A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  Travel so far to feed a new obsession? Who would do that?

  My breathing shallow, I closed my eyes and clicked the Buy button for the airplane ticket.

  Once at the festival, I scooped up armful after armful of unspun fiber. Nothing was safe from me: Rambouillet, Corriedale, Targhee, Cormo, I wanted it all, and I wanted it in every color of the rainbow. How could I guess what my first handspun sweater should be made from if I hadn’t tried spinning it? I bought sweater quantities of everything, just to be safe.

  And then I found the wheel of my heart, an Ashford Joy. I bought it on the spot. I was blowing through money like it was water, but I felt such a need to spin that it was almost a physical urge, like hunger or sleep. I didn’t understand where the need came from; I just fed it.

  In order to fly home with my bounty, I put the fiber into a large plastic tub and sealed it with duct tape. I thought it was a great idea. I’d just check the behemoth, and my loot would meet me on the baggage carousel at the other end.

  Then the airline representative said, baggage sticker in his hand, “Can you open that for me, please?”

  “What?” I asked in horror. I couldn’t open it. There was no way. I’d used all the tape. I’d had to sit on it to get it closed.

  “I just need to do a visual check, since I can’t see what’s in it.”

  I didn’t think before speaking, and the words tumbled from my mouth. “I can’t open it. It’ll explode!”

  It was as if everything else in the terminal stopped. Everything went into slow motion. Heads swiveled and the representative looked up at me and took a step backward.

  “We have a problem,” he said.

  I leaped forward, further terrifying the poor man, and launched into DEFCON 1 Crazed Spinner speak: “You can’t open it, I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just fiber. You know, pre-yarn? I’m going to spin it all when I get home. I have this dream of making my own handspun sweater, from scratch, like some I saw this weekend, and some is dyed already but some is natural, and maybe I’ll dye it. I haven’t decided. But if we open it, it will never, ever, ever close again, and who’s going to help me get all that fiber back in there? You? No, I don’t think so.” I put my head down on the counter and wailed, “I don’t have any more tape.”

  I must have been the man’s first insane spinner because in his hurry to move me along, he merely slapped the baggage label on the bin and gave me my boarding pass.

  I wasn’t done with the Baltimore airport, though. I didn’t check my new beloved Ashford Joy; instead, I carried it on in its clever backpack. As it passed through the X-ray machine, the person running the scanner paled. He glanced up at me and then back at the screen.

  “I, um, need to send that back through again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He let out a long, low whistle and then said, “Hey, Steve, you gotta get a look at this.” It took a little talking to get it through, but by now I was becoming adept at Crazy Spinner Speak. They let me pass, confusion still in their eyes.

  In the terminal, waiting to board our plane, I couldn’t wait. I took my new beauty from its case and attached a leader. I unpacked the bit of fiber (purple merino and silk) that I’d put in the front pocket of the bag just in case. I gave it a good oiling.

  People started to stare.

  I didn’t care. I began to spin.

  I got a few comments from passersby, most of them along the lines of “Whoa.” One woman snapped, “I can’t believe they let you back here with that. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

  I ignored the comment, but it made me nervous, and I noticed a turbaned security officer had picked me up on his radar. I watched him pace back and forth, frowning at me. He got closer and closer. Was he mentally reviewing his handbook? Where was the Giant Wooden Spinning Thing section? Could it be a weapon? Did he have a responsibility to do something about this?

  Finally, he approached. I didn’t stop spinning, but my heart beat faster, and I lost control of the fiber. It drifted to bits, and I had to look down at the wheel, using the orifice hook to pull the yarn back out again. The woman who had snapped at me watched with anticipation.

  “You’re spinning,” he said. He had an accent. He still scowled.

  “Yes,” I said. If he took it from me, would I get it back? Or would they destroy it? I couldn’t let that happen. If I picked it up by its handle and sprinted for the gate, would he give chase? He looked like he’d move slowly, and, after all, I’d already threatened airport security with an explosion and gotten away with it, what was one more security infraction?

  “I used to spin,” he said, the scowl giving way to something softer. “It’s what my people did. At home. I used a charka. Do you know what that is?”

  I nodded, so surprised I could barely speak. “Cotton?”

  He smiled and sighed, bending his knees to come into a low squat next to the wheel. We were eye to eye. “Yes, cotton. It’s lovely. Peaceful. I wish I could do it now, but I don’t have one. Why do you spin?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. “Because I have to. I’m not sure why.”

  “It’s what your people did?”

  My eyes widened as I realized for the first time, yes, he was right. It was what my people did. My father grew up riding his uncle’s horses on the ranch, herding sheep and cattle. My mother was raised in New Zealand, the daughter of a sheep farmer. One of my first clear memories is of being in a New Zealand shearing barn, sliding down the wool chute, and landing in piles of freshly shorn fiber. I own a handspun wool blanket that was woven by my great-grandmother.

  I come from wool people, from spinners and knitters. They are my heritage, and I was claiming it. I realized that’s why the hunger felt so natural, why the urge was so keen.

  The grin could have split my face in two. My new friend and I talked spinning until they called my flight. The offended woman who had snapped at me stopped staring and pouted into a book.

  I should have known that, for me, spinning was inevitable.

  It’s what my people did.

  DUPLICATE STITCH

  As a child, I begged to be told stories of my mother’s youth, about teaching in Europe, or living in Samoa, anything at all about her glamorous, pre-mother life. The fact that she’d had such a different life before us fascinated me as a child. I stole peeks at her photo albums whenever she would let me—they showed photos of her at parties in Germany in which she looks like a glamorous extra on the set of Mad Men. Very young beautiful men were draped over settees in low light, sitting next to women with long, fringed lashes and high, coiffed hair. All of them smoked and held highballs in their hands, and all of them smiled.

  She didn’t tell us many stories, but I knew one. While traveling near the fjords of Norway in her early twenties, she met a woman who knitted sweaters to fit. The woman measured my mother and told her to come back in a month. My mother returned, and the sweater, a traditional Setesdal cardigan worked in a dark mossy green background with cream “lice” stitches, fit her perfectly.

  Good, strong, overspun wool, it was knit at a tight gauge and wore like iron. After forty years of use, Mom had only worn a few holes in it at the turned cuff of the sleeve and at the hem, easily fixable.

  I loved that sweater. She put it away with the winter clothes at the first sign of spring, and when she pulled it out of the box in fall, it was a sure sign that the rains were coming. It was the sweater she wore when the kitchen was cold in the mornings. She wore it with her good jeans when she went out at night with my father, rare and strange occasions when she put on lipstick and transformed into someone we barely knew. On the couch at night, in front of the fire, Mom cradled us in her arms, and I have vivid memories of tracing the peeries with my fingers as she read. I loved nothing more than falling asleep to the sound of her voice reading to us, my head on her shoulder, my hand on her wrist, still touching the wool.

  The sweater was part of my history, but it never really struck me until I was an adult, living out of he
r house, that it was hand-knit. It was so far beyond anything I’d ever be able to do. I was only an American knitter (even though I held the yarn with my left hand, using a modified throwing style). But her sweater was Norwegian, the pinnacle of knitted accomplishment.

  I knitted for years and years without much confidence in my ability. I knew I could read patterns and follow them, but they felt like recipes—I wouldn’t dare make bread without consulting the cookbook, and I wouldn’t dare cast on without someone else telling me how many stitches to place on my needle.

  But always, in the back of my mind, there was the thought that someday, if I got good enough, maybe I’d be able to find a pattern that replicated parts of Mom’s sweater. Maybe I’d get good enough to attempt something that kind of looked like hers. Perhaps I’d match the color of the yarns. A Dale of Norway kit, perhaps, would be a good place to start. I knew, obviously, I’d never find the exact sweater, with its intricate designs and small motifs, but many Setesdals looked similar to hers, and whenever I saw a woman on the street wearing one, I was always hit with an inappropriate urge to hug her.

  Then, when I was thirty-five, my little mama got sick. She’d been sick before with multiple large, scary illnesses: sarcoidosis, colon cancer. But even though she was small, she was strong. A fighter. Healthy. She fought things off with a will as strongly spun as the wool in her Norse sweater, and she usually swept disease out of her body like she swept dirt out of her house. Nothing a little scrubbing wouldn’t fix.

  This sickness, though, was something different. No one knew what was wrong. She got weaker. Unable to stop losing weight, she got smaller. I smothered her with kisses, which she batted away like an annoyed cat, but I saw the smile she couldn’t hide as she turned away. She called me ridiculous, and I knew it was a compliment.

  One day, I took down the green sweater from the top shelf of her closet (she didn’t bother to bag up the winter clothes now that she had all the closets to herself since the children were gone) and draped it on the kitchen table. I was only looking for inspiration, something I could search for on Ravelry.

  But instead I saw something else, and I remember sitting heavily in Dad’s creaky cane chair at the head of the table.

  “I can make this,” I said, shocked.

  Mom put the kettle on for a cup of tea. “But why would you?”

  “Because I can.”

  “Someday you can just have that one.”

  I hated what her words implied, and they left me speechless.

  She went on, “Besides, you knit sweaters that are so much nicer than that old thing.”

  The excitement rose again. “But I could do it.”

  I ran my fingers over it, turning it over, pulling the seams apart gently, peering into its workings. “Do you have graph paper?”

  Bless her, of course she did. It must have been left over from when she’d home-schooled us, no less than twenty years before, but she knew exactly where it was, and I started charting out the graphs, my pencil scribbling against paper on top of the kitchen table, where I’d done hundreds of hours of homework in my teens.

  Now I was back at the same table doing the most exciting homework of my life. Why hadn’t I figured out earlier that sweater deconstruction was just math? I would have reknit a million of my favorite sweaters had I known that! I figured out the gauge, measured how wide it was (it had fit me perfectly since I stopped growing, just like it did Mom), and started jotting numbers. Mom pulled up a chair and laughed as my pencil practically smoked against the paper.

  “I can do this.”

  She nodded. “I never doubted it.”

  I took my chicken-scratch notes and the graph paper and drove northward home, where I ordered dark green and cream Jamieson’s Spindrift. It was a much lighter-weight yarn than that used in Mom’s heavy sweater, but I wanted something that I’d be able to wear in California (and also still achieve gauge with my loose hand).

  Not long after ordering the yarn, I had a difficult conversation with Mom over the phone. She’d sounded confused and upset, two things my mother never was. Almost as upsetting, she was also at times perfectly clear. She was cognizant that something was happening to her, and that it was unpleasant, and that she couldn’t remember or figure out what it was. It was the saddest I’d ever heard her sound.

  I made my voice happy. I laughed. “I’ll kiss Digit so hard for you, he’ll growl in your direction.” My obstreperous cat loved very few people, but my mother was one of them. “I love you,” I said cheerfully.

  “I love you too.” Her voice broke. I lived only five hours away from her, but with work and obligations and life, she felt so much farther away.

  The yarn arrived quickly. As I pulled it from its box, I decided that it was almost perfect. Not quite the same green as Mom’s, but it would do. I sat on the couch and pulled out my notes. I cast on for the sleeve. I turned on a stupid TV reality show and didn’t watch—instead I looked at my hands working the twisted rib cuff. It went faster than I’d thought it would, and soon I was picking up the first ball of cream to start the first motif. Since it was around the wrist, it also went quickly, and before I knew it, the first two peeries were done.

  I slid it onto my wrist, the circular needle cold at my forearm.

  It was as if my mother’s arm were right there, coming around me. For a single, jolted second, my adult eyes changed into those of a child’s, and I remembered, vividly, what it felt like to sit in my mother’s lap, her arms around me, my hands resting on top of her sleeve, my fingers running up and down the cream stitches, jogging up the design, tapping each V, practicing counting by figuring out how many cream stitches fit between the motifs.

  I was knitting my mother’s arms around me. The images on the television swam in my tear-filled eyes.

  I finished the sweater at her bedside in Arroyo Grande Hospital. The word hospice had just been uttered for the first time, and instead of processing what that meant to my family, I sewed on pewter buttons as if my life depended on it. Or rather, as if her life depended on it. I probably could have hung the sweater from the industrial TV rack in her hospital room and suspended myself from the buttons and the wool would have only strained a bit. Those buttons, sewn on with desperation and all the hope my lungs could breathe in my mother’s direction, wouldn’t ever be removable except possibly with a pry bar. Thank God I put them in the right place.

  By then, she was too tired to read. Finally diagnosed with multiple myeloma, she only had a few weeks left. The manuscript of my first novel, still unsold at that point, sat in a binder next to her. I read her the first few pages before she was too tired to listen. I stood outside the hospital, my forehead pressed into the concrete wall, tears streaming down my face.

  My little mama would never read my book.

  My biggest champion, the woman who had always believed the most in me and my dream of being a writer, even during the dark moments when I’d given it up, would never live to see it carried out.

  The pain was unbearable and, at the same time, I’d never felt more selfish. What did my book matter when my mother was dying? I rubbed my face on my T-shirt and lifted my face to the sun.

  Inside, I wove in the final ends. Mom was sleeping again. As I snipped the last bit of yarn, the moment was anticlimactic. But as if she heard it, Mom’s eyes opened. I shook the sweater out and held it up.

  “Hey, Mom, look. I finished the replica of your sweater.”

  She smiled weakly. “Oh, good.”

  “Isn’t it pretty? Look,” I shrugged it on. “It fits!”

  “It looks so nice…May I…have some water?”

  I reached to do the things I’d been doing for weeks, giving her a bit of Ensure, coaxing her to take a bite of the awful coagulated pudding, all while wearing my new sweater. I didn’t even consider wrapping Mom in hers, which I’d brought with me with the hope of taking photos in our twin sweaters. It would have been too difficult to move her.

  But later, when my sisters had gone
to find food and Dad had gone to the house to feed the cats, I sat at the edge of her bed and read a few more of my unpublished book’s pages to her until she fell asleep.

  Then I leaned forward and held her, and the same patterns and motifs that had encircled me, keeping me safe all my life, now held my little mama. She slept, her head on my shoulder, her hand on my wrist.

  BLANKET STITCH

  I wish you could see the Love Blanket that the knitters who read my blog made me when Mom died. I wish you could run your fingers over the squares countless times like I have. Every time I do, I find something new to marvel at. Rachel M and Dani knitted the same Tree of Life but in different colors. They flank a heart done by Lyssa. Jove made stripes. Eleanor’s square came all the way from Britain. Rachel T used handspun, saffron-dyed Blue Faced Leicester, and Michelle knitted her square on the anniversary of her mother’s death.

  I can’t tell you about every square in my blanket, because it would take too long, but let me tell you about Celia’s. Celia is a friend in real life, as well as a blogging buddy. For years, my sister Christy had said, “You have to meet this woman I work with. She knits like you do. All crazy-like.” Celia was, indeed, one of my clan. She wore her brightly colored knits with joy, and hugged with abandon. The square she made was red and had four pink hearts. One extra pink heart floated above the others and boasted small white wings. It wasn’t even until I was writing my blog post about the blanket that I realized that the top heart was my little mama, the other four were my father, my two sisters, and me. My heart broke clean open.

  The blanket’s creation was a big Internet secret, one that Lala knew about and successfully kept from me. One evening she came home from work with a large box with my name on it and just shook her head and grinned when I asked her what was going on. I opened the flaps and pulled out my Love Blanket.

  Composed of more than fifty knitted squares, each one completely different from its neighbor, it was seamed in black, which gave the back a stained-glass effect. I knew this kind of blanket, had read about them online, had in fact contributed to the construction of several over the years, but I’d never seen one in person before. It quite literally took my breath away. I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room, and I had to concentrate on taking my next breath, pulling the suddenly thin air into my lungs.