It was the early ’80s. My Grandparents had just moved back to the States from Beirut. They were missing the congregation they had been pastoring, especially the nursing students from the university. Re-adjusting to the States was challenging too, Grandma kept sizing her farmer’s markets purchases for kilograms, and Grandpa kept running stop signs. To compound his driving gaffs, the several times he was pulled over, he accidentally answered in Arabic.
The family reunion that Thanksgiving was held at the retreat center in the Catskills where they worked. We could all spread out in the main building and use the industrial kitchen. Finally, you could fit all the women of the family in one kitchen, physically and psychologically.
In between meal preparation for the gathered family, and cut throat Scrabble games (My Dad bought the official dictionary, Grandpa was now in the habit of laying down non-English words) my first-cousin-once-removed’s mother-in-law was crocheting a side window curtain for her front door in fillet work. I was mesmerized. She was working her squares in treble, with three chains for the tops, and using an x-stitch to give her a third option. She sat at a table near the game players and taught it to me. She was especially pleased that the repeat was short, so she could just refer back to her own work without carrying around the graph paper chart.
It was one of the only stitches I knew before I owned a crochet stitch dictionary, so when I made my first sweater, the Attleboro Sweater, I used it in the yoke. That stitch still reminds me of roasting turkey, young children playing, and the slap of Scrabble tiles.
I have a new tutorial for the x-stitch up at http://www.christineguestdesigns.com/tutorialpdfs/Xstitch.pdf.