Three Grandmothers, Two Decades and A Bunch of Ugly Scarves Later, I Get it.

They were incredibly patient with me. I was a geeky, awkward kid who just wanted to eat Oreos and watch cartoons, but they dutifully sat and instructed me. I dutifully poked the needles around in the wool, looped and stitched and pearled the raw materials into monstrosities that looked positively lopsided and moth-eaten. I clunked my way through two grandmothers, both of whom had the awe-inspiring ability to knit without even looking at their work, to churn out sweaters and blankets and pillows in record time. In the end, I waved the white flag, decided that I didn’t need to know how to do stuff like this. When I grew up and found my true love, I had to tell yet another doting and knit-talented grandmother that while I admired her work, I wasn’t interested in producing my own.

And so it went for about twenty years, with me reading Sartre and listening to jazz and watching art films. I fed my head twenty-four-seven, and my impatient, itchy little fingers only got to feel useful when I decided to bake a birthday cake or hem a pair of pants. I worried about all the things I hadn’t had time to do in the past, and all of the things I needed to do in the future, and occasionally, when I had a spare moment, I might enjoy the present.

About a year and a half ago, some very wise people introduced me to the idea of being “grounded”, of sticking my feet in the dirt and getting out of my head once in a while. There are all kinds of ways to do this, most of which are a challenge to a type-A cliché like me. Eventually, however, I found my way back to the needles, and in the process, I found a way to anchor myself to myself again.

It started with a book of patterns for amigurumi, little yarn dolls in all manner of shapes and sizes. The ones I had my eye on were zombies and sea monsters, not your average craft projects. The end products looked so cool and quirky that I resolved to get over my childhood aversion to traditional handicrafts. I might not be able to sew, or knit, or do needlepoint, but I knew that if I really tried, I could deal with a simple crochet pattern.

Somewhere between a three-inch-tall ninja, and a tennis ball-sized frog, I entered the zone. I was no longer buzzing about my next writing project, or unpaid invoices, or office politics. All I could think was “Chain stitch. Chain stitch. Chain stitch.” I was there, on the couch. All of me. No exceptions. The tranquility I sought, I found with an aluminum hook and a bucket of polyester yarn.