The Problem with Seeds and Skeins

As I planted 940 seeds (ask me how I know this) in flats on Saturday, it occurred to me that seeds are aligned in my brain with yarn in this way:

Seeds aren't little tiny dots, some so small I can scarcely see them even with reading glasses on, let alone count them out one by one (John Jeavons, I will haunt you when I am dead) and plant them in one inch grids.

They're plants. Better yet, seeds are beautiful red peppers, strikingly green chard with red ribs, bouquets of pastel sweetpeas, or HOME GROWN TOMATOES. They are rare and precious and bring color, flavor, aroma and a whole range of very happy emotions to mind.

And thus spake the knitter. Yarn is not twisted strands of (most likely in my collection) animal fiber or strands from the butt of a lepidoptera; it is sweaters against the rain and hats keeping a friend's body heat in and gloves wrapped around mugs of chocolate and it is lace and cables and thick and thin and the most sensuous thing I touch on most days.

Except for bread, the kneading of bread, bread which is clearly not a combination of flour and salt and yeast and water, but a scent radiating from a kitchen and a flake and a crust and a texture with melted butter. Bread, the ingredients I throw my hands into and come out with a velvety bowl of dough that takes the impression of my lifeline.

And my children, who aren't monkeys at all, but living, breathing human spirits with the future walking before them, driving of cars and passing of exams, sports and poetry, love lives and work lives and maybe even procreation.

So I understand addiction. Although I have never been one to think that drugs could take my mind somewhere beneficial and better than this world I see in front of me, I can see and feel and taste how one can become addicted: to this seed, this wool, this bread, these boys.

lgb 2/19/09

The yellow cap

It is for her son, in a mustard yellow that reminds him of Israel.

It started simply enough, a small band of ribbing around the bottom, as her husband drove her to the airport to visit her daughter in Florida, the first week of this new year. You can see where she has knitted evenly and purposefully, up to the place where decreases need to begin to shape the top of the cap.

An inch into the shaping and she received the call. Her beloved sister, the one she speaks with every day across thousands of miles to Israel, has suddenly and without warning left this life.

She has not cried. She has sat shiva for a week and returns, throws the cap at me, says, “Fix it.”

The cap’s knitting struggles and succumbs to a jumble of I-don’t-know-what-to-do stitches, purl stitches where there should be knit, shaping abandoned entirely, gathered, sewn down, harsh, a giant flat-felled seam of four layers of lumped-up wool. I find the end and begin to salvage it, but discover stitches split beyond repair, damaged yarn: disregard, disarray, and chaos. Wool in fallout.

I begin cutting with small scissors. I use a friend’s head to make sure the cap will fit; I knit it to the very top, clip the yarn, pull the end through those eight waiting loops, to a beautifully finished star.

I leave the tapestry needle, threaded, in the inside of the cap. She will wend the final end through loops on the inside, invisibly, and the cap is still her work, her gift. And on the head of her son, it will remember.


Lgb
1/27/09