Grandmother, Guthrie, and the Yarn Store

Warning: this post contains lots of long and flowery descriptions.

Today my mother, grandmother, and I went on an expedition to Guthrie, a town about forty-five minutes away from where we live. The goal of the expedition was to buy a special set of knitting needles so that my grandmother can knit baby hats for the local hospital. (None of the shops in town have needles the right size).

It's a lovely drive from where we live to Guthrie. We took a winding back road that went through the "booming metropolis" of Mulhall, which is a sleepy little town where the houses are either brand new or run-down, and where everything is lightly powdered with red dust. We drove over Skeleton Creek on a narrow bridge. The silk sleeve of the water rippled over the white, sandy skin of the creekbed underneath. Wildflowers starred the roadside grass, shimmering in the breeze, like stars in a green, windy sky. Fields of ripening wheat basked in the warm May sun, flat and open to the sky in the river bottom.

My mother commented that people who disparage this part of the country have probably never been here.

Guthrie itself is an old town. Its downtown area has been around for about a hundred years, I guess. The buildings are all tall and narrow, built of sun-warmed sandstone blocks, and lovingly re-painted and refurbished so that they look much as they did when they were first built. The downtown sits on a long hill so that all the streets slope rather steeply. We pulled up in front of S.W.A.K. ("Sealed With A Kiss"), the yarn store, and went inside. While my grandmother bought her needles and chatted with the proprietor, my mother and I looked around.

It was truly a wonderful place. Yarns were carefully stacked together on antique desks and booshelves, or piled in intricate baskets. There was eyelash yarn, delicately fringed, and yarn similar to eyelash yarn but not fringed- more like the fins of an eel than an eyelash. There was fuzzy, ropy yarn, and yarn woven through with metallic thread so that it glittered. There was heavy, coarse yarn, and yarn fine as a baby's hair. There was yarn as fly-away as cat fur. There were strings of beaded fringes, iridescent, sparkling. Yarns silken as glass, smooth as a curried horse's flank, rough as carpet.

The colors were the best part of all. Many of the yarns had more than one color, so that the colors were interwoven or stained together, as though the yarns were tapestries in and of themselves. There was a shelf full of pastel baby colors.

But my favorite colors were in an old, green-enamel bathtub full of skeins of vividly-dyed yarn, each skein with its own true color, like an Aladdin's chest full of yielding gems. Scarlet and crimson and ruby; saffron and gold and daffodil-yellow; salmon pink and rose and magenta; sunset-orange and burnt orange and warm ochre the color of Oklahoma soil; earth brown and black and bright white; grey soft as rain clouds and pale as foam or a dove's breast, and starry silver. Green vivacious as new leaves, and deep as the shadows in a summer forest; clear, colorless crystal blue of the evening sky just above the sunset, and deep blue the shade of the sky on an autumn afternoon; aquamarine of water over white sand, and polished turquoise. Lilac, amethyst, royal purple, dark purple the color of the night sky. Bronze, and copper, like polished wood.

The colors were so alive that I could taste them. I could hardly drag my eyes away.

The shop had buttons, too: smooth wooden buttons, and iridescent ones, and metal clasps wrought from intricate filigree. Cats, birds, fish, ladybugs, giraffes, and Peter Rabbit.

Anyhow, after we left the shop, we strolled up to a cafe. My grandmother had coffee, but my mother and I ordered raspberry iced tea. We sipped it, and talked, and it was all very sweet.

After, we drove around the down town a bit. There was an interesting variety of businesses housed in the old store-fronts. Restaurants, antique stores, and clothing shops shared space with a theatre, a dance studio, a "doctor's" office (for face-lifts and that sort of thing), a veterinarian's clinic, a pet store, an art gallery, a museum about printing presses, and the Double-Stop Fiddle Shop. Virginia creeper climbed up the sandstone walls and veiled the alleyways, rustling in the wind.

And then we said good-bye to Guthrie for the afternoon and drove home. Our time in the car probably exceeded the time we'd actually spent in Guthrie, but, hey....