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practical, dedicated, and almost entirely prepared for all knitting contingencies. I’m not in over my head. I am not weak. I am simply extraordinarily well-rounded in the knitting department and prepared to cast on enough projects to prove it. It’s not a failing. It’s not a lack of commitment. It’s being properly committed and prepared to knit at any moment. I know it looks bad, though. I know it looks like a bit of a mess, but really?
    It’s all about balance and understanding, about loyalty and how many relationships you might need to be really monogamous, in a larger sense.
    I’m really good at it. (In a larger sense.)

Knit Two Together
Stories of Belonging, Joining, and Love (Sort Of)

Cass
    When I decided to write about how Cass knits, I had in mind that I wanted to talk about how impressive I find her because she lives alone. I don’t live alone, I have never lived alone, and I’m not sure what would happen if I lived alone. I harbor a suspicion that I am tidy (inasmuch as I am tidy), organized (same thing), and behaving properly (going to work) only because I have other people living around me who would hold me accountable or phone someone if I gave in to my natural urges to drink nothing but coffee and wine, eat nothing but chocolate and wasabi peas, and do nothing but sit around knitting in my underpants while watching old movies. Cass has nobody to supervise her, and she still tidies her house, goes to work, pays her bills, and knits only when her responsibilities are met. (Sort of.) I wanted to write about that because I am just so keen to understand what the difference is between her and me—why I think I would go feral and start building yarn castles in thekitchen if you let me, and why Cass doesn’t. I thought that’s what I was going to write about, and while I waited for her to e-mail me the little digital movie of her knitting (she lives in New Jersey and I in Toronto), that’s exactly what I thought this would be about. I waited while we tried to sort out the technical challenges of that sort of thing, and by the time a file arrived that worked, that I could open, and that actually had Cass knitting on it, I was so damned happy to see it that I watched it four times before I saw the surprising thing about the way she knits, and I changed my mind entirely.
    Cassandra was working on a stockinette swatch, one row knit and the next purl, and I watched carefully as she knit a row. I paused the film, made a series of notes about what I was seeing, and then played the next section. On my little screen, as I peered intently and watched my faraway friend start her next row, I saw her do something stunning. As she made the switch from knitting to purling, she changed everything. Her whole hand position changed. It wasn’t a small adjustment she made to accommodate purling; it was a whole other knitting style. There wasn’t anything she hadn’t changed. She had been palm down, now she was palm up. She held the needle a different way; she even shifted which finger was tensioning the yarn. It wasn’t related to what she’d been doing before at all. If I couldn’t still see her face, I wouldn’t have believed it was still her. I reached for the phone. I called long distance. When she answered I told her that I’d been watching knittersfor a long time, and I’d never seen anything as crazy as that. I quizzed her for a while and sort of freaked her out. How the hell did she work ribbing, or any other row where knit and purl both existed. Did she have to change her whole hand position in between every knit and purl? What the hell was her plan? What was she thinking? Cass considered this odd phone call for a minute, and then she said something I’ve probably heard her say a thousand different times. “What makes you think I know what I’m doing?” she said. “I make changes. I shift things around. I just make it work. Loosen up.”
    I practically had to put my head between my knees while she was