Author Archives: Karen Seashore

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About Karen Seashore

I am a sociologist, life coach, policy wonk, and tarot reader. Other than reading a book, I always prefer to work with other people. Creating small changes -- in myself and in the world around me -- is my calling. You can find my scholarly publications under Karen Seashore Louis (or Louis, K.S.).

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.

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…”

Eighty Years, Eighty Letters

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Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

I have been obsessed with the minutia of aging, examining every new line, every wiry hair on my chin (prompting immediate removal), every unfamiliar ache in the morning. But when asked to write a tribute for a friend’s milestone birthday, I go whole-hog in the other direction– not just offering congratulations, but taking the opportunity to outline, sometimes in exhaustive detail, why their life has been well-lived.  I ignore tired jokes about wrinkles, slumping shoulders, or forgetfulness.

Almost as if I were writing their advance obituary.

But when it comes to my own Big Birthdays, I’ve mostly ignored them. When I turned 70, Dan planned a sweet mini reunion with friends and family, complete with a cruise on beautiful Lake Minnetonka. It was the first time since I turned 40 that I stopped to consider what another decade meant.

Looking back now at 40 – that was a downer. I was convinced life as I knew it was ending. I imagined myself turning into a wrinkled crone by the end of the week. I spent several hundred dollars on face creams that promised to forestall the ravages of age. Some of them made my eyes burn. I ended up tossing most of the unused jars when I realized I wasn’t actually disintegrating. I didn’t look that bad. I could continue to be vain!

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

But this summer I turned 80, and although I didn’t anticipate it, I could feel agitation building as the date drew closer. I set boundaries:

No, no reunions, no celebrations. 

No, I don’t want anything special! 
No gifts – we have nowhere to put anything! 

Do I really have to go to the Sages Lunch this year, when I helped organize it last year?

At one point I even considered writing my own obituary, not out of despair, but practicality. After all, at 80, every year feels a bit more like a crapshoot. But then I remembered – I’m not very afraid of death, although like most people, I hope it will be quick and relatively painless. So if I wasn’t especially fearful, why the restlessness? Why the resistance?

A week before my birthday, I was meditating outdoors with a small group in the clear early morning light in Boulder. Someone read a John O’Donohue poem on longing before we began, and one line stuck with me like a mantra: May a secret Providence guide your thought…”

Fifteen minutes into the silence, Providence – The Great Whatever – answered “You are supposed to write letters to 80 people to tell them how they have changed you.”

It was loud.  It could not be ignored.  It was also rather weird –so clear, it startled me. The universe doesn’t usually shout at me.

And so I began. At first I wondered if I even knew 80 people well enough to write to. But it turns out that at 80, you’ve lived a long time and met a lot of people. As I started making a list, I quickly passed 80. I began to recall how each one was memorable, and why.  Some names were easy. The memories were warm, the lessons clear. Others required more work, were uncomfortable. I had to ask: how did this person change me, even if the change came through friction rather than closeness? Some were no longer living. Some I had lost touch with. In a few cases, I already had letters written – messages I’d sent to the families of friends who’d died, telling them what that person had meant to me. I had saved copies. I added them to the list.

And then I realized something else: not all letters would go to individuals. Sometimes it was groups of people who had shaped me — a writing class, a church committee, a circle of friends. And sometimes the letter could be to a thing — a dining room table from my childhood, or a familiar object that held memory like a sponge. Always, behind the inanimate, were people. Always, it came back to connection.

Oh my.  What seemed, when Providence’s voice boomed, at first like an impossible assignment –  80 letters for 80 years – suddenly feels doable. More than that, it feels necessary. Because in uncovering the people and memories that shaped me, I am also writing something else: a quiet testimony to what I’ve always known, deep down. 

I did not arrive at 80 on my own.

I got here on the shoulders of so many who walked beside me, talked me down, saved my bacon, gave me new direction, nudged me forward when I was stuck, or simply witnessed my becoming. Big influences, small gestures, words that stayed with me — it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the accumulation of moments, and the gratitude I feel for having been changed, again and again, by the presence of others.

In this photo, I am the white-haired 80-year-old, with some of my best friends from Tappan Junior High School, Ann Arbor Michigan.  We met this summer to remember how important we have been in each other’s lives.  This “letter” is for them…and the several who were there in body or spirit but not in this picture. My friend Elsa, second from the right, describes us as a hive…that’s the way that it feels, except there is no queen bee.

“Best friends” from the past and now…

And maybe, just maybe, Providence will answer if I become sufficiently agitated and self-centered and, therefore, speak again when I need a new assignment.

Oh — maybe most important: 80 is not a boundary, just another irrelevant human marker, an indicator our of our futile attempts to corral time.

 

In Praise of Postmenopausal Women

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There are lots of jokes about menopause. 

There are no jokes about post menopause. 

Is that because we have internalized scientific reports summarizing the negative consequences of losing estrogen?  Weight gain, bone loss, heart disease, depression, and desiccated vaginas…How can you make that funny?  Recent debates about “childless cat ladies” suggest that the social consequences of not being able to procreate may be even more severe:  isolation and invisibility coupled with a lack of usefulness. 

Men, on the other hand, are still producing sperm when they die.  

Social science tells a different story, emphasizing the role of older women in supporting the next generation, as well as caring for family and community members.  Older women are willing to translate emotional caring into action on a daily basis, an image that even the most traditional sexist male can support.  But let me take this in a different direction: Society NEEDS us, and not just for the most traditional roles. 

Start with my friend Jan Hively, whose Ph.D., finished when she was almost 70, investigated the productivity of older people who lived in rural areas.  Asking what they did in their communities allowed her to estimate what it would cost to replace them with workers.  The answer was: A LOT.  Meaning that most rural communities would wither if it were not for the unpaid (or underpaid) work of older people, from volunteering in the library, driving school busses, and taking care of even older relatives. And older women are more likely to work and donate unpaid work than men. 

Jan’s mantra was “meaningful work, paid or unpaid, through the last breath,” and she lived up to it. She was an activist and social entrepreneur. In the early 2000s, as we boomers started to retire, she urged us to think of our last decades as an opportunity to make a difference and not a time to drink martinis, watch TV and play golf.  In her 70s and 80s, after finding her tribe of co-conspirators, she went on to incubate or co-organize many non-profit organizations to increase the opportunities for older people to improve their own and their neighbor’s lives.  New and existing organizations drew on her never-ending flow of ideas about positive aging; two that she co-founded have grown into national and international initiatives: The Vital Aging Network, and the Pass It On Network. 

And her second admonition was to have fun working with others! She knew that her strongest skills were imagination and starting things so she collaborated with people who love making the engines of a new enterprise run fast and smoothly.  Another wisdom of age:  we often are more aware of who we are – and are happy to turn over control for the work that suits us less well.

At 90, Jan wrote long notes to the people who were important in her life and work, including me – I was humbled because I always thought of her as my mentor – I was a youngster in my mid-50s when I served on Jan’s doctoral committee!  Like many who knew her, when I find myself “sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time” I hear Jan’s voice urging me to make those reflective moments pay off, either for my own development or someone else’s. 

But Jan, although personally inspiring, is not the only one with creative suggestions.  I am taken with the idea of the “granny cloud,” which emerged from Sugata Mitra’s efforts to educate children in places where there are no teachers (or not enough of them).  The role of the grannies (real ones and people trained to think like them) was to admire and encourage children in learning – which turns out to be critical.  The powerful effect of being a granny is to reinforce curiosity and motivation.  The international granny cloud volunteer network was derailed by the global pandemic – but grannies will be there in force as we continue to re-imagine social networks in the post-Covid future.  I think that men can learn to be grannies, but they usually need some immersion training….

How about the League of Women Voters, founded in the exuberance that accompanied the passage of Amendment 18 in the US?  Relying almost exclusively on volunteers, the League continues to see its primary purpose as protecting democracy through policy advocacy and direct efforts to increase voter registration and participation.  Its membership, which declined with the increase in working women, is soaring again as the gray tsunami looks for ways to work – paid or unpaid – as long as possible. If you attend a League meeting, you will see that post-menopausal women are at the forefront of promoting non-partisan policy debates – including sponsoring events like Bad Ass Grandmas for Democracy.

Contributed / BadAss Grandmas for Democracy

But the role of post-menopausal females in sustaining community and providing intergenerational continuity is not just for humans.  Recent research claims that “Post Menopausal Killer Whales are Family Leaders,” who support the pod’s health by finding food sources.  And who can help but watch, with fascination, the video of the 60-year old Orca, Sophia, taking down a Great White Shark, top predator of the ocean, who was probably threatening a member of her community.  No jokes needed – just attention to the evidence that the world needs postmenopausal women warriors.  Who cares about a few weak, old sperm – lots of those to go around – in contrast to keeping us all safe, fed, cared for, protected, on the right bus, and registered to vote?

Photo by Valeria Nikitina on Unsplash