Summer was already in full swing, the month of July came to an end. Marianne was glad it was a bit warm, was happy with the sun, and with the shade in her backyard.

After her work at court, after all the processing of correspondence for Johan, she enjoyed being at home, not having to do anything for a while, giving her head some rest.

She enjoyed the friendship with Johan and Marieke, a friendship that grew stronger and stronger. She was not just a colleague to Johan, or Marieke's partner's colleague, she felt more than accepted, she felt at home with them. She was part of their lives, not just an appendage, but an important part. She knew that, she felt that.

That didn't mean they hung out together every day. In fact, she had no idea how often she joined them. Just when it was convenient, if one of them asked or if she herself felt she needed to stop by.

She had noticed that the moments when she went to them at their invitation or on her own feeling, that something special always happened. It was regularly accompanied by a bit of inner healing, usually in herself.

It had happened many times, and usually felt intense for a short time. But recently it had been very funny. She had told how she handled her free time at home, doing a bit of nothing, giving her head a rest. She had mentioned that she didn't feel like reading anymore, that at a time like that, again, that took too much out of her head.

"I just feel like doing something with my hands, frumbling something, but frumbling something nice." She had chuckled at the word, frumbling, weird word actually!

Marieke had stood up and returned with a plastic bag containing some balls of cotton. "Please, you go frump some! Make something nice out of it!"

She had laughed at her goofy friend, seeing a grin on Johan's face in a flash.

And as silly as it was, she grabbed four balls of cotton knitting yarn from the bag, all shades of blue of about the same thickness, knotted them together and asked Johan if he would like to hold the knotted end.

"I'd like that," he said, "but I know something simpler. He grabbed a ball of a totally different colour from the bag, cut off a piece of thread, and used it to tie the knot of her four blue threads to the table leg. "So, you can frump all you want, that table will hold it for you."

Grinning, she had set to work on what had come to her mind, macramé, a special knotting technique you could use to make all sorts of fun things. She had no idea what she would want to make. She simply started with the most basic knot she had ever learned: holding two threads straight in the middle, and swinging the other two around them in turn.

As she was working, she noticed she was getting peace in her mind. Her hands were working nicely, and her mind was keeping pretty quiet. She didn't even notice that Johan and Marieke were making funny faces at each other. She enjoyed the peace and quiet and felt increasingly clear that she would actually like to take up this old hobby more often. Every now and then she would change knots, making sure that the other shades of blue, which in the beginning were hidden in the two threads swinging around them, also came out once. She became looser and looser in how she handled it, not caring about what she had once learned from macramé books. She was delightfully free to go her own way.

Marieke had made a macaroni bake before they got home, and had let it cool in the fridge. She picked it up, asked Marianne if she also fancied a bowl of macaroni bake and a moment later held out a full bowl to her. With a deep sigh, Marianne relinquished her knotwork, put the bulbs she had used back in the bag. She took over the bowl from Marieke and thanked her.

"Unbelievable, for a moment it was like I was all alone in the world," she said.

"Yes, you were particularly sociable, really nice to have such visitors," Johan said quasi seriously.

Marianne looked from Johan to Marieke, raised her eyebrows and took a bite. When she had swallowed it, she said to Johan: "You are the best colleague I could wish for, and you Marieke, the best friend! I feel so at home here, that I can just get completely lost in a few balls of knitting yarn... Consider it a compliment!"

"That's what it is, it felt really familiar," Johan said, putting his hand on her arm for a moment. "I liked the look of it. It looks like you can frumble around after work hours from now on. Your hands don't have to get bored anymore!"

Together they shot into laughter.

"Do you know I loved doing this as a teenager too? Only then I used booklets from the library with it. Booklets that told you how to do it. Now that might be useful to learn some new knots, but following a pattern... no, I didn't enjoy that. That's why I didn't continue then either. Apparently, I didn't get the idea at the time to try something out for myself. I was so used to the idea that it should represent something, that it should look like on the pattern. If you see pictures of macramé work, it's also often quite tight, tightly patterned, often the same type of things. Pendants for flower pots, bags, little works for on the wall, on a stick. And especially very symmetrical, following fixed lines. And do you know what I think? Because of all the process things I went through here with you, I feel freer now, I can let go of the examples, the models, the patterns and just let my hands go. They make what I see in front of me, I see what I feel, I feel what I see... Are you still following? It's getting more and more cryptic! I wonder how far this will go. The only thing I still want to do is to sort out all kinds of knots, to create more possibilities for myself. Is that really necessary? Or could I manage it myself, just figure out knots myself?"

"What do you think?" asked Marieke.

"I find it quite exciting, but I think I can come up with more and more things myself. New knots, directions, shapes... I think I'm just going to pay the thrift shop a visit, find more knitting yarn, to vary."

.

A few days later, there were several balls of knitting yarn in her cupboard. At first, she had sorted everything by colour, but then mixed it up again, thinking she would be able to find the colour by feel. And that turned out to be the case.

She knotted as if it was a sweet delight. And because she was having such fun with it, she would occasionally take a picture of it. She absolutely could not tell what her work was beginning to look like, but she was having fun with it, and for the time being she thought that was the most important thing.

At one point, when she had already made all sorts of different strings of different colours and types of macramé and self-made knots from the centre, a funny name for her work came to mind: 'Out of knots'. She laughed at it, 'Out of knots', even though it consisted of a lot of knots.

Suddenly it dawned on her, that the work consisted of a small central piece, and all sorts of different strands were emerging from it. Those strands were not in knots, they were loose, free. The only shortcoming, she thought, was that they all hung downwards. Actually, they should be able to move in all directions, but of course the work was too limp for that.

She got an idea. She went upstairs to her attic. There she had put away all possible and impossible junk, stuff she didn't want to use for the time being anyway. And there she found what she was looking for: a wooden hoop. Excited, she took it downstairs and began to stretch ecru-coloured cotton threads from one side of the hoop to the other. After she had stretched twelve threads across the middle, it seemed sufficient to her, strong enough. In the middle, where the threads crossed over each other, she wove a new thread through it in such a way that all those central points were tied together.

"Like that, my knotwork should be able to hang on to that, later or tomorrow, when I finish knotting."

She went on and on with what she jokingly called in her mind her thousand-legged squid. At some point, she felt enough was enough.

She continued with the hoop, attaching new threads to four points of the hoop and knotting four equally long strands from there. She tied the ends together. She had a hook on the ceiling in her living room, a hook from which a plant rack had once hung, but which had been out of use for some time now. Where the four strands were tied together, she hung the whole thing on that hook so that the hoop hung roughly horizontally.

What she envisioned was that she would hang the starting point of her thousand-legged squid in the middle of the threads stretched in the hoop, and hang a large part of the macramé strands, maybe even all the strands, from the hoop with an almost invisible thread, all at different heights so that they could all show their individuality.

She looked for cream sewing thread, knotted it as invisibly as possible at the starting point of her work. She grabbed the kitchen ladder, stood on it and connected her work to the centre of the threads stretched in the hoop. She then used the sewing thread to tie each macramé string to the hoop itself. In this way, she gave each string a place. In between, she regularly checked whether what she saw was to her liking, and if it was not, she did not hesitate to cut the sewing thread loose and hang the macramé string differently. Only when she was finished, did she take another photo and send the whole series of photos to Marieke. She typed along that she thought her work was like a thousand-legged squid, but that she had renamed it 'Out of Knots'.

.

Marieke emailed her back, all excited.

'Marianne, you are an artist! Do you still feel like doing Johan's correspondence?" she wrote in her response.

'Oh yes, that has my heart, no doubt. But I will be honest, that the question of what I wanted to fill my day with, with correspondence or with macramé, did come along. And actually, it was immediately clear to me that for now, that correspondence is more deeply my thing than macramé. That correspondence, apart from the fact that I love doing it, has something pressing in it, an urgency. For now, I do think macramé is the most fun hobby for the free hours,' Marianne wrote back.

Marianne's response came right after: 'Thank goodness, Johan doesn't want to miss you!'

Marianne smiled, relishing the certainty that this was good. Johan belonged to Marieke, was her soulmate, and she herself was without a doubt the best colleague he could wish for. And on top of that, the three of them were also the best of friends. What more did she want!

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