knit together

This image of how a community is formed by being knit together appears in Winthrop's "Models of Christian Charity" in his conclusions about the nature of love and two sorts of laws.  Of course it is an image drawn from a particular craft, knitting.  And we can learn much from that reference.

This poem, that is today's from the Writer's Almanac, offers another glimpse into the connections that "knitted together" suggests:

Picking Pears

by Gary J. Whitehead

I stand on the top rung and the step ladder

   shakes; above me the winter pears just out

of reach, clean and strung heavy along limbs

   and swaying like my grandmother's aprons

hung on the line to dry. I drop one into

   the bag she holds open below me. She grins,

and I'm drawn into the embrace of her gaze—

   down into handfuls of earth, seasons, the empty

cup of a lost daughter, a lost breast.

   I'm stitched into miles of quilts, curtains,

tablecloths, hems of pants, skirts.

   I'm held to her like a button on a shirt pocket,

and I smell soap, tomatoes, chicken soup,

   Portuguese sweet bread, goat cheese, pears...

and I lower myself out and around the gnarl

   of branch, down the ladder to take the full

bag of the fruit I love, warm from

   the sun and spotted like her hands.

"Picking Pears" by Gary Whitehead, from The Velocity of Dust. © Salmon Publishing Ltd., 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)