~ the knit mitt story ~

Imagine it’s bone-chilling cold in your room. You wrap yourself in one of grandma’s old handmade blankets because your heater is broken and you’d rather spend your money on looking utterly beguiling and impossible. Alas, you have a report due tomorrow and you realize your hands are freezing. What can you possibly do? You decide you must encase the frigid digits in gloves but they all make it impossible to type. You panic momentarily then you remember that your roommate has purchased a pair of Knit.Mitts from Texture Clothing. Stealthily and with great purpose you sneak into her room and snatch the exceedingly fashionable mitts when she’s distracted by shiny objects. Instantly you realize that the softness of the material is rather intoxicating. You feel like a biker terrorizing the landscape, irredeemably free. Suddenly you stop. These mitts are too fabulous to waste on a lousy term paper. So you reach for your guitar and launch into a fierce, political diatribe that you wrote to commemorate the death of some regime or other. Your fingers have opportunities. They play without restraint for hours until you decide you must have a drink or two at your favourite pub or speakeasy. So, you speed down there on your five-speed; you are dangerous and a wee bit spooky. Clutching your glass is an ecstatic experience. You try other textures and realize that the mitts have rendered your sense of touch acute. The sensuality of each moment proves to overwhelm you into a grand testament of declaration.

You abscond from the palace of wisdom and climb aboard your transport. This is a moment for acceleration. You are stricken with a desire to touch everything salient and important. You find yourself in a forest replete with species most derelict and pristine. Your fingers trace intimate strategies of pure form. Each tree is a gesture of hope and reconciliation. You ride on through a realm of glorious potentialities as you hunger for faces to caress, singular intimacies to ascertain. You return home in a spirit of discovery. You stand in your room surrounded by artifacts that amuse you. You pick up your knitting project and launch into finishing the scarf you’ve promised your Aunt Jean. Your finger are nimble as you feel the tyranny of the chill against the back of your neck.

by Everett Jensen