Memories of watching grandma knit. |
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. |