50 Miles. Sheryl St. Germain

      It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe

      … the human hand…has its own form of intelligence and memory.

      —Elizabeth Zimmerman

      Some of my earliest memories involve watching my mother crochet in our small living room nights when my father was away working his second job or out somewhere carousing. Oh, the bright and colorful afghans she made for her five children! Although I don’t remember her smiling while she crocheted, she seemed more serene than at other times, centered, surrounded by balls of yarn, an afghan slowly taking shape in her lap. Sometimes she worked with granny squares, stacking up hundreds of multi-colored squares next to her on the sofa, then, months later, stitching them together in a lively design, making a whole of pieces in ways I’m sure she wished she could do with the broken bits of her life with my father.

      Even as a child I perceived the swirl of chaos around my father, who often came home late from work, smelling funny and slurring his speech. I sensed my mother’s crocheting was a way of creating a bit of calm in the frequent storms my father choreographed, storms that included strange women calling our house late at night, strange women’s jewelry found in his car, increasing DUIs, car accidents and hospitalizations until, finally, just short of his 60^th birthday, his liver in an advanced state of cirrhosis, he slipped into a vegetative state and died a few months later. In those years, I kept a journal and wrote poems in secret, which became my way of reflecting on my father’s life, since my mother rarely talked about it unless forced. Instead of talking, instead of writing, she crocheted.

      My mother has shared with me that crocheting all those years was, for her, a form of meditation. Instead of doing almost nothing, as in traditional meditation, with one’s hands, hers were always moving, always in contact with the yarn she was looping and yarning over and pulling through in a rhythm I now understand, as a crocheter myself, underlies any thoughts scuttling about in your brain. Whatever else you might be thinking about while crocheting, you usually must be counting—one single crochet front loop only; one back loop only, skip one stitch; three single crochets in the next stitch, repeat until you have 150 stitches. Counting underlies all your thoughts in crochet, giving them a substance and song they might otherwise not have had.

      If you’re mourning some loss, as my mother often would have been—not only did she lose her husband over the years to other women and drink, but both her younger sister, and her troubled son, my brother, died young of drug overdoses—the yarn slowly but surely binds you to that loss. Maybe your stitches take on the shape of your grief, swelling as your eyes do, maybe you tighten them when angry or hold the tension a bit more loosely when you’re sad. Maybe you’re thinking of someone you love who’s not lost but still alive, your focus to create something beautiful for him, to stitch your affection into the yarn.

      While I grew to trust words to stitch the wounds in my heart, my mother preferred crocheting. The comfort of the ball of yarn next to you, the satisfaction of it growing smaller as your project takes on shape and dimension; the wonder of the colors as they reveal themselves in a stitch, especially when you have a skein of multi-colored or self-striping yarn; the rhythm of the changes of colors and of the stitching itself; the sensuous sliding of the hook into the opening of the stitch; the pulling and looping and yarning over; the comforting feel of the completed stitch; these are some of the reasons I imagine she came to love crochet.

      I make my living now as a poet and teacher of writing, although I also crochet, and I can’t help but see connections between writing and crocheting. When crocheting a long row of single crochets, the rhythm of it feels to me like a kind of poetic meter, an extended trochaic foot, one that slides around, has a bit of a southern accent maybe, with slightly too many syllables—enter, yarn over, pull, enter yarn over pull—. It feels as if you’re weaving a poem. A row of crocheting is not unlike a line of poetry where foot and meter are important, the turning chain like the rhymed syllable of the last word of an iambic pentameter line. If you’re working with color, the colors must echo and complement each other the same way words do in a poem or lyric essay.

      I first turned to writing poems to find vessels to contain the chaos of the family into which I was born; poems offered a way to present a gift to the world that often came from those early days’ tragedies. Crocheting has become a force almost equal to poetry as an expressive art for me, since both are creative acts that can be at once calming and transformative, both empowering in times of crises.

      The truth is, of course, that women have often used fiber art—weaving, knitting or crocheting—as a tool for getting through difficult times. The earliest literary example we have might be Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who promises she will remarry once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Laertes. During the day, she works on the shroud, but unravels it at night, hoping Odysseus will return before she is forced to marry one of her property-hungry suitors. This story also points out that it’s not the product of the weaving that’s important, rather the process itself.

      Several recent books link crochet’s older sister, knitting, to psychological and spiritual recovery. Ann Hood’s memoir, Comfort: A Journey through Grief, and her novel, The Knitting Circle, to pick two of my own favorites, are both inspired by her own experience learning to knit to help recover from the unexpected death of her young daughter. Susan Gordon Lydon, in Knitting Heaven and Earth, writes about using knitting and needlework to heal from the grief of death as well as her own diagnosis of breast cancer. Likewise, crochet blogger Kathryn Vercillo’s site, Crochet Concupiscence, is full of stories of many who crocheted their way through grief; she herself has written of how she crocheted her way out of depression.

      My own drug of choice is crochet, not knitting, although most yarn stores, pattern magazines, and books privilege knitting. Crocheting is in my blood because that’s the art my mother taught me, and it’s what her mother taught her. I learned to hold a crochet hook around the same age I learned to wield a pen, and it feels as natural to hold a crochet hook as it does a pen.

      Knitting and crocheting are sometimes confused, as they both involve yarn and may lead to similar projects: hats, scarves, gloves, sweaters, afghans, blankets. I often crochet in public—it’s a great way to sit through bad poetry readings if you are not at liberty to leave—and am constantly responding to questions of “What are you knitting?” with I’m crocheting. Both arts involve manipulating loops of yarn, although knitters use two knitting needles, while crocheters employ a single tool, the crochet hook. Crocheters enjoy dozens of kinds of stitches; knitters have only two. Crocheting uses more yarn than knitting, and has more architecture. Running your hands along a crocheted item you’ll feel the bumps of the stitch, which are in higher relief than those of knitting.

      I now crochet as much, if not more, than my mother, and I’m grateful for her early lessons. I’m lucky to be able to afford the kinds of yarns my mother could not. I like to use kettle-dyed, natural yarn (as opposed to synthetics) for my crochet projects as I prefer the slightly coarser look and variegations in color; I like handspun yarns such as those from Malabrigo, a woman’s collective from Uruguay, that vary in lovely ways both in the shades of the color of the yarn and in the diameter of the yarn itself so that it might be thick at one part and thin in another. As the yarn runs through my fingers I think of the animals or plants from which it came, and I feel more connected with the earth. I also like supporting the women in rural areas of South America, many of whom would live in poverty without the ability to make and sell this yarn.

      Unfortunately, a love of crocheting is not the only thing I share with my mother. Like her, I also gave birth to a son who would grow into a troubled