Sharon Fiffer

I recently read an article in The Atlantic about naming inanimate objects.  The author, Kathryn Hymes, explained, among other things, that when we named our possessions, we were more likely to appreciate them. I couldn't agree more. 

When I was eight-years-old, I wanted to learn to knit.  I don't remember why.  My paternal grandmother was a seamstress and taught patients at the Kankakee State Hospital, living on the grounds in a kind of gothic dormitory with other widows and single women who taught various life skills. She taught me embroidery and always had a new project waiting for me when we visited. My other grandma spoke little English, read no patterns, but could crochet anything from a picture in a magazine.

Neither grandma knew how to knit.

For my ninth birthday, I told my mother I wanted yarn and knitting needles and lessons.  She stared at me.  I realize now I was as much a mystery to her as she was to me.  Shrugging, she asked no questions, said okay and agreed to take me to Sis's store on the weekend.

"Sis" had a wall of yarn and a small table and chairs in her tiny storefront, Knit-A-Stitch, next to the I.C. Drugstore.  Sis said that she'd teach me as long as I didn't make a simple, boring scarf. And as long as I bought "good" wool from her.  "I won't teach you to knit that dime store craft crap."

I promised, starting a lifelong habit of yarn snobbery, and picked out a few skeins of lavender wool.

"You're going to make a sweater, something where you have to learn everything," she said, sizing me up. "I'll write you out a pattern."

Sis looked me over and wrote a sweater pattern out by hand on notebook paper and told me not to lose it. "It's going to have a cable or two.  You have to learn cables if you're going to stick with knitting."

Every Saturday, my dad dropped me off at the yarn shop and I worked on my sweater.  When summer vacation began, I went to the store every day.  I often wonder if my parents secretly paid Sis to watch me, since I spent all day in her store. 

Sis began sending me next door to the I.C. to fetch coffee and sandwiches.  I was also the go-to pair of hands to stretch out a skein when customers came in and wanted to wind their yarn into a ball. 

Many long summer afternoons it was just me and Sis and an older Greek lady, knitting at the table in the window, chatting away like old friends. They gossiped as if I was one of them and told stories that went over my head. Just to keep up, I amused them with stories I probably didn't understand and shouldn't have told--about my family and the E Z Way Inn, the tavern my parents owned.  

I finished my sweater and went on to my next project, a cardigan for the girl who lived next door.  Sis didn't want me to make it.  She thought this girl, who I considered my best friend  (and who was five years older), was just using my skills, taking advantage of me. She came into the store with me and picked out the yarn and described to Sis what she wanted me to knit. Sis was barely civil.  

Nowadays, my friends and I use the term "knitworthy," to indicate if someone will really appreciate the time and love that goes into something handknit.  I now understand that back then, Sis had assessed my neighbor, for good or ill, as "unknitworthy." When my family moved away to another part of town later that year, I never heard from my friend again, so maybe Sis was onto something. 

I put down my knitting after a few years except for the occasional boyfriend scarf I made in college (the curse is true, by the way--after knitting a gift for a boy I was dating, we always broke up. They were either frightened by the domesticity on display or, more often than not,  I wised up and deemed them unknitworthy )

Marriage, career, children.  After all were more or less launched, I came back to knitting again, newly committed, zealous, and hopelessly addicted.  I can't sit without needles in my hand, without a project in the works.  Knitters know what I'm talking about.

A few months ago, rearranging my bins of yarn and going through hundreds of needles and knitting tools--I found something --a little faded in the shoulders and hopelessly shrunk and felted after I mistreated it at some point, washing it carelessly in a load of laundry.

My first sweater has, however, despite its mistreatment over the decades, held together.  And I realized today that my most recent sweater, the most challenging I've ever done, is a pure love letter to cables.  I made it for myself.  I have learned the meaning of knitworthy.

And I am naming my new sweater, "Sis."