The Yarn Whisperer

by Clara Parkes

  That first retreat took place at Graves Mountain Lodge, an old-fashioned family inn tucked in the foothills of the Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Each morning, we’d leave the inn buildings and smaller cottages and wander downhill to the main lodge for a gigantic meal, served family style, before beginning our classes. Everything was canned or fried, and nearly every dish had apples in it, apples being Graves Mountain’s main agricultural export.

  The three of us, Aunt Judy and Kathy and I, were in a small cottage at the top of the hill, just beyond the upper apple orchards where bears hung out. Our cabin had a big stone fireplace and was crawling with Asian lady beetles—which, under the right circumstances, can pass for the more charming ladybugs. From a rocking chair on the back porch, you could watch the sun rise across the valley.

  Each night, Kathy and I lay in our respective twin beds, listening to the occasional buzz and thud of the “ladybugs,” whispering to one another until we fell asleep. That first year I had a momentary flash of my grandmother smiling down upon us from her cloud. She was a little bemused at what her daughter and granddaughters were doing—so unlike anything that had given her pleasure—but so pleased that we were all together. In fact, I think she was nodding to herself, as if this were the permission she needed in order to move on.

  Today, Kathy’s daughter Kaitlyn is starting to make noise about coming to the retreat, too. I don’t think she has any particular passion for knitting yet, she just wants to be a part of the tradition and help carry it forward.

  With no children of my own, I have nobody to whom I can pass on my knitting tradition. But I’ve done a few things of which I’m particularly proud—I’ve kept an old farmhouse from falling down for another generation, I’ve written some books that I hope have been helpful to knitters. And I’ve been able to keep the knitting genes alive and strong within other branches of my family tree. While my two nephews show no inclination toward yarn, my niece, Emma, did finger-knit a mile of acrylic last summer. There may still be hope after all.

  COMING UNDONE

  I HAVE A FAVORITE Robert Frost saying that comforts me, even though it’s been co-opted by many self-help books: “There’s no way out but through.” We have to walk through an experience. We can’t avoid or bypass life’s journey. We can’t cop out, numb out, or simply fast-forward.

  Moving through something involves a progression of steps, of putting one foot in front of the other. Even if you drive, you have to travel the distance between here and there. Wish as I may, we haven’t yet figured out a way to fold up the world into an accordion-style map and hop over the folds to reach our destination faster.

  Sequential processes often have very good reasons for being ordered as they are. We make cakes in a certain order so that the ingredients can respond to one another. Dry is usually sifted with dry, moist with moist. We’re told to whip the butter and sugar together—not just so it looks pretty, but so that when the batter heats up, each sugar crystal will melt and release tiny pockets of moisture that give that perfect crumb. We’re told to add flavoring agents like vanilla to the butter mixture not just because they’re both rather wet but because fat is an excellent carrier for flavor. In sequential tasks, everything has a reason and order to it.

  Think of knitting. It’s the ultimate sequential task. You can’t reach your destination—a finished garment—without walking each step, forming each stitch along the way. You can speed it up by using bigger needles or a knitting machine. But even then, each stitch still has to exist, the increases and decreases alike. You can’t knit a neckline until you’ve reached the neck. You’ll have something, but it certainly won’t be a neckline.

  Knitting does, however, offer a rare opportunity that few other sequential activities do. It lets us hit the “undo” button and start over without there being any permanent damage. There’s nothing to throw out, no paper to crumple and toss in the trash, no spoiled batter or ugly canvas. Sure, there’s no way out of a sweater except to knit it. But if you look closely, you’ll actually see an open window: If our knitting is not working, we can simply slide our needles out of the fabric, tug at the end of our yarn, unravel the stitches, and hop out.

  This undoing of knitting has a nickname. We call it “frogging” because we’re ripping out our stitches, muttering “rip-it, rip-it,” like the call of a frog. Frogs are great creatures. Their presence reassures us that our wetlands are still healthy. Their springtime evening calls fill the air with sounds of love and the promise of a summer to come. A single kiss and, poof, you may suddenly be face-to-face with the prince or princess of your dreams. Kiss a ball of yarn? Nothing. I’ve tried.

  The literal-minded will raise their eyebrow, reminding us that stitches don’t actually make a rip-it sound as they’re being undone, nor do most of us mutter those words when undoing our stitches. At least I don’t. (The words I mumble aren’t suitable for publication.) Nothing is being ripped, which would imply a sustained tearing apart. Still, frog has been widely adopted because it lends a whimsical, cheerful perspective to unravelling, an act that holds much more negative baggage.

  Nothing good comes to those who unravel. Have you ever noticed? We read about the woman who wakes up one day and hacks her family into tiny pieces, puts arsenic in the church coffee pots, fills her pockets with stones and walks into the sea.

  Things, too, come unraveled. Hems, marriages, businesses, economies, and entire nations alike have met equally dramatic demises. There’s not much positive imagery associated with the word unravel. Look it up in the dictionary, and you’ll see definitions like “to come undone” or “to fail.” No wonder we prefer the croak of a tailless amphibian.

  Coming unraveled may connote losing it, but sometimes it’s best to acknowledge with quite a level head that something you thought was right isn’t, that you need to undo as best you can and rebuild. In life, you can’t start from scratch as a baby and relive your days differently. But in knitting—most knitting anyway—you can. If you’re patient, you can pull your yarn out of whatever mess you may have gotten it into. You can hit “rewind,” literally rewinding the yarn back to its beginning.

  In my sophomore year of college, I had my own personal unraveling of sorts. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but I felt as if my life was out of control. I’d been so good at being the person I thought other people wanted me to be—the good daughter, the honor student, the model employee—yet I couldn’t find any actual me in there. I was losing it.

  By some stroke of luck, I found a smart, skilled woman with whom I met for an hour each week to sort things out. It was a slow process, at times tedious and painful, other times funny and enlightening. Ever so gradually, we began to sort through the mess and figure out who Clara really was. It was the most helpful thing I’ve ever done.

  Therein lies the mystery of unraveling. Dig a little deeper in the dictionary, and you’ll notice that unravel also means to loosen, to disentangle, or to solve, as when Miss Marple unraveled the mystery of the body in the library. We may be physically undoing one thing, but we’re solving something bigger. We’re untangling a problem, loosening a situation that may have become too tight, too restrictive to our creativity. It’s not all bad; in fact quite the opposite. Unraveling can be a blessing.

  As we’re undoing all that hard work, we’re also wiping the slate clean, resetting the odometer. We’re another day older and wiser, with a ball of slightly kinked but perfectly good yarn to show for it. If we’re lucky, we have a greater sense of perspective on what got us into this mess in the first place and how we can avoid it next time.

  MAKING MARTHA’S SANDWICH

  EVERY MAINE TOWN has a market, the epicenter of the community, a spiritual and commercial hub. Need to know anything about anything at all—who died, who’s sleeping with whom, whose barn fell down—go there.

  Mine is the Buck’s Harbor Market. It was Eddie’s Market when I was growing up, Eddie being a jolly fellow who gave me free licorice while keepi
ng a heavy thumb on the scale. One year he made a pretty penny by freezing snow and selling it as “genuine authentic Maine snowballs” to the summer tourists.

  Something is always happening at the market. In years past, radio correspondent Allie Furlaud could be found shouting into the pay phone over an idling Coke truck as she filed a report. “I’m trying to talk to Paris!” she would yell to a driver who, in true Maine fashion, would simply blink at her and continue about his business. One foggy morning I just missed Teddy Kennedy, who’d moored in the harbor and come up for supplies. “Only a goddamned fool would be out on a day like this,” muttered one of the town gossips, nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee nearby.

  Eddie is long gone but the spirit of the market endures, and I’m accustomed to being greeted with a challenge when I stop by. Sometimes I’m asked for a ride to Portland, or to water someone’s garden for a few days, or for advice on how to start an alpaca farm or block a shawl. I never know. So I wasn’t at all surprised the day I walked in and was offered a chance to make a sandwich for Martha Stewart.

  She was in town filming a segment of her TV show with Eliot Coleman, our prominent four-season organic gardener, author, and television personality. Her entourage had probably driven right by my house that morning. Did she notice my blooming rugosa hedge? Yikes, did she tsk tsk at my leaning mailbox or the peeling paint under the eaves?

  One of her assistants had called in a lunch order, and everyone was in a tizzy. Nobody wanted to be responsible for her sandwich. Before I had a chance to decide, Butch, the market’s convivial owner, shook his head. “Oh, you guys,” he sighed, “I’ll make it.” He wandered over to the deli case and pulled out a tube of liverwurst. The domestic maven whose net worth at that time was over $1 billion had ordered a liverwurst sandwich.

  Truth is, I would’ve loved to do it. But I’m left only with the memory of the day I almost got to make Martha Stewart a liverwurst sandwich.

  There’s something about being by the ocean, witnessing its regular flushing of the tide, that makes you feel like change is always afoot. Beneath the hats, behind the sunglasses, under the shadow of sails, you never know who’s out there—or who’s waving to you from shore. Mingled among the working lobstermen, you might see Martha and her shiny $1 million Hinckley Picnic Boat, or a regatta from the New York Yacht Club, or a pair of sea kayaks (the lobstermen call them “speed bumps”) paddling from cove to cove. Could be anyone.

  Dan Fogelberg used to sail to and fro between our side of the bay and his home on Deer Isle. Robert McCloskey motored by with his daughters on journeys similar to the one he narrated in his children’s classic One Morning in Maine. And E. B. White was a fixture, sailing up and down Eggemoggin Reach within a slingshot’s reach of my own rocks.

  Whoever it is—strangers from all walks of life—you pass, smile, wave, and move on. If it’s a particularly beautiful boat, you add a thumbs-up to your wave. Passing close, you might yell, “Looking good!”

  The ocean even launched my grandfather in his career. He was moored in Bucks Harbor, and another boat moored nearby. A conversation ensued about something random and boat-related, I’m sure. The sailor was, like my young grandfather, rather quiet and soft-spoken, a bit of a geek. It turned out he was director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory. My grandfather ended up spending most of his career at that laboratory, with this man as his mentor. All that from one chance encounter on a boat.

  I didn’t take to sailing nearly as quickly as I took to knitting. My grandma showed me the knit stitch, and it was off to the races. The water part was trickier. I love every part of swimming, but the minute my parents put me on a sailboat, I became the screaming kid who makes everyone miserable. When I felt the boat tip and my center of gravity shift, I was convinced the whole boat was seconds away from capsizing and dragging us all down, down, down, to our dark, watery graves. It didn’t help that we kept our boat in Deadman’s Cove.

  When I moved back to Maine as an adult, I spent my first few summers on shore, waving wistfully to the sailboats from under my big floppy hat. They looked so graceful and inviting—if only I could be on one of them. I signed up for a sailing class at the nearby WoodenBoat School, and after more than twenty years of saying no, I accepted an invitation to sail on Fledgling.

  In the boating world, the name of a boat is often better known than that of its owners. Fledgling is one such vessel. This hundred-year-old wooden sailboat has been a fixture in my ominously named cove forever. Early home movies of us getting into our own sailboat (me already crying) reveal the elegant outlines of Fledgling in the distance. If wooden boats were instruments, this one would be a Stradivarius.

  My friend Don grew up sailing the bay in Fledgling with his father. If a rock could be hit at low tide, they hit it. As a teenager, he sanded and varnished nearly every piece of wood, tied every rope, polished every cleat. He knows this boat like the back of his hand and could sail it in his sleep.

  Don is now in his eighties, though spiritually he’s still a robust twenty-four. Until a few years ago, he went sailing alone. On sunny afternoons, he’d strip naked, letting the cockpit (pardon the pun) conceal his nether parts from passersby. One day, he had the brilliant idea of bringing his new miniature schnauzer, Annie, with him. Barking at the waves, she lost her balance and fell in. Don loosened all the ropes and jumped in after her, but one of the ropes got caught. As he reached her, he turned around just in time to see his beautiful Fledgling sailing away. A nearby motorboat had witnessed the whole thing and came to his rescue—pulling a completely naked Don out of the water. I believe that was the last time he sailed in the nude, or with a miniature schnauzer.

  Everything I didn’t learn at WoodenBoat School I learned from Don. He has a gentle, wise disposition that I can trust on the water. His partner, Robert, has a more mischievous, dare I say pragmatic side. On our first sail, Don reassured me everything would be fine, while Robert counseled that death by drowning is the best way to go. But Don was right, everything was fine, and it continues to be every time we go out on the water.

  I approached my first turned heel with a similar sense of both terror and disbelief—although, let’s be real, I don’t know of anybody dying from a heel-turning accident. Still, the heel looked so complicated, so architectural and shapely. Worked in the round, no less, it couldn’t possibly be easy. I was following the simplest pattern ever written, yet even that pattern’s heel instructions had so many rows, so many numbers, so many do-this, do-thats. Turn your work. Now do this, but not exactly like you did last time. Then do that, but at a slightly different place. Turn your work. Pay attention! Don’t look out the window! Too late. It’s all ruined.

  I remember clinging to those instructions as if they were my lifejacket in a boat doomed to sink. With each row, I saw only impending disaster. Eventually I’d reached the point of no return, well beyond a swimmable distance to shore. Going back would be just as terrifying, so I stuck it out in the hopes that my sock would live to see the end. Now, many more heels later, I’ve realized just how simple and intuitive heels really are. All I needed to do was relax, take a deep breath, and keep the big picture in sight. Needles find their way, boats are built to float, and it’s often our mind that is our worst enemy. These days, when Don calls with an invitation to sail on Fledgling, I drop everything, grab my life jacket, and go—just as when certain designers publish new patterns, I drop whatever’s on my needles and cast on anew.

  Both sailing and knitting were once essential components of everyday life, now relegated somewhat to the realm of “esoteric”—along with the record player and fountain pen—by such modern inventions as the combustion engine and the knitting machine. And yet how exquisite they both are.

  When you sail, you’re gliding through water, propelled only by the wind and an artfully slanted sail. Everything is silent except for the sound of wind and water, and perhaps the slight creaking of your boat. If you’re lucky, a harbor seal will pop up its head and watch you go by. In
the middle of my bay, the air smells sweet—so sweet I make myself dizzy trying to breathe it all in. I’ve been passed by monarch butterflies and circled by a pod of porpoises; I’ve sideswiped driftwood and trailed my fingers in the water while feeling overwhelmed by the perfection of the moment.

  Knitting offers a quieter, dare I say drier escape into that zone. We still the mind and let our fingers maneuver yarn over, under, through, and off a needle, again and again. How utterly simple those movements, yet, lo, is that fabric I see? Yes. Lovely, durable, beautiful, functional fabric unfolds before us. Just from wiggling our fingers.

  The lapping of the waves against our needles is a whisper, a sliding of crimp and scales, of compressed energy and twist, against a solid surface. Wooden needles bring choppy waters, our boat fighting against the current. We glide faster with metal needles, interrupted only by the occasional tink tink tink of metal on metal, like steel-masted sailboats rocking in the harbor. Occasionally we are greeted by a passerby: a fleck of vegetation, a variation in twist, a knot perhaps. We greet it and move on, ever forward, plowing through wave after wave of stitches on our way to a distant point, a sleeve, a sock.

  All too often I meet a person who says she knows how to knit, but then quickly adds, “But I’m not, you know, a real knitter.” Hooey. Neither materials nor output do a knitter make. You can own a $100,000 wooden Concordia yawl and easily be outmaneuvered by an amateur at the tiller of a friend’s little boat (ask me how I know). On a windy day, you could even hold up a bedsheet in a borrowed canoe and have a blast.

  Knitters, whether you make museum-quality creations out of your own handspun Mongolian cashmere or garter-stitch washcloths out of cotton, you, too, can have a blast. You don’t need fancy-pants needles (nothing against them) or fancy-pants yarn (nothing against it) or a fancy-pants project (you know where this is going) to enjoy yourself and to be, in every sense of the word, a knitter.