There’s a particular feeling that comes with picking up your knitting or crochet after a pause. Maybe it’s been a week. Maybe it’s been three months. Maybe you put it down because life got loud, or a holiday swallowed your calendar, or you were moving through something hard, and the yarn just… waited.

It’s good at waiting.

This week, my Thursday groups — both the sisterhood blanket project and my afternoon group — resume after Passover break. I’ve been thinking about what it means to come back.

Pesach is, at its heart, a story about retelling. Every year we sit down at the seder and say: here is what happened, here is what it means, here is how it still matters now. You don’t have to be Jewish for that rhythm to feel familiar. Most of us have some version of a story we return to, a practice we come back to, a group of people we find again after time apart.

For me, this return has a particular weight. I lost my father-in-law about a month ago. In the Jewish mourning calendar, Pesach doesn’t pause shloshim so much as absorb it: the holiday takes precedence, and suddenly the thirty days are just… over. Now that my pesach dishes are put away and the matzoh crumbs swept up, life has resumed, twice over. The groups, the calendar, the ordinary daily rhythms: grocery shopping, laundry, yard work, attending minyan so my husband can say kaddish three times each day. It can be a lot. But it’s also something to hold onto.

Coming back to a creative practice is its own kind of retelling. You sit down and make a decision: do I continue the story, picking up a project mid-row, or do I turn the page and start something new? Both are right answers. Both lead back to the same place: oh, right. This is why I do this.

Sometimes the break is chosen. A holiday, a vacation, a deliberate rest. Sometimes it isn’t. Grief has a way of making everything that used to feel automatic feel impossible for a while. So does illness, upheaval, or just the ordinary accumulation of a life that got too full. There are no wrong answers, and plenty of right ones. Each one is tailored to what you need in the moment.

What I’ve noticed, in years of teaching and in sitting with people around tables with yarn in our hands, is that the return is rarely what we expect. It’s not exactly hard. It’s not exactly sad, though there can be sorrow. It’s mostly just a small moment of uncertainty: is this okay? Is this right? Should I even be doing this right now? And then, after a stitch or two, something tends to settle. Muscle memory plays a part. But it might also be something quieter, the pull of a rhythm that never quite left.

And for me, it helps that right now, it’s spring. The light is longer and warmer, filtered through new leaves. My windows are open more often than not. Allergy season is very real and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but there’s something about this time of year that makes it a little easier to pick something up and return.

If you’ve stepped away from your needles or hooks for a while, for whatever reason, this is a gentle invitation: come back when you’re ready. The yarn will meet you where you are. I hope you’ll have a community that will, too.