Stories

Ketchum Idaho’s Community Library

December 30, 2020

Knitting Yarns and Years

Nancy’s Christmas stocking was the biggest. When we three little girls hung our stockings from small hooks in the fireplace mantel each December, my middle sister’s stocking unfurled an extra turn – it was at least two inches longer and wider than either my own or my youngest sister’s – and it therefore always stirred some controversy. Everything else was equal across all three: each woven of the same green, red, and white yarns; each with a Santa dancing on the front; each with our own name stitched in block letters at the top. But Nancy’s stocking was undeniably bigger, and the other two of us fretted that Santa would be tricked into giving her more. (And we worried that this proved she was the favorite.)
My great-aunt Gloria had knitted each of our stockings, from the same bundles of yarn, following the same pattern for each. She had five children of her own; she knew the necessity of equal measures.
But life does not unfurl in equal measures, and Gloria knitted each stocking at a different time, as each one of her grand-nieces was born. She cast-on Nancy’s stocking in a hospital waiting room while her husband had open heart surgery. I imagine her tiny four-feet-some-inches frame, perched in a straight-back chair, her dark bob of hair falling alongside her tilted head, and her hands clicking wooden needles, again and again, giving shape to her waiting as the yarn unspooled. I imagine the release of her fingers when he awoke.
That stocking made our Christmas row uneven, but it had steadied Gloria’s mind while she created it. I did not recognize as a child that stocking’s true outsized capacity. It has room for heartache, and for hope.
We need this capacity, and stories offer it beyond any stocking: Each turn of a book’s pages can help knit the messiness of our days into a pattern. A string of words can help hold the weight of waiting as another year unfurls. A story stretches our capacity to hold more than we could hold alone.
Jenny Emery Davidson, Ph.D.
Executive Director

www.comlib.org

‘Community is just doing my part.’

May 16, 2016

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pp. 128-129

‘You tell a lot of stories of people you met on the road. And they’re the kind of stories that we’re becoming familiar with. Stories of good people who are working too many jobs and still not getting by. Stories of college students who are carrying way too much to be able to focus on college. Stories of people who don’t have the money to get the care they need and die too young. I am aware in my self and I think all around me, maybe, those of you in this room – – there are so many of us anguished about these gulfs that seem to be growing in our society, in our community, and in our nation. And it’s not that we don’t care. We care deeply. But we don’t know how to connect that care in meaningful, practical ways. To do something about it.’

[…]

‘There are several levels of that. One is the doing something. I sometimes think we, in the United States, think we ought to do something about everything and that it’s my job to fix everything. Well it’s not That’s way beyond us. It’s more important, I think, that we listen deeply to our stories and then see where it leads. And that’s the piece. If we all do our part…’

The realest thing in our lives…

February 20, 2016

whats_your_story

…are the stories we invent.

We live with these stories, we remind ourselves of them, we perfect them.

And, happily, if you don’t like the story you’re telling yourself, you can change it.

-Seth Godin

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