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.