Her trembling fingers made her knitting needles clink together like drumsticks in the hands of a novice, but she was no neophyte. A three time Blue Ribbon Winner at the local farm show and a two time Honorable Mention in the county fair, Muma (the appellation given to her by her oldest granddaughter and pronounced muhm-uh) was a champion knitter who did not allow her arthritis to thwart her while she alternated her knit stitches and purl stitches with an occasional Italian curse word. Celebrex did not stop her pain, and neither did the stroking of her Rosary beads, but she developed an addiction to both. She rocked back and forth in her shabby and tattered blue recliner that surprisingly never crumbled under her rotund figure, commonly associated with Italian grandmothers who hocked Ragu spaghetti sauce on television. She intended to make five blankets—one for each of her grandchildren—while she still had some yarn.
She twisted burgundy and rose together in a traditional two-row afghan for her first grandchild, Pookie, who sat at her feet spinning a different kind of yarn. Pookie, a seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed feminist, had no time to learn how to knit, and she never paid attention when she was forced to make pizza dough or homemade pasta. Domesticity seemed futile and frivolous in relation to her plans for an adventurous career in tabloid journalism, mostly focused on UFO sightings, Elvis conspiracy theories, and alien babies opposed to predictable and mean-spirited celebrity gossip.
“Please tell me, Muma, the story about what happened in the kitchen,” said Pookie.
Muma sighed, continued to twist the yarn, and replied: “You already know this story. It is nothing really special and no one knows for sure what happened. It was his word against hers, and she was too dead to talk. The police weren’t able to prove a thing. My brother-in-laws, your great uncles believed that their mother, your great grandmother Magdalene was shooting off her mouth; probably telling your great grandfather to stop drinking, work more hours at the railroad, pick up his clothes off the floor or something like that. Supposedly, she was a real nag of a woman. Your great grandfather, who was known for his temper, his love of his booze and his preference for young women, probably threw her against the wall. She hit her head and died immediately. Grandpa Rudolph never confessed, and the police ruled it an accident. It was an accident and not a murder, which is why the family never sold the house. I still use Magdalene’s ravioli recipe to this day in her house.”
Disappointed by her grandmother’s disinterested delivery of the most scandalous story in the family’s history, Pookie moved onto a mystery that captured Muma’s imagination—the disappearance Amelia Earhart. Muma, who was 19 at the time of the pilot’s failed trip around the world, recounted all details of each explanation of her disappearance and insisted the female pilot simply was too astute to run out of gas or to navigate to the wrong destination. Bad flight planning, sudden crash, or capture and murder by the Japanese. These theories bored Pookie, but stitch by stitch Muma tangled the clues into the blue and gold blanket for the second grandchild.
By the time Muma started the third blanket, the setting changed once again. This time to a poor Italian immigrant community along the Jersey shore. Muma was the third oldest out of eleven children, 7 girls and 4 boys. The sisters shared two adjoining bedrooms and divided up shoes, dresses and make-up. None of them were allowed to date, so they would take turns covering for each other. When the youngest daughter ended up pregnant at the age of 16, a baby boy named Anthony was adopted by the oldest sister and her husband. Muma told Pookie never to repeat the story. It was a family secret that no one knew (Her recounting was the third time that her granddaughter heard that tale).
The fourth blanket started with the romance of Muma and her husband Rodolpho, who was called Rody. She was working as a waitress, and he was regular customer. He tried to pay her with sand dollars when she explained with a stern but slightly flirtatious tone that only legal tender could be accepted, he offered to pay dollar bills if she would go for a walk on the beach with him. She accepted, and they were married 7 months later. She gave birth to her first daughter at the age of 35 and the second daughter came along when she was 37. The second birth occurred in 1954 when women were more concerned about traditional maternal moirés than the risks of “advanced maternal age.” After telling the tale of her daughters’ births, Muma completed a navy blue and white blanket for the Pookie’s oldest cousin.
With four blankets complete and one blanket to go, Pookie assumed that with every stitch and with every word, they will get another minute that would turn into another day, another week, another year. Muma would knit and Pookie would record stories as if they were characters in a magic realism novel creating a great blanket of words and fibers that would be thicker than the Tallgrass Prairie and longer than Appalachian Mountain Range.
Pookie planned to delay the completion of the fifth blanket, an elaborate royal blue and cream pattern. The twisting and twirling started with the death of Rody and Muma’s life as a widow and a single-mother to two girls, ages 5 and 3. As a woman with an eighth-grade education, she took a job at the local shoe factory; she put buckles on women’s shoes until her knuckles bled. They were poor but proud. Both girls stayed out of trouble, married young, and never took the time to learn how to knit. They both dreamed of store bought clothes and new furniture. “My hopes for them came true,” she said as she completed the fifth blanket, and a few weeks later, all her knitting came to an end. The five blankets were distributed to the five grandchildren.
Today, Pookie keeps the yarn alive as she tells her own daughter about the mysterious death of the woman who created the family’s ravioli recipe.
