Free-Range Knitter (3 page)

The short, intense summer is so glorious, it’s like the autumn knows that the only way we Canadians could part with
summer’s long evenings and starry nights is if we are somehow bribed at the time it has to leave us. And in the autumn, every tree and plant seems to be making its apologies to us as though they were guests trying to leave a wonderful, wonderful party. Trees throw massive cloaks of color over their shoulders and let them fall to the ground. Pumpkins arrive in previously ordinary-looking gardens, and everywhere I go there are apples. I do not care very much to eat apples, but it would be impossible to not see the romantic lure of baskets of them piled high in red and green in the autumn. The vegetable shops overflow with the most beautiful of foods; squash and kale and beans are plentiful and inexpensive, and I wander the aisles thinking of making thick vegetable soups and homemade bread.

This time of year the crisp chill returns to the air, and suddenly, after a few short months when we consider wearing wool a one-way ticket to heatstroke, or at the very least an unattractive and linty sweatbath, suddenly it is the most glorious time of year. It’s sweater weather.

These slightly frosty days, when there is a nip in the air all day, these are the glory days for knitters. These are the days when people start wishing they had a hat. The evenings when they begin to think about tucking an afghan around them while they watch TV. Yea, verily, these are the days when a woolen throw over the back of a chesterfield stops being ornamental and starts being a pretty smashing idea. These weeks, the weeks before the people reach for their winter coats and conceal their
sweaters, these days before the central heat comes on—these are the mighty and triumphant days for a knitter. There will be days in the winter (months, actually, but I don’t like to think about it) when knitting will keep people cozy. There will be snow shoveling and tobogganing, skating, and several blizzards in which the freezing temperatures and blowing snow will demand wool. Days when no one would dream of going outside without a hat and will conduct passionate searches for their mittens, but once it is winter, the knitting will always be in addition to something. They will need their parkas and mittens. Their snowpants and a hat. Your knitted stuff will be useful but will not stand alone. The autumn is a brief interval that is chilly but not freezing, cool but not cold, a few shining weeks when all one needs to cope with the Canadian climate is the fruit of your needles. These days belong to us. These are the weeks when we are most appreciated for what we make and what we do. The few. The chosen. The knitters.

These cool days are also, for many Canadians in general and for my family of McPhees in particular, the beginning of the most esteemed of autumn traditions, the Furnace Wars.

The Furnace Wars are an unspoken and holy contest among our people, a desperate war against nature, trying to delay the inevitable winter by sinking deeply into denial and refusing to give in to the need for central heat. For an intrinsically peace-loving populace, this is really the only serious war we wage, and we lose it every year. It’s as if we believe that we
can actually shorten our winter by not turning on the heat; that somehow it’s not really happening unless you allow it to get the upper hand. (The irony is how cold you have to get to prove that it’s not cold, but as with many things to do with pride, not everything about this makes sense.) This time of year, many Canadians obsessively watch the weather forecast and check the thermostat. We say things at the market like “How cold is your house?” or “Did you turn your furnace on yet?,” or we boast of our past achievements: “Last year I made it until Halloween.” The longer you can go, the colder the house gets, and the less heat you use, the more noble the fight.

As the winter approaches, and we simply must cave in to survive, some of us can’t even give up all at once. Last year in the schoolyard I heard a woman say, “I put the furnace on, but only for an hour. I just took the edge off, you know, for the kids. Bob and I can take it.”

I know this must seem alien to people who live in areas where winter isn’t a long dark challenge to the soul, but here, turning on the heat is like admitting to the beginning of winter, and nobody wants to be the first to cave in. To add fuel to the fire, heat is expensive, both financially and environmentally, and the victors of the Furnace Wars get not just bragging rights but also a low gas bill and a sense of moral superiority. As a knitter, I have other, more compelling reasons to play. This period before I turn on the heat marks the weeks when my art is an important part of the fight. These are the weeks that I look like a genius for
making everybody thick wool socks. Everyone wears slippers. They are thinking about full-time indoor hat use. Shawls and throws are over laps and around shoulders. Turning on the heat ends these days of glory for my knitterly self, and that means that central heat is my natural enemy. Unfortunately, this personal sprint for glory is compounded by the fact that I am a member of a very competitive family that enjoys egging each other on in this sort of matter, and I think it gets worse every year.

Last autumn the ongoing battle involved a great deal of confusion. My Uncle Tupper and his wife, Susan, visited my brother Ian for a weekend, and since Susan isn’t a McPhee, she compelled him to turn on his heat (if by “compelled” you understand that I mean that she said it was a stupid game). Ian complied (he is nothing if not a good host) and provided heat for the duration of their visit, then turned it off again and outlasted me from that point and tried to claim victory. I say this means he definitely lost, since managing outside influences is part of the Furnace Wars, and why you turned your furnace on is irrelevant. On is on. Ian disagrees, and the lack of clarity surrounding who the victor was has only impelled both of us to greater heights this year, and the game is on.

Ken (my friend and my mother’s downstairs tenant) turned on the heat last week, claiming that his roommate was cold (not him, of course) and thus disqualified himself and took my mother out with him. My siblings and I suspected that this might piss off my mother, but it turned out that she had
snuck the heat on briefly the week before, and when Ken was accused of ruining it for her, she admitted it. My sister Erin was unceremoniously turfed from the contest three days later when the temperature outside fell to 32°F, and a furtive spy (my daughter, who was babysitting) discovered that she was using her fireplace to heat her home. She defended herself, saying it was the Furnace Wars, not the Heat Wars, but Ian and I discussed it, and we were clear. It’s the spirit of the thing that matters. She’s out.

Therefore, the two virtuous contestants remaining in the match are Ian and me. In past years I have been held back from the full glory of my skills by the presence of small children, since they get frostbite sooner than adults and can’t be dragged into the contest with me, but now they are young women, and the fact that they carry McPhee DNA could not be more apparent. The girls discussed it the other night, and in addition to the financial and environmental rewards reaped by waiting, they also have embraced the glory of kicking their Uncle Ian’s arse on this, and I think that even if I wanted to turn on the heat now, I would be outvoted.

Warmed by their allegiance and maturity, I have armed this family with a private weapon. The best defense possible. Knitwear. After all, I am a knitter. I have been arming this family for years with a multitude of sweaters, afghans, socks, arm warmers, fingerless mitts, scarves, and blankets, and now they are about to pay off. Ian, on the other hand, is armed only with
determination, spunk, and a couple of pairs of wool socks I made him, although I do see now that the pair of felted slippers I made him were likely a strategic error, and I deeply regret the afghan, but he is my brother, and it was Christmas. I got carried away. I don’t think my lapse in tactical warfare will work too far against us, and now that I’ve wised up about arming my enemy, he’s getting a book for his birthday.

Nobody here has asked for the heat yet, although the children did wear layers to dinner last night, but I dropped by Ian’s today (I swear it wasn’t a furnace spot check). Ian’s wife, Alison, was busy putting plastic over all the windows in their house while wearing a hat indoors, which tells me that she might be feeling it. I don’t think it’s getting to us yet, but last night I did keep falling asleep while I was knitting. I thought I was tired, but now I realize that it’s possible that I was slipping into some sort of cryogenic state, and I couldn’t really knit with mittens on, which made my fingers a little numb. Still, I thought of the glory and soldiered on, wondering how far it would go this year. These are the Furnace Wars, not the Furnace Amusements, and things could, I thought, go a little too far.

Ian had the same sense (and less knitwear, which may have increased his willingness to negotiate), and we have decided, knowing full well that we both carry the McPhee gene for non-compliance—as well as a Stewart gene for stubbornness and an unreasonable inability to lose anything, anytime, anywhere, to anyone—that if we didn’t have a backup plan for when to call
this thing quits, someone could get hurt. We’ve decided that if it snows, or one of us calls the other and broaches a truce, we’ll turn on the heat simultaneously and share our status as the family’s last stand against winter.

Still, these are my glory days, and as I watch my sixteen-year-old cross the living room in leg warmers, two sweaters, a scarf, hat, and mittens, all the product of my needles, I know the truth. I’m not turning the furnace on until Ian calls me or somebody has to break the ice in the toilet. Put on a sweater.

My whole life, I have been very interested in the potential held in things. I love beginnings, when all is possible and everything could be fantastic and nothing has stepped up to the plate to disappoint me. There is nothing I like more than feeling the weight of a book in my hands and wondering what the story inside might be. I feel an overwhelming excitement at the beginning of movies, and I am sure that this love of pure possibility must be (along with how they smell) one of the reasons I adore newborn babies. I can’t wait to see who they might turn out to be.

As I look around my home at all the yarn I jockey around, I’m coming to understand that this love of potential, this urge to see what comes next, it might have something to do with my love for knitting and yarn collecting. After all, yarn is pure potential, and I don’t care what anyone says: Knitting is like anything else, you never know how it’s going to go. Sure, you can cast on for something with a plan, but there is no guarantee
that you’re going to end up with it at all. I grant you, sock yarn cast on for socks with a sock pattern beside you usually means you will end up with socks, but even within those tight parameters, I’ve had lots of times where I really had to wait and see. Will this particular yarn make tight socks? Beautiful socks? How about really comfortable socks that you wear so many days in a row that you hope people can’t smell you coming? Maybe, even though it’s beautiful yarn and a lovely pattern, the combination will make socks so ugly that to not rip them back would be an insult to feet everywhere. You just don’t know. Every yarn, pattern, and knitter begin an adventure when they come together, and each knitting endeavor could result in a triumph, a challenge, or an experience that ends up teaching you something really useful about your work. (Like if you decide to put a lot of beautiful cables around a neckline it won’t stretch enough to put your head through, even if you really flatten your hair and hurt your ears, but I digress.)

I have begun knitting projects absolutely sure that I knew what I was making, only to discover that the yarn was seriously opinionated and wasn’t hip to my plan. I’ve had scarves become wraps because the yarn went further than I thought (that was sort of a really skinny wrap, but I make my own rules), and in one particularly surprising event involving my calculations for yardage and the fact that mathematics have always been a deep challenge for me, I set out making a fall jacket and ran out of yarn before I got any more than a chunky wool tank top
with one half sleeve. (That one actually turned back into balls of yarn again, since summer wear that gives you heatstroke is of limited use.) I certainly couldn’t have predicted that the end result of twenty hours of knitting would land me back squarely at the yarn stage, and if you had told me that it was even a possibility that the project would have gone that way I would have laughed for an hour (and denied it), but like other things that are full of possibility, there you have it.

Another project began with an ordinary yarn being knit into an ordinary cardigan that revealed its magic in the knitting and has ended up being a sweater that is so unordinary that it is my near constant companion. It is one of the best things I’ve ever made, and I love it so much that I have considered knitting another one just like it as a backup sweater, just in case. I wear it so much that I imagine that someday when my descendants describe me, they will have to mention that sweater, only they will use adjectives like
ratty
and
mothbitten
and wonder why on Earth a knitter didn’t have a better one. When I started it, I couldn’t ever have predicted that the mundane and inexpensive ingredients I had assembled would end up giving me a sweater that I adore to the point of distraction, but that’s exactly what knitting is like. Pure possibility … a cosmic crap shoot of possibility.

The intrigue only deepened for me when I realized that knitting success or failure isn’t even particularly repeatable or predictable. You can knit one sleeve and have it be exactly the right width, and then repeat the same exact process for the other
and end up—for reasons known only to do with fate, gauge, and the fact that you drank one glass of wine during the first sleeve and fought with your spouse during the second—with two sleeves that don’t have enough in common to belong on one garment. Add in yarn errors, like the time that you bought ten balls of yarn in the same dye lot, only to discover (when the sweater was finished, of course) that one ball was actually lighter and is now a rather obvious stripe across your belly or breasts, depending on which one you had seriously hoped to downplay. (The knitting fates concerned with the matters of possibility do think it’s seriously funny to make your worst feature the only thing people will see coming.)