Raspberry Filling Women and the Long Unwinding Road

Women in the Raspberry Filling years like to take up hobbies. We want to fill time
formerly spent washing thousands of acres of spit-stained clothes, preparing thousands of pounds of mac and cheese, traveling thousands of miles to soccer practice, music lessons and dance recitals. Raspberry Filling Women who never had children may already have their hobbies mastered and take pity on us, their empty nest sisters, as we attempt to redirect Mommy-fingers and retrain Mommy-brains.

Personally, I like to double up on my hobbies.
Recently, on the challenge of a Facebook friend, I took up knitting. I began with a dishcloth. When it was apparent the only thing holding it together was mistakes I pulled it out and started over. The sixth time I did this I noticed the yarn was losing some of its zing. It was looking disheveled, disheartened even. I took pity and forged ahead. With stamina and grit I turned a stoic blind eye to the errors and somehow got it completed, although I am quite certain my method of getting the yarn off the needles was unorthodox.

A folk legend tells us that Amish women are such expert quilters, they intentionally stitch mistakes into their quilts to keep the ladies from the sin of pride.
How do you like that? Do you want to explain how INTENTIONALLY erring to avoid perfection can keep you humble? I’ll tell the Amish ladies how to keep humble.
Knit like I do.
Count up your errors.
Humility will abound.
Which leads me to my idea of doubling up on hobbies.

The blue dishcloth is my creation. My mom, who could knit like nobody’s business, made the yellow one. Here is a fun little ‘test your visual acumen’ game to play in your spare time. I like to call it ‘Find the Errors in Blue’.
Count up the mistakes in my dishcloth. Give me one humility point for each one you find.
Keep a spotter point for yourself.
And then tell an Amish quilter that you know someone who can out-humble her faster than you can say knit one and yarn over.

Music, Maestro

One of my mom's prize-winning creations

 My mom could make knitting needles sing. Each design had its own melody, each type of stitch its own tone. She was so expert with the needles and yarn that the song of the shawl or sweater or cap never hit a false note, never fell flat, never screeched into dissonance. The yarn kept a natural rhythm in the interval from a round ball to woven composition.
She could unite a trio of disparate skeins in perfect counterpoint or harmonize dozens of
leftover odds and ends into a serenade of love.
The needles used to create the masterpieces were metal. When she was absorbed in a project we would fall asleep to their accented refrain and wake to it the next morning.

Because metal needles were the needles of choice for my maestro mother, they had to be the best, the only needles worth having. So when, at an advanced age, I decided to take up knitting, I asked my mom if I could use some of her needles. She said certainly, as long as I didn’t want her to try and teach me how to knit. Again.

I tried to teach myself. The needles didn’t sing, they screeched. I didn’t create masterpieces, I created discord. I took my formless mass to a friend. Her first question was, “Why don’t you try wooden needles?”

I looked at her with silent outrage. My mother used metal needles. How dare this upstart question those instruments that had conducted hundreds of classic creations?
I gathered up my knotted mess and coldly informed her that I could take it from here, thank you.

The next time I visited my mother she hurried me to her living room.
“Look what I bought!” she said, flourishing a pair of wooden knitting needles. “I wish I’d had these years ago! You can keep those metal ones honey. I won’t be needing them.”

My shapeless mass of knotted yarn is still in a bag in the bottom of my closet. But I did find a use for my mom’s metal knitting needles.