A good many of the people reading this note (including DD#2) will disagree with the title. For those people, knitting gives them a headache. 

But not for me. For me, it’s the perfect headache remedy, one that I took full advantage of this evening. 

I came home from work with a monstrous headache, that all-over-but-particularly-in-the-back-of-my-neck throb that I clearly recognized stems from tension.  One too many days of The Odyssey. One too many days of trying to get high school freshman to learn a style of formulaic writing that will serve no purpose in their lives other than to help them pass the state assessment in one month’s time. One too many parent emails telling me all the special things that I need to be doing for their little darling to help him pass 9th grade, yet completely failing to mention that their child has any role or responsibility in the matter whatsoever.  (My girls graduated from high school, thank you very much, and it wasn’t because I asked their teachers to raise them for me.) 

In any event, there is only one treatment for headaches like this: Dr. Pepper, an undisclosed amount of ibuprofen, and knitting.  

For a person who has knit as long as I have, the motions are second nature. The repetition quiets the noise in my brain. My fingers move in and around, backwards and forwards, unbidden by conscious thought. The process is slow, deliberate, rhythmic, yet still fulfills my somewhat compulsive desire to accomplish something with every moment of my day. 

My super-bulky oatmeal colored yarn was as soft on the eyes as it was easy to use. Large needles let me relax my fingers and slow down the pace. An easy pattern shown in the semi-darkness off my computer screen. The pattern was something I was already familiar with; I knit guided more by intuition than by instruction. 

A broken needle and a slipped cable required that I find the super glue, but by then I felt better, so it didn’t bother me much. 

The room was quiet — no television allowed. The only noise was the sound of Bear’s deep barking from the far edge of the pasture fence and the hum of the refrigerator. 

In a few hours I finished my piece.  A cabled cowl. It matches the hat I made last night.  

My headache gone, and the tension mostly worked out of my neck and shoulders, it’s time to call it a night. 

But not without a couple of totally gratuitous baby bunny pictures! 

Breakfast time!

Hercules discovers hay