Last night as I drove home from Pennsylvania, I listened to several episodes of Cast On (what do you MEAN you don’t listen? Go now! I’ll wait…) This latest series has been focussed on what Brenda Dayne calls a sense of place- meaning your home, where you think of as home, and what ties you to it. There have been lots of really interesting and touching essays about mountains, about travel, about children, and such things, and I started thinking about myself. I can’t really say that I HAVE a sense of place.

Now that doesn’t mean that no place feels like home. Lots of places feel like home to me- and that’s kinda my point. The place I live- my house, with my family and my stash in it- is clearly home. But so is my grandmother’s house in Eugene, Oregon. Every dorm I’ve ever been assigned has felt very much like home. heck, even hotel rooms I’ve stayed in have sometimes felt like home, depending on the people I was with.

But none of these places show up in my work. I don’t bring the soft textures of the Pacific Northwest into my knitting to tie me to the place I was born. I don’t plan projects in the reds and browns I think of from Hong Kong. I don’t even feel particularly drawn to the colors and textures of Maryland, where I’ve spent most of my life. I guess it means that I’m still searching for a place to really call home. Then, I will knit it into my life completely.