Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  In exchange for our efforts, our songs and dances and sundry performances, the audience offered up more than $10,000 in donations. Respecting the media blackout, I will only note that my particular group performance was so bad, so painfully disharmonious, that we closed the show. Stephanie grabbed the mic and announced that she’d shut off the music for $100—at which point a woman sprinted up to the stage, bill in hand.

  All this silliness was fine and good, but the very next evening, I was to be the featured banquet speaker. My topic: a heartfelt glimpse into the American textiles industry. Mustering up what dignity I had left, I took to the stage just as the carrot cake was served, and I finished the Q&A as the tables—and my still-uneaten piece of cake—were cleared away. The lobby bar would continue to do swift business until closing time.

  The days were thick and demanding, during which I can’t say I had any “Aha, so this is Madrona” epiphany. Like any good event I’ve attended, the spark seemed to come from what the people made of it. There were definitely clusters of friends for whom this was an annual tradition, their own personal version of Thanksgiving. But even they were still welcoming to newcomers.

  I doubt most attendees had any idea how much work went on behind the scenes, the fertilizing, tilling, weeding, and tending that took place so that they could plunk themselves down and effortlessly grow. This appearance of effortlessness, perhaps that’s the key.

  After the last class let out and the marketplace closed on Sunday afternoon, I found myself high above the city in a hospitality suite with the other teachers. We gathered around the table, discretely trying to make the free hors d’oeuvres our dinner.

  Here, Suzanne exerted her final dusting of self over the event. One by one, she beckoned us to the couch. We sat, hands politely folded in our laps. We talked. I stole glances at the clipboard in her lap, at the envelope with my name written on it and presumably containing a check. “How did it go?” she asked. “Did you enjoy yourself?” “Is there anything we can do better?” She thanked me for my work. She provided her feedback, all positive. Then she went over the numbers, tallying them up with a calculator, to make sure we both agreed on the sum of the check. I got my envelope and said thank you.

  The logic of who gets asked back is often apparent only to Suzanne. She is very insistent on not repeating teachers more than a few years in a row—unless she wants to, in which case she’ll have you back so often they might as well name a suite after you. The algorithm is hers alone.

  I was among the lucky ones. At the end of our meeting, she popped the question and, of course, I said yes. But something made me suggest that we let a few years pass before I returned.

  I wasn’t ready for Madrona to become a “thing.” There’s a reason Brigadoon only reappears every 100 years. I wanted to preserve its magic a little while longer.

  CLOUDBURST OVER PARIS

  I’D PROMISED THEM no yarn stores, no fiber festivals, no chasing down that elusive sheep farm someone said might be in the next town. No endless waiting while I fondled, took notes and pictures, and transformed a perfectly fine family vacation into yet another business trip.

  My nieces grew up having to share me with yarn. They learned early on that any time with Aunt Clara would likely mean a festival, or a mill visit, or at least one lengthy stop at a yarn store. And, always, some form of work deadline.

  In 2013, Hannah had just turned seventeen and Emma was about to turn fifteen. My brother—feeling flush, or perhaps finally realizing how quickly they were growing up—had announced plans for a grand European tour that summer. Together with my mother they would visit Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Denmark. And their first stop would be Paris.

  France means a great deal to me. Play a few notes of Edith Piaf and I’m waxing nostalgic. It’s where I came of age, as they say. I ordered my first beer and received my first marriage proposal there, though not at the same time. It’s where I first learned about the pleasures of the table, the slowly prepared meals that take all afternoon to enjoy. I fell in love with fountain pens there, and I mastered the art of looking stern and disinterested on public transportation. After college, I fled back to France—to the city of Nantes—in the hopes that a life would reveal itself to me there. Alas, it did not.

  The more fluent I became in French, the more critically judged I felt—and not just by my language, but also by my behavior, my clothing, my ideas, and even my body. My French friends only had to snicker and announce “So American” at whatever I’d just done and I’d be deflated. My roommate, Laurence, was looking through pictures of me as a child once and said, “You would be so pretty if you weren’t fat.” It wasn’t an insult, she insisted, just a fact.

  My fragile ego could only withstand a year of this before I finally gave up and ran back to the land of coddling and free hugs. I avoided France for decades, like a jilted lover. The longer I stayed away, the more those initial memories were replaced by grand and mythical ones until I’d built an impossibly beautiful time capsule of France. I wasn’t sure I could ever return for fear that the reality of the place would destroy my airbrushed memories and leave me with nothing.

  But when my brother told me of their plans, when I envisioned my young nieces setting foot in that magical city for the first time, I knew I had to be there. I couldn’t let them stumble blindly through the tourist traps and leave thinking they’d seen the place. They agreed, and after twenty-one years of staying away, I booked myself a ticket. The promise being, let me repeat myself, that there would be no yarn stores.

  I arrived a day before they did. Charles de Gaulle airport, the signage, the machines, even the currency of gaining access into the city, it had all changed. I figured it out just in time to help an even more lost Canadian catch the same train as me into the city. His friends were renting an apartment, he explained. He was just here for three days, then off to Amsterdam and London.

  “I should be able to get a pretty good sense of Paris in three days, right?” he asked.

  His name was Gerard, he worked in finance, and he wore fine, chestnut-colored Italian leather shoes.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a writer.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded, as if to say, “touché.”

  “I write about knitting.”

  Now he laughed. “Well, at least you’re writing.”

  Eventually his stop came and I wished him a good three days. Off he went.

  Switching from commuter train to Métro, my sensory memory woke up. I recognized that sweet, slightly burned tar smell in the air, the wobbly low note of warning followed by the woosh-clang of the car doors shutting and locking. Musicians were busking in the subway corridors, Peruvian panpipes, a violin, an electric guitar. Two young men hopped into my car as the doors were closing and started playing an upbeat tune on accordion and saxophone.

  Some things had changed. Gone were the tiny newsstands that used to nest beneath the curved walls along the platforms. Instead, vending machines offered neat rows of M&Ms, potato chips, gummy bears, and Snickers bars. Since when had the French embraced snacking?

  We headed west from Denfert-Rochereau, passing all my old stops like flipping through the pages of my diary. There was Montparnasse, Duroc, Falguière, and then we slipped above ground into the Parisian version of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood. The morning sun reflected off the buildings, colorful geraniums spilling from the wrought-iron balconies. I took deep breaths to calm my butterflies.

  I got off at La Motte-Picquet Grenelle and glanced across the platform. There stood a dozen young men in old-timey vests and suspenders, knickers, argyle socks, and driving caps. One sported an enormous handlebar mustache, another a curved pipe. I looked around but nobody else seemed to notice or care. Since when did such a sight not draw the collective disapproval of everyone? I wanted to shake my fist at those youngsters, to yell, “In my day, I couldn’t even wear tennis shoes without being laughed at!”

  I deposited my bags at my hotel a
nd immediately set out to explore the neighborhood. My niece Hannah had wanted to pick the hotel. When you’re a dreamy seventeen-year-old girl from New Mexico, you naturally want to stay near the Eiffel Tower, so that’s where she put us. But now that I was there, I had to admit that she’d chosen well. We were in the 7th arrondissement near rue Cler, a pedestrian market district with a neighborhood feel. Women were pushing their little market carts, elderly men slurped their coffee while gray-muzzled dogs slept at their feet. People lined up at the outdoor counter of a boulangerie (pace yourself, I cautioned). Outside a florist’s stall, buckets of voluptuous pink peonies beckoned.

  I kept walking past a chocolatier, a butcher, an Asian take-out. I paused at La Sablaise fish market, probably because it was everything a fish market isn’t back home. Bright and clean, its walls were covered with jaunty maritime murals. Baskets were filled with crabs and mollusks and bivalves of every description. Whole fish, long and slender, short and stout, reclined on beds of brilliant white ice. None of them seemed bothered at having been caught. Another case showed off delicate, almost translucent cuts of fresh fish that smelled only of sweetness and the sea.

  On I went, past a hardware store. A few doors down I started at the sight of . . . what were those, skeins of yarn? Cupping my hands on a glass door, I looked closer. It appeared to be some sort of yarn store, with pastel Phildar yarns on the tiny shelves, ’80s baby sweater leaflets stacked on a nearby table. I pulled back and looked for a list of hours, a name, anything, but found none. I would check back every day but never find the place open, not that I could have gone in anyway because, let’s remember, no yarn stores.

  On my way back, I paused at a realtor’s window to pick my imaginary apartment. A simple, two-room affair with windows overlooking rue Cler was currently listed for a cool 605,000 euros—at that time, just over $830,000 US. Perfect.

  The rest of the day was spent speeding across Paris, opening the time capsule I’d sealed twenty-one years ago. Street by street, I replayed the favorites of my past. There it was, my old pharmacy, my old school. My apartment building still stood, prettier than ever, its facade recently cleaned, the old drafty windows replaced by energy-efficient ones. My window was open, and someone had put flowers on the balcony.

  I followed a woman down my street. She was wearing exercise clothes and carrying a yoga mat. Inconceivable twenty-one years ago. I once made the mistake of leaving home in sweatpants and everyone—everyone, I tell you—turned and stared. My greengrocer was gone, the Vietnamese restaurant now Korean. It was refreshing to see that Paris hadn’t kept itself in suspended animation after I’d left. If it had moved on, then I could too, right?

  Early the next morning, my family arrived. We did the full tour, hitting every item on the teenage girl’s Greatest Hits list for Paris—but with a few edits by yours truly. We took a boat down the Seine and climbed the Eiffel Tower. We tried on shoes and dresses, licked cones of Berthillon ice cream, rode the Ferris wheel high above the Tuileries, sighed at the Monets in the Musée d’Orsay, and whispered to one another in church after church.

  I forced them to put butter on their baguettes in the morning, and I made sure they sipped a cool Orangina under umbrella-topped tables in the Luxembourg gardens. We even sampled a tray of oysters at La Coupole. Rather, I sampled, they shook their heads.

  But on day six, I woke up in a funk. The city was in the grip of a heat wave, and my tiny hotel room had no air-conditioning. (Correction: I hadn’t yet discovered that what I thought was a TV remote was, in fact, the control for the in-wall cooling unit.) The idea of a full day of touristing en masse left me a little queasy. I told my family I’d sit this one out. They headed off to Sacre-Cœur without me, and we agreed to meet that evening on the Île Saint-Louis for dinner.

  Only it wasn’t just the heat that had gotten to me. I’d been overcome with an accumulation of emotional jetlag, a collision of past and present that left me not quite sure where or who I was. After five days of flipping through the pages of a very old diary, I needed something to pull me into the present.

  Over my café crème on a busy boulevard near rue Cler, aided by free Wi-Fi and a thing called Facebook, I was tapped on the shoulder by a ghost from the past. My old roommate Laurence was now living in Paris. She’d seen my pictures on Facebook. Was I really in Paris? Could I join her for coffee?

  Just a little while later, I stepped off the Métro at Charonne, walked a few steps to the Le Rouge Limé, and hugged a vision from the past who was, in fact, both very real and very familiar.

  There in the flesh was the same face, the same big head of curly hair, the same perfect teeth and beautiful laugh. We had not seen or spoken to one another in two decades. Babies had been born and grown to adults in that time, cell phones had been invented, the Internet had taken over.

  Yet at that moment, time folded into nothing. We took turns pointing out each line on each other’s face, each gray hair, and none of it hurt my feelings now. I was too surprised at how fundamentally unchanged she was, how unchanged our friendship. We’d been close. Then life happened and somehow we lost touch. Occasional emails had been lobbed back and forth just to be sure each person was still there.

  She told me about her daughters and about what it’s like to be a single woman in Paris. Internet dating is alive and well, but, she complained, “Once you hit forty, the only guys who approach you are in their eighties.”

  I told her about my move to Maine and she told me about her grandmother’s old home on the coast. She and her brothers had pooled their savings and bought the place. They all go there every August. “It’s magic,” she said. “The door is always open. Everyone comes and goes. We all eat together in the garden. You’ll have to come.” I told her about my own magical farmhouse on the coast, how the door is always open, how everyone comes and goes, and how she, too, would have to come.

  The trip had been a leap of faith. I was trusting that the present wouldn’t destroy all those memories that I’d held so dear. I’d spent the week flying through the air on an emotional trapeze, and hugging Laurence goodbye felt like letting go. I needed someone, something, to catch me on the other side of now. And I knew exactly what that something was.

  A few hours remained until I was to rejoin my family. I turned on my phone and used up the last megabyte of my data plan to look up a yarn store. If I hurried, I could make it, and my family would never know.

  Now, Paris has several places where you can buy yarn. The most famous is probably La Droguerie. This is an old-school French yarn store, the kind where you’re expected to know what you want when you walk in, where endless fondling is discouraged. There are no couches where you can linger for a few hours and chat with friends. Try to take a picture in La Droguerie and you’ll be tut-tutted.

  The other traditional option would be the yarn department at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. But I needed more than a respectable display of brand-name yarns in a department store. I’d heard about a newcomer, a softer petting zoo of a shop that combined yarn and tea. For months already, I’d been stalking its owner, Aimée Osbourn-Gille, on Instagram. Her pictures were always warm and cozy and inspiring.

  After two Métro transfers, I was in a neighborhood I’d never visited before. Tucked in the 13th arrondissement, Butte-aux-Cailles sits squarely between Place d’Italie and rue de Tolbiac. This area of Paris is best known for its large immigrant population—“large” by French standards means, as of 1999, some 24 percent of the residents. A particularly sizable number of those immigrants come from former French Indochina, which may be why the 13th is also home to Paris’s Chinatown. The Pitié-Salpêtrière teaching hospital is here, once the largest hospital in the world, built atop the former dumping grounds for prostitutes and madwomen, aside the maze of tracks leading to the Gare D’Austerlitz.

  In the 1960s, entire blocks of the 13th were sacrificed to the urban renewal that added the first skyscrapers to the Paris skyline. Today, the area is being carved up yet again, this time to mak
e way for the shiny, slick glass facades of a brand-new Paris Rive Gauche neighborhood.

  Despite the encroaching gentrification, Butte-aux-Cailles remains a neighborhood of real people, of Parisians going about their daily lives, walking their dogs, hanging out laundry, playing with their kids. Sounds from a television drift through an open window. You can actually find a parking spot. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself entertaining two parallel thoughts: I could live here and I could probably even afford to live here.

  Huffing and puffing up a particularly steep hill and winding around a few sharp corners, I finally came upon a colorful sliver of a building with my destination at its tip: L’Oisive Thé, which translates loosely as “the idle tea.” Its tall windows were open, and people were seated at tables on the sidewalk.

  What had seemed enormous in my imagination was, in fact, a wee bird’s nest of a place jammed with mismatched tables and chairs, cozy lamps, and knitting books heaped on shelves and windowsills. Along the walls, I spotted a rainbow of familiar faces: Koigu, Madelinetosh, Lorna’s Laces, Juno Fibre Arts, Old Maiden Aunt, Shibui. These were yarns I knew well, from people I also knew well—not twenty-one years ago, but now.

  As I stood there taking it all in, Aimée herself walked through the front door carrying a tray of dishes from an outside table.

  She tilted her head to one side and asked if I was, in fact, who she thought I was. We dismissed an awkward handshake for a hug, then an offer of water, or tea, a spot to sit. Would I like to join that evening’s knit-in? The knitters would arrive any minute. Was I sure I didn’t want some tea?

  By the kitchen, an open basket suspended from the ceiling held apples, oranges, and a single bruised banana. Bulk tea was lined up in cheerful canisters painted bright yellow, with Fauvist flowers and leaves that matched the sign out front. The names of the contents of each canister, too, were painted in beautiful cursive. Assam. Camomille. Menthe.