Free-Range Knitter

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  It’s about Balance

  Yarn shops make me nervous.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love them. I feel like I belong in them, and I almost always feel welcome in them. I find yarn-shop owners pretty universally kind, or if not kind, at the very least quite predictable. I’ve been in hundreds of shops, being the traveling knitter that I am, and I find it very reassuring that yarn shops are the same all over. Yarn, patterns, needles, hooks, and me giving them all my money.

  That’s why they make me nervous. When I’m in a yarn shop, I know that I am vulnerable. Weakened. I don’t know whether it’s just the logical negative consequence of being surrounded by that much of your favorite stuff, I don’t know whether it’s the giddiness induced by that much possibility in one place. I’ve even supposed that it could be a chemical reaction, that after this many years I’ve become sensitized to the wool fumes or the glue on ball bands, but I can tell you that every single minute I’m in a yarn shop I know that I’m just one “here, feel this” away from a trunkload of alpaca, an empty bank account, and a dirty feeling. I have virtually no defenses against yarn, and so while I’m in there, I try not to let my guard down. I try to be aware of the subtle marketing ploys yarn shops use against me, things like placing little impulse items by the cash register, or putting the cashmere by the half-price sock yarn to lure you into its sphere of influence. I attempt to remain aware that the shop owner and employees are particularly dangerous. I love them, I feel welcome and cherished by them, but I also know that I am a vital part of their business plan, and a weak knitter like me might as well have a sign stapled to me that says, “I will give you all my grocery money if you show me the merino.”

  Knowing that this is the reality, I try to keep my wits about me, and trying to maintain alertness only makes me more nervous. Once I’m alert I start worrying about being too defensive, and that leads straight to a concern that I’ll offend them by avoiding their ploys, and once I’m upset about trying not to offend the shop owner, I slide all the way to a little weird and jumpy. Once I know I’m being weird and jumpy, I try not to be worried about that, and by then I’m so nervous that I do the only reasonable thing, which is to fold like a deck of cards, buy seventeen skeins of sock yarn, and get the hell out.

  Now, I know that this is unreasonable, and I’m eternally grateful that yarn shop owners can’t seem to tell that I’m freaked out (or are at least pretending they don’t notice and have agreed on a store policy that involves approaching me with some caution). I’d love to come to grips with my nature and learn to relax around wool for sale, but as long as it has the upper hand this way, I’m bound to make mistakes.

  The fact that I am certain to make these mistakes compounds the problem, because I’ve never been the sort of person who knows how to recover from a mistake. I always know that there’s a simple way out of what’s gone wrong, but at the time it never seems like the right thing to do, or I don’t think of the simple, obvious solution until after I’ve gotten through it in some other, less graceful way, figuring out the perfect way my accidentally odd behavior should have been handled four hours later when I’m at home. I know that if a sweater kit gets the better of me and I enter the yarn-store shame spiral and find myself standing outside the shop in the cold hard light of day with a pattern for a sweater I’ll never knit and seventeen skeins of yarn in a color that, now that I have a little distance from the store, I suddenly understand will make me look both anemic and jaundiced, the simple thing to do, finding myself having fallen down that way, is to breathe a little fresh air and then go back in and say, “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what happened there. I got carried away and, darn it, I don’t want this, and I’d like to return it,” but I can’t. I worry I’ll look stupid or, because so much of my business life is wrapped up in knitting, that I might look unprofessional. (Somehow, I don’t worry that it looks sort of stupid that I just bought the ugly yarn she’s been trying to unload for seven years.) I worry that they’ll take my moment of clarity the wrong way and that I’ll hurt their feelings or offend them by bringing them back their beloved yarn. In the absence of a truly safe course of action, I always do the same thing. I go home, put the yarn in the stash, and stare at it for nineteen years until I can’t stand it anymore and give it away. (Nobody said it was a good system. Just a system.)

  Once when I was sixteen, I was late for school. (I was actually late fairly regularly, but I don’t know how many of my failings I’d like to reveal at once.) I’d turned out of my lane onto the larger street that led to the high school and started hoofing along. The street was deserted, except for far up ahead of me, where I saw my friend Julie walking. I called out to her and began to run. “Julie! Hey, Julie,” I shouted, but she was too far away to hear me. I picked up the pace and ran closer. “Julie!” I called, my legs beginning to burn from the run. I ran and shouted and ran and shouted, until I was really quite close and breathlessly exclaiming, “Julie (pant, pant)! Hey, Jules, wait up!” and in a horrible moment I’ve always remembered, as Julie turned around to see who was running after her and shouting her name, I realized … it wasn’t Julie. It was a total stranger, and entirely befuddled, just like at the yarn shop, I couldn’t figure out how one extracted oneself gracefully from this scene, and I had a sense that I was in too deep, so I solved it my way.

  I kept running.

  I ran right by that girl, still shouting “Julie, hey, Jules” at, well, nobody, since there wasn’t a single other person in sight for miles. Once I’d made that decision, that split second when I didn’t know what do about my mistake, I felt that I’d missed the moment where I simply said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.” Once I was past her, still running and yelling, I couldn’t stop then. I kept right on running. I ran a couple of suburban blocks until Not-Julie couldn’t see me anymore, and then I collapsed gasping on the grass, thinking, “You idiot, you have got to learn to think faster.”

  I’ve tried to find good ways out of bad mistakes ever since, but the lingering knowledge that I don’t really think fast when I’ve made a mistake has stayed with me, and it only makes me more nervous when I’m in a situation where I might make a mistake, which only makes a mistake more likely, which in turn makes me more nervous. (It’s a terrible loop.)

  Such was my mood in a yarn shop not too long ago. It was reasonably new, and I’d been in there only once before, and both times the place was empty. The charming owner was being very welcoming and clearly wanted my financial support, and I liked her a lot and wanted to support her endeavor. Since the best thing you can do to please and support a yarn-shop owner is to buy yarn, I had been perusing the store for a while, trying to find something I wanted. I was there with my yarn budget for the month, determined to spend it, and I was getting increasingly nervous. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by not buying something, but what she had really wasn’t to my taste. Once I got nervous and started worrying, my fate was sealed. I felt the familiar fear, and I know I don’t think well under those circumstances, so I decided to try and get out before I attempted to explain how surprised I was that she had achieved the near miracle of buying an entire inventory of yarn that I hated, so I grabbed the only thing I almost liked in the whole shop and went to the cash register, doing what I always did when I was up against the wall. Me and the yarn, forking over a credit card, feeling some relief about how well I was doing. I hadn’t done anything strange or said anything strange, I hadn’t accidentally insulted her, and as far as I knew I didn’t have toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I was thinking it was all coming off so well that I was actually starting to think there was no reason to be nervous, when it all came crashing down.

  The owner asked for my name, and I gave it to her. She typed it into her shop computer, and since I’d been in there once before, my customer profile came up on the screen facing her. As the owner looked from the screen to the yarn, then back to the screen again, it all started coming back to me.

  “Oh,” the owner said, l
ooking unexpectedly nervous herself, “funny you’re buying this kit. Didn’t you buy it the last time you were in?” And I knew it was true. Damn it. I was caught in the headlights again. If she’d just said, “Hey, you already bought this,” if it had been stated as a fact, then maybe I would have done the right thing. Maybe then I would have looked at her and said, “Oh, silly me,” and gotten away, but she didn’t. She had asked me whether I had it (even though she could see right on that screen that I did), and somehow, just like always, I inexplicably couldn’t face up to it. I couldn’t open my mouth and say it. I should have said, “Oh, yeah, I did, but I love it so much that I wanted a second one.” That would have been fine. Perfectly acceptable. She would have been complimented, I could have still given her the money. It was elegant and perfect, and somehow none of those possibilities occurred to me. Instead I looked right at her, set my feet squarely, and said, “Nope.”

  A confused expression flickered on her face; she glanced back at that screen and said, “Are you sure? If you have a big stash….”

  I cursed her. Why didn’t she just say it? Why didn’t she just say, “Hey, guess what. You’re wrong. It says right here that every time you come in the shop you’ve bought the same thing. You have this. At least go get another color.” But she didn’t. She left room for the charade to continue, and it did. I knew she knew, I think she knew I knew, but I was committed to the process of screwing this up, and every moment that passed only got me deeper in and further from an out. I knew this. I knew it was just like running down the road because I didn’t want to be embarrassed, in the process working all the way up from a small embarrassment to a freakshow humiliation. I was helpless to stop it. I looked at her again and said, “No, I’m sure. I didn’t buy this kit before,” and I tried to smile warmly and probably pulled off an odd grimace. Just ring it up, I thought. Just do it. Just end it for both of us, and I’ll leave and stand in the driveway and think of all the ways I could have done this better, and you can call all your friends and tell them that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was just in the shop, and boy is she weird. Let’s just get it done.

  “Alright,” she said slowly.

  “Alright,” I said firmly. She rang it up. I gave her the money, thanked her warmly for her time, and attempted to walk off confidently. That would have gone better had I not tripped on the mat at the door.

  Outside, I moved to where she couldn’t see me and looked at the yarn. Damn it. Like I don’t have a big enough stash without buying the same thing twice.

  I looked at that yarn and I looked down the street. I’m surprised I didn’t see Julie.

  A Knitter’s Sense of Snow

  Like that of most Canadian children, Abby’s childhood memories were chock full of experiences of every possible kind of snow. There was the packing snow that was dense, wet, and heavy and made the most excellent igloos, snowballs, and snowmen. There was the high holy snow of childhood, the snow that falls in huge quantities, all rushing in through the nighttime. Abby could remember lying in bed as a little girl, watching the snow fall by the street lamps, hoping that when she woke up in the morning there would be the insulated quiet and crazy luminous light that might mean it was a snow day. She could recall dreading the walk to school on days the sky had rained the smallest accumulated diamonds, tiny adamantine snow that glittered and squeaked tellingly underfoot. That noise, kids were taught in school, is a way of telling the temperature. Snow only squeaks that way if the snow is less than 14°F, and that sound has come to be the sound that cold makes, as far as Abby was concerned. Snowscrunch. Now that she was a grownup, Abby was most likely to go straight back inside to her knitting when she heard that sound, and as she watched the snow swirl white outside while she knit, she wondered when exactly she had gone from being a snow participant to a snow observer. She wondered whether she had drawn some unreasonable conclusions from some terrible experiences.

  There was the one day that maybe the whole snow thing had started to go wrong. She’d been fourteen years old and had an absolutely crippling crush on a boy named Jimmy Labropopulos. (The fact that she couldn’t spell his last name without looking it up in the back of her notebook did not stop her from planning their glorious and happy future together.) Jimmy had taken her on a date (which was really a bunch of kids going tobogganing together, and she wasn’t sure that Jimmy knew it was a date) over to a hill by the school that had a creek running behind it. The creek was really narrow, and snow and ice banks had built up on either side of it. If you hit them fast enough on a toboggan, these banks functioned exactly like ramps, and that’s what the kids were doing. Abby was a little scared, but her love for Jimmy made her bold, and so when she hit that snowbank and become gloriously airborne over the frozen creek, she thought that Jimmy would see that and be suddenly sure of their future together. Abby was sure he was watching her, too, which only made it more humiliating when, as she touched down clear on the other side of the creek, Abby had broken her tailbone. There is no greater trial to young love than the mortification and indignity of having to limp home to your mum with a broken arse, and the relationship did not survive. Abby had never forgotten that snow had a hand in that.

  Come to think of it, there was the day on the way back from the grocery store, too. The kids were all little, and Abby ran out of something critical during a blizzard and was forced to bundle up all three of them and go out into the snow. What was it? Bread? Milk? For the life of her she couldn’t recall what started the episode. It hardly mattered, either, for the horror was in how it ended. After taking forever to get the kids into their snow stuff and out of the apartment, she had an irritable preschooler, a biting toddler, and a screaming baby, and things only went from bad to worse. There was deterioration as they trudged through the snow to the store, further decline in the store as everybody got hot and sweaty from wearing snowgear inside, and everyone started screaming. The epic ended on the way home as Abby tried to hold it together, with the baby in the sling and the toddler in the stroller and the groceries over her arm and the preschooler standing in a snowbank up to her armpits crying about being stuck and buried, when Abby reached down inside herself for whatever strength mothers find when things are that bad, and she found it. She hauled the kid out of that snowbank, hiked the baby up on her hip, squinted into the swirling snow, and heaved that stroller forward, damn it. Abby still thought that she had never been the same after what happened next … which was that one whole wheel snapped off of the stroller in the snow, and all four of them fell down into that treacherous white. Groceries, broken stroller, preschooler, toddler, baby, all of them sodden, everything smashed or squashed, all of them crying in the snow. Abby didn’t even have a clear memory of how she got them all home after that, a reaction she thought might be post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Then there was the way the older she got, the harder it became to make a snowman taller than you. (If you can’t make a snowman taller than you, then what’s the point?) The way that people stopped paying her to shovel the driveway once she owned the driveway … and just somehow, the way that as a grownup, snow had started to seem like an impediment. Abby knit and thought about all of that as she watched the snow fall outside, watched the wind push it into drifts. She sipped her tea and felt a pang of fondness for snow, and she decided. She was going to take it back. Abby wasn’t going to let becoming a grownup ruin her sense of snow. She would wait for the perfect snow, and she would reclaim the joy that was in it. She might even knit some perfect mittens while she waited for it.

  It didn’t take long at all for the perfect snow to come. Abby knew it when she saw it start one afternoon. The snow fell and fell and fell. It was big fluffy flakes, the ones that are bigger than snowflakes should ever properly be, the ones that are a million snowflakes clumped together on the way down. When you see those, you know it’s not too cold. She watched it accumulate quickly on the road and sidewalk. When you see that, you know it’s not too warm. Flakes like those, they would be packing snow. If they were sti
cking to themselves on the way down, then they would stick to themselves in snowballs, on hills. It was perfect snow for her purposes, and it just kept drifting down.

  What her purposes were, that remained to be seen. Abby decided just to go out and enjoy the snow. Just walk around in it and look at it from the outside instead of the inside and see what happened, and being a knitter paid off. Abby donned her cabled hat and her warm Fair Isle mittens, even wound her alpaca scarf around her neck. She was walking in the snow, and it wasn’t cold at all, and she reflected on how this was really where a knitter should be. Out in the snow, using the things she’d knit. Knitters should be embracing the cold that motivated them to turn out these things in the first place. What was the point of waging a personal war against chilliness if you never went into the snow to reap the rewards? As she walked, Abby lifted her hands and turned her mittened palms over to catch snowflakes, then squinted at them sparkling in the dark. The world was so quiet while it was snowing, and she stood and tried to hear the sound it made falling, thinking maybe that so much snow falling at once just had to make a noise. It didn’t, but as Abby stood there in the dark, watching each branch get its own little hat of white, she felt more and more joyful, and she had an idea.

  By the time she got to the toboggan hill where her daughter had gone with her friends, the thrill of snow hadn’t lifted at all and Abby was even warmer, partly because of her alpaca and her excitement, and partly because hiking up a snow-covered hill in a blizzard was a little harder in her forties than she remembered. In fact, her daughter Rose and her buddies had made two full circuits up and down the hill in the time that it took her to ascend to the summit. Rose saw her mum arrive and raised a suspicious eyebrow at her, but once she worked out that Abby wasn’t there because she was in any sort of trouble, she decided to deal with the horror of her mother appearing in public by ignoring her entirely.