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world, a kind of lipstick or wig, press-on nails, a fresh coat of paint. Anything bigger and you’re asking for trouble.
    Not too long after we moved to Tucson, my brothers and I witnessed a failed duplicate stitch attempt. Both my parents had begun sowing their wild oats after the divorce was declared final. My mother dated an assortment of fellows, musiciansand astronomers and waiters alike. My father soon fell in love with one of his college students. They made plans to marry, but there was a slight problem. She belonged to a church that didn’t believe in divorce.
    For the new marriage to take place at the church, my parents’ marriage had to be declared null and void—not just from that day forward, but as in “never legitimately happened.” So everyone filled out a heap of paperwork, answered a lot of nosy questions, and mailed in their checks. In return, the church pulled out its giant magic darning needle, threaded it with a particularly bright white acrylic, and proceeded to cover my legitmate childhood with shiny new pretend stitches.
    Of course, the new stitches were perfectly obvious to everyone, like the clumsy detective wearing dark glasses and a false mustache and hiding behind a potted palm. I was unimpressed. But it was enough for the Powers that Be. History annulled, the marriage was allowed to proceed.
    Today I live in my Great-Aunt Kay’s old farmhouse, and I still have that bedroom set. Now instead of pimples and adolescent angst, the mirror reflects fading hair pigment and strange creases where once my skin was smooth. I can see the temptation to start dubbing, spreading thick coats of spackling compound over the cracks.
    But it never works. I consider the lovely women at my hoity-toity salon, with their biologically implausible hair colors and faces stapled open in expressions of perpetual surprise. Or my TV-ready face, or even that white acrylic lump of duplicate stitches on my childhood fabric. We’re not fooling anyone.

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

    GARDENING IS THE ultimate act of optimism. We plant, tend, weed, water, and wait, hoping that something beautiful will grow. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. The gardener learns to be philosophical.
    So it is with yarn. Knitters are avid yarn gardeners, one and all. We have the formal French style of gardening, in which our yarns are neatly organized into shapely bins and boxes. Tidiness and order reign supreme. We might even have our entire stash in a database for easy reference.
    The more rumpled British style of gardening has its mossy overgrown paths, the jumbled hedgerow heaps of balls and hanks, the weathered baskets that look as if they’ve been there forever.
    And then we have the Japanese “natural farming” system of Masanobu Fukuoka, which espousesno plowing or tilling, no fertilizers, no weeding, no pesticides, no herbicides, not even any pruning. He preferred to let the vegetables find their own way—the yarn equivalent would be a skein taking up residence under the couch cushions, behind the muffin tins, or inside the piano.
    A healthy yarn garden contains a broad spectrum of plants—annuals and perennials, deciduous and coniferous, rootstock and tubers alike. Most of us get our yarn as seedlings from the yarn-garden store, preferring ready-to-plant skeins, hanks, and balls. But some, the hearty back-to-the-lamb hand-spinners among us, prefer to raise their yarn from seed. They love the parental feeling of overseeing each moment of the yarn’s growth, from its beginnings as wee fibers to its maturity as a fully grown skein and, ultimately, a finished garment.
    Annuals are a thrill, those short-run, limited-availability skeins that only last one season and then are gone forever. Stock up! Get extra! You never know if you’ll see this variety again. Such yarns give us a chance to replant, replenish, and re-envision our yarn gardens from year to year.
    But others take a more