The Old Way

“…handknitting is a dreamy activity, built into many people’s thumbs and fingers by genes already there, itching to display their skills and achievements.”

-Elizabeth Zimmerman
Knitting Around

I pull pumpkin colored wool from the center of one neatly wound ball. I knit it next to a kale green. This sweater grows in slow rounds knit “in the old way” which is something I’ve never done before. So far so good, though. The pattern, Shetland Peaks and Waves plus some Nordic designs, bursts with fall colors.

I struggled with the pattern early, buying colored pencils and pens to sketch out the design. I bought too much yarn and some in the wrong colors. I knit and ripped and knit and ripped. What I did at first was try and please someone else—the other knitters in my knitting class. Their work seemed so contemporary and professional. I thought I wanted my sweater to look like that, too. I wanted to fit in. What I settled on was pleasing myself with a very bold ethnic design. In one broad stripe, on a putty-colored background, is a black snowflake design. That stripe is bracketed by peaks and waves in gold, pumpkin, kale, cranberry and aubergene. Try as I might to conceal them, my old country roots expose themselves.

I do this work to remember myself. I do this work to forget myself. Some days I knit with abandon the way clerics pray themselves into religious confusion. I get carpal tunnel syndrome. My back goes out. I knit. Today I knit in the round, in the old way, for the very first time and feel like I’m walking in the footsteps of my Eastern European ancestors.

The grandmother I loved, hated knitting, though she was an accomplished knitter. She immigrated to America from Estonia and helped raise me. The one I never knew was a master knitter who loved her craft. She couldn’t bear to leave her home in the Ukraine and when her son (my father) and her husband planned to leave she stayed on alone to manage her farm. Over her lifetime she sent us boxes of items she’d made from the wool of her sheep—vests, blankets, shawls.

A world away, I was the student who learned what my mother and her mother had carried over from Estonia in their hands during their exodus in the 1940s. Teaching me to knit was a life skill in their eyes. They taught me techniques that helped me turn Red Heart acrylic yarn into colorful vests or hounds tooth checked sweaters. It was the mid-1970s then and no one was into knitting or knit wear. All my peers wore work shirts, Levis and Frye boots. I stuck out like the sore thumb I was: first generation American; the child of people driven out of countries they loved, to a country that they hoped would work for them. To comfort themselves they cooked old country food and worked to pass down life skills like knitting. I was the next in line and my hands and heart were ready. They acquiesced to their new country by teaching me to knit garments in pieces and then sew them together.

In college, coursework took the place of knitting until one great guy came along and I felt the need to knit argyle socks for him. I was never taught to knit with four needles, but when I picked them up they felt perfectly familiar in my hands. The socks grew and the pattern was perfect, but before I could Kitchener the last toe, the boyfriend left. I set aside the needles and wool and the notion of knitting anything for anyone again.

I know some cigarette smokers who try to quit by switching to cigars. I set down my needles and switched to fabric. The quilting craze hit in the 1980s, so I started quilting. This was something very American, something very foreign to me. Nothing my mother and grandmother did. They relied on wool and made afghans and sweaters. But I made quilts—dozens of quilts for family and friends until one day five years ago. My husband, two sons and I were planning to go skiing. I went to town searching for a pair of ski gloves and found myself drawn into a wool shop. I was suddenly ravenous. I felt like an addict almost shaking. I wanted to make a ski hat.

“Give me wool for two," I said expecting I might have one finished over the ski weekend. When I went home that night I finished both.

Back the next day I bought wool for a vest but no pattern. I just knew how the pieces should fall together. I knit the vest in seed stitch and finished it with a backwards crochet trim while my mother walked me through it in a long distance phone call.

Sometimes my sons know things they’re not supposed to know, like what the nest of a wood thrush looks like, the melting point of aluminum, or the exact spot on the trunk to fell a tree.

“These are things that time has stored inside you,” I tell them, in awe myself of life’s mysteries.

So when wool called me again after so many years, I listened without question.

When I knit this sweater the “old way” I’m walking backwards in time. Past the seed stitch vest, past the two sweet ski hats, past the socks of a vanished boyfriend, past the acrylic cardigan that classmates laughed at. I knit myself all the way to the heart of my art that bubbles up like a spring—unstoppable.

In knitting the old way I knit in the round from the bottom up and my grandmother who I never knew cups her hands around mine and leads me. The grandmother who helped raise me unwinds my wool. I walk like the beginner that I am and trust their experience. Trusting what they and time have put inside me: those things that bloom again and again to remind me who I am and where I come from.