Don’t miss the caption on that first picture. And hey, Lene, that stalk to the left? That’s the second one from your bulb.

There were a few years way back when where my knitting needles were on an extended vacation. But I did do a lot of smocking back then: I bought a pleater to gather up the fabric, which I then embroidered over to make fancy outfits for my babies and for my daughters for awhile longer.

When my youngest boy was just starting to walk and talk, I got in the mood to make some more smocked baby dresses, even though at that point there were going to be no more baby girls in this family; we were done. I made three. It somehow felt important to do.

My oldest sister, whom I’d thought was done too, suddenly announced she and her husband were expecting; I waited, wondering, and, yes, she had a girl. Tadaah! I forget now who got the second dress–it’ll come to me–and the third one was the most important of all.

A foreign student at Stanford found out she was about to become a single mother. She was from a culture where you didn’t, didn’t, didn’t do that. EVER. She didn’t know if or how she could return to her home country or what to do next. She could probably never marry there now. But she decided she couldn’t possibly give up the daughter she loved for adoption–that was her child. No. My friend Renee, who found out about her, found out that she took the baby home from the hospital with only a shoebox for a crib, and Renee asked around at church and managed to round up some essential supplies for her and, we dearly hoped, a sense of emotional support as well.

And I had that smocked baby dress, brand new, to give her for her baby girl. Something to celebrate her birth. I sent it via Renee with a card with the message that I felt that every new child in this world deserves to be celebrated with something handmade with love just for them. And that it had been: I’d just had to wait to find out who that baby was, at the time I was making it, and now I knew. It had been for her.

Renee moved, and I never knew how life turned out for that woman and her daughter. She would be about 18 now.

So often, life is like that. We don’t get to find out. We only get to know we played a part that mattered at the time when it was most needed.