BluestoneReview

I Should Have Learned to Crochet By Mimi Merritt Snowflakes cake my windowpanes as the afghan she made so long ago warms my knees despite snagged holes in the ancient granny squares that I can’t mend, I never learned, the work of crochet hooks a mystery. I hear her say as if still here that her older sisters did all the housework, her mama called her lazy. She had thought that I, her youngest granddaughter, should wash dishes, should make my bed, should sweep floors, though she never said it, she only wove it into stories that she talked around, not through, while I watched swollen knuckles, jutting up like rock cliffs from blue-veined hands that trembled as bent fingers persisted in pushing and pulling yarn into perfect squares, the voice, thin with age, weak as her hands, busy as her hands, packing quiet spaces with sentences that meandered without periods through stories of childhood, small truths, hard to hold on to much more than the bits and the pieces some people weave together, some people can’t. She never said she became a widow too young, one baby buried, four more to raise while she worked two jobs, her children sweeping shavings for pennies at a coffin factory, jumping the ditch out back to hide in the woods when the whistle warned of inspectors, but she would say her sisters took a train all the way north to Philadel- phia to learn to be teachers, and that’s when her mama said people would notice the housework not getting done, it was her turn now. Just bits and pieces she told like the black squares of her afghan and their centers of blue, green and purple, just skeins of wool until she wove them together to look as grand as a stained-glass window, as her mama had taught her, knowing how to mend the holes.

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