Hands

In the parking lot outside of Whole Foods, I ran into a friend who recently retired from teaching. She told me how she writes poetry in the morning, and, waving her hands, told me that the rest of the day is devoted to errands, cooking, and caring for things at her home. She misses much at the university, but she said she was glad to have more time for working with food and flowers, doing things with her hands.

I suppose we’re all looking for balance, whether or not we care to use that word. I love Ann Hood’s fiction, and am enjoying these essays she collected from other novelists about the role that indulging in texture and color, focusing on something besides sentences, plays in their lives. I’m just a beginner, and while I admire others’ creations, don’t aspire to be much more than a knitter of scarves and fingerless gloves. I just want some down time with pretty yarn, and am okay with knit-knit-knit on big bamboo needles.

I was also soothed by reports in Knitting Pearls of the role that unraveling and starting over plays. The theme kept coming up of how knitters and writers resist it. Beginning knitters go to teachers to unravel for them. Then there’s the tricky business of finding a new place to start. In the earlier collection, Knitting Yarns, Ann Patchett writes of being a young woman in Ireland and England and approaching strangers, holding out her somewhat tangled work for help, which was always given. It’s good to be reminded of the necessity of starting over and all the possibilities it offers in essays by favorite writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Elizabeth Berg, Anita Shreve, all bringing their great prose to the subject of knitting.

And remember that much is easier to start than to finish. Maybe I didn’t need a reminder, but returning to my old baskets to pull out scarves with less than a fistful of yarn to use up, one fingerless glove and half of another pair, reminds me how it’s good to stick the course. And if I keep going, I may remember how to bind off, which used to scare me, but now I see is fun. It’s astonishing to finish something you spent days with, whether word by word or stitch by stich. I’m seeing the end of a revision of a revision of a revision, times many, and just sewed buttons on a scarf that took less time, with a few imperfect knits (I miss the delete button.) Here it is on me with eleven-week-old Kirby, another reminder that progress is rarely straight forward, but well worth every step ahead or back or to the side. I’m hoping to curb his taste for footwear, but for now have learned to keep one foot on the empty shoe while putting on the other.