The older I get, the more I’m drawn homeward. When the weather turns cold, my craving for soup on the stove, a fire in the hearth, and time to knit begs to be slaked. Chilly temps find me cruising arts and crafts stores, feasting on colors and textures of yarn, imagining new projects. Winter sends me digging for my stash.
On hands and knees with the bedspread flipped up, driven by this seasonal hunger, I drag out from under my bed baskets and totes of knitting supplies, including fifty years of my mother’s accumulation I inherited after she died. Unlike my messy stockpile, hers is meticulously organized: stitch holders, markers, and gauge rulers, and dozens of pairs of needles—aluminum, plastic, wooden, double point, circular—all collated by size and neatly labeled. Her handwriting mark the pages of dog-eared pattern books dated back to the 1950s. Unused skeins of expensive alpaca wool leave me to wonder at her unfulfilled intentions.
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