is somewhere else, that’s not true, it’s only the tiniest little bit of myself that’s knitting—and besides (I’ve always told them) knitting has an effect on me. During this time, I realized that is very true. Knitting does have an effect on me, does help me disengage enough to cope, and does take up only a little, tiny bit of my energy. Most of the time I think that knitting helps me to pay attention. It reduces my urge to get up and wander, it gives me something to do with my hands, and far from being an indicator that I’m bored, knitting is often the way I’m keeping from being bored. Knitting takes the edge off what is difficult, challenging, or hurtful. Knitting forms that bubble around me, and in the circumstances that I suddenly found myself in, circumstances so awful, I realized that for me that bubble, that tiny bit of me that was given to knitting while I coped, wasn’t working. It was almost disrespectful to knit. To pull myself out of that pain, to cushion it in any way with yarn and distraction, was a disservice to the very real hurt feelings of those around me. They deserved, and I deserved, to have me listening and talking with all the energy I could muster, and to be as engaged as I possibly could be. The significance of what was happening to us deserved exactly that amount of hurt, and to try and avoid any of it felt dishonorable, as though I were seeking to diminish it.

Gradually, a whole lot of the maxims that people said to us during the troubles (maxims that were infuriating when we heard them) turned out to be true. Time did heal a lot of wounds, we were strengthened by the difficulties, and we weren’t given more than we could bear. Gradually, I came back to myself, back to a place where a little soothing was a good thing, and slowly then, I knit. I admit that at first I mostly just held my knitting, but as the burdens eased, my hands started to move. I started to knit, I stopped crying… and it was actually an inverse relationship. Knitting didn’t seem to stop my tears, but the less I cried the more I was able to knit.

Washington Irving said, “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.… They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, and of unspeakable love.” I will never know for sure what caused the time of the big not knitting. I won’t know if it was the broken heart (mine, or someone else’s) or if it was needing to do the work of grief without distraction, or even if I was just unwilling to leave that place and move on until it was finished somehow. I do know that there was a sacredness in my tears. They were necessary and unavoidable, and until I had cried the magic number of them, knitting was only going to get in the way. Once I had that sad work done, one by one my tears dried up, and one by one they were replaced by stitches on my needle, and I knit.

ere is the way you get yarn out of my stash: You tie one end of a rope to a doorknob, and the other end around your waist, tell a friend where you’re going so they don’t worry, and leave a note for your family telling them that you love them. Then you dive in and hope for the best, since you can’t know how long you’re going to be in there. I like to delude myself into believing that the stash has order, or some sort of organizing principle, but mostly I think I’m just telling myself that so that I don’t have to try to figure out how to come up with an order or an organizing principle. It can be a little hairy in there, both literally and metaphorically. I do try to have it make some sense. If I have a whole bunch of a particular yarn, I bag it together for sweaters, and all those sweater bags are (mostly) in the same spot. The spinning stash is (mostly) not mixed in with yarn stash, and once last year when I was overwhelmed by a problem I couldn’t sort out that was unrelated to knitting, I went on a rampage in there and put all the silk in one area. A similar urge a time before that put all the laceweight at least near each other, but I’ve since contaminated that by firing some stray yarn into there in an emergency that concerned itself more with getting things put away than putting things away in a sensible fashion. (Likely someone was coming over. I probably stuffed all that yarn in those bags moments after shoving the dirty dishes into the oven and after stuffing the dirty laundry in a closet while planning to wipe out the bathroom sink with a pair of tights from the floor. I may not be tidy, but I am bold.)

No matter what happens when I dive into the stash that way, there’s one thing that I have to face up to. I have rather a lot of yarn in there that has no plan nor destiny, and occurs in really strange amounts. I speak here of the single skein phenomenon. I have a ton of single balls, skeins, and hanks that I really can’t explain. There are skeins in my stash that are there because I simply thought they were pretty, or because they are souvenirs of places I’ve been, or knitters I met. (I refuse to be judged because of that. I used to think it was strange, until I met someone who buys a shot glass everywhere they go and lines them up on shelves in the family room. If they can do that, then I can do this.) There are other skeins that are samples, or stuff I was going to test to see if it felted nicely. There is even some yarn that I bought because I had a plan that made sense before I remembered that I’m not a supermodel, or yarn I own because I wish I looked better in blue than I do, and I keep buying it because hope springs eternal.

All of that yarn, though, has a purpose, as misguided as it may be, and I love it all. The single-skein phenomenon doesn’t include any of that yarn. These are freestanding skeins that I have bought for… really no reason at all. I don’t think they’re going to be hats; there isn’t enough yardage for socks; they aren’t something I’m even planning to use as inspiration or a woolly desk ornament. They are there for no reason. None. I apparently bought them while I was in a trance state in a yarn shop—just picked each one up with no purpose at all, gave the shop my money, and walked out clutching another purposeless skein of yarn to add to the gajillions already at home. It’s behavior that’s entirely erratic and unmethodical, and while I admit to having a thousand weaknesses involving yarn, I like to believe that there is at least fleeting consideration given to my purchases. I might have a lot of yarn, but at the very least I want to be able to say it’s there for a reason. The presence of these desultory skeins says that maybe that’s not true. These yarns are there for no purpose, and I admit that I didn’t even have one when I bought them. I worry sometimes when I think about this, that my relationship with yarn isn’t healthy—or that it has hypnotic qualities or fumes that overcome me.

I was thinking about this a lot when I visited a friend who was on a diet. We were having coffee when her timer went off, and she got up, counted out twenty almonds, offered me the same, and then plunked back down. “Hungry?” I asked, confused about the timer.

“Not yet.” she said. “It’s a preemptive strike. If I have something now, before I’m hungry, then the theory is that I won’t hoover down twenty-three cookies an hour from now.”

“Good thinking,” I agreed, and I accepted the almonds. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a light lit.

Preemptive eating seems like a fine strategy. It’s a good way to avoid one of those episodes where you’re starving, take temporary leave of your senses, and only recover in time to have a postmortem chat and debriefing about the appropriate role of chocolate in one’s diet, or how wrong it is to eat whole cakes in single sittings. If you’re never starving, then you won’t ever eat like you are, at least theoretically. If you were trying to keep from eating a whole cake, I can see how a couple of strategically timed carrot sticks might take the edge off. All at once, I realized what’s happening in the stash.

My self-control around food is rather good, but we all have our weaknesses, and my self-control around yarn is notoriously bad. Legendary, in fact. I’ve gone to a yarn shop with the absolute intention to buy nothing, and walked out twenty minutes later with a whole sweater’s worth and the deflated feeling of having lost a little self-respect. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying yarn. I like buying yarn, but it should at least be intentional, and that’s not what happens when you go in there and make snap decisions. It’s impulsive and a little weak, and it’s totally like deciding you’re not going to eat any junk at a party and then lying in bed four hours later wondering what the hell you were doing when you stationed yourself by the chips and refused to give up the territory like it was a key holding in a world war. At first that’s what bothered me about the single skeins in the stash. I thought that they were the result of those spasms in the yarn shops. I thought that I have all those hanging around because they’re the symptoms of a yarn disease. I was looking at that stack of single skeins and feeling like they were the products of a yarn binge. I was wrong.

They are snacks. They aren’t the disease; they’re what I’m using as a treatment and prevention. It’s like taking methadone instead of straight up using heroin—to draw a rather crass analogy. I can see what happened now. I was in the yarn shop, I started to get weak and feel a whole sweater’s worth of yarn coming on, and I reached out for a carrot stick, the first little skein that I could find, and I bought it, and held it, and took it home. Those snack skeins are part of an instinctive protection plan. Without them, things could have been a lot worse, and that changed my attitude about them a little, made them more of a point of pride. They aren’t random; they aren’t there for no reason; and they might not have any intention of becoming mittens, but they’re still serving a tidy little purpose. I’m okay with that, mostly. The only thing wrong with the system is that, just like other kinds of snacks, skeins can really add up.

hen I was a teenager, I had a lot of problems. Not anything that was unusual or should put me in a category for special pity, you understand, just an ordinary list of problems that almost every teenager could come up with. I was dorky; I had trouble in a couple of subjects; I was short; I couldn’t dance; I was lame at sports. I liked to read; I made some of my own clothes; my family had no money. While every other kid had a different but comparable list, my own personal list of adolescent problems was so intensely crippling that I really didn’t see how they could ever stop defining my life.

Don’t get me wrong—I had a lot going for me too. I was funny, I could be charming, and while I wasn’t very pretty and had horribly big glasses, my figure was good, and I possessed a pretty big rack, which I’m ashamed to note, can make up for a lot if your primary audience is teenaged boys (who are more interested in breasts than glasses) and teenaged girls, who, while they resent that boys are more interested in breasts than glasses, know that it’s a really unfortunate truth. I struggled through the way that most kids do, and the way I watch my kids struggle now. Things like skipping French because a boy you liked was skipping French and if you skipped French you could perhaps get a little face time with him, and knowing that’s wrong and is going to mess you up later, but doing it anyway because you feel like the only thing that matters is now, even though you know that can’t be true. How about worrying that the fact that you went to science with your fly undone and a piece of spinach in your teeth really was going to define your whole life, and feeling helpless to stop the humiliation anyway?