Michelle Edwards, author of A Hat for Mrs. Goldman, will be guest blogging this week for the Jewish Book Council as part of the Visiting Scribe series.
I have been knitting all my life, since the age of five or so. Much of what I have done, I have done with my needles at the ready. So, it makes sense that I would have some stories to tell about knitting and life. Still, it took me a long time to realize this, and to tap into the well, which now often feels bottomless.
It was 1997 and I was at a small exhibit with Serge Klarsfeld’s collection of photos of French children who perished in the Holocaust, when I discovered how much of life I had viewed as a knitter. The show was in St. Paul, Minnesota, where my family lived back then. My kids were young — too young, I thought, for the bigger questions and stories about the children. So they stayed home. Instead, I asked my husband to join me. We went out to lunch first, then we walked to the exhibit. There were many noisy school kids there. Looking back on it, I wonder how they felt when they saw the black and white photos from decades before, clearly not American kids like themselves. Well, that’s another topic. Let’s make this one about knitting.
What I am sure of now, though, is that we each saw something deeply personal. And, in my case, knitterly. Among the photos, there were snapshots of the Jewish French children, sometimes with their mothers, clearly wearing some hand-knit item, like a sweater. I knew what having something handmade just for you meant. In the long and cold Minnesota winters, I had knit plenty of warmth for my own children. They came with me to yarn stores and cuddled skeins to test for softness and spring. They helped me sometimes, winding the wool into balls, so that they were easier to knit from. They took off their socks and let me measure their feet for more socks that I was knitting them. They allowed me to mess up their hair, all for the sake of getting the hat to fit.
We had a unique relationship that was all about making for them, loving them in a wooly way. That is what I saw in those pictures. Clearly, the child in the beautiful sweater was loved the way I loved my daughters. Fiercely. This child had been to yarn stores the way mine had. Maybe, on a bitterly cold day she might have picked the softest, warmest wool in the store, an expensive alpaca indulgence reserved for our heart-songs. As it was being knit, she might have tried that sweater on endlessly, so the knitter, the mom, the grandmother, could get the fit just right.
I could see their lives through my knitter’s eye. I felt their untold stories in those pictures so deeply I could barely move. Eventually, I started to write about knitting, shyly, at first. Then came many, many stories. In fact, sometimes I need to button-up when I am in yarn stores, at fiber gatherings, or around other knitters. They mention a knitting problem or a wooly discovery, an entanglement with yards offinely spun whatever, and I smile instead of letting them know how I wrote about that once.
I had planned this post to be a knitting story somehow tied to my latest book, A Hat For Mrs. Goldman: A Story About Knitting And Love. But here I am, nearly at the end of the story I had wanted to tell, and only now, through finally writing down about that day, do I realize how the two stories connect. Knitting and Love. That’s it.
Michelle Edwards is an award-winning author and illustrator of many books for children, one book for adults, and nearly one hundred essays for knitters. Her stories are about family, friendship, and community. They chronicle the large and small victories and defeats of everyday life. Michelle frequently shares her paintings and thoughts on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.