Free-Range Knitter

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Standing there, Abby looked around and watched the kids play in the snow, and in a fit of she didn’t quite know what, Abby tipped her head back, toward the sky and stars. She closed her eyes, and the snowflakes fell on her lids and face, tiny, perfect pinpoints of exquisite cold. They began to collect in her eyelashes and, following some romantic urge, she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. There she stood, in the dark, on the top of a hill, forgetting that there was probably acid snow or pollution or some good reason not to eat snow, even snow that wasn’t yellow, and she let it fall. It was spectacular.

  It was also, apparently, embarrassing and Rose, mortified in all the ways that only a thirteen-year-old can be when her mother is being obviously weird in public, came over and elbowed her hard to bring her back.

  “Mum,” Rose whispered, “Stop it. Why are you here? Why are you doing that? Is something wrong with your face?” Abby looked at the kid, and for a moment she regretted invading Rose’s fun before she remembered that she was there to capture her childlike whimsy for snow, and darn it all, no child was going to get in the way of that.

  “Don’t badger me, Rose,” Abby said. “I’m just enjoying the snow.”

  “Do you have to enjoy it here?” her daughter asked, looking nervously over her shoulder at her friends. There’s a social contract in place that doesn’t allow mothers to hang out with kids, and she wondered how long her mum could break it before her friends would leave. “You know, it’s snowing all over the city.”

  “No badgering,” her mum replied, and she watched some of her daughter’s young friends fly down the hill on a wooden toboggan. The kids were moving so fast one of them had her hat blown off. They whooped and screamed as the group hit a wee bump and the toboggan slowly came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, and all the girls tumbled off, giggling in a heap.

  “Rose?” Abby said, turning to face her daughter, looking as stern and powerful as possible, since her idea wasn’t going to go over well at all, “I’m going to need to borrow a toboggan.”

  In Toronto, trees near the bottoms of hills in wintertime are nothing more than accidents waiting to happen, and every fall the city comes around with mountains of old tires that they put around the trunks to serve as bumpers for sledding kids. (I guess the city worked out that providing this service was infinitely cheaper than the alternative, which would only begin with a fleet of ambulances.) Abby, who had always thought this was a very good idea, reflected now, as she sat at the top of the hill on a borrowed toboggan, that it was nothing short of bloody brilliant. She’d been sitting there a while, since it takes real time to stuff adult concern for life into a back pocket, and the gaggle of thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds milling around anxiously behind her were growing more and more concerned about her behavior. Abby could feel the pressure, knew that she was killing Rose, and took a deep breath, bent her knees, leaned back to get a good launch position, and … sat there.

  Rose watched this whole thing, desperate to get her mother moving along and beginning to imagine that this series of false starts might be becoming a habit. The idea that her mum could be here a while was too awful to imagine, and so she approached.

  “Mum? You’ve been sitting there a while. Your bum is getting wet, and nobody is tobogganing. We’re waiting for you. You’re on our toboggan.” Then she waited. Nothing happened, and Rose wondered whether maybe her mother was waiting for some sort of permission.

  “It’s your turn,” she said. Abby didn’t move. Sure, she thought about moving, and if Rose could have seen inside her mother’s head she would have been impressed with the progress she was making toward moving, but outwardly it looked for all the world like Abby was just sitting on a sled at the top of a hill. Eyes fixed ahead, snow falling on her handknit hat.

  Rose shifted her weight from foot to foot. She glanced behind her and shrugged at the questions in her friends’ eyes. She didn’t know why her mum didn’t go. In a moment that would have made her mother proud, had she known it had occurred, Rose decided not to push her mum squarely in the back and end this thing. Instead, she leaned forward again. “Are you scared?” Abby looked gratefully at her daughter and thought about saying, “Hell, yes,” and she thought about asking Rose to push her squarely in the back.

  “Mum,” whispered Rose. “Sometimes you just have to do it. Going down is better than going home. Everybody is watching, and those are your only two choices. Do you want to go home?”

  Abby looked at her very wise daughter, and she knew that it was entirely true; she knew that the only thing that could be worse than ending up a mangled heap at the bottom of a snowhill in Toronto was getting off that toboggan and kissing the experience good-bye forever. Abby took another deep breath. “Screw it,” she thought. She thought about being eighty years old and looking back on her life and decided she wanted to remember a day when in her forties, she’d tossed herself down a hill like a kid again, not a day where she humiliated herself in front of a group of teenagers by being afraid. Besides, these kids had been throwing themselves down the hill all day and nothing had happened to them. Adult cowardice was not going to get her, damn it all. It was just snow, just a toboggan. Abby blinked, set her jaw, and bent her knees. Rose looked hopeful. She asked whether Abby wanted a push. Abby resisted the urge to push Rose (good parenting is all about what you don’t do most days) and instead muttered, “Don’t badger me, Rose. I’m going; I’m going when I’m ready.” And then suddenly, she was ready.

  Abby pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose like an Olympic downhill skier adjusts her mask. She wished briefly for a helmet but realized that concerns about safety and brain injuries were the kind of silly adult overthinking that kept grownups from having any fun.

  She bent her knees again, and this time she pulled her feet into the sled behind the curl of the bow and grasped the ropes. The sled was already beginning to inch down the hill, and Abby leaned forward, making herself low, lean, and fast, and the sled picked up speed. It was glorious. The snow was still falling, and as she began to whoosh down the hill (it really was a big hill, especially now that she was going down it this fast) she remembered everything about loving this. The snow hit her softly in the face, making her feel like a speeding train. The toboggan skimmed the snowy earth faster and faster, little bumps and swells adding thrill to the ride. Abby began to laugh. The toboggan went faster. Abby remembered what it was like to be out of control and to give in to the youthful urge for speed and irresponsibility. She remembered the thrill of doing something that felt wildly dangerous (even though it was mostly safe), reveled in joyous risk taking, and wondered briefly (because she was really going fast now, almost scary fast) whether people would still do drugs or have road rage if you could get a snowhill into every neighborhood year-round. Squinting into the snow as the toboggan shot down the hill at a phenomenal speed, Abby was being jostled around on the toboggan as she gripped the sled string as hard as she could, as though a grip on a string would make any difference at all; she remembered all of this as a dark object appeared through the snow in front of her.

  Suddenly, the kids huddled at the top of the hill were shouting. From behind her, Abby heard the screaming start. “Left, left!,” some shrieked. “Right, go right!,” called others, and a few of the voices simply bellowed, “Turn!” or “Treeeeee!”

  For one horrible moment as the tree swelled ever larger and faster in front of her, Abby tried to do all of those things. Go left, go right, turn, anything to go around the tree. She panicked and pulled back on the sled rope threaded through the front of the toboggan, instinctively trying to whoa the curved wooden harbinger of death, but as any twelve-year-old can tell you, toboggans are not horses, and pulling on the rope raises the nose of the sled and, as Abby discovered, speeds up the thing. Abby could scarcely breathe now. The kids were still yelling, “Turn, turn!” and now Rose was yelling, “Mum, Mum!” and Abby was absolutely going to hit the tree. Absolutely. From the very back of her mind she pulled up a memory, a memor
y of four girls on a toboggan, careening wildly down a hill and one of them calling “left” and all four girls leaning left on the toboggan, left hands dragging in the snow as the sled pulled left. Noting her proximity to the tree (and imagining the moment on the way to the hospital when Rose said, “Why didn’t you just lean to turn it?”), Abby offered a quick thanks to the City of Toronto for the tires around the bottom of the tree that meant she wasn’t about to hit a seriously hard object, just a firm one, extended her hand to the left to drag like a rudder, and leaned her weight over that way.

  Despite what happened next, Abby would swear for the rest of her life that it should have worked. Abby would tell you that she was positive that you could turn a toboggan by shifting your weight and dragging your hand in the snow, that what had happened that day on the hill had nothing at all to do with the plan or the correctness of her idea. She would shake her head a little at parties where her husband or her kids told the story of the toboggan ride and how it ended that day and insist (sometimes a little angrily) that it had been conspiracy and coincidence that had made it end the way that it did—certainly not incompetence. She swore nobody would have been able to make something different happen, that the ending had been ordained by the fates the minute she put her bum on that sled. The minute she headed down the hill, a chain of events that she was helpless to change had begun to unfold. She swore, in short, that what had happened wasn’t her fault.

  What happened then was that as Abby (who, for the record, is absolutely right, dragging your hand like a rudder and shifting your weight definitely does turn a speeding toboggan) leaned over to the left and began to drag that hand in the snow, the toboggan hit a bump. It was a very little bump, hardly anything at all that would have bothered her had she not begun her plan, but she had begun, and that little bump transferred through her body and, shifted as she was to the left, whacked her left hand more firmly on the ground than she had intended. Abby’s hand caught in the deep snow for just one second, and as it did Abby was suddenly and completely struck with the realization that she was screwed. The moment that her hand was caught was just long enough (it doesn’t take long for things to happen, Abby thought later, when you are going that fast) to pull her off the sled, and she fell to the left. She felt her bottom part company with the sled, felt it come away, and through the cloud of swirling snow hitting her in the face she watched it slide toward the tree. Clawing at the snow, trying to stop her own mad slide, Abby watched the toboggan coast toward the tree, losing speed fast now that it wasn’t carrying a middle-aged woman to her death, and then gently hit the tree and come to a rest on its side, bottom leaning against the tires around the trunk.

  Abby saw this, the sled leaning up against the tires like that, and she felt what can only be described as deep regret. What she realized as she continued to pick up speed was that she had found the only possible way on a toboggan hill in the city of Toronto, where the trees are wrapped with tires just so that you can’t hit something really hard going really fast, to do exactly that anyway.

  The precise moment that Abby hit the sled against the tires against the tree with the full force of her body is best not described in detail, nor is it a moment that Abby cares to discuss. All she will tell you, if you ask her, is that she hit that sled so hard that the remarkable consequence was not pain (although there was a great deal of pain) but the spectacular explosion of colors. Abby hit that tree so hard that the little audience of teenagers standing at the top of the hill, helpless to stop the collision from happening and really hoping that she didn’t get killed or break the toboggan so they couldn’t have a turn, all flinched and gasped and made the same noise that everybody makes at the theater when a character is abruptly mauled by a zombie.

  For a time after that, everything was quiet. The kids stood silently in the snow, peering down the hill at Abby’s body lying at the foot of the tree, and they held their breath and watched for signs of life. Abby, far away at the bottom of the hill, was quiet, too, having had not just the air but all thought smashed right out of her. She rolled onto her back (bringing a collective sigh of relief from the assembled masses, who really didn’t want to have to figure out what to do with someone’s dead mother) and let the snow fall on her face. She opened her eyes and looked up, watching the snow come out of the sky far above her and drift beautifully down from straight above. Abby lay there, feeling the snow underneath her begin to melt through the full length of her jeans, and she began to form two thoughts: first, that episodes like this were probably part of the reason that the other mothers didn’t want her on committees; and second, that she hoped to hell that none of those kids had a cameraphone.

  It was the second thought that got her half-upright, plunked awkwardly in the drift of snow, checking herself over for injuries as Rose came skidding down the hill, coming to a scurrying halt by her snow-covered mother, and she opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Abby stared at her, the snow on her face melting and dripping into her eyes, and she waited. In that moment, Rose saw that look in her mother’s eyes, and for the first time in her young life she got it.

  “Mummy?” Rose inquired, as respectfully as she ever had, heaven bless her, “I’m not badgering, but would you like to go home … now?”

  Abby did. She limped along home in the very pretty, very perfect snow, and she had a hot bath and got a cup of tea and her knitting. Turns out she drew the right conclusions after all. Knitting while the snow falls. How very cozy.

  Cast Off

  Stories of Ends, Giving Up, and Living to Knit Another Day

  Samantha

  When Samantha knits, it astounds me. She’s fourteen years old now, a pretty big girl, and when she picks up the needles to knit, she does so with a great deal of ease and a miraculous amount of assurance. Assurance and ease that you would expect from a confident and experienced knitter, not one who, like Sam, picks up the needles only a few times a year, if that.

  Sam has always been like this. She is my baby, my youngest and last, and I knew she would be my last kick at the maternal can when she was born. This somehow filled me with a tenderness that I’m pretty sure my other kids didn’t find in me. I’m sure Sam will be laughing when she reads this. Everyone will, as I am not known for my tenderness. Empathy, yes. Cleverness, sometimes. Wit, most days. Tenderness? No. I am simply not that sort of mother. I am the sort of mother who finds maternal sentiment vaguely nauseating, and a have never cut the crusts off anyone’s sandwich. I am the sort of mother who never has a bandage, forgets the extra diapers, and makes up games like “how long can we go without talking?” or “let’s pretend we’re rocks!” just to get a moment’s peace. When other mothers gushed about their feelings about their babies and the fulfillment they found in wiping noses and bottoms, I used to have to fake it a little to not get expelled from playgroup.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” they would exclaim while adoringly stroking the cheek of their demon offspring, who had just pulled everything off all my bookcases and bitten my cat, and I would nod sagely, wondering when the hell naptime was and why I couldn’t feel what they did. Motherhood was just so much work that I often failed to find any sentiments in it that you could write on a card. I loved my children, but I didn’t see the romance in any job that had this much to do with this variety of bodily fluids. Right up until Sam. With Sam, everything suddenly had a sweetness to it that I hadn’t been able to see through the daily slog of laundry, sliced apples, and parenting the other two. When she got me up in the dead of the night to nurse, I wasn’t (as) frustrated. Sometimes all I could think of as we sat in the deep dark together was that this could be the last time I nursed a baby in the night, and then I would look down at Samantha’s fingers curled like new leaves and her wee down of blondish hair and suddenly, and rather uncharacteristically, I wouldn’t mind so much. Tenderness would wash over me, and the knowledge that I was going to stagger through the next day sleep deprived and maniacal with three sticky, messy kids who were totally t
eamed up against me and my desire for sanity and ten minutes with a book would fade, however temporarily.

  Samantha has undeniably been the wrong kid to be on the receiving end of all this saccharine thinking, and this newfound tenderness and rampant desire to romanticize every moment of her childhood (the last time I’ll potty train, the last time anyone will play with blocks) are something that, since she is a great deal like me, she has trouble dealing with. She’s always been straightforward, clear thinking, and efficient, and here I am trying to draw hearts and flowers around all these moments of her youth. I’d watch her play, and tears would well up at “the last time anyone will eat a blue crayon,” and Sam would look over, see me misting over, and give me right back a phrase I gave all the girls all the time: “Pull yourself together.”

  Sam learned to knit at about the same age as the other two, right around the time she learned to read, and she took to it like the other playgroup mothers took to making their own playdough. I showed her how, guiding her little girl fingers around wooden needles and real wool, and while I sighed and shed discreet tears over “the last first time one of my children would knit” she effortlessly integrated the skill, then put it down and went back to her coloring. It didn’t surprise me that she was good at it. She’d done everything the same way. Samantha had never struggled with anything. She’s a good learner, and whereas my other kids’ growth had been marked by periods of instability, unsteadiness, and general incompetence due to youth and inexperience, Sam’s wasn’t. She didn’t toddle drunkenly around the living room while she was learning to walk; she got up and went. As she grew, her ability to learn was matched by her sense of humor and frank confidence, and unlike my other girls, on the first day of school she marched smartly away from me, leaving me weeping in the schoolyard about “my baby” and “the last first day of school.” (I recovered promptly, though, when I realized that I had three hours to go to the bathroom by myself and drink a whole cup of coffee that didn’t have anything mysterious floating in it.) Given this nature, I wasn’t at all surprised she was so good at knitting. It knocked the sense right off me that then she put it down and walked away.