Local yarn

We don't have a yarn shop in our town anymore. The beautiful shop that used to occupy a prime downtown location closed up a couple of years ago because of health issues in the proprietor's family. So a key element to some people's knitting addiction has been missing from Cady Gray's inauguration into the craft. There's no yarn store for her to visit, where she can fondle various fibers and be inspired by color.

Today my enabling mother-in-law took us to a lovely little shop in Dickson, just outside the park boundaries. Yarn Frenzy was everything you want a yarn store to be -- packed with yarns from all over the world, in all sorts of weights, colors, and fibers. As Cady Gray and I made our way slowly around the floor-to-ceiling shelves, I could see her sense of the possible firing on all cylinders. She strained for a high shelf, and I asked her what color of Berroco Pure Pima she was reaching for. "That red," she said decisively. And I thought: There's a girl who wants to take the burst of energy her eyes have perceived and turn it into something that has a texture, a feel, a weight, a tangibility.

She gravitated to a jacquard-patterned wool for a pair of funky wristers. I picked up two balls of long-repeat fingering-weight yarn in the deep shades of green I see in the woods, grasses, and lakes of Montgomery Bell State Park at summer's height, for a scarf to remember. And I realize with a jolt what she's been missing. It's a craft for all the senses, and it's a real shame not to immerse yourself physically in all its possibilities.