Margaret Means "Purl"

When I was a child, my mother taught me to knit. I remember her showing me how to hold the needles, and I remember the little saying that she used to remind me of the steps: "In the little bunny hole, 'round the big tree, out the little bunny hole, and off comes she!"

For a week, we sat, side by side, in front of the fireplace, our needles clacking. Restless with five year old confidence, I announced that I was going to make a scarf, maybe five of them (this same child who used to go outside and try to "clean" the dirt road). My mother murmured, "Umm hmmm" as I knit away, one stitch building onto another, then into rows, like a small backyard garden. "Look at how much I've done!" I would boast, and my mother would examine it and nod, deigning it "good work."

Eventually, though, the yarn tangled and stitches slipped. I couldn't cast on. I couldn't bind off. The needles, draped in several inches of yarn, fell to the wayside, eventually discarded into a plastic IGA bag and crammed into the back of my closet.

As I moved onto other pursuits throughout the years (sketching floorplans, playing Orphans with the neighbor kids, typing "menus" on an old Smith Corona, curling my hair), my mother continued to knit, needles clicking steadfast, a strand of yarn wound around her index finger.

She still knits. I accompany her to knitting stores that possess whimsical names like "Knit and Purl" or "A Stitch in Time," and we shuffle along narrow aisles stuffed with fine gauge yarns and bulky weaves, aran blends, lamb's wool, soft cashmere, and little bundles of embroidery floss. There are different needles, too, some with smooth balls fit over their ends, some made of bamboo or rosewood, some shaped like circles. We just browse; my mother often massages the skeins of yarn and says that they're too expensive. She usually glances back through the window as we walk away.

My mother takes orders for her knitting; she whipped out an aran scarf for Lou for Christmas, and she has made me two purses, two scarves, several dish clothes, and a chunky cardigan in the past year. She made the cardigan while she was in Northern Ireland, visiting my grandmother. Mary, a knitter herself, smoothed the pattern over the kitchen table and announced that it was wrong. She insisted that my mother tear out endless rows of stitches and redo them, the right way. Recently, my mother told me that Mary was once asked to sit in the front window of a dusty, yarn shop in Ballymena, knitting, to draw business. Although a daily wage was involved, Mary spat at the offer. Knitting wasn't a vocation. It was just something that she did. Mary also scoffed at terms like "master knitter" or "artist." Who needed labels when she had a pair of stockings to darn?

My mother's hands have short nails. Her fingers bend slightly more each day; they will soon be crooked. When she visits us, she presides at my kitchen table, waving a knitting needle while she talks the way she used to wave her cigarette.

The last few times I talked to my mom, she was on a Sock Making Rampage. "Hold on," she said, "Let me just count this row." Another time when we spoke, she sounded depressed. I said, "What's wrong?' And she sighed, "Oh, nothing . . . well, it's just that I can't seem to get this heel quite right. Do you think I should rip it out and start again?"

Her passion for her knitting is comforting to me, somehow. It is as constant as her visits, as predictable as the turkey noodle soup she makes the day after Thanksgiving. It is a rhythm in her life, and this is a time when I rejoice in the rhythms of the people who I love.

I think that the next time she visits, I will ask her to teach me again.

And maybe this time, I will finish a scarf.