Free-Range Knitter (23 page)

Love
, (sorry, don’t want to lead you on)
Stephanie

I wish rather desperately that I could remember how Great Aunt Helen knit. I am sure I have seen her knit many times, but at the time it was so ordinary an event that I didn’t really watch. Auntie Helen is old. She is so old that she has always been old to me. She was old when I was born, that’s how old she is. We have lost track, the family, of how old exactly she is, and when we asked her straight out, she refused to tell us, claiming it was a state secret. The lack of confirmed facts leaves us guessing, figuring it out from landmarks and casual mentions of corroborating evidence. For example, we know that Helen and Uncle Don have been married for fifty-five years. In her own words, she married “far too late to have babies.” To our reckoning we figure that means that she was either physically too old or culturally “too old,” and we guess that she was probably around forty. Forty years old fifty-five years ago puts Helen at about ninety-five now, and we don’t think that can be far from the truth.

For about fifteen years, Helen didn’t change. I had a theory that she was so old that she had maxed out, simply reached an age where she was as old as she was going to get, physically, and it seemed like Helen was just going to cruise along like that forever. Every time I saw her she was very old but very active and busy and caring for her husband, home, and dog. (Helen and Don are the proud owners of “Cricket the perpetual dog,” whom they would have you believe has been the same dog for forty-five years. Less perceptive people would fall for it, too, since for forty-five years Helen has been accompanied by a white and brown Jack Russell terrier who can do a multitude of tricks. It wasn’t until I was about thirty-five years old myself, and I was telling my children that I remembered playing these same tricks with Cricket when I was a little girl, that I began to suspect something was up. Further thought did reveal that Cricket seemed to improve in physique and perkiness to marked degree every ten to fifteen years—the life span of that breed—and I suddenly realized that Helen and Don might be protecting me and my siblings from a terrible truth.) Helen stayed the same, cruising along giving us four kids five dollars and pairs of woolen mittens each Christmas.

They were good mittens, too. The occasional pair turned up a wee bit scratchy, but after a couple of snowstorms and washings they softened right up and became softer. They were always plain, practical mittens, usually all one color, but every so often a brighter striped pair would turn up. There was a lot
of other knitted stuff around then, when we were all little. I didn’t get much of it, on account of us kids having a knitting Nana who kept us well covered, but Uncle Don had vests, and there were scarves and hats and knitted ripple afghans from the ‘70s, and all manner of defense against the Canadian winter, all products of Auntie Helen’s needles.

Helen talked about it, too. Once she fondly recalled a twinset she made with a plain sweater underneath and a matching cardigan with rabbit fur trim on top. That set stuck in her mind because Helen thought it was the loveliest thing she had ever owned, and her mother chided her for wasting the money on such fancy wool. I asked her whether she ever knit socks, and she looked at me like I was quite mad. “Of course I did, dear. We all did,” was her patient reply. She told me about knitting socks for soldiers during the Second World War, and knitting argyle socks in the ‘50s because they were a huge fad and all the women were knitting them. I love listening to her talk about knitting. It all comes from a different era, a time when part of her knitting was not just for fun or fashion but because her family needed warm things, and buying them was too expensive. Helen knit from the time she was a little girl, only five or six years old, until sometime in the last few years, though I’m ashamed to say I didn’t notice exactly when.

After hovering around the “very old” mark for years and years and years, Helen made a leap toward “ancient,” and I started noticing some things. Me being me, I noticed it first
in her knitting. Out of the blue, she was knitting nothing but mittens. The same mitten pattern, over and over again. More years went by, and then there were only plain mittens. Helen’s age had finally caught up with her, and her eyes were too bad to see patterns any more. She’d taken to just knitting what she could remember how to knit without instructions … and that was mittens. When her sight failed further, she knit by touch.

A few years ago on one of our visits, I noticed that she was thinner, a little more transparent, and that her knitting basket was still beside her, but she didn’t knit while I was there. It was the same thing this year, when I went with the specific idea of watching her knit so I could write a piece about it. Her knitting basket was still there, sitting on the right side of her chair as it had been my whole life, but when I asked her whether she still knit, she said, “Oh, no dear,” just like it was ordinary to have given it up or ridiculous that she would have continued. I wondered then, as I do now, if she was so flip about it because it was such a dreadful and intimate loss. When I brought it up with my mum, she said she didn’t think so, but my mum’s not a knitter. My mum didn’t notice what I did. Helen may say she doesn’t knit anymore, but her hands haven’t gotten the memo.

The whole time we were there, she couldn’t keep them still. She would lift them up, stroke them together, turn them over, her hands flapping in her lap like long and spindly birds with a poor sense of direction. They looked uneasy. They
looked uncomfortable. That’s the only thing I can think of saying about it. Seeing her hands like that makes me wonder how long the knitting stays in us. How long we remember the movements. If you knit for a lifetime—like ninety years—how ingrained is it?

I once heard a story of an old knitter at the end of her life. As is the case with many of us, she did not leave all at once. Instead she slid out, becoming ever less present as she went. In her last days she seldom spoke, and she didn’t make a lot of sense when she did. It was during this quiet and fragile time, this time that her family watched over her and assumed more and more of even the simplest tasks she could no longer do, that they began to notice that her hands had developed a spasm or tremor of some kind. Her old, tired hands never stopped moving, churning restlessly all day, and even some of the time that she drifted in and out of sleep. They all worried, but the doctor and nurse agreed that she was so close to the end that you had to expect this sort of odd thing.

Everyone tried to smooth her over. Everyone tried so hard. They held her hands, they stroked them. The knitter had loved many people well and properly in her life, and she was never left alone in those last days. Family drifted in and out. Came and went. Drank endless pots of coffee and fretted about leaving even for a little while. There was always another pair of hands to soothe hers. Lifting, holding. One by one, her daughters came to her, by themselves and at different times, but
each held one of those well-used, thin hands to her face. They pressed their old mother’s palms against their cheeks, laying their own hands on top firmly enough to try and keep some of her with them. They inhaled her smell, and then the daughters replaced her hands on the smooth sheet of her bed, and every time her hands were let go, they fluttered back to making the same repetitive movements.

Though she seemed calm in every other way, the family was troubled by this. They thought it was a sign that she wasn’t peaceful, and that was all they wanted for her. In the afternoon on a day very close to the end, some of her friends came to see her. They were old too, and they knew that they were saying good-bye, not visiting, and they filed into her room slowly and somberly. Her daughters got up to greet their mother’s old friends, women they had known their whole lives, and as they did … they let go her hands.

Her friends froze, then they looked stunned. They watched their friend’s restless hands flutter and agitate, and they stared. After a few moments of absolutely gobsmacked silence, the first one started to laugh. It spread through the friends like wildfire, then leaked onto the family. Laughing and crying are very close to each other, and the whole room laughed until they wept and gasped for air. When they regained their composure, one of the daughters asked her what had set them off. What on Earth about their dear friend’s deathbed was so freaking funny?

Her friends gasped and wiped their eyes. They went to the side of the bed and they drank in the look of their darling girl, but they didn’t try to stop her hands. “Look at that,” they said. They had recognized it immediately.

She’s knitting.

It turns out that old habits die hard. Maybe last.