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the groundhog I once watched rear up on its hind legs, grab a tall echinacea spike, and shove the entire bloom in his mouth.
Crunch crunch crunch.
    I found his hole and guiltily flooded it with water, but still he came. I poured two bottles of cayenne pepper around the perimeter of his hole, but still he came. The only way to get rid of these pests is to bodily remove them—lifting the child from the yarn and placing her safely on the porch with a firm scolding, snaring the groundhog in a Havahart trap and taking him on an unexpected road trip.
    Plants are a responsibility. The temptation to overcommit is great. In the summer months, Clare and I go into town on Saturday morning to get our sweet rolls and visit the local garden store—conveniently at the same place. Each and every Saturday, we tell ourselves, “We’re not going to get more than we can plant.” We look at each other. “Right?” Yes, I nod. She nods. Off we go.
    An hour later, we’re pulling back into the driveway with a trunk full of plants. Just this little six-pack of petunias, I say. Just a few more basil plants, she mumbles, you know, for the pesto. I’m no better at yarn stores. Just these two balls of Kidsilk Haze for a last-minute scarf. See how pretty their colors look next to one another?
    After we bring them home, plants need to be put in the ground pretty quickly. Yarn, on the other hand, can remain in limbo almost indefinitely. The deeper it is shelved, the less visible its impatience. There it sits, silent, bitterly resentful thatthe best years of its life are being wasted in some dark, abandoned corner, or, worse yet, in a plastic tub. “I’m cashmere, for God’s sake,” it grumbles. “I deserve better than Rubbermaid.”
    Bulbs hold a particular poignancy. I remember E. B. White writing about his wife—the esteemed editor Katharine White—choosing and planting bulbs each fall. It was a yearly ritual, and neither of them could fathom not doing it, but when her health began to fail, he didn’t know if she would live to see the bulbs bloom. Yet she still dreamed, ordered, and planted, because that is what we do. We tuck bulbs away into the darkness for a long winter’s nap. We forget about them until spring, then we glance out at that bare patch of soil and wonder … did they survive? Will there be life? Like bulbs, we bury balls of yarn deep in our stashes, knowing that some day we’ll wander through our garden with an empty basket and pluck them from the soil. Better yet, maybe they’ll take on a life of their own, sprout little arms from which hands will grow, grab needles, and knit themselves when we aren’t looking.
    But they don’t, and therein lies the problem with yarn stashing that does not exist in gardening. Whereas plants take care of things with minimal interference from us, yarn needs us for each stitch of its growth. Yarn won’t knit itself.
    Sometimes it may take a while, like the dogwood in my backyard. It was a tiny stick of a seedling in my Aunt Judy’s Michigan yard when she dug it up, plopped it in a blueberry container, and gave it to me for good luck as Clare and I made our journey east to Maine from California so many years ago.
    How I nurtured that little seedling, first on an apartmentwindowsill, then in temporary soil, and finally planted, three years later, outside my kitchen window, where it grows now. For years I surrounded it with stakes and red tape to keep anyone from stepping on it or mowing over it accidentally. I went out and watered it, sat next to it, talked to it, for years and years—like the Alice Starmore sweater I pick up every few months and lovingly add a row or two to before tucking it away again. I began to notice the branches getting bigger. More branches grew, and one year a bird alighted on one. Then another. And last year—thirteen years to the month when Aunt Judy dug it from her