The Yarn Whisperer Read Online Free Page B

seat.
    On the morning of April 30, 1998, we locked the door of our apartment and handed the keys to our landlord. We got into the car—its windows sparkling clean, oil freshly changed, tires rotated, and tank full of gas—and I put the key in the ignition, took a deep breath, and squeezed the scissors.
    The cut itself took almost a month to complete. We took time along the way to visit people and places that had been instrumental in the stitches of our lives. Each had a turn at the scissors. We arrived in Maine on the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday, steek fully cut, feeling exhilarated and exhausted. The heat had been turned off for the summer and our apartment was freezing—or maybe it was my own exposed inner fabric that brought the chill.
    It took several months before all the ends were darned. Over the years, my colorway and pattern have changed some. I’ve frogged a few things and sprouted a few more openings, but the fundamental fabric holds strong—and it continues to evolve as I do. Who knows? One day we may load up the car again and head west, back to the land of palm trees, melted cameras, and abundant sunshine. Or perhaps we’ll point our jalopy in an entirely new direction, carefully cut a new steek, and see what comes next. The important thing is that, now, the scissors are in
my
hands.

CHOREOGRAPHY OF STITCHES

    THREE THINGS SUM up my first few years in Tucson: the ramada, the rodeo, and square dancing. On my first day at Peter E. Howell Elementary School, we were told to gather under the ramada after recess. The what? I came from a place with seasons, where you had to play indoors roughly half of the school year. Here in the land of eternal sunshine, on a playground that resembled the moon, they had put a flat roof on metal posts over a rectangular slab of concrete. This was the only place you could go to escape the sun—and it was, as I learned that first day, called a
ramada.
    Tucson also brought me the rodeo. Until then, the only rodeo I knew was the ballet scored by Aaron Copland and choreographed by Agnes de Mille, which I’d seen performed by the American Ballet Theatre the year we left New York. While myfather played in the orchestra pit, my best friend, Carol, and I watched from front-row seats. At intermission, I led her out a secret door—the Eastman Theatre was my playground back then—but it locked behind us. We were stuck in a small vestibule with two other locked doors. We pounded on all of them until one opened, revealing the magical world of backstage.
    The stage manager—who knew my father—ushered us inside. The only way back into the theater was through a door on the other side of the stage, he explained, and we couldn’t walk behind the stage because intermission was almost over. He offered us something even better: We got to stand in the eaves, just out of view of the audience, and watch the rest of the ballet from there. I remember stunningly beautiful dancers standing in what looked like adult-sized litter boxes rubbing their toes in the sand, staring fixedly at the stage, then suddenly sprinting out of their boxes and back on the stage, their mouths flashing into toothy smiles. That’s what I thought of when I heard the word
rodeo.
    But Tucson’s version was nothing like the world of Copland and de Mille. It was hot, loud, and dusty. We sat in crowded bleachers that were sticky and smelled of beer. A man’s voice droned over the loudspeakers like a buzzing fly, incomprehensible. Somewhere in the middle of the dust and clouds, people were doing things on horses. I think I saw a cow or two, or was that what they called a bull? I didn’t know.
    The clown was unlike any of the happy, Technicolor Ronald McDonald circus clowns I’d ever seen. This one was dusty. He’d fallen on hard times. I imagined he lived on freight trains andate bits of rattlesnake he’d roasted on a stick over the campfire. He did crazy