Grandma's Hands

I watched her hands dance through the skeins of multicolored yarn, the gnarled knuckles creaking gently as the knitting needles beat a rhythmic ticking.  As I sat at her feet and watched her work, I thought of her as a magician, able to take something so plain and ordinary and turn it into something fantastic.  I watched as the balls of yarn unraveled from the wicker basket beside me and the stitches began to take shape in her lap.  I squealed in delight as they became recognizable as a sweater, made just for me in a way that only grandmas can.

I remember snuggling up in her lap that night in my new sweater, remember her guiding my small hands through the movements of knitting.  All I could think about was feeling so safe wrapped up in her gingerbread embrace, how I was creating magic too.  I also remember finishing that first square of stitches and being so disappointed that I could not do it the way she did.  Sitting in her arms I cried out my frustrations and we tried again and again as I willed myself to understand, not wanting to go home when it came time to leave.  I had still not reached her level of skill, so I reluctantly agreed to leave on the promise that she would continue to teach me the next time I came over.

There would not be a next visit for me and grandma.  I learned two days later that she had passed away, which at the time meant that she had simply gone away, I did not understand that heaven was a place I could not go until months later.  It was only then that I realized she would not be coming back and I would never be able to run and hide in her comforting embrace again.

I slowly forgot about grandma and the knitting we had shared together until I entered high school, when my grandfather also passed away.  When cleaning out their old house, it turned out those old squares I had attempted were something that had been kept along with all of grandma's other old knitting projects.

I began to knit again simply as a coping mechanism to deal with the loss of my grandfather, who had been an important figure in my current life, much as my grandmother had been to me when I was younger.  But as I recovered from the pain of his loss, I continued to knit, simply because it was a connection to that memory of being a young girl in my grandmother's arms.

In the times when I need her most, I can still find my grandma in that multicolored yarn and can still feel the safety of those wrinkled arms around me.  She was a magician, after all.