The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward
The Thursday Errand
The caps started nineteen years ago, and I will tell you the whole of how later, because that part I did not fully understand myself until this past winter.
But here is what the Thursdays looked like, year in and year out, through two trucks and three dogs and a lot of Iowa winters.
Every Thursday morning Margie would have a grocery sack ready by the door, and in it would be soft knitted caps, the kind with no seam to rub a sore head, in every color yarn comes in.
She made them loose and gentle because, she told me, a person going through chemotherapy has a head that hurts and is cold all the time, and the hair is gone, and the cold gets right down into you.
We would drive the eighteen miles to Fayette County Memorial, and I would pull up by the side doors, and she would carry her sack up to the infusion floor.
That is where they give the chemotherapy, in a row of recliners with IV poles, and it is a cold room full of frightened people and the nurses who love them through it.
Margie would hand the caps to the charge nurse, a woman named Carol who was on that floor the whole nineteen years, and most weeks Margie would stay a while and sit with whoever wanted the company.
I waited in the truck. I want to be honest about that part. I did not go up. I thought it was her thing and I would only be in the way, a big quiet man taking up room in a hard place.
She never once made me feel bad about waiting in the truck. She would come back down with her sack empty and get in and say, well, that is done, and we would go on to the Hy-Vee and do the week’s shopping.
Nineteen years of Thursdays. Go ahead and figure it. It comes to right around four hundred caps, because some weeks she brought two and some weeks she brought ten, depending on how the winter went and how her hands felt.
The nurses kept a count, it turned out. Margie never did. She said counting was a way of being proud of yourself, and she did not want any part of that creeping in.
She just called it her Thursday errand, like it was picking up a prescription, and she did it until the week she could not lift the sack anymore.
That last year, I carried the sack to the door for her, and she carried it the last few steps herself, because she said the giving was the part that was hers to do, and she would do it on her own two feet as long as she had them.