All In Good Knits

I remember being five and bringing two pencils and some string to my mama and asking her to teach me to knit because I wanted to be like the old fashioned ladies.

Turns out that’s where it started—this long fatal love of old things. It’s why I bought a spinning wheel because I wanted the unmitigated pleasure of doing things like the old fashioned ladies, I wanted this portal back to the places I had come from, the lives lived before me. I had an identity there. And I wanted to be a part of it.

Maybe it was daddy who loved history and my mama who loved reading, but even today I’m still gone back in time most of the time. My first heroes were Indians and cowboys. My siblings and I dragged wagons up and down the hills of Wyoming pretending to be on the Oregon Trail.

I put on my mother’s old prom dresses and pretended I was at a ball in old fashioned times. My chief aspiration in life at the age of eight was to be an Indian and ride horses bareback while hunting with a bow.

I still read books and journals about the Oregon Trail, I read the letters of early homesteaders, explorers of Australia, I read about the Apache tribes that frightened me the most, I pour over old photographs of coal miners and Shetland crofts, and I’ve got this long history with knitting I never even knew about.

All my grandma’s knitting and crochet things came to me when she passed on. I held in my hands literal history with crochet hooks and stitch markers and circular knitting needles. I held bits and pieces of my grandma in those things.

How I came to knit is a story about friends and my sister in the hospital and all this seventeen year old me who’d rediscovered an old childhood wish and went back to it because returning to childhood seems to be the thing my soul needs to remember to re-member. Constantly backtracking in order to move forward.

So I constantly go back to different times where I was not alive but am ever seeking to bring to life again. Constantly returning to old ways of life because somehow, back there, it’s where I find a way to go on.

“And then I knew that I was present in
The long age of the passing world, in which
I once was not, now am, and will not be . . . ”

— Wendell Berry

I often wonder if I know what it really is I’m doing here, with knitting and crochet all about me, always on my desk, my nightstand, the crate stuffed to overflowing beside my bed with yarn and projects set aside.

Do I really understand what it is I am holding? Or better yet, do I always remember what it is I am doing? That is the real question.

When I am picking up an age old art for the restlessness of my hands and my mind, for the goodness of having created, do I really remember what it is I have in my hands?

It’s a comforting thing, to sit before the warmth of a roaring fire, listening to something good and soft, all the while your mind at ease and your hands occupied. It’s cozy and calming to make art while relaxing. It’s trendy to crochet. It’s handy to know things. It’s productive. Unique.

Those things we taught our fingers to accomplish and our minds to fashion into something we’re proud of? They were done long ago by my grandmother and her grandmother. They were done by the Herring girls waiting in the wharves for the next catch of Herring to arrive. It was done by the girls in the Outer Hebrides while they carried baskets of peat on their backs. It was done by Vikings in Norway. It was done by the Sami tribes in Sweden in colors and patterns too immaculate for words.

These things we do so lightly now were once the livelihood of millions in ages past, and when I saw the picture of the two Scottish girls carrying peat and knitting while they walked, it brought a whole new meaning to the word “work.”

They worked for their today and knitted for their tomorrow.

“When we engage in fiber arts, we are creating something, but we are also participating in historic traditions tens of thousands of years old. You are not only making art for your soul and for future generations, you are embodying the work of our ancestors.”

— The Woven Road

There is a soft music all its own in the knowing you are picking up where your grandmothers of the lost ages left off. There is a gentle sort of goodness that comes when your fingers slip the yarn and the needles click and your grandmother’s notions aren’t lying around forgotten.

It takes you backward, slows time, this picking up of needles and wool again. It takes you back to a time where work was hard, the winters dark, and the fire warm, and life was just a little bit more focused on the today, the present moment, the needs of right now.

And I want to tell them, I want my grandmother to know, the Herring girls, the old women knitting Aran sweaters, I haven’t forgotten. I want to keep them alive through this knowledge, this gift that teaches my fingers, my mind, and keeps it alive to the past and watchful of the future.

The names of my great great grandmothers and fathers are lost to me, but by the picking up of something that connects us all, I will know them. The gifts are still being spread, still warming souls, and making smiles. It didn't end with them in the wake of modern technology. The old life, the one we used to know, it's still being knit together and casting a big blanket of warmth on the world.

Winter is the time for merrymaking with all the quiet, gentle things in the world. And maybe its a time to go back to the past. Sit before a fire, your clothes smelling of woodsmoke, your hands a little sooty, red from the cold, knitting away.