WHEN I WAS eight years old, I came home from school one day to discover everything in my house on Bittersweet Road in Rochester, New York, had been packed and taken away, and that I was to be trundled into a car pointed west-far, far west-with only one parent coming along for the journey.
If this story had a soundtrack, here's where you'd hear a needle being yanked off a record. We met my father at a park, and my brothers and I said goodbye while my mother sat in the car. Then we drove away. Simple as that.
For my mother, it was the beginning of a glorious new life of sunshine and self-discovery. For me, propped in the back of an un-air-conditioned car with a spider plant, a Sony TV, and sullen brothers for company, this was my first real exposure to emotions beyond the realm of dropped ice cream cones or a broken toy. My heart hadn't grown a callus nearly thick enough to protect it from what was happening.
As the car continued to pull us farther and farther away from home, I couldn't help but also be curious about what I saw out my window. New things. An indoor/outdoor pool at a Holiday Inn in Illinois, the Mississippi River, a real palm tree, a hotel lounge with a live band playing "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," where I was allowed to order ginger ale for the first time.
Onward we went through the sweltering heat and increasingly barren landscape. With each state we crossed, my mother grew more jubilant, my brothers and I more impatient. I remember being hot and uncomfortable. The Instamatic camera I left in the back window melted by the time we reached Texas. Tucson was our final destination.
This was not the Tucson of today, with its multistoried resort homes, splendid golf courses, and outdoor shopping malls with fire pits, air-conditioning, gelato, and Tiffany's. It was a dry, flat place best remembered with the silence and faded colors of a Super 8 home movie.
We arrived at dusk and checked into a Howard Johnson off Interstate 10. The air smelled sweet, and a green, spiked thing was growing in a pile of rocks by the parking lot. It fascinated me. The soft fuzz between the thorns felt just like the surface of a peach. That evening I learned my first lesson of the desert: Never pet a cactus, no matter how soft it looks. It took days to pick all the tiny thorns out of my fingers. Welcome to Arizona.
Of course, my mother reminds me that we all knew about the move for months, that I even helped with some of the packing. She also points out that we left on an August morning, not suddenly one day after school. Rationally, I know this to be true. But my eight-year-old brain still remembers the whole experience quite differently; no amount of preparation would've changed this.
Cut something apart, and there's always a momentary shock to the system. What was once whole is now sundered. Slice through the veins of your knitted fabric, and the newly exposed stitches may easily unravel as they scramble back toward a home that no longer exists. At the same time, there's no doubting the sense of possibility that accompanies this opening, a curiosity about what the new fabric may hold.
There's a way to do it right, without pain. We work a series of steps called a steek, so that the stitches are prepared for what's coming and can absorb the shock, heal without any scars, and even thrive in their new environment. According to Alice Starmore, steek is an Old Scots word for hardening a heart or closing a gate-a fitting way to describe what you're doing to get those stitches ready for what could be a traumatic experience. Even now, I keep discovering stray loose ends from that shocking cut when I was eight years old. A favorite cup will get broken, a pen thrown away by accident, some unexpected change is foisted upon me, and I am overcome with a powerful panic I know is not rooted in the present.
A good steek is much more than just going at it with scissors. It begins at the cast-on, when you add several extra "waste" stitches to buffer each side of the cut and prevent deeper fabric erosion. Right before cutting, you'll use a sewing machine or crochet stitches to reinforce either side of the waste stitches. Secure those edges well enough, and the floodwaters will never breach. In fact, once those first steps have been taken, the cutting is almost anticlimactic. Instead of grieving the cut, your fabric can enjoy the new scenery.
We like steeks because they let us make colorful, intricate Fair Isle garments in the round without ever having to fuss with a purl row. We can just set the engine on "knit" and speed on down the road, going around and around until we're done. Then, simply pop the steek, sprout the armhole, and you're nearing the finish line before you know it. Forget to add a steek, and your sweater remains, at best, a fancy pillowcase.
Steeks represent a necessary part of life, almost a coming-of-age for fabric. As roses need pruning and seedlings need thinning, steeks require cutting if your fabric has any hope to grow into something else. Eventually, we all need to cut open our stitches to leave home and become independent human beings.
By my late twenties, I became aware that my life was calling for a steek. I'd been going around and around at a job in San Francisco. I had a cool title on an impressive-looking business card. I'd made a snazzy fabric, but it wasn't very well tailored to me. Either I would stay in that tube forever, my movement slowly shrinking and changing to fit the confines of the fabric, or I would do the scary thing and cut open those stitches to see what could grow.
My steek required a cross-country move back East to the scene of my childhood summers in Maine. There were two of us now. My partner, Clare, and I were knitting this new fabric together. It took us three years to build up a wide enough band of metaphorical "waste" stitches to absorb that cut and buffer us from its impact. Unlike the last time I'd gotten into a car and headed to a new home on the other coast, this time I was in the driver's seat.
On the morning of April 30, 1998, we locked the door of our apartment and handed the keys to our landlord. We got into the car-its windows sparkling clean, oil freshly changed, tires rotated, and tank full of gas-and I put the key in the ignition, took a deep breath, and squeezed the scissors.
The cut itself took almost a month to complete. We took time along the way to visit people and places that had been instrumental in the stitches of our lives. Each had a turn at the scissors. We arrived in Maine on the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday, steek fully cut, feeling exhilarated and exhausted. The heat had been turned off for the summer and our apartment was freezing-or maybe it was my own exposed inner fabric that brought the chill.
It took several months before all the ends were darned. Over the years, my colorway and pattern have changed some. I've frogged a few things and sprouted a few more openings, but the fundamental fabric holds strong-and it continues to evolve as I do. Who knows? One day we may load up the car again and head west, back to the land of palm trees, melted cameras, and abundant sunshine. Or perhaps we'll point our jalopy in an entirely new direction, carefully cut a new steek, and see what comes next. The important thing is that, now, the scissors are in my hands.
