A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  It all came rushing back—I’d almost completely forgotten about her hottie. When I was growing up, my mother boiled water on cold nights and filled her ancient hot-water bottle. I’m not sure how she chose which daughter would use it—she only had one bottle that had to be shared among the three of us. It had a woolen cover, crocheted in what seemed to be leftover yarns in three different colors, and it was tattered-looking, the cover a bit too big for the bottle so that if you weren’t careful, the rubber burnt your skin. But I felt special when it was my turn, and I was so warm with the bottle at my feet that I tried not to mind the inevitable cold puddle that formed by morning, the water slowly dribbling from the old cracked seal.

  “Where do you even get one of those?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. I got mine in a drugstore in New Zealand thirty-five years ago.”

  That explained the leaking, I guess. I vowed that as soon as I found out where they were available, I’d buy her a new one.

  I went to the Super K-Mart in Oakland, which was one of the few places open twenty-four hours a day. I could go in after my shift at the call center, at three in the morning, and shop in a blessedly quiet store, something hard to find in the Bay Area. That night, naturally, I went first to the aisle where electric heating pads were stocked, but no dice. I searched the whole pharmacy area without luck. I asked a man who was stocking the shelves if he could help me. While his English was decent, I could tell that he’d never run into this particular request before, and we went back and forth a while, until he finally led me to the plungers. I thanked him for his time and drove home, bottle-less.

  The next day, I tried Big Longs. Before it was tragically sold in 2010, it was ginormous, and I had a theory that it sold everything—I once bet a friend that it probably sold bindis, the Indian forehead decoration. She said no way. I won the bet and collected happily on my Polish sausage from the hot dog cart, because Big Longs had one of those too. Big Longs sold hats and yarn, booze and socks. They had a full aisle devoted to fly-fishing. People drove across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco just to visit the gardening department. Big Longs had to have a hot-water bottle.

  I searched high. I searched low. I enlisted two young men to help me, and they came up empty-handed. Finally, in desperation, I asked the woman at the pharmacy counter if she had any idea where in the world I could find one. She nodded and reached toward a shelf behind her.

  “I keep a few back here behind the counter,” she explained. “It’s not something we normally stock, but I get requests, so I usually buy one or two on special order. Here you go.”

  She handed me a combo douche and enema kit.

  I opened my mouth but it took me a few seconds to compose myself. “No, no,” I finally said. “It looks like a hot-water bottle, but this is…” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I don’t need this stuff.” I pointed to the nozzle, hose, and clamp. “I promise, I don’t. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I hastened to assure her.

  She shrugged. “It’s the only way it comes. That’s your hot-water bottle. Just throw out the other pieces if you don’t want ‘em.”

  I tucked the box under my arm, hoping the print was hidden, and took it to the front register because I had too many other items in my basket to be rung up at the pharmacy. I prayed like I’d never prayed before that the box scanned, that we wouldn’t need a price check blared over the PA system.

  I made it out alive—no one except the woman behind me in line saw what I was buying, and she was buying four cans of Raid and a bag of marbles, so I wasn’t too concerned with what she thought.

  I got home, boiled water, and poured it carefully from my teapot into the mouth of the bottle. Then, of course, I couldn’t touch it. Even resting on top of my clothes, it was too hot to use. I thought of the old ratty cover my mother had on hers, and knew I needed something like that, a sweater for my bottle. Sure! An easy knitting project: a flat tube, joined in the round, with a doubled-back ribbed collar worked extra long to hide the neck of the bottle. I cast on for it immediately in a blue silk/merino yarn from my stash.

  But in the meantime, I still had a hot-water bottle, and my chilly bed was begging for heat. I wrapped the bottle in an old towel and tucked myself up with it. I started with it at my feet, then moved it up as my body warmed until I was hugging it against my chest. Digit fought me for space, curling onto the other side of the bottle. We fell asleep, happy and warm, and when we woke in the morning, the bottle still retained heat.

  It was genius. How did people not buy these in bulk? Why were they such a secret? I realized that in this respect, I was a late adopter. There was nothing high-tech about a hot-water bottle; you didn’t even have to plug it in. And wrapped, as mine would be in a hand-knit cozy, it was so low-tech it was retro.

  I finished my blue silk/merino cozy. It was just what I wanted, a miniature sweater that hid the rubber bottle (which, despite my best intentions, I kept thinking of as a particularly adorable enema bag). I gave it to my mother, who, obviously, had the most need for a new hot-water bottle. She loved it, and in typical Mom fashion, she tucked it carefully into her cedar chest and kept using the old, leaky one.

  I went back to Big Longs and bought several more enema kits. This time I held my head high. I knew what I was buying was awesome. Four douche/enema kits for me!

  The second cozy I made went to a friend who suffered from cold more than I ever did. She shivered when the temperature dropped below seventy-five, and she, too, fell in love with the usefulness of the gift. We compared notes on how much better our winter sleep was and lamented that so few knew the secret. The third went to a friend whose daughters had both just reached the age of cramps. I told them how much a hottie did to reduce pain, and the next time I got cramps of my own, I thought about them, happy to have been of help.

  One night I screeched myself awake when the towel slipped from around the bottle, the rubber burning my stomach. I cast on for another cozy—this one for me—in a simple red wool, nice and thick. A night or two in front of the TV watching the one channel it received with its VHF rabbit ears—technologically, I was still stunted on this front—and another hottie sweater was complete. But then it wound up going to a sister who had a birthday coming up. The next, to a friend moving to England.

  I wrote up the pattern (see appendix). As of the date of this writing, years and years later, there are more than 500 people on Ravelry who have made the hot-water bottle cozy, and my favorite e-mail comes from a woman who made one for a teacher on Prince Edward Island, the home of Anne Shirley. It thrilled me to my hand-knit socks to think that something I helped create would make it that far, and the irony that such a low-tech solution made it to the island because the pattern was disseminated in a forum in an online knitting community was not lost on me. It was the perfect marriage of high- and low-tech ingenuity.

  Once I was aware of this kind of pairing, I started noticing similarities elsewhere in my household: acoustic instruments paired with digital tuners; an electronic yarn scale next to my spinning wheel; running shoes next to a Garmin GPS watch. Tiny miracles everywhere, but they only felt like miracles if I remained conscious of what came before.

  I didn’t have a hot-water bottle cozy of my own until my mother died—I found the silk/merino-covered one that she’d carefully stored and I brought it home with me. I’ve used it a few times, and the smell of cedar that lingers in the wool tugs a place in my heart that aches. Actually, I love the smell so much I keep her bottle in my own cedar chest now. And when I need a hottie, I just boil water and fill the closest hot-water bottle—usually the naked one in the linen cupboard—and wrap an old towel around it. Even simpler than a knitted cozy, it’s what I’ve become used to, and it works for me just fine.

  DRAFTING TRIANGLE

  When I was perhaps twenty-seven, I visited my parents’ home, and while I knitted in the living room, I listened to my mother whistling along with the old songs on her radio. Arlo Guthrie’s classic “City of New O
rleans” came on, and I listened to my mother quietly sing every word. My eyes welled with tears, as they always did when I heard a snippet of that song—no matter where I was, in a campground listening to a stranger play it on his beat-up guitar or skimming over radio stations while driving up the Central Valley, I always experienced an emotional surge that I never saw coming or ever expected.

  I wandered into the kitchen, dabbing at my eyes with my sleeve. “I wonder why I cry whenever I hear this song?” Embarrassed, I reached for a Kleenex.

  My mother stopped moving and stared at me. “Do you remember?”

  I frowned and shook my head.

  “Of course you wouldn’t remember,” she said. “But this was our song. I put it on the record player and danced you to sleep to this every night when you were a baby.”

  I stood there, stunned, as I almost remembered the feeling of her rocking me to sleep. I wished for that memory, longed for it, knowing a memory like that could get someone through just about anything.

  It seems almost unbelievable to me that my mother never forgot anything, and seemed to know a little something about positively everything. But I wasn’t alone in thinking this about her. I worked with her at a bookstore for years, and I watched the residents of our small town come to the store just to ask her questions. This was before the Internet, and instead of going to the library, customers visited Jan. “When is the next gibbous moon?” “How do you make a battery?” “Where’s Belarus?” She was like a walking encyclopedia, and I used to field the phone calls of customers who were disappointed when she wasn’t working. And no, I didn’t have the answer, sorry.

  Mom knew odd things. Things no one else knew. Once, at a bluegrass festival (a Herron family camping tradition), my father got into some face paint. Thinking himself clever, he drew a Maori-style tattoo on his lips and chin, and wore it all afternoon, bragging about his New Zealander wife. In the evening, when he came back to camp for dinner, my mother looked up from the spaghetti she was boiling on the camp stove, saw him for the first time all day, and said simply, “Nice moko. You know that means you’re a married lady?” Nope, Dad hadn’t known that. But my mother had.

  Sometimes I worry that with my famously bad memory, I’ll someday forget the things that are most important to remember. I don’t need the eight times table (God knows I’ve only barely known it at the best of times), but what if I forget how to knit? What would that feel like, to sit with sticks and string and not know what to do with them? It would be like forgetting a language, I think.

  And sometimes I believe the harder I try to hold things in my memory, the faster they fall out. The tighter my grasp, the less I retain. I forget names and dates. I forget to pick up the mail and to feed the dogs and, worse, I’ve forgotten plans, not showing up where I’m supposed to be because I’m so forgetful, still knitting in front of the TV, unaware I’ve let anyone down. After twenty-five years of trying, I finally remember how to start the kitchener stitch, but I have as slippery a grasp on the concept as I do the eight times table, and I always expect the knowledge not to be there the next time I need it.

  But after some trial and error, I’ve come up with what I think is a clever way of coping with this problem since my mother, The One Who Knew, died. It’s this: I find smart, kind women who remind me of her, and I befriend them. Now, I know some women don’t have mentors. They don’t need them, perhaps. They are content with friends, coworkers, peers. But having had such a remarkable woman to look up to all my life has conditioned me to want more than just that, if I can get it.

  I don’t think the women I’ve picked for this role in my life really know I’m making surrogate mothers of them, but because they are who they are, they won’t mind when they read this and find out—each one is maternal enough to love me anyway, even though none of them are old enough to actually be my mother. Sophie Littlefield will laugh and call me darling and make me feel like I’m the center of the universe and that everything I say is the smartest thing that’s ever been said. Barbara Bretton will send me an e-mail when she reads this, but what she won’t know is that it will catch me exactly at the moment I’m falling, about to face-plant on the concrete—her words will cushion me from hitting the bottom. Esther Luevano, who at first glance might come off as a softie, doesn’t take any crap from anyone anymore, and she’ll let me baby her if I want to, the way I used to baby my little mama—she’ll let me worry about her and tell her to rest and insist she needs another cup of tea, and she gives me kisses when I cry.

  And then there’s Janine Bajus.

  Janine came into my life when she moved to the Bay Area from Seattle. My friend Ryan sent me an e-mail that read: “The Feral Knitter is moving. She won’t know anyone, and I think you two should meet.” We’ve all had these kinds of e-mails before—friend, meet friend! Everyone is cc’d, everyone writes back: “Yes, lunch sometime!” And then the common decency box is checked off, and if you forget to get back in touch, no one’s feelings are hurt.

  But the Feral Knitter (so-called because a friend misunderstood the words “Fair Isle Knitter” and the misnomer stuck) was different. Something in her e-mail made me suggest a knitting coffee date. We met for the first time at the Temescal Café on Telegraph Avenue, just doors down from my favorite knitting shop. And over coffee and easy laughter, I decided on the spot to adopt a new friend. Whether she liked it or not, I was keeping her. It was the nicest friend blind date I’d ever been on.

  There’s just something about Janine—please pardon my French—that precludes the bullshit. With her blunt-cut shoulder length brown hair and bangs, open smile, and the way that she really looks at you when you talk, she leaves you one option: You tell her the truth. And if you don’t know the truth, you think about it and figure it out while you’re talking to her, and she’ll make a connection to something else in your life, something you never thought of but should have.

  And she knows her knitting. She’s my knit-guru, my personal Elizabeth Zimmerman. She came up with—get this—set-in sleeve caps that are worked in the round. (Knitters: I know. Non-knitters, or new knitters: Trust me, this means she’s a genius.) She taught me how to spin one afternoon, and we were, that afternoon, part of a line of women dating back thousands of years. My mother didn’t spin—probably one of the few things she didn’t know how to do—so she’d never taught me. Janine’s daughter knitted, but didn’t spin or show an inclination to do so (yet).

  As she taught me, we wondered how many women had sat together spinning, just like this: one patient, the other frustrated. In that moment, we symbolized mother and daughter throughout the ages. Janine, of course, was the one who commented on it that afternoon. I was too busy swearing at the wheel to notice it until she did, and if I painted the air blue with curse words, she was genteel enough not to comment on them, to wait until the air cleared before she spoke again, just as my mother would have.

  I actually adopted Janine as my friend and mentor before my mother died, and while I didn’t do it consciously, I was so lucky that she was there for me in those first months afterward. When I got word that my book had sold, Janine was the second person I told, after I’d woken up Lala. Janine got one of the first galleys of my first novel, the one Mom would have received.

  Since Janine taught me to spin before Mom died, I brought the spinning wheel to our family campsite at bluegrass festivals. In the past, I’d always perched around the late-night musical jams knitting and singing, without my own instrument to play. But once I learned how to spin, I took my portable wheel camping every year, and while people played guitars and fiddles, I’d keep time with my foot on the treadle, playing my own tune. Mom even tried it once, with my hands guiding hers, and she was a natural spinner, of course. It didn’t surprise me.

  One of those festival nights, Mom and I sat watching Arlo Guthrie on the main stage. The meadow grew dark as he sang, and the sky above us sparked with falling stars. He sang “City of New Orleans,” and my mother and I held hands until the song was do
ne. She’d been diagnosed with cancer, and was heading into surgery the next week. We both knew it might be the last time we’d ever hear him sing us our song.

  It was.

  Years later, I stood in the same meadow, watching Arlo again, and closed my eyes as he sang, Mothers with their babes asleep, Are rockin’ to the gentle beat, And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel. I grieved, tears coursing down my face in the dark, but underneath, I felt buoyed by the knowledge that I will never, ever forget why that song makes me cry. And no matter how bad I do get at remembering, I hold a brightly colored, handspun, knitted ace in the hole: a repository of stored memory, held by my friends. And I hope I provide a shoulder (and a memory) every once in a while for them to lean on too.

  REPEAT TO END

  I’ve been writing since the day I could hold a pencil. My favorite thing to do when I was a child was hide under my covers and plot books. I wrote my first novel and illustrated it in first grade—it was about a brownie (the fairy kind, not the chocolate kind, although I may have conflated the two: the protagonist had a suspiciously dessertlike shape). And I’ve been knitting for as long as I’ve been writing. It took me many years, though, to see that there were more similarities between putting words on paper and making stitches on the needle than just the fact that they were both huge parts of my life.

  After I sold my first real, adult novel, I hovered aboveground for a good two months. I wrote a whole book! Holy heck! And a real publisher was going to publish it. It would be in honest-to-God bookstores, and people I wasn’t related to would read it. It was a dream come true.

  Then, as I realized that I had to write another one, I landed on earth with a painful thud. I’d sold a three-book series, and whenever I mentioned that to other writers, they’d look concerned. “Beware the second-book curse,” they intoned, their voices hollow, chains clanking, black cats walking in front of them, and bats flapping past their heads. Okay, that might be a teensy exaggeration, but not much. They tried to scare me, and I tried not to listen.