All You Have to Do is Ask

She had always known there was something special about the way she crocheted. 

Scotland loved the way it felt, even as a young girl. Metal hooks, balls of yarn, the soft mulling of tea on a nearby table, she still can remember the way it felt to have her grandmother show her how to craft the first loop. 

Worn hands, aged curtains, the moth balls in the back of upstairs closets, Scotland had spent a lot of time with her grandmother. Always draped with some silver and dried flowers, her grandmother had a house out in the country where the frogs sang at night and the air always seemed to gleam during the day. Warm ponds and running creeks, Scotland would visit her grandmother every summer when she was little. 

It was never a choice for her, but if she had to choose, it would have been hers anyway. She liked the way the country felt on her toes and lips, the city apartment she had with her mother and sisters always seemed boxy and loud. And when school was finally over, and the days got deliciously longer as they do, Scotland would find herself counting the moments before the car ride North. 

Over the hills and past the fields, the drive that took that one exit on the freeway that Scotland eventually learned the name of all those years later when she had learned how to drive. And when she eventually had to drive it herself to clear out that house when her grandmother passed. 

But when she was a kid, just those young little years of summer shimmers and humming nights, that was the place she was always happy to be. 

It was one of those summers, early on, when she still wasn’t sure how to fill her time without crosswalks to skip or plastic playground structures to climb. When the mounds of earth and stone, the bubbling creeks, and flowered fields, all seemed like framed pictures she didn’t know what to make of. Places she had never seen, or at least she had never asked if she could touch. 

They had been sitting on that beautiful wooden porch, the one with the craved sigils and runes that back then seemed like a design from centuries past. But only with her older eyes did Scotland understand. 

There had been a creaking hum to the night, the one where the crickets and frogs and birds and whispers of wind all collected in the barrel of her grandmother’s valley and funneled themselves into a delicately played symphony of summer nights. The kind of sounds that can never be heard exactly the same way ever again, the everlasting evolving beauty of now. 

Scotland’s grandmother had a bright yellow orangey blob of soft yarn in her lap, the kind that looked like the sun had leaked all over and the drips of it had made its way magically to her lap. It had all felt so simple and sweet in the swaying of the willows and grasses and the soft full moonlight of then. 

Her lived hand, wise with years of twisting and twining, weaving and crafting, bobbed along the yarn as effortlessly as the smile on her face curved. Curious eyes and nimble fingers, Scotland felt the pull and whisper of something much deeper and older than herself lulling her to the yarn and the hook and the hands of her grandmother. 

“What is that?” Small voice, almost a whisper as if not to disturb the hushed peace of the weaver. 

“Well this will be a scarf my dear,” Her grandmother’s voice always sounded like the way sweet lavender tea felt.

Curious eyes and nimble fingers, Scotland had sat at the feet of her grandmother. The cool wood porch, the symphony of night around them, the soft clinking of her grandmother’s bracelet against the metal hook in her hand. 

“Would you like to learn?” The sweet steam of her voice wafted down to Scotland’s waiting ears. 

Big eyes and nodding head, Scotland curled herself up closer to the beginning of her known lineage. 

Plucking up the end of the yarn, the wafted dissipating linger of her grandmother’s voice tickled her ears. Those lived and wise hands held Scotland’s in place, delicately demonstrating the ease of allowing the yarn to become exactly what is asked of it. 

“You always ask the yarn for what you want, you must be nice about it. And if you are true in your heart, it will listen.”

“What do you mean ‘ask’ it?” The way those beginner’s words had floated in the air, Scotland had no idea what she was even learning. But oh was she learning. 

“Well my dear Scotland, there are so many things in this world to want. And you might already be seeing this, but so many people want but never ask.” Scotland fingered the yarn, turning it over in her palm and pulling it apart with her eyes. The woven threads spread out in front of her skin to show the slimmers of space and possibilities built into it. 

“My dear, it is the asking that is the power.” She had said it with that small smile she always seemed to have on her face. The one that showed that small slice of teeth and lips that Scotland learned as she grew, that her teeth and lips were shaped after. The small smile that Scotland catches herself wearing from time to time in reflections of cars or mirrors, her grandmother always smiling back at her.

“And if you are anything like me and your mother and all the women that came before us, then the asking will be your power too,” She sat with the golden drips of the sun in her lap amongst the symphony of night and Scotland could feel all the asks bubbling up in her like never before. 

Her grandmother catching the look in Scotland’s eye let out a chuckle that tickled the back of Scotland’s neck.

“There she is, I knew you would have it too,” And her wink floated through the air as sweetly as her lavender tea-like voice. 

Scotland sits in her apartment now, days and weeks and months and years past that night. So many that it is hard for Scotland to picture it as clearly as she used to. But she doesn’t let that bother her, as when she calls the memory to mind she asks it to stay with her, and in a funny way, it always does. 

Yarn and hooks and bins and totes all sit like statues in her apartment, tucked in corners and holes, all the webbing and netting of anything she could ever need or ask for within the distance of her boxy city home. And she sits on her couch now, her fingers wiser but her eyes the same curious, and a ball of yarn sits in her lap like so many times before. Twisting that first loop, rehearsed so many times now, she pulls through her first knot. The soft yellowy orange blob of fabric in her hand, the slightest of shimmers woven into the yarn already, she begins to weave over her rounded belly. Slow and steady, Scotland pulls at the yarn in the way her grandmother always taught her to.

And as she silently weaves, thinking of her grandmother and her mother and all the women that came before her and this one now growing inside her, she holds her ask in her mind as sweetly and nicely as her grandmother always taught her. And as Scotland continues to weave the baby blanket splayed across her lap like dripping sunlight, it starts to become her own daughter’s first magical item. Scotland laughs to herself as it takes shape before her eyes just like she asked it to, and it all seems so fitting.