The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

“I asked her once if she would teach me too. I was twenty-nine. She laughed and said I had hands like a hummingbird, too quick, and that some people just are not knitters. She meant it kindly. She said it kindly. But she never asked me again, and I never asked again either.”

I did not remember that. I truly did not. Grandma Holm could say a thing like that and forget it before the coffee got cold.

“And every Christmas for twenty-six years,” Kim said, “you have handed out scarves and hats and those little ornament mittens for the tree, and everybody goes on and on, and I bring a store-bought cheese ball. And I stood there that morning looking at those bins, sixty pairs, and something ugly in me just said, they’re only yarn.” She finally looked up at me.

Her eyes were wet. “I heard myself say it. I knew it was mean while it was coming out. And then I put them under the table where I didn’t have to look at them, and I forgot, and I told that young mother no.”

I reached over and put my hand on her wrist. It was the first time I had touched Kim on purpose in maybe twenty years, other than a hug at a funeral.

“Kim,” I said. “Grandma Holm was wrong about you.”

She laughed, a wet little laugh. “You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. You poured thirty-two candles in your garage all summer, in that heat. I’ve seen your hands work.”

She pulled the grocery bag over and opened it. Inside were three skeins of wool, the same heather gray I use, and a pair of size seven needles still in the cardboard.

“I drove to the yarn shop in Bemidji on Wednesday,” she said.

“I didn’t know what to buy. The lady helped me. I want you to teach me. I want to make one pair. Just one. If I can do one, I’ll make more. And I want them to go where yours went.”

I looked at that bag for a long time.

Then I got up, went to the living room, and came back with my knitting basket.

We cast on that night. Forty stitches, a child’s size six, because a small mitten is the kindest place to learn.

Her first row was so tight I could not get the needle through it, and she ripped it out and tried again three times before she got it loose enough.

Grandma Holm was wrong about the hummingbird, but she was right that Kim’s hands were quick. By the second Thursday, Kim had a cuff.

By the third, she had the thumb gusset, and she cussed at it once under her breath and then apologized to me, and I laughed so hard I had to set my own knitting down.

Dave came up from the basement around nine o’clock each of those Thursdays, poured himself a cup of decaf, looked at the two of us at the table with the lamp on and the wool between us, and went back down without a word.

Later he told me it was the best thing he had seen in that kitchen in years.

The mitten tree was Kim’s idea. She brought it to the council herself, the second week of December.

There is a little artificial spruce that has stood in the corner of the narthex every Advent since before I was married. Kim asked if, instead of the paper ornaments, we could hang mittens on it.

Hats and scarves too. Anybody could knit one and hang it, and anybody who needed one could take it. No sign-up sheet. No asking.