She Taught Me to Knit and Fixed My Mistakes

I'm going to teach a friend to knit. To begin a piece of knitting, you have to cast on. That's where most knitting teachers start. But I might cast on for my friend. And I might knit the first row, too, because that's what Aunt Bobbie did for me when she taught me to knit almost fifty years ago.

Casting on is more difficult than straight knitting and the first row after the cast on can be too tight to knit easily. So, when I spent time with her one summer, Aunt Bobbie cast on and knit a few rows. Then she showed me how to hold the needles in my two hands, how to insert the right needle into the right-most stich on the left hand needle and pull a loop of yarn through.

My first attempts were full of split yarn and dropped stitches. Aunt Bobbie looked at my knitting and laughed.

"What did you do?"

Then she took it from me, unknit most of what I had done, fixed my mistakes, reknit the row and gave it back to me to start over on the next row.

Aunt Bobbie was very different from my mother. My mother was blond, blue eyed, serious and stern. Aunt Bobbie had dark hair and brown eyes, wore bright colors and seemed always to be happy and cheerful. My mother sun bathed. Aunt Bobbie covered up so she wouldn't get too dark. My mother was a good cook but Aunt Bobbie made tacos and enchiladas and served them with homemade bread, cake and pies. One summer she taught my mother and my grandmother to make earrings from watermelon seeds painted with bright red nail polish. My mother never wore nail polish.

My mother went to work when I was seven. Aunt Bobbie was a traditional housewife who should have had a house full of children. But she was just a bride when surgery made that impossible. My mother said the doctor was a butcher.

In the 1950's theirs was a mixed marriage. My aunt and uncle were not allowed to adopt. She doted on us instead.

When I was three she made me a doll that looked like me, was as big as I was, and had braids of yellow yarn. The rickrack red plaid dress with a ruffled white pinafore she made for me when I was seven was my favorite.

One Christmas she made a gingerbread house and decorated it with Necco wafers and gum drops. It was the first gingerbread house I had seen outside of a fairy tale.

The days I spent with her were fairy tale like, vacation days without chores. I was well behaved and so she rarely corrected me. By the time I was old enough to understand the pain in her life, she was gone. When I remember her, I remember her cheerful. I remember her trying to do for me whatever would make me happy. I remember her teaching me to knit and fixing my mistakes.