Today is the day to start spring-cleaning. My choice is the corner in the living room where all the books & junk have accumulated over the past 2 years. That one corner next to the woodstove, where we throw everything when we don’t know where to throw it. Mom and Dad decide to start with the porch, which hasn’t been cleaned off since we moved in, 7 years ago. A tangle of weeds, old camping gear, trash, and broken flowerpots.

The pile of junk in my corner has been growing for two years. Books, tools, and most recently – my knitting supplies. My huge blue lidded box has been thrown haphazardly on top of the books & trash in that corner, and now it’s the time to claim it as my own.

I start by taking all those cardboard boxes and pulling them out. Leaving the rest of the junk to fall in the middle. Dusty books, many of them old textbooks from the 1950s, and stacking them into the cardboard boxes. Notebooks are searched through for important information.

It’s at this stage that I find it. An old brown spiral bound notebook, with a price of $.25 on the cover. I had come across many of these in the past 2 hours, and I figured it was another one of dad’s Dungeons & Dragons notebooks, filled with character sheets & spell lists. I balance it on the pile growing on my knees, getting ready to be put into another box, when I notice that the text-type on the cover looked older than the other notebooks. The pages are more yellowed around the edges.

I open the notebook gingerly and half-scan the pages. “Knit next 2 Rows” pops out at me. I start at the top of the first page.

Handwritten in pencil, in beautiful cursive that I don’t recognize as any of my family’s handwriting, is a knitting pattern. I turn the page. More patterns.

On the inside covers are rows and rows of small Xs, presumably to indicate rows.

In the back of the book is a pattern for a children’s hooded poncho, and a small pencil sketch of a young girl twirling around while wearing it.

Two other patterns fall out of the book as I turn the page. One is a very old photocopy for knitted slippers; the other is for knitted & crocheted Christmas stockings. It’s clear from the terminology used “2 balls of Knitting Worsted, Needles to achieve gauge listed.” That these patterns are from the 1950s.

The question now becomes, who’s notebook was this? No one in my family (save for my grandmother, who knew HOW to knit, but never actually knitted.) practiced the craft. I called for mom, who was cleaning up flowerpot shards in the front yard. I showed her the notebook, and she reminded me of two aunts (who I had never met) who knitted. Aunt Faye, and Aunt Bea. All my Afghans that I use were crocheted by Aunt Bea just after I was born.

As I looked at the patterns, I felt tears well up behind my eyes. Finally, a connection to someone in my family who is like me. Someone who takes two sticks and string and turns them into usable items. After 4 years of knitting, and believing that I was the only one in my family who enjoyed this way of life. And now, to find that not 1 but 2 people in my family do the same, and that one of them designed her own knitwear..It’s enough to make me cry for hours.

Now the only problem is figuring out which aunt wrote these patterns.

 

Also, I have to say that I now have too many needles to fit in the mason jar I had been using to store them. So I dug through the kitchen shelves, and came up with these two containers for holding my needles. Both are antiques that my dad had.