Fifty-three Sweaters

It's been a month since I've touched yarn to needle. The closest I've come to knitting in all this long time: yesterday I brought all my stash from the back yarn room to the living room, to sort, record, dispose of, and. . . get ideas for knitting?

Sorting stash reminds me of nothing so much as going through family photographs, for the sometimes hesitant recall of where that was (from), the cringe at having made such a choice; the longing for involvement with that seven hundred yards I bought twenty months ago at the little shop outside Milwaukee, but I'm sure there's not enough for what I envision. Nothing direct or unencumbered about this sorting, it's not like putting away winter clothes, not even like choosing to Salvation Army this and to keep that. Those can be crisp choices.

Now that I've got wireless connections with my laptop, I have the prospect at least of taking the laptop into the living room, and typing onto some site at Ravelry exactly what amounts of which yarns I have. Then it will be done. Will I do this tonight?

Will I ever knit again? (You bet I will, for I see dollar signs as well as textures in the yarns that surround me.)

I have found four sweaters, each one finished and totally forgotten, but each in a baggy in the stash. How peculiar. I now add those four to the ones I've got better in my mind, and in my photo records, and announce with wonderment, that I've knitted fifty-three sweaters in the last two years, along with multitudes of smaller items; fifty-three sweaters since I started knitting in August of 2006.

Will I ever knit again?

I have been teaching, film studies to high school students at Cornell, intensively for three-plus weeks, the major reason why I've not been knitting. All day, every day. But before, when was real life any bar to my knitting?

Will I ever knit again?

Probably, to speak with some prescience, never with the productiveness, expansiveness, devotion of these last two years.