Love, Loss, and What I Knit

Before I became a knitter, I just thought it would be fun to make things with sticks and string. What I didn’t realize is that it would become my personal knitters anonymous and save my sanity. Or that it would force me to confront my feelings about perfection, or the lack of it.

I became a knitter when my husband Tom developed throat cancer about 18 years ago. The sheer terror of it kept me up at night, all night. I self-medicated with yarn and reruns of Becker, in which Ted Danson plays this curmudgeonly but good-hearted doctor. On my iPad, I would switch from scenes of Becker grousing at the local diner to videos of how to perform a slip-slip-knit.

It was a year of hell, filled with surgery, tube feedings, and so many trips to Mayo that it felt like a second home. In a horror film.

The result is a beautiful black sweater that I can’t bear to wear. It reminds me too vividly of sitting in the waiting room while they sprayed radiation into Tom’s neck. The good news: he survived, and thrived, and I found a new passion.

The black sweater that I knit while Tom was enduring radiation treatments.

In the beginning of that year of hell, I stumbled into a knitting store in a little blue house on Scottsdale Road in Arizona. It was like walking from the horror film into the inside of a rainbow. Yarn was piled in cubbies and hanging from the ceiling. I wandered around, holding the soft, lovely skeins to my cheek, my eyes closed, healing my fractured soul, just a little.

The owner, a no-nonsense woman, must have sensed I needed comforting. She helped me pick out yarn, needles, and a pattern. When I screwed up, I went back, and she helped me fix it. I went back again and again. Years later, she closed her shop. It was like a death.

Then, knitting went digital, and my knitting community went global. I found MDK and its daily knitting missives, and I instantly bought all the wonderful Field Guides. I discovered Knit Stars, which each year releases videos of amazing designers around the world.

I’ve made mittens with the face of John Lennon, pink-and-white checkered socks designed by Summer Lee, and a Sushi and Snark Wrap by Casapinka that’s like a poncho, but not. Her tip: Never position it as a crotch pointer.

After Tom’s cancer, knitting helped me rebuild my shattered courage. I don’t remember where I first heard the phrase, “It’s not hard; it’s just new,” but it was definitely in my yarn world. I’m pretty sure it was Gaye Glasspie, @ggmadeit. I learned to knit a cable. Lace. Bobbles.

I flew to Thailand and bathed an elephant in a river. We sold our house and moved into a camper van to travel the country.

The ice-blue scarf I knit for my mother.

Knitting helps me embrace the fact that I’m an odd bird. I look for other odd birds in the wild. I love their twinkly eyes and wrinkled faces and pink hair and excitement over a repurposed breath-mint case to carry stitch markers.

I talk to them in airports, and campgrounds, and coffee shops. Amazing conversations start with, “What are you making?”

As I knit, I feel a yarn lifeline connected to that sod-busting woman on the plains, spinning yarn on a drop spindle to make socks for her family. And to the women I visited in Vietnam weaving in dirt-floor houses with no electricity.

It’s a lifeline of women’s work, historically considered of little value. I’m so proud that, despite the backbreaking work of birthing and feeding and washing and nursing the sick, they summoned the precious nanoseconds of energy they had left to stitch creativity into a shawl or quilt or rug.

I’ve knit shawls for people I love, hats for friends with cancer. A burnt-orange scarf that hugs Tom’s scarred neck. For our precious son, Nate, a sweater exploding with color and filled with joy.

The sweater exploding with color for our son Nate.

At first, if I made a mistake, I went back to fix it, even if it was waaaay back, even if it was something only I would notice. Imperfection plagued me. Now, I’m more forgiving. A few oddly shaped stitches? Well, it’s f#%#ing handmade. Want perfection? Get your boring, machine-made knitwear online.

But when imperfection becomes unacceptable, like a cable leaning the wrong direction, or some drunk knitting you don’t recognize the next morning, or a sweater that won’t fit around your thigh, knitters know what to do. We call it frogging, ripping out stitches, rip-it, rip-it, rip-it, unknitting to get back to the place where you can go forward again.

Bonus: Frogging works on real life, too. Frog that bad job or boyfriend. Rip-it until you get to the spot where you can stop, take a breath, and move ahead to remake your world.

I did.