Authors: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
All Wound Up (5 page)
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
No. Security did
not
allow me through with these knitting needles. Instead of coming through security just like everyone else on this plane, I had to come up with an extremely complicated plan. This morning, before I left home, I positioned the needles on my person and then when I passed through the X-ray machine I told them it was a steel plate I have from the war. When they looked suspicious and snapped their latex gloves, I ran. I bolted past the desk, deliberately abandoning my things in the search machine (having strategically removed all identifying materials ahead of time), and streaked through the airport, hiding briefly in a Starbucks to elude Homeland Security. When I saw them pass, I used the door codes I’d stolen from a pilot I shagged last week to open the gates, and slunk through the back corridors of the airport, stepping in every puddle I could find to avoid leaving a scent for the tracking dogs. I backtracked, made only left turns, and briefly rappelled until I made it all the way back to my original gate where I used a counterfeit German passport to sneak onto the plane. Now, I’m sitting here, knitting, and celebrating the fact that, even though I have certainly secured myself at least fifteen years in federal prison, if not a violent shooting death upon landing (assuming, of course, that I am not taken out by an Air Marshall long before arrival), I have at long last met my goal of sneaking needles past security so that I can at long last knit a damn sock on a plane! (At this point I imagine I would laugh maniacally.)
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID:
Yes.
Me, knitting and appearing to enjoy it. Non-knitter says, “You knit a lot. Do you enjoy it?”
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
No, I can’t stand it. It’s fiddly and dumb and the needles keep poking holes in my purse, but you know what? I bought hundreds of skeins of yarn before I was sure about it, and I’m no quitter. As soon as I get this yarn used up I’m off it. It was a horrible mistake.
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID:
Yes.
Me, knitting socks. Non-knitter approaches and asks what I’m making. I tell the person that it’s socks, and we have a brief conversation about how long it takes to make a pair of socks, at which point the helpful non-knitter tries to release me from my slave labor by telling me something that I obviously don’t know, or I wouldn’t be knitting socks. The non-knitter asks, in all sincerity, “Did you know that you can get socks for a dollar a pair at Walmart?”
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
Are you serious! Really? Why didn’t someone tell me this before now? I feel dizzy. I need to sit down. Do you know how much time it takes to make a pair of socks? Do you know how much time in my life I’ve spent on this? It takes forever to knit socks—and it’s boring and expensive! Please, I beg of you! Take me to this mysterious and magical “Walmart” so that I too may have socks that don’t need to be knit! Oh, happy, happy day! Now if only something could be done about sweaters.
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID:
Yes.
Me at my spinning wheel, making yarn. Non-knitter asks me what I am doing. I reply, “making yarn.” Non-knitter asks, “Real yarn?”
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
No, not real yarn. Real yarn can only come from a machine and a store. Spinning wheels are a way of replicating yarn, but it’s not usable, just ornamental. It actually disintegrates after a few hours and leaves only a pile of lint.
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID:
Yes.
Me, knitting away, no pattern in sight. Non-knitter approaches and asks where my pattern is. I reply that I’m not using one. She looks boggled for a moment, and then asks, “If you don’t have a pattern, aren’t you worried about what you’ll end up making?”
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
I really am. I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out to be another hat, because that’s what it was the last two times I knit without a pattern. I like the element of surprise, though—the way that when I don’t use a pattern, it’s all up in the air. Could be a sweater, could be mittens, no way to know until I’m finished. It’s fun, but frustrating.
WHAT I REALLY SAID:
No.
I’m knitting, as I usually am, and I’m approached by a non-knitter who points out that every time she sees me, I’m knitting. “You knit a lot,” she observes. What comes out of her mouth next is the only thing a non-knitter has ever said to me that has effectively silenced not just my actual voice but my inner one as well.
“You must have a lot of time on your hands. You should think about getting a hobby.”
OUT OF THE CLOSET
live in a teeny-tiny house, one of several in a row, built more than 130 years ago for the workers of a nearby piano factory. (In an odd twist of fate I actually own one of those pianos, built by someone who lived in my house. I like that.) These are thrifty, odd little houses, and everything about them and even the street I live on tells a story about what things used to be like here. For example, nobody has a driveway (because nobody owned a car) and yet the street is twice as wide as all the others in the neighborhood because there used to be a dairy nearby and the horse-drawn milk wagons needed room to turn. My little house sits right at the sidewalk, with only a few square meters for a front garden, and over the years the whole house has increasingly begun to list toward the light post. (I’m almost afraid to look into that.) The history of this place and its odd little quirks give this house a set of charms that you won’t find in a new house in a modern suburb, although I admit that I do occasionally (and by “occasionally” you understand that I mean “pretty often”) envy those dwellers something. While I love my claw-foot tub, I sometimes think about what it would be like to have water pipes big enough to grant sufficient water pressure for a shower, and while my friends in newer homes can plug something in without a thought, I live with electrical wiring that seems to have been installed by M. C. Escher and scares the living snot out of every electrician I hire to try and make sense of it. While it was charming, and even knitterly, to discover that parts of my home are insulated with newspaper and wool, in the February of the Canadian winter I consider nothing but the dead sexy nature of modern and efficient insulation. There is much that I have pined for, but if I had to drill it down to one thing I have always wanted, always wished that this little house had, it’s something I bet you never thought about taking for granted. It’s closets.
Oh, as the mother of three daughters, how I have longed for closets. At the turn of the century, when this house was built, closets weren’t at all in vogue. People owned very few clothes and when they did hang them up, it was on hooks, not hangers, so closets were hardly an efficient use of space. As a result, the closets in Victorian homes are often sparse, and tiny, and without a rod to hang hangers on. If you do install a rod in your tiny little closet, the closet itself is hardly deep enough to accommodate hangers—many of us end up choosing between having hangers and having doors on our closets. My entire house has (brace yourself) two closets. Two. Two tiny closets so small that one of those plastic storage bins—the ones that are about two and a half feet long, and about one and a half feet deep—barely fits. That’s small. There is no coat closet (we have hooks by the door), no linen closet (we have a wardrobe for towels and sheets), and most importantly, and I’m sure you can feel me here, nowhere to shove the mess if someone is coming over and you really need to hide all the dirty laundry. There is no closet big enough to be a proper hide-and-seek spot, and the phrase “come out of the closet” held no meaning for my children until they were old enough to grasp it as a metaphor, because if you told them someone should come out of the closet they would stare blankly at you wondering why, or actually
how
, whoever it was got in there.
Now all of this, this closet talk, is important here, not just because closets are great places to keep yarn—I’ve developed all kinds of entirely radical and innovative yarn storage skills as a result of my closet shortage—but because of what that means. No closets means that the yarn habit can’t be in the closet, and so the people who live here have to get down with my yarn situation pretty quickly, because it is impossible to live in a closetless house with a knitter and have the yarn be a secret. It just doesn’t work, and that extends to all of your belongings, no matter what you tend to hoard. Having no closets breeds a certain sort of openness and honesty about your stuff and how much of it you have. If you can’t hide things, if you can’t just decide not to decide if you have to have them and stick them in a tiny room with a door and no light created in your home just for the purpose of holding things, then you have to start deciding about what you’re going to keep and what you’re not. If space is at a premium—and you don’t know at what sort of a premium closet space is until you’ve lived with three teenage girls, a knitter, and a man who has kept (he’s very sentimental) every item he’s ever owned—and you have only two closets, then you have to make crazy, harsh, and deliberate decisions about two things. You need to know what—in a culture that says you should have more and new stuff all the time—is exactly worth having, and you need to embrace the idea of sharing that space and negotiating what is important to each of those five people, given that all of you will be competing with Olympic vigor for said limited space.