
Thanks go out to author Stephanie Pearl-McPhee whose humor and insight recently led me back to knitting.
I picked up her 320-page book “At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much” during one of those rolling snowstorms in February thinking I could reflect on one meditation a day for the rest of the year. But I was wrong.
Reading the entries with willpower was like trying to eat one jellybean or grape or piece of chocolate from a full bowl. Each time I put the book down and walked away, I couldn’t stop myself from returning to read “just one more page or two” until the book ended.
And then all I wanted to do was knit.
People respond to prose in various ways. The greatest compliments for me as a writer are when people tell me they craved soggy tomato sandwiches after reading my food essay on the topic in Bay to Ocean 2018 or that they couldn’t keep their minds off eggplant after reading my piece about cooking the vegetable posted on Philadelphia Stories.
Connecting with readers is a joy. And as Pearl-McPhee reminded me, so is knitting.
–cawk