Part 1: Stuff. . . and Change

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I rested my hand on my cherry dining room table, knowing they would soon load it on the moving truck. I’d contacted Bridging, a local organization that furnishes homes for families in need, to pick up items from our house that wouldn’t fit in my new, downsized, condo. The table was to be last on the truck, so I had time to linger.

My hand was still, but my heart screamed at my mind. “What are you doing? Remember those family dinners, ten people talking at once? Remember the times you used your china? You know, that is going to end up in a thrift shop, too.”

I saw the cards flying in bridge games with our friends, Karen and Dan. My husband, Jim, sitting opposite me, would maneuver the bidding so I’d be the one playing the hand.

Birthday celebrations—I remembered my cake for my 80th—Jim had died three months prior, so we didn’t get to share the milestone birthday. We’d shared much at that table. During COVID, endless games of Scrabble—I played to win, and he played to engage.

And my vase that I filled with questions about each other that we answered after meals. It was revealing fun.

“Don’t worry. Someone will love that table as much as you have.” The man from Bridging reassured me. I let my hand drop and they loaded the table, aghast when they started to put boxes on it.

“That’ll scratch it!” I shouted. They took the boxes off.

It was no longer my table. I didn’t want to think about what might happen next to it.

I bought the table at Dayton’s Warehouse Sale, back when Dayton’s existed. It wasn’t my style, but the beautiful wood caught my eye, and it was the right size. The legs matched chairs left to me by my second husband, Gary, who died at age 55. He didn’t value stuff, but he loved these chairs, which he’d bought in Pennsylvania, another memory. Every time I pulled a chair out, I’d see Gary at his desk, which was the dining room table.  

My table was hard to part with, but holding on felt like grasping at a life that used to be—the one filled with family, friends, careers, holidays, parties, the sad and the happy, around that central gathering place. My heart hoped that letting the table go would make room for my children to carry on traditions.

“Stop it!” my mind admonished. Stuff is work, and it takes up space. Remember how you had to store those leafs under the bed. They were so heavy, you needed help to slide them out and carry them to the dining room. Wake up! No one’s here to do that anymore. Let it go!”

My heart gave up, watching the door of the van close, the men getting in and driving the truck out of the lot. “Goodbye,” my heart whispered.

*****

What was I really grieving when I gave away the table?

Memories stay with me, whether I own the table or not. What I grieved are the roles the table signified, mother, grandmother, hostess, and the keeper of traditions. Beneath my sadness about the table was facing the problem of who I am as life shifts and changes, particularly in retirement

My husband, Jim, who was more sanguine in his approach to retirement, stayed involved, with people, sports interests, and adult education courses. He didn’t seem worried about roles, but then he never downsized as a widow either. One Easter, when our families were mostly busy, Jim suggested that we invite other people with no immediate plans for a light brunch. I look back and remember how interesting that day was. Roman Verotsko, a well-known artist and neighbor came. He spent much of the time talking art with my granddaughter, who came without parents. Other neighbors mixed with each other. The party created a new role for Jim and me. We didn’t need to be the grandparents who have everyone over. We could bring friends together.

Shortly after, Jim bought a big Bunn coffee maker and started inviting neighborhood men for coffee. He’d found his niche. My friend, Johan, used to hold what he called “musical soirees” about old jazz and Mozart. He’d invite all the people he knew who lived alone and had an interest in music. In my condo association, various people give short talks about finding and roasting coffee, astronomy, and even puppets.   

It’s not easy to find new ways of being in the world, yet the ubiquity of change requires adaptation. Roles, to some extent, are what we project to the world, but what about inside us, our personal authenticity. As I’ve aged, I’ve turned more inward to access that person.

Memories from the past, like the ones my table evokes, can cohere around life themes. Timelines of your life can also reveal these. The classic about doing this is Writing about Your Life, by William Zinsser. I participate in a church group called the Elder (wince) Gathering, and we are reading a book called The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, a book I’d already read in another church group. Soul work seems to call people my age. But that’s a big topic for another blog.

Where does this leave me about the table?

I treasure my memories ‘round that table. It’s an album of my life. But now when I feel sad about giving it away, I imagine a family in their first real home. It’s tiny, but there’s room for a table—a lovely cherry one. Children are gathered at it doing their homework. Someone nearby is making dinner.

          “Put your stuff away,” she calls.

Books and pencils and paper and laptops are put away. Someone sets the table. Everyone sits down. Dinner time.

I smile. My table is home.

Stay tuned for Part 2

Knitting Lessons: Crafting and Life

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Christmas Anemone Hats 2020

I am a knitter. I first learned while living in Norway in 1955, when knitting was still part of the required national curriculum in Norwegian schools. My first project was a ski hat with a traditional Setesdal cross pattern in the brim. There were clearly no low expectations for 11-year-olds in those days. 

I gave up knitting when my children were young, just as I gave up sewing my own clothes. Both require long periods of concentration — hard to come by when elementary-school children fill your life. I began again when they were older and haven’t stopped since. In other words, knitting has become a significant part of my life.

Non-knitters assume we knit because we want the product: the scarf, the hat, the sweater that emerges from all those stitches. But for most knitters, those things are merely a byproduct of the experience itself, which is meditative and soothing — something done in contemplation, letting yarn slide through the fingers while listening to the soft click of needles. It is a Zen-like state that, at least for me, comes close to true meditation. The grocery list disappears; the endless whirl of memories and ideas quiets. The report that needs to be written can wait.

(Photo by Oksana Maselko on Unsplash)

I spend hours in yarn stores, admiring as often as buying. Going through my stash is a sensory experience — even when I decide that I have too much and can donate some.  

Knitters love yarn…when we have too much, we “destash.”

Of course, knitting can also be social. There are knitting circles, retreats, classes, yarn shop gatherings — dozens of ways to connect around a shared pleasure. But these are not why we knit; they are another happy byproduct. It helps, after all, to know there are others who can read the bizarre language of knitting, who do not blanch when confronted with instructions that begin: p2, skp, *yo, k2 through back loop, yo, rep from *. Others who understand your delight in a yarn that is half silk, half alpaca because their own hands remember that softness slipping through them. Others who want to be part of a “knit-a-long” where people from many countries knit the same pattern at the same time and discuss their progress online.

But knitting teaches other things as well — especially now that knitting socks is an expensive pleasure for gift-giving rather than a necessity…      

If I am not a perfectionist, it is because knitting taught me that most mistakes are invisible in the finished piece. If I am patient, it is because I learned not to swear — more than once, anyway — when encountering an error too serious to ignore. There is the inevitable acceptance that I must tink (knit backward to undo a row) or even frog (rip out substantial portions, sometimes the entire thing) because it simply is not right.

What would frustrate me enormously if it involved hosting a dinner party, causes only a moment of regret in knitting, because I never knit to a deadline. The process is what matters.

And yet the finished objects matter too. If a purchased sweater is attacked by moths, I mend it and donate it. If the same thing happens to a sweater I knit myself, I mend it carefully and continue wearing it for years. Hand-knit sweaters are passed down. I own one that belonged to my mother and is now 60 years old. My eight-year-old granddaughter wears one I first knit for her mother, later worn by a grandson now in college, and — invisibly mended — treasured by a third owner.

2018 and 2026

Vintage is cool; vintage made by someone you loved is even cooler.

But knitting is also a metaphor.

In relationships, when do we overlook the small flaws, invisible to others? Mend the holes? Can we knit back to the point where things first began to strain and begin again? What happens when one person decides to rip it all out — declaring that the sweater in progress is no longer the right color, no longer the right style, no longer wanted at all?

And perhaps the deepest lesson knitting teaches is this: even after unraveling, the yarn itself remains. Something new can still be made from it.

Growing Soup

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When my daughter Jane was small, she would put her hands on her hips and declare indignantly, “When I grow up. .  . I’ll stay up as long as I want. I’ll watch as much TV as I want, or I won’t clean my room unless I want to.” We smiled and let her complain.

Sooner than I imagined, Jane was in her twenties, with an undergraduate degree, no job or clear vocation, wanting a car, and those things that come with growing up. I remember her declaring to me, “All my life, I’ve wanted to grow up, and now that I am, I don’t like it. Nothing is the way I thought it would be.”

Those words could well apply to me and growing older. Unlike Jane, I was never in a rush to grow old, but still, I’ve been doing exactly that, making me inclined to say, “Nothing is the way I thought it would be. My body just can’t do what it once could.” Some days I rail against these changes. I want 45-year-old Karen back. I plan exercises and diets that will magically restore me. I adopt schedules to take better care of myself. I resolve to make new friends, find a passion or renewed purpose in an unknown something. Maybe I’ll paint a bird house, make a resistance hat, or start making my own bread. Maybe I’ll do all of these things – or something else that is different.

But I still go to bed another day older.

This morning, reading a Lenten meditation by Parker Palmer, I saw another way to consider growing older. He argues that although we were originally an agricultural society, tied to seasons of growth and rest, we are now a manufacturing one, and the “master metaphor of our era” comes from manufacturing. Rather than “growing” our lives, we make them. He notes our everyday speech: “We make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love”.

I wondered, could I reframe growing older into a positive perspective?: I could ask how can I grow time, grow friends, grow meaning, grow money, grow living, and grow love? I could move on from the “making” approach that probably fits much of adulthood and embrace the growing in growing old.

One suggestion for growing old is from Cynthis Bourgeault’s Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging.Number 5 is:

Watch what happens when you try to draw energy from an outmoded image of yourself.. . .You get an immediate rush of ‘Ah, I’m my old self again!!’ But that is exactly who you do not want to be. Your old self is the sacrificial lamb you will lay upon the altar of your deeper becoming.

Sounds like Bourgeault is talking about hanging onto our former self versus growing into a deeper becoming. I have no idea of what the “deeper becoming” might be, but I’m willing to find out.

As I engage with these ideas—growing instead of making myself into the perfect aging senior, I’m reminded of my second husband, Gary.  Gary did not cook at all. When I met him, he lived on Special K for breakfast and Healthy Choice frozen meals for lunch and dinner. When we married and forgot to say “no presents,” someone gave us a crock pot. Gary thought it was the greatest cooking invention ever.

He loved homemade soup, and the crock pot was perfect for making it. I’d be off to the office in the morning and he’d say. “I think I’ll make some soup today. What do you think should be in it?” I’d add some broth and maybe leftover chicken and, as I ran out the door, suggest that we could add noodles later.

While I was gone, Gary grew the soup, scouring the refrigerator for leftovers and the cupboards for things that might add flavor. I’d come home to a completely different amalgam of soup than the one I left. He grew the soup with what we had and with his imagination. And like many things that grow, some soups were forgettable, others unexpectedly outstanding.  But because they grew organically, there was no recipe for replicating any particular soup, and that’s what made his soups so interesting.

While I was busy making a life, I was also growing my own life soup, with a variety of personal experiences. Some have turned out great and others I wish I could do over and would just as soon forget. But in the end, it’s the growing that counted.

The other Karen mentioned in her blog, Who Is the Old Lady Directing the Circus? “growing down,” acting with greater spontaneity and less regard for the product than the process. Surely by 82, I’ve earned the right to grow up, down, or sideways. I hope I can grow like Gary’s soup, adding wisdom from my cupboard of life and a pinch of adventure, stirring in love and more love to taste. 

The Butter Box

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My father balanced a martini and a cigarette, settling in heavily as he often did when he came home at night.  We snuggled, me tucked under his arm;  he adjusted one of my short legs so it looped over his. Without words, we savored the smells and sounds of dinner on the stove, wrapped in comfort.  The couch softened, and we sank further in, my breathing increasingly paced with his. 

I was cozy, savoring my special time, while the smells and sounds of dinner on the stove wrapped the room in comfort. I didn’t want to move.

“Why, Daddy?” I asked.

“I have some stories to tell,” he said, smiling.

Well, it was sort of a box—small, oval, and battered. I must have walked past it every day, probably knew it was there, but never actually noticed it. Something there, but not consciously there.

I wasn’t especially curious, but the promise of a “Daddy story” was always enough. He loved to tell them—sometimes real, invented—and that was how he spread his love through our little family, how he made himself our daddy.

The box was light, wooden. The top pressed on.
“It’s easy to open, Karen,” he said. “Go ahead—but be gentle. There are some loose things inside.”

I tugged at the lid—a serious job for six-year-old hands—and hoped for candy, or maybe a small toy stowed away for just such a Daddy–Karen evening.

“Daddy, there’s nothing really in here—just some old stuff!”

That’s when the story began.

“A very long time ago, in another country called Sweden, your great-great-grandfather was a small boy, about your age, living on a farm. And your great-great-grandmother was a small girl, living on another farm. But the farms were poor, and the soil was rocky. They had a few sheep, but too many stones to keep a cow. They grew potatoes, drank sheep’s milk, and lived in a small house—much smaller than ours.”

In my mind, all I could think was: boring!

“Daddy, can you make the story go a little faster?”

“They left Sweden and took a boat to the United States…”

His voice was deep and slow, like music. I remember how happy I always felt when he was in a storytelling mood—but this one seemed too slow, confusing. I knew better than to interrupt too much. Interrupting could mean the story would end.

Then he picked up the box and held it to my nose.
“Smell it, Karen—it’s old roses. They still smell.”

“Daddy—I see brown things at the bottom. Are they really roses?”

“Those roses are more than fifty years old. They came from your great-grandmother’s garden in Minnesota.”

“Oh.”

“The box is ancient too—it was what they used to store butter in Sweden. It’s the only thing we have that came over with them.”

He paused. I could feel him trying to decide how the story should go on. But he didn’t. We got up, had dinner, and put the box back on the table.

Since there, I’ve come to understand why he breathed deeply and stopped.

For him—and therefore for me—the box was a link to a past we would never fully know, but that made us Swedish. Or rather, Swedish-American.  It represented something about who we were and where we belonged in the world that was hard to explain.

Every so often, he would say, “Let’s look at the box again,” and I would bring it down. I’d ask, for the hundredth time, “Who are the people in the funny tin picture?” and “Why did they make necklaces out of hair?” and “How can the roses still smell when they’re so old?”

Decades later, when I was in my fifties, I saw him unpack the box again as he settled into a retirement apartment, moving from Ann Arbor to Minneapolis to be closer to me.

“Daddy—the butter box! It wouldn’t feel like home without it on a shelf in your study. Can I open it?”

I still called him Daddy, though by then we spoke more about our shared research interests than anything else.

“Of course you can—the roses still smell, even though my sense of smell isn’t what it used to be.”

As I pried the lid loose, I saw that his mother had taped a small torn label inside. It read: This is for Stanley.

I knew what he meant. I would have it next. I said nothing.

Now the box is on a shelf in my living room. The roses still smell–well, at least the cloves that were used to dry them. The old tintype and the hair necklace are still inside. My grandmother’s class list from when she was a teacher — 1899.

When does a simple object become something so valuable that it would be the first thing that you pick up, after your dog, if you had to evacuate?  Is it the object?  Or the stories it engenders, not just to one person, but to many.  When do objects become part of a family’s web, holding it together across generations?

Obviously, it is easier if your object is a butter box than your great-great-grandmother’s Queen Anne table. 

But for me, the boundaries between the butter box and all the people who loved it have become blurry –it is hard to separate the object from the remembered presence of someone you hold very dear.

Soon, I’ll ask my granddaughter to bring it down from the 8-year-old level shelf where it sits.  And I will tell her the story – perhaps not as beautifully as my father, but with the same effort to weave an invisible but durable web of connection.

“Opal, can you open the box?”
“Sure, Nana—what’s inside?”
“Just open it and see…”