There is someone there whose story is not mine to tell, but let’s just say that the hat I knit her awhile ago was both quite needed and, it turns out, better received than I had any idea: she told me how warm it kept her, how much she’d loved it all winter, that she wore it practically every day.
And that she’d lost it.
She was wearing a purple jacket as she was saying this and I knew in that instant that what I had would match it perfectly. The hat that had bugged me to finish it, that my elbow had yelled over, that had already taken three days when normally it would have been done in one, that I finally made myself just sit down and do after Anne’s box came so that it would be finished and I could be done with it and go on to Anne’s yarns (which I did). I cast off with both satisfaction and frustration: why had this commanded so much of my attention, at a gauge that’s painful right now, when I didn’t even have a recipient in mind.
Oh…!
“I just finished a purple one,” I told her, and her face lit up and she sat up a little straighter right then and there.
I handed her my phone at the Add Contact page so that I would know where to mail it and she wouldn’t have to wait till mid-February for the next meeting to get it. We do not live close to each other.
I got home from that meeting with just enough time to run in the yarn ends (oops–hadn’t done that yet, it was just a stash FO), drive to the post office, and get it in the mail before it was time to go get Richard.
Knowing some of the things she’s gone through, and knowing now how much what I’d made had meant to her, you bet she was getting another hat. And in a different color in case she ever finds the first one.
Man, that felt good.
The other thing she asked me?
To teach her how to knit.