A Thousand Times No

Part of the original purpose of my trip to Minnesota was to start clearing out a lot of stuff from my parents’ house. My parents have been gently reminding me for years that I need to sort through things myself, since they don’t want to pitch out anything that might turn out to be important to me. To keep down everyone’s stress levels, I decided to begin my visit while my parents were out of town on vacation.

Yesterday, I started unwinding from the last several weeks of intense activity by completing the knitting work on a scarf that I’ve been making for one of my friends. She had mentioned that she was partial to scarves of Dr. Who-vian proportions; by the time I was done knitting, the scarf ended up being the same height as your average NBA player. I still need to work in all the yarn ends, flatten any wayward stitches, add tassels to the ends, and block the scarf, but all the actual knitting work is done.

This morning, unable to put off the actual item sorting any longer, I started going through all the shelves, drawers, and closets in order to take inventory of just how many items I would need to begin sorting through. My first surprise was how little stuff there actually was. Somehow, I had imagined that there were going to be boxes and boxes of ancient things, but it’s not nearly as dire as I imagined. My next surprise was just how much space was being taken up by Not My Stuff. I would open old dresser drawers to discover that they contained paperwork or household items that didn’t belong to me.

My best surprise of the day so far when I opened one of the last drawers I was surveying. As I was casting off the scarf I was making for my friend yesterday evening, I was already thinking about the next scarf I wanted to work on. Years ago, I had planned to knit a scarf for one of my boyfriends, picking out a particular shade of blue yarn to bring out the color of his eyes. I never got around to making much headway on the scarf, and somehow, that’s the detail that stayed with me over the years.

A little over a year ago, that former beau was flying through Philadelphia from Paris, where he now lives, with his son and daughter. I hadn’t seen him in over a decade, but we had stayed in touch, so I went to the airport to greet him and meet his children. As he emerged down the long passageway to the waiting area, he appeared virtually unchanged since the last time I saw him, even though he had gotten married, become a father, gone through a near-death experience, and was in the midst of very delicate divorce proceedings. (”He looked like he was in his forties when he was twenty, so now he looks like he hasn’t aged a day since,” remarked a mutual friend.)

After we gave each other an enormous bear hug and I had a chance to say hello to the kids, who were tired but in good spirits after their long plane ride, we all sat together quietly during the short layover. That’s when my old sweetheart pointed to the scarf he was wearing. I looked at it for a moment, unsure of what he meant, and then I realized that I had made him the scarf eons ago. I was never keen on the neutral, cafe latte color of the yarn, and I was so fixated on the next scarf that I intended to make him, that I had completely forgotten about the scarf that I had already given him — the one he had kept over the years, and across the continents.

We’re finally going to have the chance to meet up and spend some time together at the end of this summer, when he’ll be in the States again. Ever since arriving back in Minnesota, I’ve been thinking about what sort of blue yarn to purchase to finally knit up the scarf that will show off his sky-blue peepers. So this morning, I opened a drawer, and there it was: the blue yarn I had bought half a lifetime ago, still furled up in skeins, ready to be worked. It was even more beautiful than I remembered, because it’s “chained,” the yarn itself made up by looping a very fine, soft strand over itself to form an airy, woolen tube.

I’m already several inches into a sample swatch. I can hardly wait to see everything take shape, at long last.