Who first spun, looped a long strand with fingers, doubled it back on itself, noticed the value, the creation, the method? What ancient need, what story of creation, what desire to make a useful thing? We knit last night, the five of us, each pair of hands working the long thin needles in her own rhythm and rhyme, some pushing front and back, some reaching and catching. Some smooth, others abrupt in her own motions. My hands don’t move the needles much, but do move the yarn; I watch my index fingers catch and hold the strands, my middle fingers and thumbs hold the needles, seeming so arachnid and separate from the rest of me, nimble and clever and quick. My hands. Could they span the night with thread, could they catch luminous moth wings in gossamer strands?
These knitting hands look like my Grandma’s hands, long lean fingers, strong fingertips, but I lack the curved-back thumb and hard nails, I lack the knowledge she had for playing piano, and my hands have not held so many hands of children or baked as many cookies. Her hands were always warm and dry, calloused but smooth. I remember watching things grow from between her two extra long bronze-colored steel needles she always used, click click click click, they moved fast and steady. When her eyes failed and she fell into delirious sickness her hands still moved sometimes like she were knitting, trying to loop it all together, a body’s comfort, the ancient rhythm a salve for the soul, and there I feel that ache in my heart. So bittersweet, some memories.
Last night I smiled to be surrounded by knitters, their work growing and spilling from the thin sticks they held. I noticed how our threads were as different as our working rhythms, different textures, thicknesses, colors. It is a curious phenomenon, to create something, to not know how it will look until it is finished. Between the hope and the completion, the perception of the thing changes. We lose any supposed objective sensibility, and cannot see it except through our own eyes, which saw it all along, from beginning to end.
JJ & I sat on the wood floor, it felt good and cool beneath me, and placed me at eye level with the top of the coffee table. I watched the knitting projects increase and the wine in the bottles decrease. We worked with quiet conversation, the two men on either side of me relaxing in their own chairs, joining in with observations. The knitting circle is a place of reflection and learning, of quiet talk about children and education, of books and travels. Politics do not enter, and religion is only sometimes mentioned as a personal relationship, without judgment, understood. We weave laughter and stories into the simple stitches, the things remembered are knit together with care, loops connecting loops with the intent of creation.
These knitting hands look like my Grandma’s hands, long lean fingers, strong fingertips, but I lack the curved-back thumb and hard nails, I lack the knowledge she had for playing piano, and my hands have not held so many hands of children or baked as many cookies. Her hands were always warm and dry, calloused but smooth. I remember watching things grow from between her two extra long bronze-colored steel needles she always used, click click click click, they moved fast and steady. When her eyes failed and she fell into delirious sickness her hands still moved sometimes like she were knitting, trying to loop it all together, a body’s comfort, the ancient rhythm a salve for the soul, and there I feel that ache in my heart. So bittersweet, some memories.
Last night I smiled to be surrounded by knitters, their work growing and spilling from the thin sticks they held. I noticed how our threads were as different as our working rhythms, different textures, thicknesses, colors. It is a curious phenomenon, to create something, to not know how it will look until it is finished. Between the hope and the completion, the perception of the thing changes. We lose any supposed objective sensibility, and cannot see it except through our own eyes, which saw it all along, from beginning to end.
JJ & I sat on the wood floor, it felt good and cool beneath me, and placed me at eye level with the top of the coffee table. I watched the knitting projects increase and the wine in the bottles decrease. We worked with quiet conversation, the two men on either side of me relaxing in their own chairs, joining in with observations. The knitting circle is a place of reflection and learning, of quiet talk about children and education, of books and travels. Politics do not enter, and religion is only sometimes mentioned as a personal relationship, without judgment, understood. We weave laughter and stories into the simple stitches, the things remembered are knit together with care, loops connecting loops with the intent of creation.
<< Home