During a ride down the office escalator the other day, I happened to mention the Dining Divas to a colleague and the thought occurred to me—I sure do belong to a lot of groups. That’s not too surprising for a woman these days. Many of us belong to book groups, work teams, neighborhood groups, school chums, and of course, families.

But I think I have taken my group-ness to extremes. In addition to all of the above, plus the fabulous Dining Divas, I belong to two other distinct and very special groups.

I took up the fine art of knitting two years ago, and learned immediately that there is something irresistible about a woman sitting quietly with her needles. People are drawn to her, want to touch the yarn, and ask questions. Women in airports and on trains have overcome their reticence to engage with a stranger by their curiosity.  Some have never tried to knit, but want to know, “is it difficult? I’ve always wanted to learn,” and seem encouraged when I tell them how simple and soothing it really is. Others are experienced knitters and offer tips on the best yarns shops or websites. Some have even shared patterns on the spot with me (and one sweet lady on a plane very tactfully corrected my technique back in my earliest moments of purling). I’ve discovered that although knitting is a rather solitary pursuit, one is never alone. There is a vast community of knitters out there. I never noticed them before, but now it seems they are on every bus and airplane, clicking away.

One day, I brought a project to the office and sat quietly in our company café. It didn’t take long before other knitters stopped by. Today, an entire group of knitters has banded together. Known affectionately as the “KnitWits,” we gather weekly over lunch. In the year we’ve been together, we have knitted for charity:

• A blanket crafted from individually-knitted 12-inch squares. We raffled it off for $1,400 and donated the proceeds to the Chicago Wilderness Foundation’s initiative, “No Child Left Inside.”
• 51 wool hats for a charity called the Warm Woolies (they provide woolen clothing for children in orphanages in Asia, where central heating is rare)
• 30 blankets for Project Linus, whose mission is “to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of new, handmade blankets and afghans.”
• 20 vests (with yarn donated by Land’s End) for needy children in the US

I’m also becoming extraordinarily close to a group of my cousins. My mother and her six siblings together raised 34 O’Grady cousins. With just about all us on the far side of 50, smaller “clumps” of cousins have taken to traveling together, starting with a trip to Seattle four years ago to celebrate Peg’s 50^th.  We now have a standing trip to Florida every February that’s open to any and all. We descend on John’s home in St. Petersburg, where we spend many hours in the kitchen cooking, eating and laughing.  Our joke is that if you leave the room, the others have free reign to talk about you behind your back. We’re hoping to plan a trip to Ireland in 2010, if we can only agree upon dates.

With most of our parents gone, enjoying the company of our cousins is very special and comforting indeed. It brings us back to our childhoods, when a typical Saturday night out for our parents meant going to this Aunt’s or that Uncle’s house to play cards. The kids were naturally dragged along to get into whatever mischief we could. As adults, it’s been revealing and fun to rekindle that closeness. An extra bonus is discovering cousins who were out of the narrow age band we played in as children.  Cousins who were 8 or 10 years older than me as a child might well have been senior citizens as far as I was concerned, seen only from afar as they went about their exotic ways, going to sock hops or going on actual dates.  Today, they are my friends and guides along the bumpy road of life. 

There’s even a splinter cousins group devoted to, you guessed it, knitting! We haven’t given ourselves a formal name, not yet anyway. But we have a motto (taken from the outside of Peggy’s knitting bag):

“I have 8 inches of cold hard steel and I know how to use it!”