I Wasn’t Looking for a Best Friend After 60. Then She Called About Two Chairs on the Curb.
I am a card-carrying introvert. Not the kind who is secretly hoping someone will drag them out of the house and prove them wrong. The actual kind, where going somewhere takes effort, coming home is a relief, and a Saturday with nowhere to be feels like a gift. I have always been this way and I have made peace with it. So when people talk about making friends after 60 as though it is some great challenge to overcome, I understand what they mean, but I also think the conversation is usually aimed at people who are lonely, who are missing something, who are trying to fill a gap.
That is not me. I am not lonely. I like my own company just fine.
And yet. Somehow, across fifteen years of lunch dates and knitting projects and a summer spent covering two wicker chairs in every color of yarn we owned, I ended up with a best friend. I was not looking for one. I did not engineer it. I just kept saying yes to small things, and here we are.
How It Started: A Panera, Some Yarn, and a Monthly Meetup
About fifteen years ago I started a knitting group. Nothing formal, just a standing invitation to show up at a local Panera Bread once a month, bring whatever you were working on, and sit with other people who understood why you had seventeen skeins of yarn in a bag under your coffee table. Some people came once and never came back. Some became regulars. My knitting buddy was one of the regulars, and over time she became something more than that.
She is about fifteen years older than I am, which I mention not because it matters much but because it tells you something about how friendship actually works when you stop waiting for it to look a certain way. We did not become close because we were the same age or at the same life stage. We became close because she is warm and funny and wickedly smart about fiber arts, and because she listens without judgment in a way that is genuinely rare. When I bring her a knitting problem, she engages with it seriously. When I bring her something harder than a knitting problem, she does the same thing. There is no agenda, no advice she is trying to land, just attention. It turns out that is most of what you need from another person. She came with me to chemo once when my husband could not be there.
We still meet for lunch every couple of weeks. We always bring knitting. We show each other what we have been working on, compare new yarn acquisitions with the seriousness of people evaluating important evidence, and help each other work through whatever problem has come up in a current project. We have been to yarn exhibits at local museums together. We have met in parks for picnics with our knitting. We made felted fabric from scratch once and she sewed it into purses with zippers. We even made emotional support chickens together. This is the kind of friendship where the emotional support chicken feels like a completely normal entry on the list of things we have done together, and I say that with full appreciation for how lucky that is.
The Phone Call About the Chairs
If you spend any time on knitting or crafting corners of the internet, you have probably come across yarn bombing. It is exactly what it sounds like: covering objects in public spaces with knitting or crochet. Bus stops, park benches, tree trunks, stop signs, bike racks. Someone knits or crochets a covering, wraps it around something that has no business being wrapped in yarn, and suddenly there is a little burst of color and absurdity in an otherwise ordinary place. My knitting buddy and I had seen these kinds of projects online and appreciated them the way you appreciate something that is both completely pointless and completely delightful.
So when she called one afternoon to tell me about two wicker chairs she had spotted on a walk through her neighborhood, my first thought was not “that sounds like a lot of work.” My first thought was that this sounded like exactly the kind of project that had no practical justification and also sounded wonderful. Someone had put the chairs out on the curb, and she thought they might be interesting to cover with knitting and crochet. She was right. I said yes without a lot of deliberation, which is honestly unusual for me because deliberation is usually how I talk myself out of things.
We left the chairs at her house. That was the first practical decision we made, and it was the right one, because it meant I had a reason to come over once a week all summer, and once I am already somewhere and the project is in front of me I am fine. It is the getting there that costs me something. Every week I would work on pieces at home and bring them over, and we would sit together and attach whatever we had made that week, sewing and hot gluing our way around the frames and legs and spindles of these chairs that had been somebody’s trash.
Making It Up as We Went
We did not have a plan. I want to be clear about that because the finished chairs look like they might have been the result of some elaborate creative vision, some color story or design intention. They were not. We made every decision as we went, which meant the chairs became a record of whatever yarn we happened to have around, whatever stitch pattern one of us was in the mood for that week, whatever texture or color caught our attention when we were digging through our stashes. My background is almost entirely knitting. Hers leans more toward crochet. So the chairs ended up being a combination of both, different techniques and textures living next to each other because that is who the two of us are.
Each week the chairs got a little more covered. Stripes appeared next to bobbles. Smooth sections sat next to fluffy eyelash yarn. Browns and oranges and teals and golds accumulated over the weeks like a fiber arts archaeological dig. We would arrive with our bags of finished pieces and figure out where each one belonged, pinning and sewing and debating whether a particular section needed something chunkier or something with more color. We made seat cushions too, knitted and crocheted covers over foam so the chairs would actually be usable, not just decorative. It occurred to us at some point during the summer that we were not just making something to look at. We were making something to sit in.
And then there was embellishment day.
Once the chairs were completely covered, once every inch of wicker was hidden under yarn, we had a dedicated session for the finishing touches. We brought pom-poms and beading and buttons and whatever small treasures we had accumulated. We sewed things on. We hot glued things on. Tassels appeared. Little flowers. Things I cannot fully account for but that felt exactly right in the moment. If the chairs had looked a little wild before embellishment day, they looked magnificently unhinged after it, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. They look like a clown sort of threw up, and I say that with complete affection because they are extraordinary.
Where the Chairs Are Now
Her chair went to one of her grown daughters, which feels right. Mine came home with me and lives in my bedroom next to a big window that gets good light in the morning. My cats have claimed it, which was probably inevitable. Depending on the time of day you might find one of them sleeping on the seat cushion or tucked underneath the whole thing in the little cave the legs and stretchers create. The chair is fully functional as a cat napping station, which I consider a design success.
When the chairs were finished we brought them to show another knitting group, someone who had heard about the project and wanted to see them in person. People thought they were wonderful. Not in a polite way, but in the way people react to something that is genuinely strange and joyful, where the strangeness is the point and the joy is right there on the surface. Nobody looked at those chairs and thought they were too much. They looked at them and laughed in the good way, the way you laugh when something surprises you into delight.
My knitting buddy even made a guest appearance on my knitting livestream once, so my online audience got to meet the person behind the chairs. That felt right too. She has been part of my knitting life long enough that it made sense to introduce her to that piece of it.
What Making Friends After 60 Actually Looks Like
Here is the thing about being an introvert that people who are not introverts sometimes misunderstand. I have fun when I am with people I like. I genuinely enjoy those afternoons at her house, working on the chairs with lunch in the middle and the easy conversation that happens when you have known someone long enough that silence is comfortable too. I look forward to our lunch dates. I care about her deeply enough that trying to describe her friendship makes me cry a little because just putting it into words isn’t adequate.
And I am also always a little relieved when it is over and I am back in my own space. Both things are true at the same time. That is just how I am built, and a good friend understands that without taking it personally.
So when people ask about making friends after 60, I am never quite sure what advice to give because my experience did not involve trying. It involved starting a knitting group fifteen years ago because I wanted to be around other people who knitted, showing up to Panera once a month with my project bag, and gradually discovering that one of the people who kept showing up was someone I did not want to stop knowing. The friendship built itself out of shared lunches and yarn problems and small projects that turned into bigger ones.
The chairs were just a summer. A phone call about some wicker furniture someone had left on a curb, a yes that came easily, a bunch of weeks showing up with whatever I had made that week. And now there is a completely unhinged yarn-covered chair in my bedroom with a cat on it, and every time I look at it I think of her.
That is not nothing. That is actually quite a lot.
Looking for more stories about the friendships and adventures that sneak up on you? Read about the sisters trip that started with a Donny Osmond poster and ended in Las Vegas, or how my husband and I Signed Up for a Bob Ross Class and Didn’t Hate Each Other After.
