A Love Letter, A Little Too Late

My roommate's cat in Stitch Niche yarn.

For the past week or so, I've been trying to ignore the fact that my favourite knitting store is about to close down. Which is easy enough to do when I'm a few hours away, and can keep myself busy with school and work. Or when I can convince myself that Frankie will somehow find a way to keep it going. But I have to accept that it's going soon, and before it does, I want everyone to read me get all mushy, so they can know how much the Stitch Niche meant to me. You see, it saved my life. When I dropped out of school second year and needed to pull my life from the brink- and maybe kill some stash at the same time, if that wasn't asking too much- Frankie's kept me going. Every week I would show up, pretend I was happy and normal with the other women, and knit a little more. Another block would be added to Leo's baby blanket. Another pattern repeat to Katie's socks. And in between all of the stitches, I didn't have to pretend as much anymore. I might not have become happy or normal, but I was a little more so. Enough to get by on, to get to the next week, until I had made it through a four months and could pass for a functional human being. Sure, it wasn't just the Stitch Niche- stores as places of mystical transformation work better in books than in real life. Real life is messy, and has to deal with counselling sessions, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, repeats of Canadian Idol and other petty grievances. But it, and all of the women there, meant a lot to me. They meant safety.

Before this, I never really understood why people got upset when stores or businesses closed. To me, they were just places, and the public shiva over Sam the Record Man or CBGB struck me as excessive. I thought those people were just substituting something that could be bought for communities that had to be earned, the kind that grow up around beloved parks and dignified churches. I was wrong. If we buy things to fill a need, than why can't the places where we buy mean the same to us as that church? Especially if they maybe, finally, begin to fill that need? Even if they don't, maybe it's just the residual nostalgia that makes us sad, for when happiness was something that could be purchased with legal tender. I don't know. Trying to quantify it just makes me sigh irritably.

And, anyway, my sadness is only a part of this. There's everyone who used to show up, and then there's Frankie. This place was her time, and her love, and her effort. And it was nothing but bad luck that she had to close it. I hope, if any one's reading this in Guelph, that you'll find time to visit it in the next few weeks, and to buy some pretty yarn as well. Alpaca doesn't quite take out the sting, but it's a good place to start. It was a great place. But Frankie will always be a great person.