Family Knitted Together
/The Boston Herald
We are like puppies trailing him, at his heels, our ears up when he speaks, our eyes bright and shiny, so happy that if we had tails, they'd be wagging right now. The reason is simple. Our son is home from England, not home for good, but home for a week, home from work, not war. It's nothing momentous, yet it feels it.
We're used to his not being home, long past the "He's grown up and gone and what's life going to be like without him?" stage. We know what life is like without him: The bathroom's cleaner. His bed's always made. And we don't wake up in the middle of the night and wonder where he is. We never know where he is. And while that may be good for sleeping, it changes things. A family is knit together because of proximity, because of being together every day, at the kitchen table, in the family room, anywhere, bumping into one another, sharing stories, jokes, problems. That's what family is, different people knitted and purled together for better and worse all the days of their lives.
In the beginning, parents design the pattern. We're the primary colors, red, blue, green, bright yellow, no-nonsense stitches that seem to be going somewhere. We actually think we're in charge, that we can create something even and orderly. But then children arrive, angora in the mix now, pink or lavender or baby blue, softer yarn with a different stretch, not as serviceable, but a lot prettier.
Living together and growing together, weaving in and out of rooms and seasons and moods and stages and years, we create not a flawless coverlet with a predictable pattern and square edges designed to fit neatly on a bed or a couch. But a coverlet that is as unique and as identifiable as DNA
The pastels of childhood grow showier as the years go by. The design zigs and zags, shimmers and shines. And the primary colors? They don't exactly fade. They're there. They just don't dominate anymore. They're entwined and intertwined. Everyone and everything is entwined.
And so it goes, stitches added, stitches dropped, colors laced and unlaced, joined and disjoined, stopped and started for as long as the family exists.
This family exists in other places now, everyone somewhere else. The three children are adults. They have their own homes and apartments and lives. But when they come home, they become part of each other again.
"Tell us about work and your life and how you feel and what you've learned? Talk to us,” we say to our son. He has so many stories, so much life lived away from us. He shares that life, some of it, part of it. And we share ours and the days go by and the thread of everyday living weaves in and out. A pattern begins and there's an ease in the knitting, a comfortable familiarity.
That's what no one tells you when your children are small. In knitting, when changing colors, you need to bring the color to be used next under the last color used and weave in the loose ends. If you don't you get a hole.
But families are different. With families you pick up where you left off. Coming and going? Dropping in and out? Being together but not being home? These holes are part of the pattern.
Like an old coverlet kept at the foot of the bed, a family comforts and warms in ways that nothing else can. That's the beauty of the quilt that families make, not how it looks in a photograph, but how it endures and how it feels, holes and all.
