Happines...Is a Warm Scarf

Conjugate the verb to knit.  I knit.  I knitted.  I have knitted.  You knit.  You knitted.  You have knitted. He knits...well, the rest is redundant.  To knit: a regular verb, but it's a flexible word.  When I broke my collar bone in seventh grade, the doctor did not have to set it; he said it would "knit" itself.  My mother is a knitter as well as my aunt.  It was an odd image in my seventh-grade mind that my bones were performing the same activity as my mother and aunt.  Watching them knit was always like imagining them as spiders...nice spiders who would regularly pull a length of yarn from a skein nestled in a bag covered in a tapestry print that opened like a canvas deck chair, point two sticks at each other, and magically produce a length of sock, scarf, or sweater with the twist of fingers in a coordinated, magical sign language. 

The language of knitting is simple:  knit and purl, cast on and cast off.  With these basic incantations the knitter spells the hands into movement.  I've never known a knitter to watch his or her hands while involved in the work of knitting.  My mother knitted while watching soap operas; my aunt would knit while talking to others.  My sister knits to relax. 

When children are born in our family, or when people marry into the family, they receive a knitted Christmas sock made by my aunt.  Each sock is unique, and each has the owner's name knitted clearly around the sock's top.  We are a well-knitted family; bones that have cracked, knit, healed, become stronger.  My sock, now nearly fifty years old, has held pounds of toys, candy, fruit, and its single strand of yarn has held up all this time.

So when my sister, who also knits like a possessed woman in a fairy tale, wonders why I ask her for a hand-knitted scarf for my birthday, I tell her I'd simply like a scarf.  What she doesn't know is that each time I wrap that around my neck and tuck my ears and nose in the wool, I feel that each strand will continue to hold me up, that the knitting has truly healed and made the bond stronger.