For people allergic to wool, one’s heart can only bleed.

One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up; one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground.

I am a knitting fool. It’s a quiet pastime, and a productive one. It enables one to join in the conversation or switch one’s brain off, according to the interest or the excruciating dullness of what is being discussed. And the product does keep people warm and comfortable.

Really, handknitting is a dreamy activity, built into many people’s thumbs and fingers by genes already there, itching to display their skills and achievement possibilities.

Now comes what I perhaps inflatedly call my philosophy of knitting. Like many philosophies, it is hard to express in a few words. Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness.

What? You can’t knit in the dark? Stuff and nonsense; anybody can. Shut your eyes. Knit one stitch. Open your eyes and look at the stitch; it’s all right. Shut your eyes and knit two stitches. Open them. Shut them. Knit three stitches. Falling off a log is no comparison.

One tends to give one’s fingers too little credit for their own good sense.

I can knit. I knit all year, day in, day out. It is my passion, and I rarely knit the same thing twice the same way.

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.