Symmetrical Celtic knotwork design

Your grandfather never drew a knot with one hand. He used two pencils, one in each fist, and started from the middle so both halves would come out the same, which the Harrow boys called foolishness at the Michaelmas fair the year he won the rope-walk prize. I have the drawing still. It is pinned inside the pantry door where the apples go, and the paper has gone soft with the orchard damp.

You asked in your last letter how he got the top and bottom knots to match when the centre was so much harder. He told me once that you do not work from the edges inward, you work from the crossing outward, and every loop answers the one opposite. I thought it was the sort of thing men say to sound clever until I watched him do it on the back of a seed catalogue in August, the wasps drunk on the windfalls outside and the light going amber across the table.

The week after, the south wall of the top orchard came down in the gale and the pickers were stranded on the ladders. Your grandfather took the spare rope, tied a figure of his own making around the trunk of the old Bramley, and sent the lads up in pairs, one going up while the other came down. Nobody fell. When I asked him why it held, he tapped the drawing and said it was the same knot twice, mirrored, so the strain had nowhere to go but round.

Keep it. Eat the Bramleys before the wasps do.

Love, Nan