Knitting Thoughts

Revisiting overwhelm, grief, and joy in a rainbow scarf

*My friend, Brittney, an immensely talented independent yarn dyer whose work is often inspired by the books she loves, is re-releasing her Pride Not Prejudice yarn for June, and she asked me if she could share this post that I wrote in October, 2023. It’s now behind the archives paywall, so I wanted to make it available again as my sister, mom, and I contemplate our next trip to Germany. We rarely know when a goodbye is the last one, and preparing for this one was especially meaningful.

I started this scarf a month ago, when I bought the ticket to join my mom and sister in Germany. My favorite aunt, Tante Leni, is dying. She’s six years older than Mom, and when her husband of nearly sixty years, my Onkel Wilfred, died in August, she said she was done too. Mom talked her out of actively dying then, but last month it became clear that she’d been passively doing so, and Mom convinced her to hold on until we could get there to see her. I’m missing meetings and leaving my teenaged son to care for two dogs and feed himself for a week while I go to the tiny farming village outside Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, where my mom lived for the first eighteen years of her life.

My economy-light ticket doesn’t even come with a booked seat, much less a checked bag, so my gifting options were limited. Besides, what does one bring to the aunt who was like a second mom, whose house was another home, whose cakes were pinnacles of perfection, whose garden could feed a village with leftovers, and who took me in every other summer for a month my whole childhood? I brought Tante Leni photos last time I visited. This time I’m bringing video recordings of Logan playing his bagpipes (which made her cry when he played for her in person) and a rainbow scarf.

My amazingly talented friend Brittney, who hand-dyes yarn, and reads books, and loves history like I do designed yarn to match the Pride flag in honor of the Pride Not Prejudice Anthology for which I’d written a novella last June. I had two skeins of it that I’d been saving (hording like a dragon hordes gold) for the perfect project, and while my aunt wouldn’t know she wore the Pride flag around her neck, I would know, and my kids would know, and my cousins might guess, and it wouldn’t be a statement, it would be a declaration of all the love and color and joy and time and thoughtfulness, and whatever creativity I have in my hands and my brain … for her.

I chose a pattern with drop stitches because it’s faster and a little lacey looking, and knitting it with worsted (thick-ish) yarn makes it feel strong and substantial with undeniable femininity and a hint of fragility – exactly like my aunt, who turned eight on January 19^th, 1945, the day she left her home in Schlesien, twelve hours before the Russian army invaded, walking beside her mother and the baby buggy that carried her two younger siblings. That little girl and her mother walked through the snow, and occasionally rode in carts pulled by tractors, and sometimes slept in barns for a month until they finally reached a train that would take them to my grandfather’s family in West Germany. I visited her two years ago, and my mom translated my aunt’s memories as she traced the path her mother had drawn in pencil on an old atlas so their father, who was a prisoner of war in France at the time – could understand the journey they’d taken that winter, on foot, in the snow.

I chose the pattern for Tante Leni’s scarf for it’s ease and expedience, and I had no idea how perfectly it would showcase Brittney’s talent. Every row of slip stitches is a lovely rainbow, and even my occasionally miscounted knits and purls get lost in the riot of joyful color emerging from the yarn.

I pick up the scarf to knit when I’m waiting for the oven timer to go off, or when the book I’m listening to just gets to a really good part and I’m not quite ready to shift back to writing. I brought it with me to Puerto Vallarta on the long-planned girls’ trip that each of us would have backed out of in an instant if just one of us had said “it’s too much” because it really was too much time away from very busy schedules, and too much money to spend right before the holidays, but none of us did, and too much turned into just enough to carry us into even busier schedules without quite as much overwhelm. I knitted so much on the plane down that I was actively looking forward to the trip back home, just for the progress I would make, and I very nearly cried when Mexican security said the knitting needles were not allowed.

“But I brought them on the plane from L.A.” I moaned, feeling helpless dread at the thought of removing the needles to leave behind. I’m not a skilled enough knitter to pick up all those dropped stitches, and the prospect of losing weeks of work made me sick with panic. But more than that, the prospect of losing the one gift I’d convinced myself I could meaningfully give my aunt – the time I’d spent thinking of her and savoring the memories of her house, her garden, her food, the way we stumbled through her minimal English and my passable German to really communicate – felt like losing her before she was really gone. It was irrational, but it galvanized me to come up with an unusual solution. I asked the security agent for scissors, and when she understood what I wanted to do, she dug a pair out of the security trash bin and with much wrestling and wrangling, helped me cut the needles from the heavy cable that connected them. I tied the severed ends of the cable together to preserve my scarf, then spent the flight watching a romantic comedy instead of knitting.

My mom had taught me to knit when I was young, and I still have the one black and purple scarf I’d made myself using only knit stitches, after which I never picked up the needles again. And then COVID shut the world down in 2020, and as three weeks turned into a year, I looked at the lovely yarn Brittney had designed to match the covers of my time travel books, bought myself a set of needles from Amazon, found a couple of YouTube videos, and re-taught myself to knit. My first scarf was abysmal, but it was made of beautiful yarn so I gave it to my mom for Christmas and she loved it and treasured it just as moms do with the things their children make, even their adult children, because that’s what moms do.

Michelle Obama wrote in her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, that for her, knitting became a way of managing the overwhelm. When things felt too big, too uncertain, too many (my word, not hers), she would pick up her knitting needles and start a hat. It wouldn’t take long, maybe a few hours, maybe a day, and in the end, after knitting while talking to her mom on the phone, or listening to a book, or just thinking through the things that felt like too many, she would have a completed project to show for her efforts. The sense of accomplishment, of starting and finishing something, of doing was often just the right thing to kick start the solution to the bigger thing that had overwhelmed her, and I feel those words to the depths of my soul. Maybe that’s what this Substack is for me when writing a book feels like too many, and it’s definitely what knitting my aunt’s scarf feels like as she lies in her bed, holding on until we get there to say goodbye.

I’m leaving for Germany next week and the scarf is just long enough now to tie off. But I’m not quite done with it, and I think I’ll knit a few more of my memories of Tante Leni into it. They’re all rainbows and joy, and delicate-looking stitches made of sturdy yarn, and they’re me and her and all the love I have for the person she is, was, and always will be in my life - my mom’s big sister, my Tante, my second mom.

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