KnitLit by Linda Roghaar

Author:Linda Roghaar [Roghaar, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53583-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

“You Have to Make Something”

Connie Elizabeth Tintinalli

About 35 years ago, my grandmother patiently taught me, her preschooler granddaughter, how to knit. My first project was a red wool scarf. It was rather short (but then, so was I!), as I was anxious to call it finished. There are actually only two stitches in knitting—the knit stitch and the purl stitch. All patterns of varying degrees of complexity and endless variety are simply combinations of these two stitches—a series of knots precisely formed to create a fabric that can be as delicate and airy as lace or heavy and dense as a fisherman’s sweater. My next endeavor was a rather complicated (but still diminutive) white hat with a cable stitch that stretched from ear to ear and tied beneath the chin. I proudly wore that hat through many winters, until my ears grew too far apart. My projects increased in complexity and ambition as I grew into adolescence—sweaters for myself, my family, and, in my 20s, for a lover (quite a risky undertaking: Will it be finished before the relationship ends?). When a sweater I began for my soon-to-be-born nephew was finished after he had outgrown it and was suitable to be worn only by his teddy bear, I accepted that my life was too frantic and busy to allow for the gentle relaxation of tying wool into knots.

Some 10 years passed with my knitting bag inhabited by a (potential) sweater, with only a back and half of a front. Walking on Toronto’s Bayview Avenue one day early in January 1996, I was strangely compelled to enter a knitting store, drawn by some inexplicable force. I fell in love with some hand-dyed yarn—yarn that began sapphire blue and wandered into azure and magenta and finally a midnight purple, bringing to mind the colors that saturate the sky as night falls, colors with the evanescent quality of a dragonfly’s wings.

“Don’t be silly,” I told myself, “you never have time to knit anymore.” I left the store and continued to do my errands. But on my way home, I was drawn back to the shop. I bought the yarn and a pattern, telling myself that, if nothing else, the yarn itself was so beautiful it was worth possessing if only to look at now and again.

The next day, my grandmother entered the hospital and was diagnosed with a heart ailment. I took up the enchanting yarn and began to knit. I think I believed that each stitch could somehow bind her closer to me, to the earth, to life. She recovered and, with medication, continued to embrace life and experience, with as much energy and determination as she had before. I was torn between finishing the sweater or leaving it unfinished, just in case I needed another miracle. I took up the sweater again a year later, waiting anxiously in the corridor of a London hospital with my mother while my father underwent heart surgery. Knit—inhale. Purl—exhale. Knit—inhale. Purl … With his complete recovery, I set the magical sweater aside.

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