Tea with the Pacific Wrap

[The inspiration for Andrea Sinclair's design comes from Tea with the Black Dragon by RA Macavoy. The first few lines quoted below are also from the book and are used here to set the scene. Andrea writes: "She's a fiddle player, a student of Zen, and in this delicious little mystery she flys from New York to California to meet with her estranged daughter, bumps into the most interesting man (who used to be a dragon), gets kidnapped and rescued. Throughout it all she stays calm, and who could do that without some engrossing knitting?" Quite!]

Martha Macnamara stood at the Pacific, her toes digging into the froth. She had come the length of the country in one day's flight, and she had trouble believing that this was a different ocean. 'Oh go on, admit it,' she grumbled, kicking the ivory scum from a pile of kelp. 'You're all the same water.'

Perhaps not. She peered at the line where the iron blue of the sky hit the soft-colored water. So bare a sky did not shine over Coney Island. A gull plunged, kissed the water and veered right and away, all ten yards from Mrs. Macnamara. Her head rose to follow its flight...

...and her knitting lifted in an unconscious echo of its movement.

The motion drew her attention back to where her fingers had stilled and now she saw it. The sky and water did blend differently here, and the currents mimicked the transitions in her knitting. She had fallen in love with the rich greens and blues in the store, imaging an ocean less grey and brown than her own. Normally Martha preferred solid colors that showed off her clever, patient stitch work, like the grey/brown wool that snuggled the swooping cables around her cardigan. But these soft color transitions swirled and dashed together in the decreases just like the ocean before her. That the yarn contained seaweed was a novelty that did not ruffle her sensibilities, though it had been a stretch. It reminded her of one grand Zen teacher who never let her sit down. Just as soon as she was comfortably arranged for Zazen, for sitting, off they must go to another rock, another patch of moss, another park bench, this view, that texture, that scent but no, no, let's try this one. She had laughed, grumbled and finally asked pointedly why the sitting practice never seemed to sit down. 'Why should Zen be comfortable?' the teacher replied 'What does your soul's sitting have to do with your body?' and off they had moved to the next place and the next after that.

So Martha let her hands move while her soul sat, contended to be watching the stitches slide together and around each other, the intricate dance of lace. In this row there are three stitches between the decreases. Work an even string of purls across the back, now there are four stitches between the decreases. She knew that in a few rows the pattern would come crashing back together, one stitch between, then two, then three again over and over. The border moved with a different rhythm than the body of the rectangular wrap she was inventing, in and out instead of out and in, but it didn't matter. The two together harmonized unexpectedly. The faint smell of seaweed she had noticed when she bought the yarn was stronger now, intensified by the breeze coming in off the water.

The chilly air stirred the silk and once again Martha was grateful she had decided to travel with such a delicate project. It tucked neatly into her purse as she remembered another teacher's words. "'If you would know the way,' she recited to herself, 'observe the subtlety of water.' Martha considered these words as she watched the waves fling themselves roaring onto the sand. What was subtle in such a display of power?" Perhaps the master spoke more of her knitting than any actual ocean. 'Yarn, wrap and ocean. All Pacific,' she murmured to herself as she watched the waves, smiling.