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The Love of Knitting Part Two

May5

Part One

Hats are even simpler than shawls—cast on, rib for two inches, knit for-what-seems-like-ever, decrease consistently and methodically, cover your head. I have made more hats than I can remember. About ten for my best friend who wears some sort of hat all the time, a few each for my children, a handful for family babies, and towering stacks for infants I will never know. I knit them when I want someone to know I love them just because their existence has come to my attention, and I think it’s worth celebrating. You don’t have to do anything special to merit a hat, and I knit them with joy in my heart and laughter on my lips. I think it must be the happy and not the wool that makes them so warm.

That towering stack of baby hats was made in partial payment to the midwife who delivered my last two children. Every time I gave her a new stack, she looked at each one and cooed over it. I had more fun watching her enjoy getting the hats than I had making them. “Look how tiny!” she said. And, “Oh, that color is so pretty!” And, “I know who I will give this one to, her baby is so little and it’s so soft.”
It doesn’t take long at all to make a newborn hat, about four hours if it’s crocheted and six if it’s knitted. Just knowing that it’s going to be on the head of a brand new soul is payment enough. Thinking about those hats and the little heads they went on reminds me of the way my own babies smelled. Not that fake baby powder smell, but the other one, the clean and earthy smell of new life. It lasts such a short time, three or four days at most, and then it is gone; outgrown faster than the first clothes and harder to remember because you can’t touch it.

The hats for my best friend have stories, too. Most of them were knit as we talked on the phone, while he drove across Louisiana and Texas and Virginia and New Jersey and once even to New York. For a while, it seemed like he got a new one every time he came home. He’d take off the old one and put on the new one, and we would sit for hours smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, talking about war and peace, love and hate, time and distance, trauma and hurt. Sometimes entire paragraphs were spoken silently between each painful sentence. We tried to help each other become whole again, one pair of frosty blue eyes looking into another, verifying that we were each worth the next breath of air we took.
~~
We are eating dinner one night, building fajitas from the plates of food the waiter brought to the table. “Tell me about Panama,” I say. I expect to hear about beautiful women, and tropical fruit.

He begins to speak as we unroll the tortillas. “I sat there, with what was left of him on my lap. I couldn’t let him see ….that. I blocked his view. I told him he was going to be fine. I couldn’t let him see that his legs were gone. Three days before, we had been state-side, sitting in the day room, talking smack. He was laughing. I drew his picture. He bled out lying in my lap,” he says. It takes about five minutes for him to say this to me. He looks down at his busy hands while I look at him. Occasionally, he looks up to see if I am still listening, and I nod. When he starts eating, I make my fajita, and we eat that set in silence.

He doesn’t draw anymore.
~~
“What happened with your husband?” he asks. We are sitting in the camper. It is raining. I have just asked about his ex-wife and he tells me about his children instead, and then changes the subject. “You were married to him for 16 years. That’s a long time.”

“Oh,” I say. Then I stop. My eyes leave his face, and dart around the paneled walls. He sits between me and the door. Finally, I drop my gaze to the cracked linoleum. He waits. “Things had been…not right…between us for a while. Several months, you know. And then one day, I came home and he had a picture of me on his computer. As his background. One I had allowed him to take privately almost year before. I, I was wearing. I had on shoes and a smile. He let my children see that. Jasmine says they were all lined up looking at it, all seven of them. He showed it to my children. So I told him again to get out. Get out, get out, GET OUT. I felt like he raped me there in front of my kids.” It takes one and a half cigarettes to tell him this.

“I felt so ashamed,” I say. I glance at his face to see if he hates me. He doesn’t, but what I see in his eyes makes me cry all the same. I look away and we smoke again.
~~
He is lying across the bed, surfing the internet while I clean my room. I need to get rid of some stuff and organize it, because I am planning to paint it pink soon. It will be a princess room for my single-girl self. We are talking about nothing important. I throw a cracked ceramic canister into the nearly empty trash can, and he jumps. “What’s all that about?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. I continue to clean for a bit, and then I realize that while his face is still turned in my direction, he is no longer in that room with me. His hands are poised over the keyboard, but they are still. His one-word answer was not the truth.

I call his name. My voice pulls him back from wherever he’s gone. “What happened?”

“She used to throw things. When she got mad. I’d come home off the truck, and she’d be in bed with some guy. She’d get mad then. She got mad, and threw things, and hit me. And I let her. Let’s go smoke,” he says. So we do. When we get outside, I ask him why he let that happen. He tells me, “I thought it was my fault. If I were a better man, she wouldn’t cheat, and if she didn’t cheat, I wouldn’t catch her, and if I didn’t catch her, then she wouldn’t get mad and hit me.” He says all of this in one breath, between puffs on his Pall Mall. I realize I am looking at him the same way he looked at me when I told him about my husband. We finish our cigarettes in silence. When we go back in, I am careful not to make any noise as I continue to clean the room.
~~
“How’s your mom?” he asks. I can hear the steady beep of the compressor as the air brakes fill on his truck.

“She’s fine,” I answer.

“What’s wrong?” he says. I hate that he can tell at hello if something is not right with me, even on a cell phone, even when he’s in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio where there is barely any signal.

“I was over there today. I spoke to Bill again, and he acted like I wasn’t even there,” I say. Bill is my step-father. It has been six weeks since he looked in my direction, and three months since we’ve had an actual conversation. “He’s still doing that thing he’s doing. Or not doing. Whatever.”

“Have you asked him about that?” he asks. It’s a reasonable question.

“No. Mama still won’t let me,” I say.

“Do you know what his problem is?” he says. It’s another reasonable question to which I have no rational answer.

“I guess. He hasn’t really talked to me since Pat and I split. It’s like he blames me. He told Mama he thinks I’m sleeping around.” I laugh, bitterly. “How can I sleep around when I can’t…?” I trail off here. He already knows what it is that I can’t do. “I feel like he thinks this whole thing is my fault, that he blames me for it somehow. I don’t know what to do.”

“Nothing,” he says. “There is nothing you can do with that.”
~~
He startles himself awake. He has been asleep on the loveseat while I have been doing homework. I am across the room before he finishes sitting up. People don’t make that sort of noise when things are fine. “Are you okay?” I say. It’s a crazy question. I can see he isn’t, but conversations have to start somewhere. I sit down beside him and put my hand on his leg, just above the knee, on the hem of his blue shorts. I keep my eyes on that hand.

“Did I say anything?” he asks. His voice is rigid. So are his arms. His breath is so fast and hard that it could almost be called panting.

“No,” I answer.

“Nothing? I didn’t say anything?” he asks again.

“No. You didn’t say anything,” I say again. We sit for a couple of minutes. I know he doesn’t like to be touched, so I start to get up. He grabs my hand, and pulls me back, placing our linked hands on my own knee. We sit a few more minutes. His breathing slows. He takes his own pulse. It’s a gesture I have gotten used to over the past three years.

“Let’s have a cigamarette,” he says. That’s a word he uses when things are too heavy, when he wants to get away from them. We go outside, and light up.

“Are we going to talk about that?” I ask. When he doesn’t answer, I know we aren’t.
~~
“How bad a person must I be if two husbands and two fathers can’t love me?” I ask. It is the cry of a wounded child, and he can’t answer.
~~
“No one should have to look through their sights at a kid wrapped in explosives and have to make a decision about whether they die alone or whether they take you and your buddies with them,” he says. This, too, is the cry of a wounded child, and I have no answer.
~~
“Did you know that when you start to go crazy, you can feel it? Like, physically, I mean? It feels like the top of your brain is coming off!” one of us says.

“Yeah, I know,” answers the other.
~~
We don’t converse in the normal way when we talk about these things. One of us talks, or tries to, and the other listens, mutely. Really, what do you say when someone shows you their naked soul? You say nothing because only by your silence can you show your respect for the pain. Always, when one of us finishes, the cigarettes are smoked down to the colored filter and the butts are firmly stubbed out before normal conversation resumes.
~~
It must have worked, all that wool and all those words. The man who swore he would never love again is in Missouri now with a new girlfriend and those ten hats, plus two scarves. It gets cold there in Missouri. And it is cold here without him, but only if I stop to think about it. I’m glad for him. We don’t talk as much anymore, he and I. When we do, usually on Monday mornings, the conversation is light, and focused on what’s currently happening in our lives. Some ghosts are best left alone, once you get them to sleep.

This is the second of three parts. Check out these lab coats while you wait for me to get back with the links.

Part Three

This entry was posted on May 5, 2012, in cass writes.

The Love of Knitting Part One

May5

In my other life, my non-writing, non-working, independently-wealthy-with-no-responsibilities-and-plenty-of-free-time-on-my-hands life, I knit. I have a knitting blog, albeit one that has seen better days, and more consistent updates. While I was doing all that blogging about knitting, I was also a professional knitter. I could devote six hours a day, or more, to my craft, every day of the week. You can use a lot of yarn and make a lot of pretty things in thirty hours a week, and I did. I enjoyed all that knitting time enormously.

I developed the pattern for “Holy Sheep! Baby Bottoms,” which included soakers, shorts and pants, myself. A soaker is a knitted woolen garment used over cloth diapers in the place of rubber or plastic pants. I could turn out a soaker in one day or a pair of long pants for a two-year-old in two days. I’ve made them plain, ruffled, striped, and with cute embroidered designs. Most of these were custom pieces, with the customer choosing the colors, motifs, and measurements, which I then knit to order. I enjoyed it because it allowed me to practice different skills, the palettes and textures were never the same, and each piece was an original.
My favorite was a pair of green pants with a bear applique on the bum. First, I dyed the yarn and knit the pants. Then I followed a cross-stitch pattern, using it to make a knitted bear. I sewed the bear to the pants, and drew in the facial features with brown yarn. The whole process took about ten days from the time I put the yarn on until the washed and water-proofed pants were in the mail.

Plunging white wool into a vat of colored vinegar-water is as close as mortals can come to making magic. The smell of wool soaking in hot vinegar takes some getting used to, but eventually it becomes tolerable. It comes to signify creative alchemy— I forget that it is so acrid my nose burns and my eyes water! As it “cooks,” the water becomes clear and the yarn takes on a brilliant hue. The whole process takes several hours. As I soak in the acrid smell and watch the color move from the water into the wool, I am thinking about what I am going to make with that yarn.

But there are seasons for everything and that season of professional knitting ended for me after the birth of my seventh child. I miss it: not so much the knitting, which I still do, but the designing and the dyeing of the yarn, and the creativity that went with it.

I have been playing with yarn for decades. When I was nine a family friend taught me to crochet, but my love for knitting was partially inspired by my first husband. He knew how to knit, and he considered his craft quite remarkable. He thought crocheting was a “waste of good yarn.” He tried to teach me several times over the course of our six year marriage, but as with so many facets of his personality and our marriage, it never quite worked out. He had some good qualities and many skills, but teaching was not among them. He held the yarn like a left handed knitter, even though he was right handed. “You do it like this,” he said, hiding what he was doing with his hands.

“I can’t see what you are doing,” I said.

“Then move! Watch my hands!” he said. When I moved, so did he, shifting the position of his hands so that my view was blocked yet again. And when I didn’t understand his wordless demonstration, he said, “This is too complicated for you. Go back to that simple stuff.”

“No, show me again,” I said. We must have repeated that conversation a dozen times over the years. I finally just shelved the desire and watched him knit while I crocheted. I made several blankets and a couple of vests while we were married, and I watched him work on the back of a sweater in plain gray wool—always just the back, and it never seemed to get any bigger. But the lust to knit and knit well was born in those moments, so it was a temporary shelving. I had the tools, I had the books, and I had the desire. Eventually I taught myself.

Late one night shortly after my sixth child was born, I sat in my rocker with my needles and yarn. I opened the instruction book yet again, and I did what it said yet again, and I began to knit. I had actually been knitting correctly—and ripping it out—for several hours that night before I realized I was doing it right and the sample pictures in the book were labeled incorrectly. I was so excited that it was all I could do not to run through the house screaming with joy. After all, I’d been trying to knit off and on for most of 15 years at that point. Of course, the fact that my shout of joy would have awakened my whole family and ended my knitting time helped keep me in my chair.

Even though it took me 15 years to learn to knit, I still say nothing could be simpler than knitting, unless it is breathing. I’ve taught several people to knit, sharing my love and passion for the craft. One begins with two sticks and a string and after a varying investment of time, ends with a useful finished piece. It is a skill that takes just minutes to learn but can bring a lifetime of satisfaction. The left hand holds one stick and the yarn, and remains mostly stationary. The right hand executes small, precise twists, flitting the other stick into and out of the existing stitches to make new ones. There are only two maneuvers, the knit and the purl. To make a knit stitch, one enters from the front, and to make a purl stitch, one enters from the back. From these two stitches every knitted thing you have ever seen is composed. It is soothing and repetitious work, and the pseudo-monotony of it is strangely liberating. The mind is free to wander and dream while the hands are busy creating. The body is kept fully in this world, while the imagination dashes here and there— thinking, planning, composing. It’s how man is supposed to live— staying busy with our everyday lives while dreaming of something better. Someone will probably solve the problem of world hunger one day while doing just such a thing as knitting.

I made my first knit stitch in 2002, and in the years since, I have made hundreds of pieces. I have covered heads. I have covered feet. I have covered everything in between with wooly warmth. I have knit for money, I have knit for the joy of it, and I have knit because I had nothing else to do at the time. I have knit while laughing, while crying, while mourning, and while praying. When I don’t know what else to do, I knit.
Like most “yarnies,” I have yarn everywhere. “You have a lot of balls,” said my best friend, the first time he saw my room. I looked around with fresh eyes. Fiber spilled out of my cubbies, there was a basket full of it by my chair, and my current project was resting on the nightstand. He couldn’t see the boxes of fluffy mohair and silk and baby alpaca under the bed.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I answered. I gave him mental credit for a double entendre that gave both my personality and my knitting skills full credit.

Along with the yarn, there are unfinished projects tucked here and there about the house waiting for my time and attention. Many of those unfinished things are for me. I tend to drop what I am knitting for myself to knit for others: a prayer shawl here, a special request there. But like I said, I am patient. The stuff I’m making for me will wait a bit and it will get finished eventually. Someday.
In the meantime, if you receive a gift from my needles, you can be sure that I loved you more than I loved myself for the time it took me to make it. That’s all knitting really is. It’s love solidified. Wearable love. Love that hugs and warms your body. When I am knitting for you, I am thinking about you, praying for you, loving you. The finished item that you get is just a reminder that I spent that time with you on my mind. It’s an affirmation of your worth to me.

Prayer shawls are usually given anonymously. You can’t just walk up to someone you don’t know and give them a hand-knitted shawl. Especially when a person is grieving, you want to give her space. It embarrasses those who aren’t grieving to find out someone holds them in such high esteem that they would go to that much effort. Because of this, I like to put them in a pretty gift bag and leave it labeled in a conspicuous place, watched over by a trusted co-conspirator.

I did this once for a woman I had admired for more than thirty years. She was a substitute teacher in my elementary, middle, and high schools. I was always pleased to walk into a classroom and see that Miss Bee was the teacher that day. She went to her grave never knowing who loved her so much. That is exactly as it should have been. She touched so many lives with her graciousness that the entire community loved her. People stood in line for hours to pay condolences when she passed. I was one of them, and I never heard a murmur of complaint while we waited. Instead the line was full of stories celebrating close to 80 years of faithful service to her husband, her children, her church, and her community.

Also her Savior. We never spoke about her faith until I was grown. “It is only because of Jesus’ love for me that I am what I am. There is nothing good in me by myself,” she said. While I designed and made her shawl, I was thanking God for such a remarkable influence in my life.

The Clapotis, pronounced clap-oh-tee, is a fairly simple thing to make. You knit across, increasing on the ends, and purl back. Every few stitches, you twist a stitch. Every few rows, you drop a stitch. After about 20 hours, you have a parallelogram that you can wear around your head or around your shoulders, depending on size. I have made three of them in the past three years. Two I have given away, and one I kept for myself. This is the piece I make now when I am loving someone who is sick or grieving, or just having a rough time. I knit while I mourn with them and pray for them. Thinking about what someone else is facing for such a long time makes me realize how insignificant my own troubles are. It becomes a healing piece for both of us. I’m fairly certain it is the hours of prayer and not the yarn that makes that healing happen.

This is the first of a three part series. Go get a quote for liability insurance while you wait. I’ll have the others up shortly.

Part Two
Part Three

Object Lesson

Jul28

You know, our kids learn stuff in crazy ways. And sometimes, life just hands us a very effective teaching tool. Now, “That’s not fair!!!” happens to be one of the most annoying sentences in the English language, at least in my viewpoint. And as you have probably guessed, I have one child who says that in response to every suggestion, directive, or instruction he receives. Last night, he was playing xbox with his sibs, and I told him he needed to let someone else have a turn. And he said….yep, you got it…..”That’s not fair!”

So, I walked over to him, and I said, “Son, this weekend, for my BIRTHDAY, I went out and got a dog that was supposed to be my friend for the next fifteen years.” His mouth dropped open, but I kept on talking. “Now there is a very real possibility that dog may die, and have you ever once seen me stomp my foot and say ‘that’s not fair!’ ” He nodded no. And I continued, “That’s because saying ‘That’s not fair!’ doesn’t change anything and it just makes people think you are a whiner. Sometimes crap just happens and you have to deal with it and move on.”

Did it work? Maybe, because later in the evening, I heard him say, “That’s not……” Nothing, he stopped.

There ya go, better than a Barney video off Netflix, and no vga to hdmi cables required. As for MAB, we are entering day 6 of parvo, and he’s still wagging his tail. It gives me hope that I will eventually need a category called “Cass has a dog.”

This entry was posted on July 28, 2011, in cass writes.

Visitation

Jul27

So, I went to see My Awesome Boyfriend today. He looked at me and accepted a few pets. The he walked about 18 inches away, turned his back on me and laid down. I’m not sure if he’s angry with me for “leaving” him, or simply ready to die and be done with it. I’m hoping it’s anger, because that’s a powerful emotion, and maybe it will make him hang on. I didn’t let it stop me, in any case. I just moved over to where he was and petted and talked to him some more. He was alert to the sounds in the hallway, and he looked at me a few more times, but his wag is just gone. It’s sad.

By the way, have you ever been out for a walk in the woods and come across some rotten meat? Maybe on a hot day? With maggots all over it? That’s how my dog smells right now. And that’s how my hands smell, even though I have washed them about five times since I touched him.

Who says I can’t still paint an awesome word picture?

This entry was posted on July 27, 2011, in cass writes.

Tentatively Hopeful

Jul26

I am not quite ready to break out the macanudo cigars yet, but I am tentatively hopeful about My Awesome Boyfriend. His white blood cell count is good, he is quiet but alert, and “certainly still in the game.” That is, he isn’t any worse, and every day he makes it increases the likelihood that he will make it. With parvo, it is usually dehydration and secondary infection that does a dog in, and not the virus itself. With those issues taken care of, it becomes a waiting game.

I have pooper scooped the yard this morning, and today I will bleach the house. It needed/needs to be done anyway, but I mind it less if I think about it as getting ready for him to come home.

Very soon, I hope to be writing stuff about how we went fishing and camping and played with toys. I’m looking into puppy obedience classes and such, and making a list of doggie supplies that I need to buy or replace. I better start with a collar and leash, because I threw that and his harness away after the nurse said “be sure and wash that real well.” I figured that it was better not to take the risk that another dog might one day be infected because I wanted to save a few bucks on new gear.

Urgh!– My Awesome Boyfriend

Jul25

So, this post was supposed to be all about my new dog. But I am not going to tell you about him now, because my dog has parvo. And if he doesn’t make it, I don’t want this post here to remind me.

Oh, that’s crap. I love this dog. He deserves better than that. He is an awesome dog. See?

I picked him out Friday afternoon from one of the local Animal Control shelters. He is an Australian Shepherd mix, about 6 months old. He was picked up by the side of the road on the 19th. He is emaciated: 19 inches at the shoulders, 30 inches from the tip of the nose to the base of his tail, and only 17.8 pounds. He has pinworms, ringworms, and roundworms. And even with all of that AND the parvo, the dog is so on his game that we were house training (and my version of house training means “pee/poop on command”), crate training and leash training.

He submitted to a bath as soon as I got him home, and laid meekly in my lap while I trimmed AND filed his nails. He is an awesome dog, and his name is My Awesome Boyfriend, because he gave me kisses and a present on our first date. The present was a pile of parvo-laden, worm-filled poop, but it was a present!

I’ve been wanting an Aussie since I worked with them in rescue, so about 12 years, maybe a bit longer. I refuse to believe that fate would finally allow me to have the dog of my dreams just to let him die on me. Three days of My Awesome Boyfriend is not enough; I signed up for the full fifteen year hitch.

But this very minute, the weight on my heart is about as heavy as your average undermount sink.

When sleep won’t come

Oct27

the whole night through…. Do you remember that song? That was me last night. The stuffy yet runny nose, the Listerine and shower cap on my head and a generally anxious state of mind combined to keep me up way past my normal bedtime. As a result, I am very tired today. I totally see a nap in my future. But first I have to do a little blogging about cabin furniture.

And if I wasn’t a complete heathen, I would probably wait until my bedding had dried, but…I’m not sure I can hold out that long.

So, my cousin (who gets occasional excerpts from my writing) asked me last night if it bothered me to put all my inner thoughts down on paper. She said it just seemed so “naked”. Well, I explained to her that those weren’t all my inner thoughts, that I got to pick and choose which ones to put down, and so it was okay. But this morning, my 6 year old, who can now read just about anything, walked up to my desk and started reading my list of stuff I plan to write about. “Coffee, hair, sex, bike ride….” Oops. Yeah. That wasn’t so okay. Not because it bothers me for her to be able to read the word sex, or that I mind if she knows my thoughts occasionally wonder in that direction. No, the problem is that the list of stuff I plan to write about is very, very naked. It is in the writing that I dress it and ready it for presentation.

Note to self: Keep your notes hidden, cause they are the naked.

This entry was posted on October 27, 2010, in cass writes.

Fourteen Handwritten Pages

Oct22

So, today, I wrote my three morning pages as usual. And as has become my norm lately, they dragged on and on as I kept half an eye on the internet and half an eye on a conversation with a friend and half an eye on my two baby girls, which left only half an eye for the pages. And near the end, I realized that what my cousin had been saying to me for the past few months was true. I am a writer. I draw pictures with words. It’s what I do. The writing isn’t what I am doing while I wait for my real calling to show up, the writing is the calling.

So, with that in mind, I made up my mind to sit down and just write for 2 hours. Not write to a handed-to-me topic, not try to fit a link in to make a quick 5 bucks, but just write. And I turned out ELEVEN pages in about an hour and 40 minutes. Eleven pages people. About four of those pages were notes on the writing process itself, but the rest was essay material, and better than the average hydroxycut reviews out there. Wow. What could I accomplish if I set aside two hours everyday just to write? No internet, no telephone, just me and the writing? And coffee of course. I am not sure, but I do plan to find out.

Here’s the rub. In order to share all that with anyone, I have to put it in print. I can’t turn in a handwritten manuscript. The blog does not accept paper and ink posts. So eventually I need to have enough self discipline to sit at this keyboard and use it ONLY for writing. For now, I will stick with developing the self discipline to just shut the cover. It’s a beginning, right? And if I can do it for the remaining days of October, I ought to be good and primed when NaNoWriMo starts on November 1st.