I write, therefore I knit

The day I released my dog from her suffering, I took up knitting again. My daughter had been wanting a scarf patterned with Griffyndor stripes since Harry Potter enchantment overtook her, and my decision to start knitting that day somehow felt life-affirming. I could not settle my thoughts enough to write about the grief, or even try to imagine the hold it would have on me. No point in that anyway. Grief demands that you be with it. The word itself carries a weight, made a little heavier by the weeks of ministration to an ailing creature. To try and push aside grief, 'get on with one's life,' misses the point. I could easily co-opt and modify words from a familiar song, Gospel in origin – so high you can't get over it / so wide you can't get around it – to give voice to my feelings. The only way is through. Be with it.

Which brings me to knitting. I remember learning to knit as an adolescent, something to occupy me as I sat with my family at night, watching TV. Or was it a fascination of sorts, something about a single strand of wool being shaped into a sweater or a scarf? Even the simplest pattern, no fancy cables stitches, can yield something beautiful. Even the most straightforward garter or seed stitch requires an attention to detail. There is a rhythm to knitting and purling, not a far cry from a meditative settling of the breath or the quieting of the mind needed when I sit down to write.

Is it a stretch to suggest that a story exists in a hand-made sweater? Or that the very act of knitting, steadying as it is, is akin to that state of receptivity when I leave my laptop behind, take a walk or a drive, always surprised, and delighted, at the way le mot juste will make itself manifest? Putting aside the pleasure I get from knitting, or my own suspicion that it serves as some physical manifestation of the same creative impulse that drives me to write, I find myself thinking about metaphor: the Fates weave; Madame Defarge knits; I pull out some stitches, too loose to my liking, redo them. Getting it right means seeing how the parts become the whole. Finishing it off means understanding that a hand-made scarf or hat, like a story or novel, can be less than perfect and still exquisitely cohesive.

Hovering

I had a dream the other night, a helicopter down on its side, no passengers visible, though there was a sense that I was witnessing a rescue effort, some scrambling about. The images from recalled dreams leave an imprint, and this one tempts me to tease it apart. Maybe it's a fascination with the ease at which a helicopter goes right up that brought the image to my unconscious. Maybe my dreamscape transformed the recent Hudson River airplane landing and rescue into a helicopter scenario. Or an image from a novel-in-progress haunted me. (The protagonist sees a a newspaper photo of a plane crash, the one that killed Stevie Ray Vaughan).

The wonder of helicopters is the way they hover. It's a notion I keep with me in certain yoga postures. It's an image that made me laugh the first time I came across it in reference to being a parent these days. I don't think I've been a 'helicopter parent' in the way I understand it (though my daughter might beg to differ). But these days, in which my daughter, drawn by the lure of the film industry out west, struggles through the rite-of-passage known as getting that first job, I feel a certain unease that has me hovering, if not crashing.

Early morning, a phrase pops into my head, hanging in the balance. If 'hovering' implies lightness, the tissue-thin wings of a butterfly, 'hanging in the balance' brings its own weight to uncertainty. One day there are interviews, lots of anticipation, so much promise; the next day no postings, no phone calls. So much hangs in the balance. It's enough to bring a mother to tears, not just for the obvious (I'm a mother, nurturing is what I do); if there is a certain mirroring to the mother-daughter relationship, being a mother who also happens to be a writer brings even more poignancy to my daughter's efforts. For her it's creative cover letters and resumes, somebody ple-e-a-s-e hire me (i.e., I'm enthusiastic, hard-working, detail-oriented). For me it's creative cover letters and the telling detail of well-honed story, somebody ple-e-a-s-e take note. The cycle of putting oneself out, being rejected (or downright ignored), complaining, crying, taking a few deep breaths, rolling up the sleeves, putting oneself again, is oh-too-familiar. Even in the best of economic times, very little comes without effort.

One image gives rise to another: I see my daughter on one side of a mountain, myself on the other. Hovering above, between us, is the realm of all things possible. For her it is all about the climb, everything on the rise; for me, even if there is sense of slipping down, there is also an acute awareness that what is behind me sets in motion what lies ahead.