Unraveling Brown Sheep Wool

 

Seventeen years I’ve had that wool?  Actually more like nineteen. I sound like the world’s slowest knitter. It’s just that I haven’t used that particular wool in awhile, I kept buying more. A bright turquoise for my granddaughter, lime green, purple, pinks to make scarves for the homeless. A yarn shop closed so I bought multiple skeins of fuzzy, loopy yarn for possible scarves or collages.  Skeins of revolving rainbow-colored yarn sits on open shelves like a favorite painting. Most of the Brown Sheep wool that I brought home from Holden is for warm, bulky sweaters like the ones I needed at Holden, in the winter, and in Minnesota, in the winter. But it doesn’t get as cold in Bellingham so I’ve made sweaters out of lighter weight wool.

             

I don’t stick to patterns. I find wool  I like or someone else likes and agree to make a sweater, figure out the gauge and then off I go until I get in trouble and lose the shape I aimed for. Then I take the troubled sweater to the knit shop and figure it out with another knitter. Once I took a knitting class on making sweaters without a pattern, but I missed too many classes because of work. And most of the women spent the time discussing their trips, I am not gracious around travelers because I can no longer afford to travel and I miss it.  Sometimes it’s possible to tell the mood of a knitter from the gauge, in this case my envy tightened my gauge to the point I had to unravel part of the sweater. Must work on traveler envy.

After leaving Holden’s supportive knitting environment, it’s been harder for me to find the time to finish a sweater. Finishing sweaters requires a lot of concentration to keep track of the stitches and the gauge. I love knitting in the round. If I could just knit up sweater bodies to the armholes, I’d have knitted up all my wool. But now if I’m at a meeting where I’m to pay attention or talking to someone I forget to mark the rows and lose track of when I need to increase or decrease. I guess meetings at Holden didn’t require my attention. My hands go on automatic and there’s no stopping them. Sometimes I just let them go and then go back and unravel my mistakes. Other times I stop my knitting and then fidget during the rest of the meeting because I would rather be knitting.

One time I agreed to make a hat for someone out of an expensive homespun yarn that she’d bought. It was lovely wool, but the weight was uneven so it was hard to get the hat to look exactly like the picture. I spent about five hours on it. The woman didn’t like the finished hat. She wanted a completely different shape and wanted me to knit it for free. So I unraveled the hat and gave her back the yarn. It was very satisfying. 

One reason I like knitting is because it is so easy to undo a mistake, just give the yarn a tug and out comes your mistakes. Wouldn’t it be great if we could undo life’s mistakes as easily?  “Opps, I shouldn’t have said that,” give the remark a tug, and it’s undone, no one gets hurt. My mother is an intelligent, vital woman and still making important business decisions. The other day I was frustrated with her for defending my dad’s decisions about his trust. Then suddenly she unraveled and in her brief tirade she admitted to me that she wished she had stood up to my father. I was stunned; she had always remained silent about his abuse and had resisted my questioning his behavior.

She even recalled the rose bush incident. She said she wished she’d protected me-- words I had always wanted to hear. Or did she say that? Did I just want her to say that? I was so stunned that she remembered the incident and that she actually admitted that she wished that she had stood up to my father - my mind was stuck on those words. “I wish that I had stood up to your father” that I held my breath.

The rose bush. She said she wished that she had protected me, and yet it was one time when I had consciously stepped back and wanted her to protect herself. I had dug up part of a 100-year old rose bush from a house that I couldn’t afford to keep and planted in her yard a couple of years before. Now I wanted to bring it to my new home and she and I were having trouble digging it up. Suddenly father stormed out of the house yelling at us. I thought he was crazy; the rose had nothing to do with him, what would have made him so mad? Sometimes I tried to defend my mother and he would turn on me. But this time I remember thinking my father had crossed the line of justifiable anger (justified yelling: a messy house, giggling at the table, swearing under the table when picking up a fork). So I consciously stepped back and did not interfere. I wanted my mother to stand up to him. When he called my mother stupid, it broke my heart. Now my mother is saying she wished she’d stood up to him, that she had protected me. I don’t remember if I’ve ever heard her so emotional, so angry and hurt and so straightforward in what she had to say.

Tears rolled down my face as she sobbed and told me she was 88 years old and she didn’t want to end up taken care of by people who didn’t care about her. (She was probably reacting, in part, to my complaints about my job).  She had to decide what she wanted to do about the next phase of her life. She went on to list all of the people and business that she was expected to take care of. She said she could understand what I felt not being appreciated because she didn’t feel appreciated either and then she slammed down the phone. When I called her back, she was her lighter self again.

I had unexpectedly tugged on the right emotion for my mother to unravel a small part of our difficult past, a part that was an important touchstone for me. Our relationship is much too complicated for one outburst to fix. I roll her confession around in my mind in and in my heart, I don’t know what, if anything, to do with such a remarkable admission.

When my daughter gets home from school today I need to trap her into trying on the sweater I’m knitting for her, again, to make sure I’ve made the correct adjustments so I can knit at tonight’s board meeting.

Creating a Sweater Started in the Mountains

My next creation is finishing a lamb’s wool sweater in dark blue that I’m knitting for my daughter. Both my daughter and my oldest son want dark blue sweaters. Neither one wants purple or red or even royal blue, nor  blue like in the night before a storm, just dark blue.

I learned to knit from Jeanette, an older Norwegian woman who was a skilled knitter; she had been knitting for 50 years.  When I first lived at Holden Village, almost 25 years ago, she was probably the same age I am now. I can still picture the beautiful purple and dark blue sweater that she made in an intricate Norwegian pattern. She was a wonderful, patient teacher.

I wanted to live in the mountains and Holden was the best place imaginable to fulfill my dream. The village is nestled in Railroad Creek Valley, which is 50 miles by boat from Chelan, then twelve miles by sputtering, choking school buses up the mountain on a gravel road to an elevation of 3200 ft in the Cascade Mountains. The village is not accessible by car, or phone or radio or television. A visitor from Switzerland compared the view of the mountains to the Swiss Alps; the views of Buckskin, Dumbell, and Copper mountains are that spectacular.

The village had been built to house miners and their families for a copper mine in the 1937. The mine closed in the 1957. The Canadian mining company, the Howe Sound Company, gave the miners little notice so they had to abandon their homes. The Forest Service tore down the miners’ family homes after most of the roofs collapsed under the winter snow. But several buildings remained including the single miners’ dorms, the hotel, the village center with a gym, library and a soda fountain upstairs and a pool hall and bowling alley downstairs. The school, twelve chalets that had been the engineers’ homes and an outdoor hot tub with a first class view of the surrounding mountains, also survived. Those buildings were given to the Lutherans, actually they paid one dollar for the village and leased the land from the Forest Service.

The first year I lived there I stayed in one of the dorms. Number six. We lived upstairs over the wood/electric/plumbing shop; everything was fixed in the shop. I came in April and was asked if I would be the head housekeeper. My job was to open up the four guest dorms for the summer season. I had a staff of two so I also helped out at the museum. I enjoyed working in the empty dorms, turning them into livable rooms. But I especially loved giving tours to guests of the village, explaining the remarkable history of the village and taking them up to the museum.

In addition to experiencing life in a remote mountain village, I learned to knit. I'd always wanted to knit a sweater. So my first knitting project was a bright turquoise blue sweater with a lacy pattern. I used to sit by Jeanette during meetings. At first my hands felt awkward and I was a clumsy knitter. I couldn’t see how the pattern was created. So whenever I made a mistake I would hand my sweater to her and she would either correct the mistake or make it look like it was corrected. Gradually I began to see the pattern and could correct my own mistakes, but it was a hard day when she left the village and I hadn’t learned how to finish the sweater.
The next woman who was in charge of the Craft Shop made socks and couldn’t help me with a sweater. She was impatient that I had been allowed to start with such a complicated pattern.  But wasn’t it wonderful that Jeanette didn’t discourage me? Wouldn’t the world be better off if we were encouraged to create what we wanted instead of what was reasonable? I still have that sweater. Although when I finished it and laid it out, I was astounded at how large it was. Actually after all the work it required, I was horrified. Fortunately the lacy pattern allows it to drape so the size isn’t noticeable. My gauge has always been a little loose and I have since learned to pay more attention to it and correct it when it goes astray.

After four months I left Holden Village to be with a man; I returned a couple of years later to stay away from him. When I returned I became head of laundry. They didn’t need me in the summer so I volunteered as a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service, working in Entiat Valley, the next valley over. Sometimes I would hike to the top of the ridge and look into Railroad Valley, but I couldn't see Holden because the valley curved away from the spot I could hike to.

When I returned to Holden at the end of summer, I alighted from the bus as part of the winter staff.  The volunteer coordinator announced that I would work at the Craft Shop part time and head of laundry part time. I had to learn to warp the looms, track the inventory, and maintain the supply inventory, which meant I ordered yarn. Ordering yarn was like having Christmas once a month. I could order yarn wholesale, and any of the staff could join an order. We would wait for the trucks to bring up the supplies off the barge. We would help unload the trucks, carrying bags of rice, potatoes, crates of milk and buckets of delicious ice cream. Then we would spot the boxes from Harris Tweed and Brown Sheep and we would grab them and run to the Craft Shop. After we cut through the packing tape, the boxes would spring open with the fluffy yarn in a whirl of colors.  I left Holden at the end of the year  with skeins, and skeins, of Brown Sheep wool. Seventeen years later I'm finishing a sweater for my  daughter from some of that yarn.

Final Performance

We finished the run of “In the Context of Life” on Sunday. Friday night we started warming up with a cast dance to Kathy’s upbeat music. I really enjoyed the freedom to dance without an audience and seeing the dance floor filled with joyful dancing.The Firehouse is such a warm space with its wooden floors and the care that went into creating the space.

Kathy told me that she liked my dance the best because there was no talking. I hadn’t realized that mine was the only one without talking. I thought mine was the simplest piece, but Pam told me it was complicated and the most dancelike. If there were an opportunity to use one of the pieces in a dance work, she said mine would be the piece that would qualify.

It took time to get used to the space and the lights. Although I never got comfortable with the lights glaring at me when I faced them. The second weekend I was still stressed and my body exhausted and tense. It helped not being on stage just before my piece so I could warm up with yoga poses and stretches under the seats. During the performance there was enough time between some moves so that I would shut off my mind as a way to handle the stress and discomfort. Ella reminded me not to go through it by rote, anticipating the next move.   Last weekend I forgot a move and Ella’s subtle hints didn’t trigger the correct move so the dance was thrown off a little. It was one of the few nights Pam watched so I expected some tsk, tsking, can’t remember your moves, but instead she was complimentary on how the dance was different and better. She explained that the tension the “mistake” created added to the dance. This weekend it sunk in that the piece was not static that I could still make a difference in the performance. I realized that I could make conscious choices in the piece by being more present. I missed the playfulness of rehearsals so I asked Ella if we could smile at each other in the end. It was never the joy of the creative process, but the space between us did get lighter. I especially liked the beginning when I followed her on stage in the semidarkness and at the end, her slight tap that we could walk off the stage, private moments.

My mother asked me if I would miss the people, but the cast didn’t spend that much time together. We spent most of it sitting on the stage watching each other. Also many of the people are public artists who I can see in other performances. All the dancers, including Pam, are in a production at the beginning of November. Shannon, who did the lights, will be running the lights at a Western theater production and invited me to come. And the musicians play around town.  After ten performances, I did not need to see the piece again. Spencer gave me a copy of Kathy’s music, my sheep bells and several of his other compositions. Some of the lines run through my memory, and some of the moves. 

In the process of creating the dance I moved through some of the frustrations that I have in my work as a caregiver. But further into the process, I left my work behind and allowed the dance to evolve into  my changing role as a caregiver to my daughter; to feel the give and take in our relationship as she moves closer when she needs me and then back out.  And finally as a way of letting go of my role with her as it was and allowing a more equal relationship to emerge as she becomes more independent and struggles with decisions she needs to make as a young woman.  

There is a beginning modern dance class on Monday nights that I’d like to try.  Kathy might try it as well. I think about how I made slight changes in the piece by being more present, which created a better experience for me. I can’t easily change my job, but I can create a better experience for me even in the mundane. So I carry the dance experience with me.

In the Context of Life

This summer my creative life was starting to bog down in my work as a home health aide so I decided to challenge myself and take a risk to perform a dance in public. 
This dance piece is my first public performance ever. It's a dance piece that I perform with a young dancer, Ella Mahler. I had the privilege of working with Pam Kuntz, a senior dance instructor at Western Washington University, who choreographed the dance. This is the sixth piece that Pam has created  with community members telling their stories with dancers.

This performance is about health. She had community members write out a Neighborhood Health Map. I wasn't sure what she wanted, so I composed a simple one like a wheel with me in the center and the spokes radiating out with my health care providers and activities such as yoga and walking and eating good food that I do to keep healthy. Then I talked with Pam and Richard Scholtz who has been initiated the health mapping project, to explain my map. Pam chose to create my dance piece around the care providing that I do for work. But as we worked on the piece, I realized that I have been a caregiver most of my life, and since my daughter turned sixteen, she's been moving away from me, so I am ready to move out of the care giving role and wanted the piece to represent that change. So instead of ending the piece entwined, Pam agreed to end the piece with Ella and I walking away as equals.

The first time I saw anyone else's piece was at the technical rehearsal. It was also the first time I performed the piece in front of anyone else other than Richard and Spencer who didn't count because they were working on the sound. Oh, and although they chose the ambient sound of sheep bells tha Richard recorded in Paraguay, they sound like cow bells. I asked for a picture of sheep flashed on the screen so  people wouldn't get a bovine image in their head, but I was overruled, or ignored. Now I am able to ignore the sound.

At the tech rehearsal I felt awkward and out of place in the new space. We are performing at The Firehouse, an actual old firehouse that was remodeled with loving care by a dancer into a performing space. But, yow,  the lights were too bright and made it uncomfortable to dance in. And I didn't know most of the other performers and some of their pieces were too long and I kept thinking, what have I gotten myself into ? 
The lights were were toned down for the dress rehearsal.  I concentrated on Ella. Ah, for the young, agile mind and body. I depend on her to remember the piece and sometimes to guide me to the next move.

Last weekend we opened the show. We've gotten lots of positive publicity. The Bellingham community is very supportive of Pam's pieces and this piece has several well known Bellinghamsters performing, including ex-Mayor Mark and a couple of popular folk singer activists so it has been well attended. I've been too stressed until today to really enjoy performing. Thursday I actually made an appointment with an accupunturist because I was so physically so uncomfortable. But this weekend I received several compliments. Today Pam asked me if I realized how good my piece was? I don't, some of the other pieces are so much more energetic and upbeat. And Warren, Warren is a perceptive, remarkable eight year old. How does one follow an cute, pixie-like child?  I sit next to him and he has relieved some of my tension though. I answer his questions - like why is that woman taking off her clothes? Me - because she is too hot. Why is everyone being rude and whispering?  Me - because we have lines to say, we'll get you a line. Now he remembers his line on cue and I have no idea what I'm to say, except cup is in the phrase.

My sixteen-year old came to last night's performance and afterward she came up and threw her arms around me and told me she liked the dances. She thought I was good ! I was worried that she would just think it odd and be embarrassed. And after today's performance,  a friend rushed back stage, threw her arms around me and told me I was wonderful ! What an amazing gift. I'm beginning to believe it's good.