Two years ago, I learned to knit at Christmastime, and my mom asked me if I wanted to look through the trunk of clothing my grandma made for my brothers and me when we were children. The trunk is full of treasures, all of them a little worse for the wear. There is a pink dress sized for an infant with a white yoke embroidered with tiny yellow chickens. There is a dark blue, satin-lined cabled coat for a four-year-old girl. There are matching hats with Snoopy on them, one brown and one green, knit for two little boys. My grandmother was an excellent knitter, and the clothes display her skill.

In my closet at home, I have adult-size sweaters Grandma made that I wear often. I have a green wool pullover with a gray and yellow pattern that she knit for my father — to his exacting specifications — when he was in junior high school. Many years later, he shrunk it slightly, and it has been my favorite sweater ever since. I have an orange acrylic cabled cardigan that I can remember my mother wearing on an autumn walk we took when I was very young. Every year when the leaves begin to turn, I want to find that sweater and put it on. One year for Christmas, Grandma knit six wool fisherman’s sweaters, one for each of her grandchildren. Mine she made shorter, with a V-neck, just because I asked her to. It is the sweater I reach for on the coldest winter mornings.

Grandma taught me to knit once, but it didn’t stick. These days, though, it is pretty much all I want to do. Many of my friends are having babies, and I have been knitting for them, making small, elaborate things that take me days, sometimes weeks, to complete. The babies don’t need these clothes, they probably won’t get much use out of them, and my friends don’t expect them. So why do I feel compelled to knit them? When my sister-in-law, Amy, told us that she was pregnant with twins, I immediately began making them little dresses, felted booties, and a double-sided blanket of my own design that took ages to finish. To be honest, I would prefer for Amy to remain ignorant of exactly how long it took me to make these gifts, because I think she might find it a bit ridiculous. But I didn’t make them for her, exactly. I made them for my nieces, Lilly and Ella, as I looked forward to their birth.

Ann Shayne of Mason-Dixon Knitting wrote recently about knitting a scarf for a friend. Her friend’s daughter is very sick, and in the face of Ann’s utter inability to do anything to help, she began knitting the scarf as a way of offering this woman the only thing she could give: her time. Her thoughts and her good wishes were silently worked into every stitch.*

The act of knitting for babies and children is like that: it is also an offering of time, a message of love, but with the added twist that the recipients can’t possibly understand it and maybe never will. Knitting for babies is a bit like putting a love letter in a time capsule. Lilly and Ella may never learn to knit, and they may never understand that those little dresses are a record of me thinking about them and loving them before they were born. I wore the clothes my grandma knit for me for decades without giving much thought to them.

But things are different now. My grandma has Alzheimer’s disease, and she is dying. She lives in a nursing home hundreds of miles away from me. I wish that there could have been years in which we both knit. When I visited her, I could have showed her what I was making, and she could have given me tips. But I take some small comfort in knowing that at least now that I am older, and now that I am a knitter, I get what she was doing when she knit sweater after tiny sweater for me and my brothers. Every hand-knit baby dress, every sweater in my closet was a gift of her time, her energy, her thoughts. Every one still bears her message of love.

Sometimes the only thing you can do to express your love is to spend your time, to focus your thoughts and your actions in the direction of the person you’re loving. I try to write to my grandma every week. I often tell her about what I’ve been knitting, sending her pictures of finished objects and little bits of yarn for her to touch. This week, I will tell her about my friend Anne, who called the other day to tell me that she had her baby ten weeks early. I will tell my grandmother that the baby’s name is Matthew, that he’s doing well, and that I knit him a tiny yellow hat and mailed it off as quickly as I could.

18 May 2006

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I wrote this essay last year at a time when my grandma’s illness was much on my mind. I found out last night that she died yesterday afternoon and thought it would be appropriate to post it here as a sort of tribute to a woman who was a master knitter and a wonderful and loving person to everyone lucky enough to know her.

* The entry in question is here under March 15, 2006 — which is, incidentally, the very day my twin nieces were born.