Socks

I was putting away some laundry the other day, and as I was making room in Joel’s sock drawer I put my hand on the socks. The first pair of grown-up’s socks that I’d ever knitted with my own ten fingers.

Joel’s never worn them. It’s not a critique of my knitting skills, it’s just that they’re wool. Soft-ish sock alpaca/silk, a beautiful taupe skein from a bonafide yarn store in Plano, but wool nonetheless. Slightly itchy. No Gold Toe. But Joel keeps them because I made them. He’s a bit of a sucker like that, even though he’s all tough and manly on the outside.

Regardless of the lack of action they get from his feet, those socks are beautiful. I took them out of Joel’s drawer and unfolded them. I marvelled at the idea that the tangle of stitches, increases, decreases, heel flaps, and Kitchener stitch all came from uncoordinated me and a fistful of double-pointed needles.

As usual, some other random thought strikes as I’m folding the socks back together.

“He” asked me to knit a pair of socks for him once. “He” being my high school sweetheart, the boy I just knew (at the wise old age of seventeen) that I would marry someday. I used to fantasize about signing our checks and Christmas cards with my first name and his last name.

Yes, it was true love indeed.

(And I rarely write checks anymore and barely issue Christmas cards, so that really was some fantasy.)

I had never knitted a thing in my life at seventeen. I tried to crochet a sweater once out of a book from the library. I scored a couple of skeins of squeaky white Wintuk from Shopko and forced myself to decipher the pattern into wearable art.

Three weeks later, and I’d barely gotten beyond the foundation chain.

When I was little, my dear neighbor, Hope Harbeck, latched on to my interest in anything crafty. She made it her mission to pass on the feminine arts that her own grown daughter had never given a passing glance. I used to follow her husband, Orville, around their garden. I liked digging up the carrots, which of course he let me wash and eat right there. But after all of that dirty work and vegetable consumption, Hope would wrangle me to sit with her while she tried to help me grasp the concept of casting on.

When “he” asked me to knit socks for him, I took on the assignment with the fervor only a lovestruck adolescent could possess. I ran like a bullet train to Northwest Fabrics and bought a skein of the “good stuff”, something like 20% wool.

I was out an entire $3.95, but like I said, this was true love.

I knew that I needed more than two needles to accomplish this sock knitting thing. I settled on a pattern (an old one from Hope, if I remember, complete with cables) and I cast on all of the stitches required for the first row onto one of the slippery Size 5 double-points. The pattern instructed me to divide these stitches onto four needles, being careful not to twist the stitches. All I could do was twist the stitches. I unraveled the cast-on stitches and tried again. And again. And again. I kept trying until the yarn was so over-cast-on that it lay limp and frazzled in my hands.

I gave up.

He was not meant to be with me. The socks were not meant for him.

They were meant for Joel.

For some reason, the next time I attempted to knit socks, I understood the pattern. It was like looking at that optical illusion where you can see two faces or a vase, and this time I saw the two faces instead of the vase or the vase instead of the two faces. Sure, I made a few mistakes, but it didn’t seem like reading Chinese upside-down like it had so many years ago. I knit a fine pair of socks, worthy of my soul mate’s feet.

To everything there is a season. Socks included.