Ok, so I haven’t been here daily. Not even close. Many excuses, too boring to name. I’ve been thinking about things to put here though, and here’s one. I wrote this several years ago about a moment that happened several years before that. It was only a moment but I love to revisit it every once in a while.
An Unspoken Yarn
Three women on a bus in China. A small, rattling shell of a bus heading fast and loose down a rough road in rural southwestern Yunnan Province. Fields and fields stretched out flat for miles against a mountainous backdrop looming perpendicular to the valley floor. The planted rows played their staccato tricks with our eyes as we passed. Three American women each filling her own bench seat, backs to windows, legs stretched out, six feet bumping each other in the center aisle. To have seated ourselves properly in the seats would have risked having thigh bones jammed into hip sockets and knees embossed with the rice-like bubbly pattern on the metal backing of the seat in front. The impossibly close proximity of the seats was accentuated with each bump in the road as body parts flung against them. Unruly hair slapping in the dusty wind from open windows, the rough road, the metallic clatter that must surely be the bus falling apart, the bouncing of bums on seats, the ceaseless Chinese pop music aimed through tinny speakers in the driver’s general direction, these rhythmic bits in concert swirled around me as I knitted.
I had been knitting obsessively since I learned how less than four months earlier. I had made the requisite starter potholder, a scarf, two hats and a pair of socks. I had yarn in place to start my first sweater upon arrival back home from this trip with my sister and her partner. I grinned and raised one eyebrow as they both stared at me now from across the bus through squinted eyes on sunburned faces.
The knitting needles were very small and joined end to end by a flexible plastic wire to make one long needle called a circular needle. The stitches it made were so small it was hard to discern them individually. I had purchased the needle and yarn in a market in Kunming after noticing multitudes of women knitting around the city. Sitting and knitting, knitting and talking, walking and talking and knitting, hands moving in mechanical rhythm setting the pace for their conversation and stride.
We lurched toward the front of the bus as the driver suddenly stopped to pick up three more women from the side of the road. We could tell they were Naxi (na-she) by the blue cotton coats they wore over blue pants. The fabric was gathered at their waists with white embroidered sashes. They had baskets tied to their backs. The aged women moved past to sit two rows behind us. Two of the women shared one bench, sitting upright, legs forward, arms draped over the baskets of greens in their laps, large calloused hands resting on the rims. The other sat behind them in the same manner.
The Naxi are an ethnic group that makes up the majority of the population in this region of China. The traditional matriarchal structure of their culture remains influential there. For example, women are automatically assumed to be the heads of households, businesses and labor forces. It also means that lineage and land inheritances are traced through the woman’s family. Since my arrival in Yunnan, I had been trying to envision the extent of the systemic effects of having all elements of a culture shaped in a woman-centric way. The differences seemed profound.
I glanced back to try to absorb in a discrete instance the presence of these women, especially the one sitting closest to me in the aisle seat. She reminded me of a composite of my grandmother and great aunts. They were proud, rugged, southern women whose hands were roughened by work, but whose backs were straight with the sense of accomplishment at having held it all together – their men, their farms, their families – and in knowing that was the thing that couldn’t be taken away from them. They had been large women in a society not sure what to do with women of their strength. This woman had a large presence and it seemed that she held much more than just the weight of her basket. Slowly she closed her eyelids, paused and opened them again to watch out the window. The gesture gave the sense of her having witnessed in life more than others would care to imagine. Yet the way her eyes danced over the fields as we passed revealed an observer’s curiosity.
My attention was jolted back to the task at hand as the bus hit a particularly large bump putting air once again between seats and bums. I looked down and saw that my knitting had fallen apart. That’s how it seemed to me. The plastic wire had come out of the end of one of the needles and fallen out of several of the tiny stitches in the middle of the row. Little loops of yarn were left unsupported and began unraveling with the jostling of the bus. My just-under-four-months of experience hadn’t prepared me for what seemed like a knitting catastrophe. I stared at the mass in my hands. It had gone from looking like neat regimented stitches to certain hopeless entanglement in a matter of seconds. I looked up and caught my sister giving me a look that was part sympathy and part smug satisfaction for having known better than to try to do a project while riding this bus. I shrugged my shoulders and put the knitting down on my backpack that had slid into the aisle.
I surrendered to the rocking and bumping and sleepily watched out the windows across the bus. I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and looked down to see a weathered hand, rough and calloused, slowly drawing my pile of knitting into the lap of the woman sitting nearest me. I had not noticed her reposition her basket into the care of the others. I turned to look at her and she paused as if caught mid-act. I shrugged and smiled half-heartedly to indicate that I was sure it was a lost cause, but not terribly upset about it. She looked at the knitting, assessed the situation and slowly grinned nodding her head. And with those large rough hands, she reinserted the plastic wire into the needle. Not a permanent solution, I knew, but I could work on that later. Then she skillfully and gently took the stray loops into one hand and eased them onto the repaired needle. On the stitches that had fallen out completely, she used the needles to loop yarn from the rows below to make new stitches. The woman on the seat beside her turned her body a bit to get a better view of the repair in progress. The woman in the seat behind peered over her shoulder. They both smiled and occasionally glanced at me with affirming nods.
Finally the woman held the repaired swatch in her hands and inspected her own handiwork. She gestured that I take it from her and I raised my eyebrows to show my surprise at her success. When I had completed my “inspection” I looked over and smiled. I closed my eyes and bowed my head in her direction for a brief moment, hoping that to be an appropriate sign of thanks. As if on cue, we all lurched toward the front of the bus as the driver came to another abrupt stop. Looking out the window I saw nothing but more fields. There were no structures, no other roads. Quickly the three Naxi women gathered their baskets and moved down the aisle and off the bus. They stood by the side of the road and waved at us as we left them behind.
I resumed knitting and after a few rows noticed the knitted “scar” from the repair. The stitches in that area looked different somehow and stood out from the others. For an instant I thought about the imperfection of it, how noticeable it would be in the end. I thought of unraveling the whole thing and starting over. Then I remembered the woman’s intent look and the care with which she treated my simple swatch. I thought of the communication in those brief moments between us, and the lack of need for language. I thought of her hands, how improbable that those hands could do such “fine” work. I studied the knitting again and realized that just as scars on a body tell stories of experience and transformation, this little swatch now held the story of my journey. I saw it as a timeline from the purchase of the yarn to that moment. That strand of yarn represented so much. I knew I simply needed to keep knitting and adding to it. I couldn’t force any more of the story to emerge, but I also couldn’t wait to see what the stitches would reveal, where the yarn would take me.
