Free The Yarn Whisperer by Clara Parkes Page B

bounty with anyone else.
    If the croissant is your ideal stockinette, the mille-feuille—with its “thousand” alternating layers of flaky pastry and rich cream filling—would have to be stockinette into which you’veadded alternating rows of frothy high-calorie cashmere, or perhaps a brushed mohair that wafts from a silky core.
    Cupcakes and muffins would be the honest bobble, puffing proudly and invitingly from the fabric surface. Feather and fan is the freshly baked cannoli, its slender middle tube forming a tunnel through which the sweet mascarpone filling passes before billowing out from each end.
    Garter stitch, rest its soul, would be the oft-misunderstood whole-grain bread. It’s packed with body and bounce, with robust nutrition and substance. Yet it often plays second fiddle to its nemesis, the baguette. How she taunts with her perpetually skinny, perfectly tanned form. The baguette is the homecoming queen, the head of the cheerleading squad, and if you were to knit her, she’d have to be the slender, perky I-cord.
    The madeleine,
my
madeleine anyway, is knitting itself. When Proust dipped one of these simple bite-sized, shell-shaped cakes in tea, the taste triggered a flood of childhood memories. It’s called “involuntary memory” when a seemingly unrelated sensory experience triggers a memory. For me, a mere glance at yarn and needles—whether in our hands or someone else’s—can unleash powerful recollections.
    Sometimes when I’m knitting, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a window. The mirror image of my hands alters them just enough so that they don’t appear to be mine. Clear as day, they are my grandma’s hands. Just one brief look, and I’m transported to a whole other dimension between past and present, a never-never land of in between.
    I’m watching my grandma expertly maneuver her needletips and yarn in graceful, elegant arcs. I’m so young that I may not even know how to verbalize what I’m seeing, but the impression is right there, infused into my cells.
    From there, I fast-forward. I’m sitting in the backseat of the car, my grandma by my side. Her hands are folded over her small brown leather purse. They’re beautiful hands, small and shapely, and they do not stand still. They are in a constant state of motion, thumbs quickly orbiting one another, fingertips fidgeting, then both sets of fingers rubbing the bag’s frayed leather handles. She’d stopped knitting, her mind having forgotten how—but her hands couldn’t stop moving.
    As time passed, she began to narrate everything she saw around her in a whispered mumble. We strained to listen, curious what her world looked like. Usually she was simply trying to remind herself what everything was. “That’s the youngest boy, standing by the window …”
    The narration grew more random, “Get the … yes, yes … that goes there … Good, good …” until we could not see her world at all.
    My brothers and I decided that she must have engaged in top-secret government plots when we weren’t around. “We bomb the embassy at midnight,” she’d mumble into a secret microphone in her collar before changing quickly back to jibber-jabber when we returned to the room.
    Other people have knitting memory recalls, too. “I haven’t seen someone do that in ages,” a stranger will smile, eyes already getting that faraway look. “My mother used to …” or “My grandmother always made us …” or “I used to do that.” I’mespecially fond of the men who tell me
their
knitting stories, relieved to have found a confidante who understands.
    I have another memory, too: that of being a child lured by those guilty-pleasure, plastic-wrapped confections at the convenience store, products that purists might not even deign to call “pastries.” I’m talking about