I’ve always had a pension for creating things. The idea of taking nothing and turning it into something always seemed to satisfy some deep inner desire. I suppose it all came from my mother. She was a crafter to put most others to shame. Much to my father’s annoyance, our house was always littered with the scraps and pieces of a million different projects, many never to be completed.

Just finding a chair to sit in was a source of frustration for him. Would he be stabbed by a knitting needle? Or stand up covered in the stray pieces of fuzz from the stuffing of a new pillow. Pins seemed to be his greatest annoyance, since they would always find some sensitive spot in which to lodge themselves each time he leaned back in his chair to relax.

Every corner of our house was occupied by a basket of yarn spilling its contents across the floor, destined to become a tangled mass after Ginger, a well meaning miniature poodle, decided it closely enough resembled one of her balls. Only after the yarn became hopelessly entangled about her feet, legs and neck, would she come whimpering into the family room, head hung dismally in shame. “I don’t know how this keeps happening,” her misty brown eyes would plead. The yarn, long past salvaging, would eventually end up as a mass of snippets on the carpet as my brother and I patiently cut her loose.

Surprisingly enough, my mother never became annoyed. After all, there was certainly more yarn where that came from. Indeed, my mother never ran out of yarn for any project. That’s not to say that a project was necessarily completed with the yarn it originally began with. Our front closet was forever an avalanche waiting to happen, its shelves heaped with scarves, hats and mittens all crocheted from a bit of this, mixed with a bit of that. Generally they all had one quality in common, a rather poor fit. She never seemed to know when to finish off a scarf. It’s as though the peace she found in patiently adding row after row of double-crochet stitches just couldn’t be brought to an end, and neither could the scarf. More appropriate in size to a table runner or bedspread, I would head off to school, my feet endlessly tripping over its tasseled or fringed ends.

Now all grown up, with a family of my own, I think back on her peaceful evenings in front of the T.V. While I might have as many balls of yarn as she ever did, scattered about the house, stuffed in boxes, or spilling over from wicker baskets, I can’t seem to reproduce her sense of contentment. She understood the art of enjoying the process as much as the accomplishment, while I, still focused on churning out that latest project, rush through the process to the final accomplishment.

Yarn in hand, crochet hooks splayed out before me, children roughhousing in the background, and my husband wondering what time dinner will be, I muse on the differences between us. Process vs. accomplishment I wonder, and realize it hardly matters. I might not yet be able to achieve her sense of contentment, but I’m quite sure the image my children see of their mother, as I patiently start counting off a series of chain stitches, looks remarkably similar to the memories I have of my own.

MK Welty hosts a website for yarn enthusiasts at http://findyarn.com.

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