The Yarn Whisperer (17 page)

I remember clinging to those instructions as if they were my lifejacket in a boat doomed to sink. With each row, I saw only impending disaster. Eventually I'd reached the point of no return, well beyond a swimmable distance to shore. Going back would be just as terrifying, so I stuck it out in the hopes that my sock would live to see the end. Now, many more heels later, I've realized just how simple and intuitive heels really are. All I needed to do was relax, take a deep breath, and keep the big picture in sight. Needles find their way, boats are built to float, and it's often our
mind
that is our worst enemy. These days, when Don calls with an invitation to sail on
Fledgling
, I drop everything, grab my life jacket, and go—just as when certain designers publish new patterns, I drop whatever's on my needles and cast on anew.

Both sailing and knitting were once essential components of everyday life, now relegated somewhat to the realm of “esoteric”—along with the record player and fountain pen—by such modern inventions as the combustion engine and the knitting machine. And yet how exquisite they both are.

When you sail, you're gliding through water, propelled only by the wind and an artfully slanted sail. Everything is silent except for the sound of wind and water, and perhaps the slight creaking of your boat. If you're lucky, a harbor seal will pop up its head and watch you go by. In the middle of my bay, the air smells sweet—so sweet I make myself dizzy trying to breathe it all in. I've been passed by monarch butterflies and circled by a
pod of porpoises; I've sideswiped driftwood and trailed my fingers in the water while feeling overwhelmed by the perfection of the moment.

Knitting offers a quieter, dare I say drier escape into that zone. We still the mind and let our fingers maneuver yarn over, under, through, and off a needle, again and again. How utterly simple those movements, yet, lo, is that fabric I see? Yes. Lovely, durable, beautiful, functional fabric unfolds before us. Just from wiggling our fingers.

The lapping of the waves against our needles is a whisper, a sliding of crimp and scales, of compressed energy and twist, against a solid surface. Wooden needles bring choppy waters, our boat fighting against the current. We glide faster with metal needles, interrupted only by the occasional
tink tink tink
of metal on metal, like steel-masted sailboats rocking in the harbor. Occasionally we are greeted by a passerby: a fleck of vegetation, a variation in twist, a knot perhaps. We greet it and move on, ever forward, plowing through wave after wave of stitches on our way to a distant point, a sleeve, a sock.

All too often I meet a person who says she knows how to knit, but then quickly adds, “But I'm not, you know, a
real
knitter.” Hooey. Neither materials nor output do a knitter make. You can own a $100,000 wooden Concordia yawl and easily be outmaneuvered by an amateur at the tiller of a friend's little boat (ask me how I know). On a windy day, you could even hold up a bedsheet in a borrowed canoe and have a blast.

Knitters, whether you make museum-quality creations out of your own handspun Mongolian cashmere or garter-stitch
washcloths out of cotton, you, too, can have a blast. You don't need fancy-pants needles (nothing against them) or fancy-pants yarn (nothing against it) or a fancy-pants project (you know where this is going) to enjoy yourself and to be, in every sense of the word, a knitter.

And despite her 35,000-square-foot vacation home just up the coast, Martha understands this, too. Why else, when the media mogul was presented with a humble acrylic poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate on the eve of her release, would she proudly wear it out into the free world? Never before—and probably never again—has a poncho made such a big stir.

Which is why I'm confident she would've appreciated my liverwurst sandwich.
Psssst, Martha, call me.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

I LIVE IN A
farmhouse on a bluff of a peninsula looking inland across blueberry fields, treetops, and water to rolling, rocky hills that eventually lead to Canada.
My view is unmarred by any human structure save for the distant blinking of cell phone towers.

The house was built in the typical New England style, with a big house leading to a middle house, to an unfinished back house, and finally to a barn. The big house was built in 1893, with the middle, back, and barn built soon after. I like to think that most of the trim came from the Sears Roebuck catalog.

The view called to Clare and me during a brief visit in the summer of 1995. We were exploring the perimeter of my Great-Aunt Kay's house, long since boarded up and uninhabited. We pushed our way through the bamboo, the sumac, the tall, forbidding weeds doing their best to keep us back. When we
finally reached the north side of the house, we discovered three windows at waist height, which had not been boarded up or covered from the inside. I cupped my hands to the glass and peered in, seeing a small sitting room with two rocking chairs. It had all sorts of garbage piled high, but I remember the rocking chairs.

As if on cue, both of us followed the gaze of whoever would have been sitting in those chairs. It was not the view I normally saw from the road when driving by her house. It was a far more settled, perfect, painterly landscape, a siren's call to my cityweary soul. Suddenly I saw myself in that room, cleaned and lovingly brought back to life again, sitting in one of those rocking chairs and gazing out at that view. I knew, without a doubt, that this was where we were meant to be.

That week we hatched a plot, which we jokingly called “Operation Freedom.” We would find a way to leave San Francisco, move to Maine, transform that farmhouse into our very own home, and live happily ever after.

Everyone thought we were crazy. On the outside, the house was a disaster. Peeling paint, cracked plaster, windows that barely held their glass in place. A few years earlier, the first floor had given up completely and rotted into the muddy basement, taking all its belongings with it. The floor had been rebuilt and some possessions put back in place, but the rest was still heaped in the barn.

The house was like the remains of a fine sweater discovered quite by accident in an old, forgotten suitcase. Moths had eaten through the stitches. Both elbows had blown through,
wrists were worn away, the shoulders thinned to a shadow of their former selves. But the compassionate eye saw potential. All the original lines were still there, the granite foundation and steady roofline signaling, unquestionably, possibility.

My great-aunt was a character deserving of a book all her own. Immediately after World War II, she traveled throughout Europe for the Audubon Society presenting a film on the birds of North America. She cared for her ailing parents, never marrying or having children of her own. When her parents died, she took on the responsibility of caring for their belongings—and they had many, for they'd never been able to part with what they'd inherited from
their
parents' houses. The family home was jammed with generations and generations of things that held no real appeal to an outsider. When prompted, she would launch into a story about how so-and-so, from somewhere-or-other, used this for something a long, long time ago.

Perhaps she noticed that we were bored senseless by these stories, my brothers and I, for she began writing them down on pale yellow tags and affixing them to things—“Key to Arthur Cyrus Hill's office, dentist, Boston, 1843,” read one, or “Sterling spoons marked ARH, gift to Adella Richards Hill from Emma Aline Osgood, Somerville, 1861.” Naturally, my brothers and I responded by adding our own labels to things. “Spatula, handle partially melted by Jeffrey Tousey Parkes, Maine, 1984,” with the name underlined three times for emphasis.

Aunt Kay was a true eccentric who followed her own compass and didn't care what anyone said or thought. To her, it was only natural that the passenger's seat of her car should be
removed, so that her dog, Loki, could get in and out more easily. Today, she might have been featured on
Hoarders,
but she was, in kinder terms, a curator of the world's abandoned belongings. The fact that some of those things came from the dump was really beside the point. She was saving treasures that others had so carelessly left behind.

We didn't get the keys to her farmhouse until a year after we arrived in Maine. We'd spent that first year in Portland getting our footing, Clare finding work and me building my freelance career, both of us ecstatically noting things like The First Firefly, The First Snowfall, and The First Power Outage.

When we finally got inside the farmhouse, the scope of our folly hit home. The place was a wreck. Broken chairs, rusty box springs, parlor pianos (yes, plural), a roll of used fiberglass insulation, stacks of green window shutters that did not belong to the house, two kerosene-filled oil drums that sprang a leak as we rolled them out. There were steamer trunks jammed with mildewed sheets and moth-eaten blankets that had been home to generations of squirrels and mice. We leafed through heaps of old navigational charts Aunt Kay's parents had used when cruising up the coast from Boston to Maine each summer. It was as if every stitch in the sweater had been somehow compromised. What had once passed for a kitchen pantry now held serving platters and rusty paint cans alike. And there were stoves. Gas stoves from the 1960s, cast-iron stoves from the 1800s. We counted twenty-four total, only two of which were fully functioning. Stoves were her favorite. When I once asked why, she answered, “Why not?”

We took a full year to empty out the farmhouse, driving up each Friday night, working all weekend, and schlepping our exhausted selves back home on Sunday evening. It's a miracle neither of us contracted hantavirus because the whole upstairs was one giant fossilized pile of mouse and bat dung. Yet the house still called to us, so we toiled, investing every penny we had to bring this old place back to life.

So vast were the needed repairs, and so limited our skills, that we hired someone to manage the work for us. He would oversee the stripping of the house down to its very joists, patching, rewiring, restoring, insulating, replacing windows, installing heat and bathrooms and a functioning kitchen where none had existed for decades. My goal was to breathe new life back into this house while making any upgrades invisible to the passerby. I wanted it to stay as true to the original sweater design as possible, to look like nothing but a farmhouse that had been lovingly tended all these years. I'd salvage what I could, gently tease apart what I couldn't, then spin, dye, and slowly reknit.

In the beginning, I adored the process of rebuilding this house, marking the exact spot for each electrical outlet, light-bulb, and switch. Each room was positioned to maximize a specific view I'd imagined in my head. Everything, down to the last hinge and doorknob, existed for a reason.

I was designing what I envisioned would be the perfect sweater, one that matched every contour of our bodies so completely that we'd never need another sweater, ever again. All this was on paper and in my imagination. As it gradually transformed into the three-dimensional reality of a home, the
disappointments came. Stitches didn't resemble what I'd imagined, rows had decreases that didn't match the perfect slant I'd drawn on graph paper. Original window hardware was thrown away by mistake, a beautiful old attic window was broken by one of the workers. Why hadn't they vented the stove the way I'd asked? Shouldn't this outlet be a quad?

The longer the project lingered, the less fuss I made when things weren't right. When bathroom fixtures arrived without my ever having specified them, I gave up. I'd reached that point in the project where I was sick of everything. I just wanted to bind off the damned stitches and finally wear the sweater. So what if the cuff was too loose? I could always unravel that part and redo it later, right?

As anyone who's renovated an old farmhouse will confirm, the project took twice as long and cost twice as much as estimated. We were out of money and beginning to compromise with the game of “I'll give you X if you'll still do Y.” Now in play were two crucial pieces: the porch and the septic system.

One reason I rebuilt the farmhouse was so that we could put a screened porch off the back and live in it all summer long, gazing out at that amazing view without ever having to slap a mosquito. But we'd become so bogged down with matters of insulation and windows and heating systems, the contractor's unraveling marriage and his foreman's drinking problem, that the porch was now on the chopping block. If the septic tank was compromised in any way—and all signs pointed to “yes”—the porch would have to go. Everything else, in fact, would need to be cut.

Our local plumber, Bobby Gray, is related to half the town and has probably been in every house at one point or another. He told me he'd installed the original tank in 1976. Remembered it as if it were yesterday. (Most people who'd had dealings with Kay did not easily forget her.) It was a steel tank—he even knew the gallon size—and it had to be rusted through by now. There's no way a tank could last that long, he said.