Teach Me, Grandma b y
Mid or i
Lee Wag ne r
“C
an I do dat, Gwamma?” So began Kiyana’s first knitting lesson. She was three. She actually was able to handle the needles and follow the simple four-step chant: “In at the bottom. Around the back and between. Pull a new loop through. Slip the old one off.” Eventually, it was reduced to “In, around, through, and off.” She is eight now and loves to knit periodically. She is currently working on a holey scarf for her little sister, Bella. It is pink and matches the name, leaning heavily toward surprising angles and slopes, with varying degrees of transparency. Beautiful. That’s what it is. She loves sitting and knitting with me, often commenting that she is a much faster knitter than Grandma because she has finished her row and Grandma hasn’t. Tickles my heart. This fall, she learned to “drive” my spinning wheels. I don’t know who was more pleased with the morning, the little girl or her grandma. Before we finished, she had made an admirable several yards of fat singles, which we doubled back on itself to make a twoply yarn. She even knitted a wee bit of it into a small square. It sits pinned to some fabric, awaiting a needle and thread so that I may stitch it down as a marker, a memory of our day, and her first efforts at spinning. My own grandma painted, knitted, and baked, and taught me to smock
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and crochet. When I was twelve, I made my first quilt, a king-sized Lone-Star of Texas, out of scraps from my mother’s baby clothes, one diamond at a time. It took three days at my grandma’s machine. I finished handquilting it about eight years later. As a girl, I just loved sitting and listening to her tell me stories of her
ern woman, abandoned those activities with her young womanhood. I had always wanted to learn how to tat, but by the time I asked her to teach me, dementia had set in, and we were only successful at creating great globs of lacy loops. I have seen a photo of her mother wearing a beautiful dress embellished with tatted lace she made herself. She was a pioneer woman and a credentialed teacher who lived on a North Dakota homestead, and her husband had traded with the Sioux. One stitch at a time, one thread at a time, one shuttle throw at a time, I weave my own connection to these beautiful, strong women from whom I come. And they live on in me, in my art, in Kiyana’s holey scarf that Bella may indeed one day wear. I love to spin, to take all of those fragile and loose pieces, attend to them, hold them, supIllustration by Benjamin S. Clarke port them, and watch them magically become something far grandma who had been a sixteen-yearstronger than they could ever have been old bride, a Southern belle who had alone, capable of creation when gathmarried a Northern soldier after the ered together and turned toward and Civil War. They could settle neither in around one another. “Gwamma, can the North nor the South and so hit the I do dat?” I certainly hope so, little Oregon Trail in a covered wagon, with one. z a few treasures salvaged from her home Midori Lee Wagner of Northern California, is a bithat had been burned by Sherman’s lingual (Spanish/English) elementary school teacher troops. She was a twin, and she never who has been known to populate the school playground with knitting nine-year-olds. When she isn’t saw her sister, Nancy, again. My grandteaching, she often knits, spins, weaves, sews, quilts, mother named my mother Nancy. dreams, visits the coast, writes, or reads. My other grandma knew how to tat, embroider, and sew but, being a mod-