The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward

And a woman she had never met in her life came down the row of chairs with a grocery sack, and stopped at her chair, and handed her a soft knitted cap, a green one, and then sat down with her for the whole length of the drip.

That woman was my Margie. Donna was the first one. The very first.

Nineteen years ago, the first cap Margie ever carried up to that floor went onto Donna Reinhart’s cold bare head, and Margie sat with her through it every Thursday for the worst of that year.

Donna beat it. She has been clear for nineteen years now. She still has that green cap folded in a dresser drawer.

And when Donna heard, this past November, that the woman who gave her that cap had passed away, she could not stand the thought of the Thursdays just stopping cold.

So she picked up the phone and called the only two other women she knew who could knit, and the three of them met in the family room the very next Thursday, and they started it up again, so that there would not be one single week when some frightened person in a cold chair did not get a soft cap put into her hands.

By the time I walked in with the basket in January, there were six of them in the circle, and the sack by the door was full to the top.

The errand had never once stopped. Margie had carried it for nineteen years, and the first person she ever carried it to had picked it right up and carried it on, and not one of them had thought to tell me, because none of them had ever known how to find the man who sat waiting out in the truck.