Two dozen years ago today, Andrea and I were married at Otter Brook Park on the edge of Keene. The ceremony began with the skirl of bagpipes and the afternoon ended with the music of our friend’s bluegrass band, “Lost Wages.” There was a potluck feast with mismatched napkins and dishes of random patterns, there were sore hugging and smiling muscles, and so much love.

Today, I’ve been thinking of lessons I’ve learned from her in our years at each other’s elbows.

Here’s one: Early in our time together, when we were still in Central America, to express her burgeoning love in the way truest to her 4-H soul, Andrea was knitting me a sweater, a gloriously wearable artefact of hand spun, hand-dyed, blue wool from Momostenango, the sheep capital of Guatemala.

In a break between meetings, we were sitting against the bare concrete block wall of the courtyard of the Guatemala City office of the organization we worked for. Andrea was working on the sweater, and all seemed to be proceeding normally. I was reading at her side, possibly an oral history biography of Monseñor Romero, sharing occasional passages out loud. Such a tranquil scene.

All of a sudden, her hands were flying alarmingly up and down as she undid much of the work of many hours! In a flurry of unexpected, determined activity, she ripped out row after row of stitches. Yarn was flying around us in big loops like we were in the middle of a blue spaghetti fight.

This yarn storm had come upon us quickly and quietly; there may not even have been expletives involved. I was nonetheless concerned, because I thought I was being exposed to Andrea’s previously unsuspected violent side.

You see, I was taught to be a man by World War II vets with incompletely-repressed anger issues. So when I saw Andrea apparently wantonly destroying the sweater she was making for me, I assumed there was rage involved, and wondered if it was towards me or just, improbably, directed at the mute, inanimate material she was working with. It called to mind a story my father told me about a time when he was keeping his brother-in-law company in the garage while Uncle Bob reglazed a pane of glass on a window sash. The pane he was working on cracked, and Uncle Bob reacted by picking up a nearby hammer and systematically smashing every single one of the remaining panes. Dad told this as a humorous anecdote, but there was clearly more going on in that flash and tinkle of breaking glass.

Well, as it turns out, it’s different for knitters. Ripping out is just standard operating procedure. If they realize they’ve dropped or twisted a stitch, or disrupted their pattern in some way that can’t be tolerated, sometimes the only remedy is to tear out their work all the way back to where the yarn misbehaved. And I won’t say that there’s no disappointment or frustration involved, but it’s done matter-of-factly, relatively stoically, and rage isn’t part of it.

You can see how this ability to diagnose a problem, fearlessly work back to where it went awry, and set it right could be useful metaphorical magic. Sometimes I think the success of our relationship all boils down to a knitter’s basic courage.

Happy double dozen, Honey!