Stitches in our lives

The women in my family are crafty types. We like to work with our hands, whether it's gardening, or sewing, or cooking or writing.

One could say we could keep the home improvement magazines in business with our subscriptions.

Each of us have our favorite pastimes, but the one constant we all share is the art of crochet.

I was seven and in my first year of 4-H when my mom taught me the skill that she learned from her mother and grandmother. She taught me how to hold the hook and yarn and how to read a pattern and something clicked on inside me. It was an awareness of where I came from and who I was. It was as if my mother handed me the key to understanding my heritage when she handed me a crochet hook.

Each of the women in my family has her specialty. Mom likes to make her doilies and baby blankets, while my sister made several sweaters. Our grandmother made dozens of lap blankets, and I like to work on afghans.

Call it a quaint, old-fashioned hobby, but there's something about repeating a pattern over and over again that simply relaxes me. I can have a pressure-cooker of a day, but when I get to working with the hook and yarn, it all fades away. Through the years, in times of stress and times of happiness, I've been crocheting. I crocheted an afghan while I was waiting on my grandfather to finish radiation therapy and I worked on another while I sat by my grandmother's hospital bed during her final days. When friends got married, each got a crocheted afghan for their new home. And now that those same friends are having babies, I'm busy making baby blankets.

Usually, as I crochet, I let my mind wander down various paths. I think about whatever's bugging me, or a problem I'm trying to solve in my writing. I think about home improvement projects I want to tackle, and what maintenance I need to have done on my car. Sometimes I think about the women who taught me this skill, my mother and grandmother, and how some of the patterns I still use were ones they taught me.

The other day, though, a thought came to me as I stitched on a baby blanket for a friend.

The art of crochet is a lot like life.

A project is made up of a lot of stitches--some big and difficult, and some small and simple. But, in order for the finished product to look right, the stitches have to be used in a pattern--they have to connect in just the right order and with the proper tension. Even the mistakes made in a pattern have their place.

It's a lot like our lives. In order to be well-rounded, thoughtful, successful individuals, there were a lot of people who contributed their "stitches" to our lives. There are our family members, teachers, friends, mentors, and yes, even the not-so-nice people.

And just like any well-used crocheted afghan, there's tension in life, we just have to manage it properly. Without enough tension the crocheted piece won't hold its shape. With too much tension the piece will be warped and unusable. The proper amount of give and take will result in a better overall work of art, one that will last for generations, just as it does in our daily lives.

And, any good crocheter will tell you that you haven't really experienced the "fun" of crocheting until you have to tear out half of your work because of a mistake made in one of the first rows. Mistakes happen in life, too, and we have to learn from them. It's a part of the grand pattern to slip a stitch or two, but as long as we recognize them, we can fix them in time so that they don't affect the whole piece.

Looking back on my years of crochet work, I see now that all those projects had played a very important role in my life. I can measure my progress by the different patterns I've attempted and the growth in my skills. Each item, no matter how big or how small, brings back memories of a time and a place, but most importantly they bring back memories of the women who taught me the art in the first place.

And maybe that was the bigger lesson my mother was trying to pass on to me in the first place. Crochet, it's not just a hobby, but a link to the past, present and future.

Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached by phone at 620-227-1807, or by e-mail at jlatzke@hpj.com.

10/1/07

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