Passing

Somebody died and a relative brought her knitting to the library. Unpacked, it covered a large table in the room where the Langworthy Knitters meet on Wednesday nights. It was mostly synthetic yarn. Jane urged us to take whatever we wanted. I waited until the end of the meeting to see what the others chose. Very little, it turned out. I found a pair of number six needles and some stitch holders and took those, because they're useful to me.

I certainly didn't need any more yarn, and I rarely knit synthetic fibers. By the end of the meeting just about everything was still left on the table.  I had another look. There were a lot of completed afghan squares, and jumbled skeins of Orlon and acrylic.

I noticed a clear plastic bag from a hospital, the kind you're given to put your clothing in after you exchange it for one of those hideous johnnies.  The bag was filled with off-white aran wool, and a pair of almost-finished children's mittens. I decided I'd take those, too. Then I saw the beginnings of a red sweater on two number eight needles that were capped with very nice point protectors and embellished with a stitch counter. Suddenly, I wanted those notions, and I thought it would be unkind to strip the red acrylic yarn from the needles. I took it all.

The hospital bag made me remember when my mother was hospitalized in 1984. I was living in a really depressing part of Illinois and had just had my second child. Mother came to visit her new grandson and unexpectedly fell very ill, spending the next three weeks at the same joke of a hospital where her grandson had been born without my having anesthesia because "we don't have an anesthesiologist on call at night.  If you want anesthesia, you'll have to go to Peoria."

The children weren't allowed to visit, lest they bring in infections, so every day I'd take them and stand on the hospital grounds outside her room. She'd come to the window. I'd hold the baby up high, and my other son, who was four, would jump up and down and wave to his grandmother. Grandma was really bored in the hospital and she asked me to bring her some yarn and knitting needles. During her stay, she made two pairs of mittens, which I still wear, and two children's sweaters, now stored in mothproof bags.

The hospital docs thought she had pneumonia.  Eventually, when she was strong enough to travel, she went back to New York and had further testing at a real hospital.  She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

When I unpacked the hospital bag with the aran yarn, I discovered an old green measuring tape among the neatly-wound balls.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair...

Day Two: 29th March. Skill + 1UP

Look back over your last year of projects and compare where you are in terms of skill and knowledge of your craft to this time last year. 

The more I knit, the more I realize that nothing in this game is linear. My latest challenge is knitting with two circular needles rather than four dpns to which I've been accustomed. Thanks to the Internet, I can access demonstration videos that amplify and clarify what I've learned by reading Cat Bordhi's Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles (Passing Paws Press, 2001). 

Sound and fury before the storm. A contest.

Sky Scarf, begun 2-23-13, showing only one day of blue sky since.

The current New England winter has organized life into milestones not dissimilar from Kübler-Ross's Stages of Grief and Dying: the Anticipation of Storms, the Fearful (and sometimes Angry/Fed Up/Curmudgeonly) Anticipation of storms (fomented and abetted by the Culture of Fear media, including and especially The Weather Channel and its team of storm-a-holic reporters), the Stoic Preparation for Storms (Bread? Check.  Milk? Check. Gasoline? Check.), the Experience of the Storm Itself, and the Passing of the Storm, when we all emerge from our hidey-holes and trade tales of what we endured during the storm.

Currently New England is in the Fearful Anticipation Stage, as the weather brewing is supposed to dump snow and freezing rain on us ferociously, starting any minute now or maybe tonight or maybe early in the morning; the tides are high and already eroding the beaches with surge; the northeast winds are gusting up to sixty+ miles per hour.

The wind-whipped Wood River, Woodville, RI, in Fearful Anticipation Mode.

So, to take our minds away from all the ominous, foreboding, depressing etc. of winter's last gasps (note to self:  Daylight Savings Time begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday March 10), I will draw your attention to a cute little book recently sent me by its publisher:

You might be wondering why I'm touting this, since this blog's focus is on New England--but, gentle knitters, I must confess that I was born and raised in New York City, and return there often. (In fact, I'm going to the Big Apple next week.)  And given that I'll be sitting around a lot during the next bout of Awful Weather, I'll at least start working on one of the clever designs in Knit New York.

British designer Emma King's patterns are all witty, but what really tickled me is a knitted Staten Island Ferry. It was my sad fate to spend my formative years on Staten Island, but my luck to commute from SI to New York on the ferry twice daily, whilst I attended Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts. Sailing past the Statue of Liberty every morning and afternoon, and Ellis Island, Governor's Island, and viewing the Verrazano Bridge in the distance, on the bright orange ferry with dark blue letters--there are many happy memories for me clustered around those commutes.

Furby's on the same page with me.  We will be knitting a ferry during the impending storm.

Other KIY NYC icons in the book are the Empire State Building, the Walk/Don't Walk street-crossing sign that all dyed-in-the-wool jaywalking New Yorkers ignore, and a red fire hydrant, etc.

The publisher, Collins and Brown, has kindly made a free copy of Knit New York available as a giveaway.  If you, dear readers, will post a brief comment here explaining why you'd like the book, I'll choose a winner--contest closes on Sunday the 10th at midnight! (Please note:  the contest is limited to people with mailing addresses in the US.)

O.k., time to batten down the hatches!