I’ve been crocheting a lot recently. I like to keep my hands busy. It is almost a spiritual practice. It is surely a creative practice. My mother taught me and her mother taught her. I can usually look at some item that is crocheted and figure out how to do it. Although, I will admit, I don’t often try to tackle complex projects. Lately, I’ve been working on little creatures – animals or dolls.
This little bunny is the first that I created without a pattern. I hope to improve with practice. I sent it off to my nephew and his wife who just had a baby girl. The first grandchild for my brother, and my first great niece! I haven’t met her yet, but I hope to soon. And I hope this is the first of many.
Crochet is one of my mainstay activities, like reading and journaling, since I was a child. What follows is a poem that I composed many years ago to express what it means to me.
I Crochet
When I was a toddler I watched my grandmother crochet
while I listened to the stories she told,
the stories I can no longer recall,
because I was more fascinated by those dancing fingers so fast, so fluid.
Now, I crochet to remember the day
my grandmother handed me the battered little cardboard box
that held her handiwork, scraps and samples,
tiny steel hooks and balls of cotton thread.
The box that she’d kept in the China closet, where she stored
the fancy plates and glasses that only came out on special occasions,
with the embroidered linens and tablecloths,
and dozens of carefully laundered crocheted doilies, stiff with starch–
this box was her legacy to me.
I crochet to stave off the loneliness, now that they are gone
my mother and my grandmother, the aunts who taught me,
chain stitch, single, double, triple,
patterns growing exponentially from my hands now.
I crochet to have them here with me,
to cross over into the past, to be with all the women
who taught my grandmother
to take up the yarn on the hook, loop over, pull through,
they spread their warmth across the Atlantic,
the ones whose names I’ll never know
because my grandmother left them all behind in Sicily,
all the aunts, the mothers, and grandmothers,
who stitched their love into blankets and bedspreads.
I crochet as they did to dissolve the tears,
when it seems that everything
has come unraveled, the hook, the yarn,
the loop, the chain, I only have to follow
the pattern in the sample,
remember the stitches, continue the motion,
gather the courage,
generate the warmth, the simple beauty,
and all they knew to keep on going.
Breathtakes 