A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  But having yarn sources and yarn people in your own town is better. Having someone you can call on to show you in person exactly how to do that crazy Cat Bordhi Moebius cast-on, the one that makes you double a long needle and knit around and around, top and bottom, increasing from inside out, making your brain explode in the process, is priceless. That just wasn’t something I could learn online from YouTube videos, although I tried— I had to tap Morgaine of San Francisco’s Carolina Homespun (which I knew because of the Internet) and beg her to show me. Morgaine is my friend. She’s local. Of course she’d show me. And what are yarn friends for, after all?

  NEGATIVE EASE

  The first time I went to Europe, I was twenty-four years old. My sister Christy was studying abroad, and we traveled together through as many countries as we could cram into her spring break. I carried yarn in my backpack (it came in handy for shoelaces and clotheslines several times) and we stayed in hostels, littering Rick Steves pages behind us as we went. Traveling through Italy, we only stopped in Venice because Christy wanted to. I’d thought Venice would be like Disneyland, all glitz and painted sets featuring overpriced boat rides. We approached the city on the train at night, riding across the long span, the ugly steam stacks of Marghera puffing behind us, the twinkling lights ahead of us. I knitted as the city floated closer, not expecting much.

  Then we exited the train station and saw the Scalzi Bridge spanning the Grand Canal, a deep velvet sky hanging heavily above. I fell in love at first sight and, suddenly, my heavy backpack weighed nothing. I could have walked all night (and we almost did, trying to find our elusive hotel room in the dark, winding streets).

  I’ve been back as many times as possible during the last fifteen years, and Venice is the city of my heart. It’s beautiful, of course, but also tricky. La Serenissima keeps her secrets from most of those who tromp through on a one-day pass, those tourists who never get off the crowded main calles and complain about the canal’s fragrance on warm days, but if you wait, if you’re patient and very lucky, Venice reveals her plans and her reasons in her own good time.

  The light is refracted up into the salty air in a million splintered pieces, and the sounds of the city—boat engines humming on the canal, heels clacking on cobblestones, men singing outside osterie—make me feel like I’m finally home. Once I was lucky enough to rent an apartment just around the way from the Casino, and I pretended I lived there, making my coffee in the caffettiera, drinking it on my terrace overlooking the red roofs. While I ate the crusty bread and thinly sliced sharp cheese I’d bought at the local grocery store, I listened to the bells chime around the ancient city. Never in sync with each other, they made my head swim with their richness.

  I was thrilled when I got to go there with Lala. Her band was touring in Belgium, and I thought as long as she was getting paid to go to Europe, I should show her my favorite city. I took her to the best secret views and to the richest gelato place in town. I showed her the Snail Staircase and the hidden bathroom in San Marco.

  “You know your way everywhere,” she said. “How do you not get lost?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

  “Don’t lose me. I’d never find the hotel again.”

  “Stick with me, kid.” I turned down a tiny calle and led her into the best music shop in town.

  Of course, I didn’t skip shopping for yarn. There isn’t much of it in Venice, but it’s there if you know where to look. As you pass the lingerie shops that face the main streets, look farther inside, past the hanging bustiers and garter belts, and there, on the back wall, you can sometimes find a few rows of Italian yarn, hidden in plain sight. And then there’s LellaBella, which sits just on the far right-hand side of a tiny bridge as you walk toward San Marco from the train station. No knitter worth her double points can miss it, and it’s well worth a stop—it only carries Italian yarn, and while it’s not inexpensive, the shop’s staff is helpful and friendly. That day, I found six skeins of merino yarn, a variegated soft pink and lavender. I’m usually drawn to rich ochre, red, or yellow, the colors of the city’s roofs, so I don’t know why I picked it off the shelf and bought it—the color kind of freaked me out.

  And when I got home to Oakland, I don’t know why I was drawn to cast on for a sweater in a pattern I’d already made (Debbie Bliss’s “Lara”). Knitted sideways, it was a puzzle of a sweater, and I loved the surprise of it: Just fold and sew a seam and presto! You get a sweater! It was a magic trick worthy of Elizabeth Zimmerman. But with so many patterns in the world, I don’t need two of any sweater, and to re-knit a pattern wasn’t like me.

  Right away, I wasn’t sure about the size I’d chosen. It didn’t seem quite long enough or wide enough, but it was hard to tell while knitting a sweater that wouldn’t be recognizable until that last seam. And even when I was a week or two into the knitting, I still wasn’t sure about the color. Pink! What was I thinking?

  I kept going, though. When I finished, it didn’t fit. Of course it didn’t fit. I’d seen it coming—why was I surprised?

  I felt that Venice had let me down a little—the first time the city had ever done so—and I was disappointed. Usually when I brought things home from Venice, even when I didn’t know what they were meant to be, they revealed their true purpose when I got home. The ashtray I bought after I quit smoking became the jewelry tray in the bathroom. The glass snail I bought in Murano weighted down the stamps on my desk. The paperback I picked up on a whim in the English bookstore was the first in a series my mother and I would love for years. I’d thought that the pink sweater would magically become my favorite, that I’d be suddenly slim enough to fit into it when it was done. Or that I’d put it on and my ruddy complexion would instantaneously become delicately colored, all peaches and cream. I blogged about my failure, briefly showing the sweater in repose on a chair and then put it on my stack of completed knits. I immediately cast on for a different sweater, just glad to be done with the pink merino.

  Weeks later, I got an e-mail from a woman named Joan. In a short note, she wrote that she’d recently lost her husband after a motorcycle accident before she got to take him to her favorite city, Venice, and that she’d thought about offering to take the Venetian sweater off my hands, but that would be “the ultimate in cheek” from someone I didn’t even know.

  It wasn’t cheek. I felt it as soon as I read the e-mail, and I wrote back, asking for her address. I told her that when I was knitting it, I knew it was wrong—the colors, the size—but I’d just had to keep knitting it, and now I knew why.

  Venice had known she needed it, and I’d been making it for her.

  I sent the sweater, and she mailed back a letter that made me cry.

  Him? The bluest eyes I’d ever seen, a moustache, a tattoo, and a 750cc Norton Commando motorcycle…Over the years, the only thing that changed was the number of motorcycles: When he died, I was left with five to deal with.

  What happened? In early June 2006, my darling man, who started riding in 1968 or ‘69 and had thousands and thousands of miles under his wheels, was coming home on a solo ride to a vintage bike gathering in NorCal and was knocked off by a kid making an un-signaled, illegal left turn into an unmarked track. The impact compound-fractured his tib/fib and the ER doc in Susanville told me that Gerry was likely to lose his leg, that he was being medi-vaced to Reno, and that he thought I should get down there…Two days later, while waiting in the pre-op area for a routine clean and debride, he had a massive MI, was revived but never came back. He took three weeks to die.

  Ger’s blood volume was completely transfused. Twice. From total stranieri, the gift of more time—time to get our heads around what was happening, time for our daughter to come home from France, time for our son to go from kid to adult, time to realize that his side of the bed was going to stay empty.

  I was so happy I had something to give her. And then our lives went on, and she left comments on the blog from time to time, and sometimes I’d wonder if the sweater had any us
e, or if it had ended up in the back of her closet. Either case was fine—it was her sweater. It always had been. But years later, curiosity got the best of me, and I e-mailed her: “What happened with the sweater? Did you end up wearing it?”

  Her answer was incredible. She’d sent the missive via e-mail but she’d asked that I imagine it was written in fountain pen (wide-nibbed), black ink on yellow-lined eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, and I did.

  Rachael, I wear your sweater at least twice a week through the winter and well into the spring. I wore it so often that first year that one of my students asked if I only had one sweater. I think of La Serenissima and her colors floating on my shoulders, and I remember that I will go back and that I will take some of Ger’s ashes to share with her waters. I will never dance with him in San Marco, never ride a traghetto with him, never take my glass-worker to Murano, never wait patiently while he takes another picture of canal repairs. I wrap myself in your sweater, though, and know that all that is good of him and me is still here and you are part of that learning and I am so grateful for you. I consider you and Lala friends not yet met. I hope you don’t mind.

  I realized that Venice had given both of us a gift we’d never imagined receiving. I’d bought the yarn, I’d knitted it, and I’d mailed the sweater away. I’d gone through my days afterward handling my own life and work, grief and joy, and seldom gave a thought to the sweater I’d sent northward (although I did think of Joan on warm summer evenings when motorcycles roared through Oakland—she’d told me she still turned to look when they passed, just to see if Gerry was riding one of them).

  The day she sent that letter was a rough day in our house. Lala and I had been arguing about stupid things, and I was fractious and annoyed. I actually remember having the thought that sometimes floats through a person’s mind, “So this is why they say marriage is hard.” I knew I wasn’t going anywhere and didn’t want to, but at times a person is more conscious of the choice to stay than other times.

  Then I remembered that when Lala and I were in Venice, we’d had a tremendous argument near the Doge’s Palace after a dinner featuring too much wine. We rarely fight, but this one was a doozy and involved both of us stalking away from each other in fury when the words got too heated. Almost instantly I realized several things: Lala didn’t know the name of the hotel where we were staying—I’d meant to put a business card from the front desk into her pocket, just in case, but I’d forgotten to do it. Neither of us had cell phones. And Lala didn’t have any sense of direction in the confusing city and couldn’t have even guessed which way to go.

  I panicked. I looked back the way she’d walked, and I saw her going over a bridge on the Riva degli Schiavoni, near the Danieli. I ran as fast as I could through the midnight crowd, grabbing her shoulder when I caught up to her. “Oh, God, I thought that—”

  It wasn’t her. The woman gaped at me in surprise and then kept walking. I looked back over the two bridges I’d just raced across and couldn’t see anyone who looked like her. I ran back, toward where I’d last seen her, calling her name. If I could only find her again, I’d apologize. I’d say all the things I hadn’t said in our argument. I started to cry, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first woman to ever wander past the gondolas with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Finally, I called her name again and heard, “I’m here.”

  Lala stepped forward. She’d been leaning on a lamppost in front of the Bridge of Sighs, over which Casanova legendarily passed on his way into prison in the mid-eighteenth century.

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  She shook her head and took my hand. “Impossible.”

  We made up in St. Mark’s Square, dancing in the moonlight to the dueling orchestras while rose vendors hawked their wares and eyed us suspiciously. She learned the name of our hotel, and we drank less wine the following night.

  But I remember that sense of desperation I felt during such a minor mishap: If I couldn’t find her, with no way to find her, all in front of me turned to blackness, and there was no place for the light to creep in.

  When Joan lost Gerry, she couldn’t find him again. She had to stay behind while he left, and in no way does this seem fair or right or good or anything but too terrible to contemplate. But when she let herself write to a stranger about Venice, the city of her heart, La Serenissima had a gift waiting for her in Oakland.

  You bought yarn and knit it into something that you knew wasn’t working for you and yet you kept on going—something that is such an act of faith that “it will be all right in the end and if it’s not all right, then it’s not the end” and I have hung onto that fairly often.

  But it’s her life, not my knitting, that is truly the act of faith. She keeps moving, keeps knitting, keeps living, day after day, stitch after stitch. I hate that Joan will never take Gerry to Venice. And her story reminds me of this: The fact that I still have my person is just pure dumb luck. For Joan’s sake, I will not take that for granted.

  For Joan’s sake, when I’m short-tempered and tired, when I’m tempted to lash out, I will try to remember that frustration is fleeting and that love is what matters most. Lala, who lost her first wife to cancer, knows this. Joan knows this. And I vow I will try not to take a single day of togetherness for granted. It’s not always easy, and I know I’ll fall back into snapping at Lala about her music being too loud while I’m trying to sleep, and she’ll complain that I don’t listen to her. I’ll protest loudly, knowing in my heart that sometimes she’s right, I don’t listen. But for Joan’s sake, I’ll try my damndest to listen more, to notice every single precious second given to us.

  And this is my wish: I hope that in every roar of every motorcycle, Joan continues to hear Gerry’s voice. I hope that when she stands at the Bridge of Sighs, she feels his lips at her temple, a brush of wind that feels familiar and necessary. And when the wind takes his ashes, I pray she finds peace. And I thank her, with all my heart, for the gift she’s given me.

  JOIN IN THE ROUND

  I’m an early adopter. I love technology. If it’s a new gadget, I embrace it and everything it comes with. I was banking online as soon the banks had Web sites. I had a blog before most people knew what the word was short for. I bought a first-generation Kindle before I knew if I would like reading books digitally (which I do), and even though I told myself that I’d never buy an iPad, I owned one within a week of their release. I love the world we’re living in. I adore that I have a computer in my pocket. With my cell phone, I can locate friends, look up menus, and give people directions to places I’ve never been. When I’m trying to decide whether to knit a particular pattern, I don’t have to guess how the sleeves look if the pattern picture isn’t enough—I look it up on Ravelry, the capital of our virtual knitting community, and consider how women shaped like me look in the sweater in question. We are living in the future, and it seems as if many knitters know it. While embracing the old craft of knitting, we’re now making notes about our needle sizes on our iPhones, never thinking about how impossibly amazing this is.

  I mean, sometimes I trip out just driving my car. Oh, heavens…what a commute—how weary I am of sitting in a comfortable seat and pushing a pedal with the muscles of my big toe. Even as a kid, I’d look out the car windows and pretend that Laura Ingalls Wilder had just teleported through time to sit next to me—what would she do? Scream? Faint? I’d point out the wonders of traveling at sixty miles per hour in a closed environment, and she’d be my best friend forever. Our world would fry her lid.

  But even the simplest technology comes with a price tag that I haven’t always been able to afford, and when I was in grad school, I didn’t have even so much as a pager. The most technologically advanced thing I owned was my secondhand computer the size of a VW with its dial-up modem—it took fifteen minutes to boot up, and God forbid the wind change when I was saving a document. More than one paper was lost to the blue screen of death and the sound of my wails.

  As I’ve mentioned before,
I learned what cold meant during grad school. Cold and dry is not the same as cold and wet. Clammy lends a deeper, more bone-chilling coldness to a night, and a tiny apartment built into a damp hillside in Oakland never dries out and never warms up. For someone who thought she never got cold, I learned quickly that I was just plain good old-fashioned wrong.

  I saved up and bought an electric blanket. I loved it. It was the high-tech solution to my chilly problem, and I loved flipping on the switch and setting the dial to ten. This was good for a while, until my dad started calling me, telling me about the dangers of electromagnetic radiation. I disregarded his concern for the electromagnetic waves that would irradiate my body as I slept, until one night wiring in the walls shorted and I woke to an all-over body shock. My cat, Digit, who slept with me, screamed in pain, and I rocketed out of the bed as every plugged-in appliance in my apartment turned first on and then off—the lights, the TV, the hair dryer, my poor computer. Then they all went off, and a small flame licked out of an outlet in the sitting room before it swiftly extinguished itself.

  The fire department came and said that my frayed wiring didn’t mix well with my wet walls. I insisted that the owner replace the wiring, which he did, but I never trusted the electric blanket again, even though it wasn’t the blanket’s fault that I was under it during a power surge. It went out into the trash.

  I complained to my mother that I was using the gas stove again to heat my apartment and running the hair dryer up under my shirt to warm my painfully chilled chest. She suggested a hottie. I said no, thanks, my life was complicated enough. I’d just gotten out of a relationship—I needed a break.

  “No, a hot-water bottle. Remember?”