The Yarn Whisperer (15 page)

No, for me a good mystery is the quiet kind that makes the nuance of human character an integral part of the plot. It's the knitting pattern in which yarn and stitch are kept in perfect balance. These mysteries speak to the very nature of human psychology—to the fiber itself—to who we are and what makes us do what we do. They work with yarn rather than against or in spite of it, sometimes even stepping aside so that the yarn alone can enjoy center stage.

These stories let us meet and analyze all sorts of people we'd never encounter in real life. We snoop in their drawers, we eavesdrop on their conversations, we try fabulous new stitches and techniques and materials. We're given clues and then slowly figure out who, among all these characters, would have had any reason to kill the eccentric and much-disliked master of the house. (It was the daughter-in-law. Always is.)

Agatha Christie may have kept her secrets to herself, but at a very high level, all mysteries do follow a certain formula, just as knitting patterns do. They always have the thing that happened, a murder or theft, extortion, kidnapping—a shawl,
sweater, pair of mittens. They have a cast of characters, each with his or her reasons for being a likely suspect, and each with similarly compelling reasons why they couldn't possibly have done it. In knitting patterns, yarn and needles comprise your cast of characters. Our plot is the pattern itself. A good designer lays it out in a logical sequence that moves us ever forward toward resolution.

Sometimes we're led down one path that proves to be a dead end, the red herring. This is the point in our project when we realize that the instructions we've been diligently following actually had a second part that began,
“at the same time.…”
None of which we'd seen or done.

By then another body is discovered, a building burned, a priceless masterpiece stolen. Our stitches look utterly peculiar, and we realize we've gotten dangerously off track. Faulty stitches fixed, we race toward the real culprit, hoping to reach him before the bind-off. Just in the nick of time, our hero or heroine figures it out. In a dramatic climax, the whole dastardly scheme is revealed and the perpetrator brought to justice. The stitches are bound off, shoulders seamed, tails darned, fabric blocked and ready to wear. The end.

Just as I've progressed from being a follower of other people's patterns to the tentative creator of my own, I've also started to dabble in writing my own mysteries. I keep them in a notebook I've jokingly titled
The Knitter's Book of Plots.
Just as I have no illusions of being a fabulous knitwear designer, these stories need work. But the act of writing a plot is a great mental game. Like swatching, it lets you establish your gauge and
piece together all sorts of scenarios, figuring out the what-ifs until everything makes sense, your numbers match, your plot is foolproof. You can do all of this without ever having to follow through and cast on a single stitch or write a word of dialogue. Some of the best patterns were conceived on paper before any stitch was knit. Of course, some of the worst patterns were conceived this way, too.

There are good mysteries and bad mysteries, good patterns and bad ones and
truly
ghastly ones. A bad mystery is enough to put you off mysteries forever, just as a bad pattern can send you off your knitting for a good long while. The lousy mystery leaves ends undarned. Its plot is flawed. The characters may be weak, their behavior not always consistent; the yarn is a poor match for what the pattern is asking of it. The writer omits crucial facts. The conclusion was reached too hastily, the hem of your sleeve is far shorter than any human arm would ever be. You're left scratching your head when the pattern later instructs you to pick up the stitches that you'd placed on the holder. What holder? What stitches?

The very worst of the lot are those that end by revealing a
new
undarned end, a shadowy figure shaking his fist and shouting, “I'll get you for this!” before slipping away into the bushes. Advertising a sequel to badness is unconscionable.

But the good mystery? You're sad to bind off and eager for the next adventure. Once you stumble onto a designer and designs you like, you'll knit anything they put out. You derive comfort and inspiration from their creative process. You might even spend a whole summer trying to decipher
their
formula.

AUNT JUDY

EVERYBODY HAS AN
Aunt Judy.
That may not be her actual name, but we all have that one aunt we especially adore—the one who was there for us in ways our parents couldn't be, who loved us unconditionally, and whose house was the greatest place on earth to visit. You know the Aunt Judy I'm talking about. What was yours named?

Mine really is an Aunt Judy. She's my father's oldest sister, and she lives in Michigan with my Uncle Russ in a yellow house with porches on all sides, surrounded by a garden more overrun and magical than the one in the children's book by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

We used to visit Aunt Judy often. I associate her with laughter, playing in the pool, eating ice cream, running around barefoot. There was a complete lack of drama around Aunt Judy, just pure, unadulterated
childhood happiness—even when her Saint Bernard, Toby, fell in love with my mother and had to be locked in the basement.

Aunt Judy was a schoolteacher, and she spent every spare minute out in her garden. Her parents were passionate gardeners, and she shared their fascination with all things green. She dutifully planted her yard according to a plan her father had drawn for her. After he died, she and my grandmother traveled the world visiting gardens. She's a master gardener and can tell you the Latin name of almost any plant—and not in that snub “watch me speak Latin” way, but more like a kid who's showing her favorite toys to a friend.

My brothers would always run off with her son, Roger, and do older “boy” things together. I worshipped her daughter, Kathy, who was also older than me. In her I had an actual friend, a girl with whom I could stay up late having whispered conversations in the dark. The year Kathy redecorated her room with jet-black carpet, silver wallpaper, and matching silver Venetian blinds, my brain nearly exploded from awe. My parents' divorce made our visits less frequent, and soon our age difference broke the spell. She started working in the summers and then moved into her own apartment. We visited her there, but it wasn't the same.

Once I reached my twenties, I didn't see my aunt or my cousin very often. And I certainly didn't reveal many of the exciting upheavals in my life. We wrote Christmas cards and kept the conversation light, but when Clare and I made our cross-country move to Maine, we made a pilgrimage to Aunt Judy's house. She welcomed us with open arms.

I used to think that my knitting lineage could only be traced back through my mother's side of the family to my grandma, but late in her life I learned that my “other” grandma—Aunt Judy's mother, who insisted on being called “Grandmother”—also knew how to knit.

She was a violinist, and her husband was a composer and conductor. They met at the Eastman School of Music, the same school where my parents met some thirty years later. When they were first married, my grandfather arranged music for Buffalo Bill's radio program and my grandmother played violin in the Buffalo Philharmonic. This was in the early 1930s, when women rarely worked outside of the home, and they
certainly
didn't perform in orchestras. She was one of the few women who did, and she later spent thirty-seven years as concert-mistress of the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra.

But back in Buffalo during rehearsals, the conductor sometimes focused on one part of a piece, leaving several of the musicians twiddling their thumbs. My grandmother used the time to pull out a tiny sweater she was working on, presumably for my aunt, and sneak in a few rows. But the conductor noticed. He glared at her, and then her knitting, until finally she put it away. After the rehearsal, the conductor came over. “Mrs. Parkes,” he said in a heavy Hungarian accent, “What were you doing just now?”

Before she could answer, he began to critique her knitting. Not that she was
knitting,
but that her
technique
was wrong. He grabbed her sweater and promptly began demonstrating the “proper” way to knit.

She gave up knitting not too long after that. It didn't give her nearly the pleasure that playing violin and puttering in the dirt did. A year after my grandmother passed away, Aunt Judy decided to come to a knitting retreat I was putting together in Virginia. She seemed a little untethered by her loss, as if she'd lost the “tock” to her “tick.” Try as she may, her daughter, Kathy, just couldn't share in her mother's love of gardening. Her thumb was not green at all, and I know she felt bad about this, as if she were letting her mother down. But Kathy
was
intrigued by knitting and by the prospect of getting to see me. She asked her mother if she could come along.

“Of course you can,” said Aunt Judy. “But you realize you'll have to learn how to knit?” A minor detail.

On an airplane headed east from Detroit, at an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet, my Aunt Judy put knitting needles in Kathy's hands for the first time. She had no reason to like it, especially since she'd been given a bent pair of scratched aluminum Susan Bates needles and a frayed, pilly old ball of synthetic yarn. Yet Kathy took to knitting like a fish to water.

My Aunt Judy hadn't knit since her kids were young, so her technique was, like her own needles, a little rough around the edges. Every few rows, the empty needle would slip from her hand and hit the classroom's linoleum floor with such a clatter that everyone would stop what they were doing and stare. It was such an effective attention-getter that it became our official gavel, gong, and dinner bell. “Where's Aunt Judy?” I'd ask, and then patiently wait for her to finish her row before taking her needle.

Aunt Judy and Kathy fell in love with knitting together. They quickly replaced those old aluminum needles with fresh new ones. They took classes and made road trips to farms and yarn stores. Between them, they began amassing quite a collection of yarn. By the next year's retreat, Aunt Judy was doing colorwork and Kathy was putting zippers in vests. They haven't missed a year since.

That first retreat took place at Graves Mountain Lodge, an old-fashioned family inn tucked in the foothills of the Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Each morning, we'd leave the inn buildings and smaller cottages and wander downhill to the main lodge for a gigantic meal, served family style, before beginning our classes. Everything was canned or fried, and nearly every dish had apples in it, apples being Graves Mountain's main agricultural export.

The three of us, Aunt Judy and Kathy and I, were in a small cottage at the top of the hill, just beyond the upper apple orchards where bears hung out. Our cabin had a big stone fireplace and was crawling with Asian lady beetles—which, under the right circumstances, can pass for the more charming ladybugs. From a rocking chair on the back porch, you could watch the sun rise across the valley.

Each night, Kathy and I lay in our respective twin beds, listening to the occasional buzz and thud of the “ladybugs,” whispering to one another until we fell asleep. That first year I had a momentary flash of my grandmother smiling down upon us from her cloud. She was a little bemused at what her daughter and granddaughters were doing—so unlike anything
that had given
her
pleasure—but so pleased that we were all together. In fact, I think she was nodding to herself, as if this were the permission she needed in order to move on.

Today, Kathy's daughter Kaitlyn is starting to make noise about coming to the retreat, too. I don't think she has any particular passion for knitting yet, she just wants to be a part of the tradition and help carry it forward.

With no children of my own, I have nobody to whom I can pass on my knitting tradition. But I've done a few things of which I'm particularly proud—I've kept an old farmhouse from falling down for another generation, I've written some books that I hope have been helpful to knitters. And I've been able to keep the knitting genes alive and strong within other branches of my family tree. While my two nephews show no inclination toward yarn, my niece, Emma,
did
finger-knit a mile of acrylic last summer. There may still be hope after all.

COMING UNDONE