I got there a little early for a doctor who is always late because he takes the time to listen to his patients, which I like, and pulled out needles and the purple baby alpaca I’d grabbed on my way out the door. I’d had a project already started to try to get done by Thursday, but somehow it just..wasn’t..it. But purple was. So.
Doodling around, let’s see, cast on 33, take it from there, I was several inches into it, wearing the shawl on the cover of my book, wearing the socks that Michelle knit me, when another woman not much older than me checked in. (Wait, I’m 50, I might look that old too… I tend to forget that…) Now, when you’re sitting in cardiology, it’s fairly striking when someone younger than the average clientele comes in–but it was my knitting she was drawn to as she sat down by me.
On a whim I’d brought mine in a Purlescence bag rather than one of my knitting bags. She told me she was a knitter too. She hadn’t heard of that store and wanted to know what the place was like.
My mind glanced briefly back towards the owner of another shop who’d once asked me, “How are you?” rather warily as I’d walked in her door. Someone who has seemed to me fearful of what life might be capable of: who, a few months before that moment, had suddenly come upon me waiting at the elevator at Stitches in a wheelchair and with no preliminary conversation, had simply exclaimed, “It’s not fair!” like a small child and had rushed away while I was going, huh?
“Do you want to know?” I shot back.
“No.”
Well, that’s honest, I thought, and answered, truthfully on the non-health side of things, “I’m fine.”
Coming back to the moment, I told my fellow patient, “They have a great selection. And also this: I had a shawl on display there, and came in asking to have it back after my daughter-in-law’s uncle had a brain tumor and went into a coma; I wanted to get one to his wife quickly.
Whereupon Kaye, one of the owners, not only gave it to me, she took an expensive, beautiful, handmade shawl pin, put it in my hands, wrapped my fingers around it, and asked me to give it to Barbara too. Someone she had never even heard of before.”
The woman went, wow.
And then I told her, “And last January I was in the hospital. The owners of Purlescence gifted me with two skeins of a buffalo-blend yarn, which cost something like $50 apiece, as a get-well card.”
Her eyes got even bigger.
“They are NICE people,” I told her. “Just the best.”
That being true, I thought I would repeat here what I told my fellow knitter in that waiting room today. I wish that all yarn stores could be like the one that I get to go to. I know how lucky I am.
I could have gone on and on about how they attract good people like themselves, (that’s just for a start), but my name was called.
I so hope that woman shows up at Purlescence sometime when I’m there! She would fit right in.
To Nathania, Sandi, and Kaye: you create much good in this world. I am blessed to know you and have you nearby. I just wanted to say publicly, thank you.