The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery

At twenty-five past eight on the first Tuesday of October, I carried a cardboard box up the back stairs of Haven County Hospital, the way I have done on the first Tuesday of nearly every month for thirty years.

I take the stairs because of my knee and because the elevator smells like floor cleaner and old coffee. The box is a Folgers box, the kind with the lid that never fits. It held nine caps wrapped in tissue paper, each one no bigger than a teacup.

My granddaughter was somewhere on the other side of that second floor. I had not seen her yet, and I was walking a little faster than my knee liked.

Her name is Josie. She was born eleven weeks early, and I will get to that. What matters is that on Sunday night, after five weeks in a hospital in Wichita, they had driven her forty minutes home to our county hospital, and I had been told I could come on Tuesday for the first visit.

I was not planning to stop at the nursery desk. I was going to drop the box with Bev, the way I always do, and then go find my daughter.

I did not get that far.

Rosa Vega came out of the nursery doors while I was still ten feet from them. Rosa has worked that unit for twenty-four years. She is a small, square woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she walks like the floor owes her money.

That morning she was not walking like that. She came down the hall slowly, with both hands cupped in front of her, as if she were carrying a baby bird.

It was a cap. Cream colored, with a ribbed brim and a gathered crown.

“Marcella,” she said. “Before you go in.”

I said good morning. I said I had Bev’s box. I held it up, as though that explained me.

She did not look at the box. She held out the cap in the flat of her hand and said, “Would you look close at the yarn for me?”

I am a woman who has been asked many odd things in a hospital hallway, and I know when to do as I am told. I set the box on the radiator cover and took the cap from her.

I want to say how it is to hold one of those. I have made over three thousand of them, and every time I finish one I turn it inside out, check the ends, and turn it back. It weighs almost nothing. You can close your hand around it and lose it.

I held it up to the window at the end of the hall. The light came through the stitches the way it does through a screen door.

And in the cream, running through the strand every few inches, was a thread of pale green.

I knew it right away. I knew it the way you know your own handwriting on an envelope you do not remember mailing.