belatedly

I’ve been thinking a lot about knitting lately, trying to figure out what it would mean to create meaty prose about purling and dragging yarn over and over and over again. My sister-in-law Lisa has escorted me to the yarn harlot and knitting daily, and as much as I appreciate the former, the writing on neither really piques my interest.

And then there’s those blog readers -- those modest few -- who tell me that they skip my posts whenever I write about knitting.

In any case, I realized this morning, on a bumpy train to work (only 10 days left!), that the reason I’m interested in writing about knitting is because -- and perhaps for me alone -- it’s the stuff of muscle memory. Or rather, it’s somehow and quite literally often the fabric of my emotional landscape.

Like yesterday. On a perfectly balmy mother’s day afternoon, I meditatively continued on with a teal summer cardigan in Philadelphia’s under-appreciated Fitler Square. This sweater features the kind of lace knitting that I actually have to pay attention to or I’m apt to misinterpret a knit-two-together as a slip-slip knit. Yesterday, though, my mind was drifting off and I could -- for the first time in more than twenty five years -- recall my very first piece of knitting: a mustard yellow acrylic patch, one of those misshapen numbers that my mom told me was most definitely a doll’s blanket. Too bad I didn’t like dolls.

I recall neither the yarn passing through my fingers nor what became of this scrap, but I do remember showing it to my mom and sheepishly pointing out the mistakes. And this is where it gets at something I want to remember. My words are missing, but in some resonant way I recall blaming that acrylic for the skipped stitches, the little holes that surely meant a doll’s toes would catch cold. What I remember even more clearly was my mom telling me that it wasn’t the yarn that had erred. It was me.

I’m convinced that I remember this moment amidst all of the other fogginess of my life because of it was such an anomaly, a moment in which my mom actually called bullshit on my bullshit. I like this moment, then, because it’s one rare bit of critique amidst an otherwise hazy morass of adulation and encouragement. I want to believe that this moment made me a more careful knitter, that it implanted some shed of self-reflection, and for it I’m thankful.

{This Moment}

headed to Kentucky this morning with the newly-blocked, quickly-finished Ishbel in tow. Balm for airline travel = lacy madelinetosh shawl. Bring on delays, the pat-downs, the misery. Happy weekending.

every girl needs a goal

While my Dad was in surgery, we waited. And waited. And waited. It was Suessian waiting:

We waited in a hospital.
We waited in the hall.
We waited on the stairs.
We waited on a lumpy couch with our legs folded up like beach chairs.
We waited in the first room.
We waited in the second room.
We waited all day long.

Amidst all this waiting, another waiting lady asked me what I was knitting. Before I could answer, my stepmom said, “She’s knitting a baby sweater. She always knits baby sweaters.” I let out a nervous little giggle. The kindly lady asked after my baby who wears all of these sweaters and, of course, I had to admit that there isn’t any baby. I stammered something about liking the quick satisfaction of the tiny form, about knowing a lot of babies, but I could also feel my cheeks reddened. I was busted as mommy-knitter-wanna-be. How embarrassing to be uncovered—though fully clothed—in a hospital waiting room.


I wasn’t knitting this during the inquisition. It was already off the needles and on its way to Boston last week for Alexandra, the tiny baby who met the world fourteen weeks before she said she would. The micro-preemie pattern is here. And here’s my ravelry link. Somehow I managed figure out the itty-bitty hat in my head and so it’s without a real pattern, but instead the result of much looking. I’m calling it the every-girl-needs-a-goal cardigan because it should fit when she’s tipping the scales at about 4lbs, a long way to go right now, but a worthy goal for a little gal.

less troublesome

Or maybe more troublesome. Two or three weeks ago it was looking a bit out of control. I thought an update, then, was in order.

This jury duty jumper found its way off the needles. I blocked it last weekend, but haven't managed to get it in the mail. The pattern is here. As you can see, I modified it into a pullover. After blocking it, its proportions seem a bit odd. It's rather long for a newborn but seems to be about the right width. Who knows, perhaps I should have increased for girth around the middle?

This Turn a Square cap did get in the mail and hopefully on the head of J, the birthday boy. He's been clamoring for a cap for awhile. I think it might be impossible to photograph a hat without a head, but it's all I got in this commuter marriage.

The Stephen West Little Colonnade was certainly not my favorite knit of the year. I just hated doing the decrease columns. And it seemed totally puny when it came off the needles last week. Here it is in its pre-blocked form. It's on blocking wires right now and it seems to have grown a good deal. I'm going to love wearing it; I just didn't love knitting it.

Finally, the Shalom. I never thought I'd get back to this, but a trip to Arkansas early in the week gave me an excuse. I knew that I'd be totally exhausted on the trip home and unable to look at work. So that exhaustion combined with two cancelled flights and a ten-hour travel day meant that I got Ms. Shalom this far. She needs some selves, of course, and this will happen soon, perhaps on a return visit to Little Rock next weekend with J.


We're deep in the midst of decision making around here. J and I have to decide if we're going to be in Arkansas or Kentucky, at one rural small college or another. All of the choices come with significant sacrifices and we're muscling our way to a decision that can work for both of us. It's a tough time, but I think we're both trying to balance our desires with our hopes for one another. More than anything, we're committed to taking this marriage to (gasp) a shared space. It just remains to be seen where that space may be...

frankly

Dear Frank,

I'm loving this sweater on you. Frankly, Frank, I think it does fabulous things with your hair. Some people may think it a bit too feminine, but I say, let them think what they want. Just be frank about it. I have another one of these EZ February sweaters on the needles right now because everyone, I dare say, should knit one in February.

Anyway Frank, enjoy it. And let's hope the snow melts one of these days and you can get outside before you turn two.

much love,
me

brrr

Is there anything worse than frigid days without snow or sun? It's just bitterly cold in Philadelphia, the kind of cold that freezes the pissed-on newspapers in dirty sculptures along the sidewalks. It sounds artistic and interesting, but it's just gross. I keep wishing that it were more snowy and that I could step out my door onto a pair of old cross-country skis. It must be in my blood, this longing for snow and skis. All winter I've been thinking about the white days Arlo and I spent while I was teaching in the northwest corner of connecticut. We used to strap on the skis (well, I did at least) and quietly float around the lake on campus. When I think about the moments when I've been most at peace in this world, those afternoons would be at the top of my list. This is why I'm feeling the need to get back to a snowy climate. It just seems that my heart pulls north even as my brain--and my marriage--is cajoling me south.

But enough about my meteorologic desires. It's just plain cold. So I've hunkered down inside with pot after pot of herbal tea; The New England Primer , which I'm teaching this week and about which I'm not sure what exactly to say; with a stack of books on Whitman, whom I plan to teach at my interview next week in Arkansas; with plans for a wheat berry salad that I keep calling "winterberry" in my mind; with a fresh idea for this blessed yarn.

Finally, thank you all for your thoughts here and in emails about my recent employment anxieties. I feel so lucky to have friends--old and new--that will tell me what to do.

a rose in bloom

Dear Rose,

First off, I love your name (though I might have to call you Rosy, if you don't mind). And secondly, thank you for your letter and for your picture. I love that you're enjoying your sweater, though I think we both might have to admit that you've just about outgrown it. I know, I know, I'm sad about it too, but that's what happens when you get bigger. It's a good a thing; really, it is. I was thinking that you could put that little sweater on your sister's favorite doll. She does like dolls, doesn't she? I mean, she certainly doesn't have to. I didn't much like them, and I don't really think your mother did either, though I vaguely remember a cabbage patch doll somewhere in her past.

I'm really sorry that we didn't get a chance to meet over Christmas. Your grandparents, though, told me all about your charms. I'm planning to visit again before too long and we'll have to make a play date, so that I can pinch your cheeks and squeal with delight over your sweet cooing.

Until then, I'll be thinking of you and hoping that your parents keep you bundled all winter long.

Love,
me

troublesome

I think I might have a problem. I worried a month ago that I'd have no desire to knit. It turns out that there's really no concern in that department. In fact, it seems to be the only thing I feel like doing. I might indeed be developing a problem. I live in a shoebox and everywhere I turn, I run into another project. In bed. In the kitchen. On the couch. Dare I say, in the loo?


There's this jury duty baby sweater that just needs a final arm and a bit of gentle coaxing. Oh and it could use a perfect button as well. It's a quick, easy knit, but it lacks the charm (is it too much to say the revelation?) of an Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern. Nevertheless, it's in superwash DK wool and will hopefully find a good home with a yet-to-be-born babe in Northern California.


Then there's this. It's a "surprise." So I shouldn't say more.


This is the beloved Shalom . It's my second edition in the same colorway. My niece Felicity loved the one that I made her for Christmas (or she did a good job lying about it) and I'm eager to have a matching one for myself. I mean I don't want to be all matchy-matchy, but come on. It'd be pretty cute.


Then there's this Stephen West little colonnade. It's my first official foray into the world of shawls. I've realized that I have three--or maybe six--balls of sock yarn that need to be used up. I loathe sock knitting (it's just not my thing) and so shawls seem to be the perfect outlet for these lovely and lonely single skeins.

The real problem is that I have work to do and my eyes keep falling upon these projects everywhere. And so I make deals with myself. One hour of work = 30 minutes of knitting. 30 minutes of work = 7 minutes of knitting. 7 minutes of work = two rows of the nearest knit. It's pathetic. There are interviews to prepare for, syllabi to finish, lectures to write, a dissertation to pull from under the bed and dust off (oh the horror), conferences to feign an interest in attending.

I think I need to find a local meeting of KA. That or I need to start one.

{This moment}

It may be neither bucolic nor beautiful, but it's early morning commuter knitting.

from soulemama: {this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

A discovery

When I returned to Philadelphia on Saturday night, I found a changed season. Kentucky had been flirting with fall, but Philadelphia had embraced it several weeks back while I was away. I felt a bit like coming into a party sober when everyone else is already drunk. The people on my street had begun donning their hats and mitts, woolen scarves were already wrapped to earlobes and I couldn’t help but feel like everyone was jumping fall’s gun. But sure enough, I awoke at 10 am (!) on Sunday to a decidedly autumnal sniffle that I suppose may be more airplane than autumn, but that slowed me nonetheless.

My postnasal drip, though, did have its positive side. I was determined to fish out my cold weather clothes, finally take my coat to the cleaner, and stash away summer’s sandals and dresses. As I was scrounging around under the bed––among long-ago-moth-eaten cashmere that I can’t bear to part with for sentimental reasons, even though I have just 20 square feet of storage––I lit upon a strand of pure white, or rather, not pure white, but perfect white. Yanking it out, I discovered this sad, little gem.

Hello old friend. The last time I saw you was on a couch in 2002––or was that 2003?––just after a relationship that had lingered throughout much of my mid- to late-twenties in miraculous fits and starts and with moments of clarity and then long bouts of confusion came to its final and ugly conclusion. I still have the scar on my left calf, from the moment I crashed my bicycle on Yom Kippur when he called me to tell me that he was seeing someone else. The cell phone and I both went over the handlebars, and as I lay sprawled out in front of the graduate library at UNC, my leg bleeding, my head pounding, the spine of my Sensational Designs broken, my cell phone split in two, I knew that my relationship was finally and decidedly done.

As my leg healed and my ego gradually regenerated, I cast on this sweater. It’s beginnings were auspicious, it’s fibers almost bouncy. After all, I had bargained for eight of its enormous skeins on a cold, but sun-drenched day in Patagonia in December 1998. I had gone to the end of the continent to see my sister Molly, who was spending the year in Argentina. It was a funny trip--my father and I unlikely travel companions--and I was obsessed with just three things: seeing Patagonia, finding the kind of perfect wool that I knew had to exist (even as this seemed unlikely in a period dominated by Brown Sheep and Cascade 220 in the U.S.), and uncovering the truth about the country’s Dirty War.

On an estancia outside of the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares––where we watched the Perito Moreno Glacier advance in crumbling chunks of iceberg that plunged into Lake Argentino––I came upon this wool. Molly and I met its sheep. And then on a tour we found ourselves inside an enormous sheep barn listening to a farmer’s description of his process. I couldn’t understand his Spanish and so I left Molly to listen while I snuck out the side door. There I found terrific mountains of raw wool roughly the size of four double-wide mobile homes. When I later got Molly to ask the farmer about this wool, he said that it was surplus, that the estancia simply couldn’t process all of its wool profitably (this was a meat producing place, not a knitter’s paradise). They couldn’t even seem to give it away. It was there to rot. In a flash, I decided that if I had half a nerve, I’d rent a few semi-trucks and drive around Argentina picking up this wool, importing it, and ta da, I’d have a life’s work. At 22, I didn’t have the nerve.

So I just stuffed my backpack with about ten pounds of dirty, smelly raw wool. It’s a wonder that I got through customs without getting searched. I can’t seem to remember what happened to that pile. I suppose that it got tossed during some cross-country move when it seemed a poor idea to keep toting it along. But in any case, I emerged with this white magic that I then looked at lovingly for about five years before an atrocious breakup set me on to this sweater. (I also bought some heavenly midnight blue silk and wool that I squandered on mittens for another boyfriend who then broke my heart, but that’s another story).

I can’t remember why I put this one down. I suspect that as the sting of my breakup lessened, I got off the couch and returned to my reading and my running.

When I discovered it the other day, I had little faith that it would still fit, but indeed, it almost seems that I made it for my 34 year old body instead of my 26 year old one. It had no sleeves on Sunday, but as of last night, it has half of one. It’s riddled with funny, inexplicable mistakes that I suppose I could try to correct, but I kind of like that it’s an index of my younger knitting self, an autobiography in stockinette stitch.

when you want it bad

So what do you do when you fall madly in love—I mean, like, deeply, madly in love—with a new pattern only to realize that you just don’t have the extra $100 to buy the most beautiful yarn to knit it up? Well, you bemoan your career choice and you calculate the relative harm of living on boxed macaroni for a month. Then you remember, in a stunningly wonderful moment of clarity, that you might just have all the yarn you need. You find yourself at your other house in Kentucky, furiously pawing through boxes of old fabric and tangled yarn. You remember that your kindly dissertation advisor once handed you a whole bin of sea blue merino that she had knit up into a kind of shapeless mess of a tunic before her arms failed her and she had to retire her needles. Her misfortune becomes your fortune.

You feel guilty for about ten minutes. You look at all that knitting and you imagine her working that stockinette stitch between bursts of critical brilliance during a cold Massachusetts winter long before you met her. You even imagine her, for a second, as Penelope spinning her fleece in anticipation of another's arrival.
But then, well, then you can't stand the guilt any longer. You rip into it. You frog it in the most ravenous way. And then you find yourself enveloped between piles of plush and curling merino. You feel both totally delighted and a little bit devious. You wonder if you should tell her about the destruction, err, the recycling. You think maybe you will, one day.
You stuff the permed skeins in your suitcase and return to your other house in Philadelphia. There you draw them a good, warm bath. You think for a moment about joining the skeins in the tub, to really luxuriate in their supple goodness. You decide that that's downright creepy.
You let them soak on their own for a good thirty minutes or so, until they've drowned and straightened themselves out. The water cools and you squeeze it out. For a second you wonder if this is a bit like milking a cow, and you wish you were on a farm in Minnesota, the place you've decided you and J really should live. You decide it's not at all like milking a cow.
You hang them up to dry over night. You decide that it's a good idea to open the bathroom window wide and even raise the blinds. You think J would be horrified by this, but you do it anyway.
In the morning, you lay the perfectly straightened skeins on your bed and you revel in their apparent perfection. Then, in flash of terror, you wonder if you really do have enough merino. You realize that you made no attempt to measure the skeins and you realize that running out of yarn would be a disaster in this case because you have no idea what kind of yarn this really is. But you forge ahead because that's what you tend to do.

You find yourself with eleven balls, some a bit beefier than others. Surely you have 1176 yards. You love them in any case. You decide to reconcile yourself to the fact that this sweater might just have three-quarters-length sleeves.

You realize that writing in the 2nd person might suggest that you're coming unhinged. But then you remember that the 2nd person always works in small doses.

*****

In 17 days I’m getting on a plane and flying to Kentucky to be with J for a whole month. Imagine that, married folks getting to be together for four sweet weeks. It’s too bad that those will be weeks of intense job hunting and ones without a reprieve from my work here. But still, we’ll wake up in the same place each day and that seems about the best thing I can imagine these days.

The only glitch is that between now and then, over these next 17 days, life gets really nutty. My history of the college is due in a week. There are about 75 unfinished things left to do, some tiny—like rechecking page numbers for the 5^th time—and some huge—like making sure we secure all of the permissions we need or actually drafting the last 30 captions—and I’m super anxious that at least a dozen won’t get resolved. Then there’s the conference I’ve been working on for the last year that opens on the 23^rd. I can’t even bring myself to articulate all that needs to be done between now and then on that front. Oh and then there’s two guest appearances in different colleagues courses this week and the on-going revision and drafting of my job materials for yet-to-materialize jobs. As I often reiterate, it’s too much and it’s been too much for me for too long. But in 17 days, well, in 17 days, I’m going to sit outside in Kentucky, breathe the Appalachian air and let it go.

pace

I’m not usually a real rusher. I don’t speed through things. I’m efficient, I suppose. I work at a pace that allows to me to notice when other people do things really fast or really slow. Take my friend EM, a poet and English instructor extraordinaire. She teaches 180 students, writes seriously good poetry, is in a band that performs regularly in New York, and is about to take her Ph.D. exams. She also writes lovely letters, is in a serious relationship, and makes time for friends and family. She does all of these things because many of them she can do quite quickly. She can bake a batch of cookies—from cracking the eggs to painting the frosting—in less than an hour. She’s quick. I’m not nearly that quick. But I’m also not slow, like another friend who shall remain nameless, and who takes a half an hour to shower and another half an hour to brush her hair. She’s a stunningly good writer, but deliberates over every word, every syllable really, and so things take a long time. J is also what I might call deliberate. He thanks me for my patience occasionally, like at times when he takes an entire day—and uses every dish in the house—to cook a dinner, but often my desire to have something done runs directly into his desire to have something done well.

So when I take on a new project I’m often hyper-aware of my speed and the way that my speed affects the outcome. Recently I was getting nervous that I wasn’t going to have something made for J’s sister’s soon-to-arrive baby [perhaps I should pause here and say that I’m painfully aware that this little blog space has recently been taken over by all things baby. Rest assured that it’s a passing phase – though with not one, not two, but three of my facebook friends announcing the births of their children yesterday alone, I’m not so sure…] and so I abandoned what I had been working on to frantically get this on and off the needles:

It’s the ubiquitous Zimmerman surprise jacket. I made it in worsted cotton in hopes that it would be easy to wash and quick to make. It was certainly quick, but I think that’s because I ramped up my speed out of anxiety. As a result, I didn’t love the process. I was just frantically trying to finish it and now of course, there’s not a baby due in sight for the next two weeks. I could have slowed down, been more deliberate (especially with the seaming), and probably enjoyed it a bunch more. I need to remember that: slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Oh no, I guess knitting has once again become a metaphor for life.

Frogging it

Now you see it.


Now you don't.


This had been the start of an adult version of a little baby sweater finished for Jonas, my new nephew, in September. Why I thought that a sweater that flatters an infant would flatter a grown woman is beyond me. It just seemed so cute...



...which I gather is an adjective that probably need no longer apply to my wardrobe. So I frogged it. Took it out and am beginning again with a pattern designed for, imagine it, a woman. I’m not thrilled by the dull green hue (it’s kinda like the Incredible Hulk suffering from a bit jaundice) but it keeps my hands busy during our evening Sopranos watching and that means I eat less of my cuticles.

But frogging my sweater isn’t the only thing I’ve been frogging. Last week I accidentally happened upon the MLA book exhibit at the – gasp – MLA convention. Actually, I got dragged there by a friend who promised me that I wouldn’t run into a soul. Ha. Within three minutes I was face-to-face with a colleague, and in another minute, with a nemesis who appears whenever I’m looking particularly downtrodden, like when I show up at the MLA convention book exhibit expecting to see no one and thus wearing jeans, my down coat that makes me look like a couch with legs, and my hair plastered against my forehead. Reeling from the encounter with said nemesis, who made sure to coolly remind me of her recent marriage, her tenure-track job at an R-1 institution, and the progress of her “manuscript,” I hurried off to peruse the displays. I headed over to a certain press because I wanted to see what they have coming out this spring, and because I wanted to daydream about how my manuscript might fit in someday with their catalog. But you know that feeling when your stomach just falls out, when you feel it drop on the floor and just lie there? Well, that’s what happened when I spotted a new book – still in proofs – bearing the name of a scholar whose article a decade ago first interested me in my topic. As luck would have it, she’s had a very productive retirement, and my gamble that that article would never become a book because she had to be close to retirement proved unwise. I opened to the table of contents: a couple chapters on Alcott, a few on Jane Addams, and heck, even one or two on M. Carey Thomas. This, by the way, damn near replicates my dissertation – in topic and in spirit. I started flipping through the introduction, felt the tears welling up behind my eyes, and just made a run for it.

All this to say: I may be frogging my dissertation. At the very least, it won’t be seeing the light of day at that press. But my disappointment about this discovery, is not, in fact, my point. My point is that I thought to myself: I could frog it. I could let it go. It’s going to be fine. In other words, I didn’t panic. I didn’t even really feel that anxious. And this is what’s new. Calm. Or at least relative calm. A new calm for a new year. A new blog. A new sense of proportion. I may have just 550 square feet and I may have to start again from scratch, but I’m here and I’m breathing. And I’m not in graduate school.

And don’t worry: I promise to avoid – at all costs – the suggestion that knitting is a metaphor for life. Gag me with a spoon.

a cold

Wouldn't you know that I'd start the new year with a new cold. I went to sleep with great plans for Saturday -- an early visit to the gym, recipe planning for a dinner tonight, finishing the revisions for an article. Instead, I woke up with a nasty cold and so I canceled my gym plans and am having a quiet, if unproductive, morning.



My friend recommended that I take Molly Wizenberg's lovely book off my shelf -- a gift from another graduate school pal -- and snuggle up with it. It's wonderfully confessional and culinarily intimate. I'm in a cooking phase, an unexpected phase for me, and so her inclination toward marrying food with family narrative (a perennial interest) intrigues me. When I asked J if he thought we were in a cooking phase, he grumbled something about my need to always diagnose the present. Diagnosis or not, I think we're in a cooking phase.

As you can see here, I'm also in a winter knitting phase. I decide to tackle the entrelac scarf. It's easier than it looks, and doesn't it look cool? This is my second scarf with Noro Silk Garden and it certainly won't be my last. Bring on the chill, I'll be prepared.

And on to that damned article...

hats, risotto, sopranos

Luxury on the head. Finished this little number as the final minutes of 2009 passed away. A new hat for a new year in a new city. It's jade sapphire 8-ply cashmere, a pure splurge occasioned in early december by the successful purchase of a wedding dress.

2009 ended with shrimp, lemon, and brussel sprout risotto that I stirred, stirred, and stirred. J looked on, but let me take the culinary lead. It was creamy and rich, with a fullness of flavor that I rare take the time to achieve.

We also curled up with the Sopranos, a series that we've both been keeping in reserve for a long time. It doesn't seem as immediately compelling as Six Feet Under or The Wire, shows that call you to emotional attention in the opening minutes. But we'll persevere and see what happens.