When Your Words Catch Up With You...or, My Face Is Red, but My Heart is Full

Yesterday was Wednesday, and Wednesday night is late night at Knitique, my LYS (knit-speak for local yarn shop). Knitters have a propensity for communal activities. It's part of our DNA, so to speak, from the days long ago when no woman worth her salt or not would be found with empty hands. Women's work in all those Jane Austen novels was needlework, and if you recall, they could always be found in front of the fire somewhere with work in hand. But--I digress.

So, yesterday was Wednesday, and Wednesday night is late night at Knitique, when a revolving, evolving group of us gather around the table in the back of the store and knit and talk and eat pink M&Ms and knit and talk. Most LYSs have something similar; I've been to a number. Never have I found one where I went back again and again. There's a Yiddish word, gemeluchkeit

I wrote that a couple of weeks ago, got tripped up on how to spell that Yiddish word and never posted it. I was going to tell the story of how embarrassed I was when my friends at Knitique greeting me after a post in which I had lamented the lack of hard-core, graduate student, jargon-laden BS in my life. They just hooted and hollered and yelled at me in faux-yokel dialect. At first, I was confused. Then I realized--omg, they read my blog! I was pleased, embarrassed and then, perverse though it may seem, felt an overwhelming love for this group of women who have become my friends. One of my core issues has always been that I'm not being truly seen, but these women--they see me.

I'm writing this now because I spent New Year's Day with them and it couldn't have been, I feel, a better, more propitious start to 2007. Danielle, the owner of Knitique, has started a New Year's Day tradition: a 6 a.m.-2 p.m. deep discount, wear-your-PJs sale of everything in the shop. I didn't get there at 6, but at 12:30 everything I wanted was still there. So, I went 'round the store with two shopping bags and loaded up. I bought yarn and books and felting needles and more yarn and...and...and... You'll see everything over the next months, I promise.

But it wasn't the sale that made the day so special. It was the women there. Danielle, of course, and her sister, Lisa (we discovered we were kindred souls!), and Teresa and her daughter and Kim and Shirley. There were some Knitiquers missing--Mary and Susan (who was home with her week old baby) and SJ and Nancy and....and....and...you get my point. After the shop closed at 2 p.m., we went to On The Border and had margaritas and dessert and then dinner.(Yes, you read the order right.) We laughed and talked and shared stories and made plans and...and...and--if this presages the best of 2007 for me, it promises to be a fantastic year!