Free-Range Knitter

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Dad said to her that it was nice that you had sent two sweaters to me for the winter because at the rate Mum goes maybe I wouldn’t have her sweater until the summer, and then Mum said that it must be nice that you have all that free time to knit and keep your house cleaner than our house and Dad said don’t start with that and Mum said, “Oh, I’m not starting,” and then she got a glass of wine and said she would be knitting in the bedroom and Dad said maybe it was a good time for Mum to have some time to knit so he will read me a story. Now he’s cleaning the kitchen because that is always what he does after him and Mum talk about you.

  I’m going to have my bath now. I got mud on my hair climbing trees. Mum said she didn’t know there was mud in trees and neither did I.

  See you at Christmastime. I will wear your sweaters until my other one is finished because I think Mum will like me to wear hers too. It is costing her a lot of money in the swear jar.

  Love, your grandson,

  Michael

  P.S.: I think I almost have enough sweaters if you wanted to do something else for the next present.

  Knitting and Writing

  I am a solitary writer. It’s taken me years to learn this, to stop beating myself up for not being able to work with noise and distraction. I envy people who can shut out the world and take advantage of found moments, or the time that the kids are watching TV, but I am not one of them. Neither am I a coffee-shop writer, who are those of the breed who, when they cannot find writing space in their homes, go to a coffee shop. I don’t know how they do it. The distraction of my fellow humans is too much for me. I watch people get their drinks, I listen to their conversations (I don’t mean to do it; I can’t help it). I wonder where they are going, wonder what they are doing. I stop doing my work and start people watching. I am distractible, and despite all efforts, I need quiet and a minimum of distractions, which is too bad because I really like coffee. An empty house is good and used to be something I could arrange. Joe worked at a studio outside the house, the kids were in school all day, and I could have long stretches of uninterrupted time to think and write.

  That system imploded last year when Joe began working from home and the girls hit a year where I have one in middle school, one in high school, and one in college, and I haven’t been alone for months. It’s like they’ve suddenly arranged to tag team me, making sure that I don’t have a solitary moment. I’ve searched the house for the secret schedule I know is here, because it’s just not possible for them to have achieved such total perfection and coverage. The other day I got up, and so did Meg and Samantha. They left for school, and I sat at my desk, only to hear Joe up and about moments later. It took him a couple of hours to make his calls and get himself sorted, and he walked out the door at 10:30, which in a remarkable coincidence was the time that Amanda’s alarm was set for. He went out; she got up and began her daily ablutions, then settled in to prepare her breakfast and study for an exam, taking a twenty-minute break to go buy some school supplies she needed, which she must have prearranged with Joe, since that’s when he came back to the house for lunch. Joe and Amanda exchanged sentry posts at 12:30, when Joe went back out to a gig and Amanda returned to use the phone and Internet and generally be in my way until 3:20, when she left for a late afternoon class. In what can only be described as an organized assault, 3:20 happens to be the time Meg gets home from school. Meg blew in with a pack of teenagers who ate everything in the kitchen (although I don’t know why the sight of the prostrate writer sobbing in the next room doesn’t put them off their food) and then announced they were going to the pool for swim practice and blasted out the door at 4:00, just in time to say hi to Samantha. Sam told me about her day, then sat down to practice electric guitar until the whole family returned for a nice quiet evening around 6:00. Try and tell me that sort of coverage is a coincidence. It just can’t be. I have no idea why they would come up with a strategy that ruins the intellect and will to live of the person providing them with food and money, but I suppose it all may be part of a larger plan that I just haven’t come to understand yet.

  While this system makes me absolutely wild at the best of times, the collusion of the whole family to keep me from writing makes me simply frantic as I approach a writing deadline. This time, I had a book (this book) due in just over a month and was falling behind on the work, mostly because of a crazy idea I had that I would be able to work a few hours a day. When I realized that the kids were about to go on winter break and would be home (in some combination or permutation twenty-four hours a day for ten days), I may have just about lost it. At that point, further time was taken from the writing schedule and lost to abject hysteria and closing doors more firmly (I hate to call it slamming) than was strictly necessary.

  At this point, Joe had a masterstroke. He realized that if the book was going to get finished and I was going to be more than a mere husk of my former self, I needed some real time to work, and work in a way that didn’t threaten the stability of everyone within a ten-mile radius. He decided I needed to be alone. (I maintain to this day that Joe’s best ideas spring from self-defense, this particular one from the very subtle hints I was giving him about my needs. Hints like me taking my laptop into the closet and dimming my screen so as not to be discovered, and the really understated way I kept screaming, “If I cannot get some time alone, this book will never be finished!”). He realized that he had a client who was sort of broke but wanted Joe to engineer and produce a record for him but was a little short on the traditional wherewithal. Joe happened to know that the guy’s family has a place in the woods, far from everywhere, a place where a writer could really get lonely and bored, and he worked out a trade. The guy got the start of his record made, and I got six days in the middle of nowhere in the dead of the Canadian winter.

  When I say “nowhere” I don’t mean it as an offense to the place, and I don’t mean it was somewhere unimportant. It was a place in the woods where there was only a woodstove, electricity, and phone, and nothing for miles around. It sat in the center of about ninety acres, and if I wanted to see another person, I would need to hike a half mile to the road, then over four miles to the store, which was one of those crazy little stores that was the town liquor store, beer store, coffee shop, grocery store, post office, and gas station all in one small building. (The population of the entire township, if you add together all forty-eight towns, is just over nine thousand people. I don’t know how many of them are knitters.) Here I would be a solitary writer, to almost a scary degree.

  I was so thrilled to be going that I packed with a lot of glee. I didn’t bring a lot of clothes because I really intended to just sloth around in cozy old sweaters and a pair of yoga pants until the writing was done, and I relished the idea of being so free that I didn’t even have to expend the energy to put on decent clothing. (Every member of my family would tell you that this differs in no way at all from my ordinary days, when I sloth around writing in some of the world’s most tragic clothing, but the point of the cabin was that it would be appropriate.) In place of clothes, I packed, as I always do, a lot of yarn. A lot of yarn. I was going into the woods for six days, maybe eight, if the weather kept me there, and I brought enough yarn for four pairs of socks and an entire sweater, all of which, I am ashamed to tell you now, I thought I would complete while I was there. (Also, when you are a day’s hike through the forbidding snow to the closest yarn store, you want to make sure you’ve got your back covered.) No kids, no husband, no nothing. I would just be knitting and writing, writing and knitting. That could take a lot of yarn.

  Joe’s client drove me up to the place, lit a fire in the woodstove, showed me around a bit, and split. The moment he left, I was giddy. Giddy and truthfully, a little bit scared. Not only was I more alone and isolated than I have ever been in my life, I had also, as my mother said, left all my excuses at home. If I couldn’t write in that environment, there would be nobody to blame but myself. She was right, and I found that one of the most frightening things I had e
ver heard, but sort of inspiring. After all, it was in my best interest to write well and prolifically while I was up there so that on my return I could continue to blame Joe and the children for all my problems and avoid any personal responsibility.

  It didn’t take long for it to work. Deprived of a TV, a radio, company, and other places to go, I was soon bored and lonely enough that I was writing. I was writing a lot. I was writing to entertain myself, to pass the time, to keep a record of what it was like to be in that place. I wrote all the time. After a few days, though, I was surprised to notice a shocking side effect. I wasn’t knitting.

  Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t knitting much. (I don’t know if it’s strictly possible for me to go cold turkey.) I was writing and going for hikes in the woods and meandering in the snow. I was communing with deer and keeping an eye out for bobcat. When I wasn’t out traipsing around listening to trees and negotiating the huge amounts of snow, I was back in the house, tending the fire, cooking for myself, and writing, writing, writing.

  The more I wrote, the less I knit, and it wasn’t just a matter of time or feasibility, although there is an obvious problem in not being able to physically knit and type at the same time. I wasn’t called to it. I didn’t need it (much). Generally, I carve several hours out of my day to knit. I knit while waiting, talking, watching TV. I knit on the bus, while I’m on the phone—all the time. At the house in the woods I just didn’t have a lot of those things. There was no TV. I wasn’t waiting for a bus. There was no downtime, and furthermore, nobody was around to piss me off or annoy me. I’ve always known that I use knitting to take the edge off of difficult people or situations, and at the cabin I didn’t need the edge taken off of anything. As though to confirm this, I noticed that the only time I really wanted to knit was in the evening, when the night closed in all around that place in the woods, the dark pressed up close to the windows, and things got a little bit creepy.

  I have long struggled with the question of whether knitting is truly creative. Creativity is usually defined as the generation of ideas, whether it’s for art or science or what have you. When you are creative, you’re relying on your own brain to come up with answers, solutions, and concepts. In this way, creativity can be found in parenting, plumbing, painting, baking, or even some of knitting. I say “some of knitting” because not all knitting is creative, using the traditional definition. The generation of the idea is creative, and so may be choosing your colors and coming up with your plan. We creatively problem solve in knitting all the time, but the act itself, actual knitting, that’s not tremendously creative. That’s execution. Once you have the figuring done, or when you’re following someone else’s pattern, the knitting part of making something just can’t be defined as creative, can it? When I think of the process of a plain sock, knit a number of times until it’s rote, I’m thinking of the tens of thousands of stitches it takes to finish that sock. When you’re just executing knit or purl stitches, repeating them thousands of times, can the physical process of knitting that 96,890th stitch really be considered creative?

  The interesting thing I seemed to be learning at the cabin is that the answer seemed like it might be “yes.” It was as if I had a set amount that I needed to create each day, and that need could be met by either knitting or writing. If it was turning out that the need to knit was filled by writing, a complex creative process, then mustn’t that mean that knitting is, too? I was stunned to discover that they could stand in for each other. (I shouldn’t have been. I have known for a long time that knitting is my favorite procrastination to fill hours I should be writing.) If both could satisfy the same urge, then they must be the same sort of process, but (I hate it when I argue with myself) they aren’t the same. Writing is pulling a new and thoughtful idea from nowhere, and unless you’re also designing, knitting is mostly execution. What my common sense was telling me and what my experience was showing me really weren’t matching up. That happens to me a lot, and it usually means I’m wrong about something. (I’m wrong a lot, too.)

  On a long tramp through the woods, I got to thinking about it. If I was getting a result that didn’t make sense, then maybe I was starting with the wrong base premise. I stood in a snowbank as realization swept over me like a tidal wave. I was thinking too narrowly. Surely knitting and writing both met other needs, needs beyond my need to be creative. They were multitaskers, doing more than one thing, fulfilling more than one purpose. The same way that a glass of milk is both good food and good drink, knitting and writing must be serving another function. Standing there, with the snow melting through my boots, thinking about going back in the house and making either socks or a book, I got it.

  It was so simple that I was almost ashamed that it had taken all day to put it together. Knitting wasn’t always about creativity, and neither was writing; it was about creation, bringing something into being. Making a thing where there wasn’t something before. When I was writing, I was coming up with an idea, and then using my skills to make it a reality. Same thing with knitting. I was imagining a sweater, or socks or whatever, and then using my skills to translate that image in my mind into a real thing you could touch and see. I had been right (and rather wrong) the whole time. They were the same, they fed the same human need, they enriched the soul the same way. They were not an act of creativity, they were a pure act of creation.

  Who knew. To your spiritual self, writing a novel may be exactly the same as knitting a sweater.

  A Knitting Class

  The lady on the phone seems to have no idea that she has said something completely insane, so I wonder whether I heard her right. “Can you repeat that?” I ask, trying to keep the fear out of my voice and to ignore the sound of blood rushing rapidly out of my head, which seems to be interfering with my hearing.

  “I’d like you to teach a knitting class at my toy store,” she repeats. “There will be about eight kids between five and nine years old. Can you do it?”

  Now, that’s what I thought she said, and she doesn’t seem to think that it’s fundamentally crazy, so for reasons that I still can’t explain and are completely against my better judgment, I agree.

  The minute I hang up the phone I regret the decision, which was not really a decision but a crappy defense against a precision surgical strike. I am one of those people who will agree to just about anything if you ask me directly, and I have a feeling that this woman knew it. Not only do I know that I meant to say “no” when I actually said “yes,” I also know that this toy shop owner has burned through three decent upstanding knitting teachers before me, including a friend of mine who is such a good teacher that it’s likely that she could teach your cat to not just use the toilet, but to use toilet paper, wash her paws, and flush afterward. Knowing this, I should have said “no.”

  I imagined what it would be like to teach knitting to that many kids. In truth, I wondered a whole bunch of things, and since I had never taught even one kid to knit, I wondered whether my imaginings of total chaos were going to be that far off the mark. I phoned a friend and told her what I had agreed to do, and hung up when she still hadn’t stopped giggling helplessly through an entire cup of coffee. This cemented my belief that if I escaped from this experience (eight kids? in one room?) without being tied to a chair with my own yarn and needles, I was going to think I had done pretty well.

  I think that this toy-store owner, the one who had roped me into this, had gathered some empirical evidence and decided I was a good mark because all my children knit. (I also think she was running out of knitting teachers who were not wise to her scheme, but I digress.) On the surface, that would make it seem as if I was a good person to teach kids to knit—after all, I managed to produce three knitters out of three ordinary children—but the truth is, I didn’t teach my kids to knit. Nobody did; they were the product of a complicated, multiyear, knitting, learning experiment.

  In the 1980s the whole language approach to learning to read became popular. In essence, proponents of whole language b
elieved (and I am oversimplifying here) that you didn’t need to teach a kid to read at all. They believed that reading and writing would occur naturally in children when they were ready, simply by involving them adequately with language. Reading to them, showing them writing, generating learning opportunities from a rich literate world around them was supposed to grow readers and writers out of kids, and for the most part those proponents were right. Exposed to enough language sources, kids did learn to read and write, although opting out of traditional language rules meant that they were weaker in some areas than in others. Whole language kids tend to be crappy spellers, for instance.

  If immersing your kids in language could make them readers, I wondered, what would happen if you immersed your kids in knitting? Would they learn? Would they accept it as “something Mum did,” or would they think it was something everyone did and therefore take it up themselves? Would they come to accept that knitting was just what people did while they watched TV and feel empty and sort of itchy if they had come of knitting age and their hands weren’t busy? I devised a plan. Step one was to have some kids. That was pretty easy. I was able to make them from materials found around the home, although it did take some time. Once I had procured the children, I began my endeavor, immersing them in knitting during their formative years.

  I knit without cease during this crucial time. I knit them blankets while I was pregnant. I knit while I was in labor. (Useful tip: It is time to call the midwife if you can no longer knit two together without arsing it up.) I knit while they lay nursing on my lap, I knit while they were in the bath. I knit in the park, I knit at playgroups. I knit while they sat on my lap and told me stories, and I knit through temper tantrums (theirs and mine). I even sacrificed fun and empowering experiences such as vacuuming and scrubbing the toilet to free up more knitting time. Inasmuch as it was possible, I put down the knitting only to administer first aid and hugs and to read to them. (It was insurance for the whole language thing. I didn’t want to raise a whack of illiterate knitters, even if they were very good knitters. If nothing else, they would need communication skills to search for patterns and yarn on the Internet.)