The doorbell rang the day after. It was our longtime UPS guy, holding the box in his hands, standing still on my doorstep, actually waiting for me to open the door so he could hand it to me in person.
It took a second for the concept to echo around my brain. Doorbell. The UPS guy? A box? Normal life? Somehow, that all seemed so very far away, but there he was, needing the human contact of seeing me receiving it from him. Making it personal. He knew I’d be home; my car was in the driveway. We both stood there in suspended animation for maybe two seconds, broken finally by my saying “Thank you,” as I received the box from him.
We’d both needed that moment.
There had been an online vendor selling merino lambswool/angora blended into an ultrathin yarn on a cone, very soft; as is, I’d probably never use it, but what I did was to wind half of it off, then two-ply it on my spinning wheel. Two-ply the two-plies. Wash the resulting four-ply yarn roughly in hot then cold water to felt the strands together, and knit it up into an afghan for a Christmas present.
For my brother and his wife, who taught high school in New Jersey. Where a terrible number of the children had lost a parent in the Towers the day before John the UPS guy handed me that box, some of them both parents. My brother himself had been on the subway: he’d called home to say, “Mom. Dad. My subway was late. I’m okay.”
The enormity of it all was not something to dissipate anytime soon, and I knew, as I picked up my needles once my yarn was spun, dried, and ready to go, that I needed to keep it very simple. I needed comfort knitting. I needed it to be something I could knit without its requiring much attention out of me.
It wasn’t till I was very nearly done that I spread it out, with its 7×1 ribbing, and then it massively hit me: I’d been knitting a representation in yarn of one of the Towers, with not a clue I’d been doing so. To wrap them and comfort them in softness and love from me.