The Hand of Comfort

New life has a way of arriving whether we are ready or not.  As the autumn equinox approaches, the asters droop on their stems, and the front page is full of darkness at noon, babies arrive.

Instead of writing this week, I have tended other connective threads in my life, my needles in hand.  When I knit at the end of long days, I gain a perspective that little else provides.  I join the long and lovely and varied skein of generations – women alive today and one hundred years ago, women in transition from one season of life to another, women in relative poverty, women who have lost children, women in refugee camps, women tending hearths where there is insufficient food – all of them, women of stamina, creativity, and courage.

Working threads, making stitches, creating blankets in which to wrap our babies (or the babies of dear friends), is a healing and loving act that gives both ways, to the knitter and the recipient.  My grandmother gave me the gift of this meditative and useful skill.  Born 119 years ago to an Irish mother who bore 7 children, and supported her girls by keeping other women’s homes clean, at night my great-grandmother would create small lace accessories for her girls with the last bits of her waning stamina before sleep, so that they would feel her love and aspirations for them.

The stories of our threads are as precious as what we make with them.  In a life filled with discontinuities and many lost souls, the work of our hands in the service of comfort can bring us back to true.  Home.

Namaste