Crochet -- or What I Don't Know

Thanks to their Aunt K, My girls came home from visiting the grandparents (hubby's parents) with a new hobby -- crocheting. Forgive me a moment while I roll my eyes and sigh... but they were SOOOO excited.

"Can we get our own hooks? Can we buy some yarn?"

I could hear my own mother doing a happy dance in her grave.

My mother excelled at all things needing needle and thread, any size or variety. She could--and would--make anything you could dream up. She made dresses, shirts, pants, dolls, bears, blankets, curtains, bedspreads, furniture covers... and she was forever trying to convince me that I could do it, too.

In eighth grade home economics class, it was true that I probably knew more about sewing than anyone else in class simply from what I had absorbed through osmosis. It was hard living with my mother and NOT picking up a thing or two about sewing. Believe me, I tried. None-the-less, even she would admit that I lacked her patience with a needle. For my final project in home economics, I made a jumper. Round one, I sewed the front of the jumper bottom to the back of the jumper top. After carefully picking out all the stitches, I went at it again. This time, I somehow sewed both the front AND the back of the jumper bottom to the back of the jumper top. My teacher let me take it home to work on it.

Round three, I somehow managed to sew it together right... sort of. I gleefully tried my jumper on to discover the bottom was attached wrong-side-out to the right-side-out of the top. My mother, after watching me struggle to pick all my stitches out AGAIN, finally pinned the damned thing together for me.

On the way home from the grandparents house, one of the girls asked if I knew how to crochet.

"No." It was easy to answer.

But watching them last night, as they chained their way through their first skeins of varigated yarn, a memory somehow awoke in my fingers. My oldest had a six-foot long chain making its way across the living room floor.

"Would you like me to show you how to go back the other way?" I asked.

She looked at me skeptically. "I thought you didn't know how to do this," she said.

"I don't. But maybe I do."

She brought me the yarn and I showed her... or perhaps it was my mother showing her, using my hands. I certainly have no concrete memories of ever crocheting anything of substance. Yet, I somehow know, at least a little bit, how to do it.