The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery
I’ll tell you how I came to know it. But I have to start thirty years back, because otherwise none of this will make sense.
My name is Marcella Reed. I am sixty-eight years old. I have lived in Haven, Kansas, my whole life except for two years in Salina when Gene was in a training program for the grain trade.
Gene is my husband. He managed the Farmers Co-op elevator for thirty-one years, and he retired with a pocketful of pens that say Farmers Co-op on the side. He wears two hearing aids and uses neither of them when I ask him to take out the trash.
We have one daughter, Jenna, who is thirty-six, and now we have one granddaughter. For a long time I thought that was the whole list.
I started knitting caps in 1995, and I did not mean to.
There was a woman in our Methodist church named Ida Pruitt. She was in her eighties, and she ran what the hospital auxiliary called the cap table. It was a card table by the nursery door with a wicker basket on it, and every few weeks Ida came in with a grocery sack of knit and crocheted caps for the newborns.
Ida died that February. We held the service on a Saturday with the ground too hard to dig, so we waited until Monday to bury her.
At the lunch in the fellowship hall afterward, the auxiliary president, Mrs. Hollis, came around to the women of my circle holding a sheet of paper. It was Ida’s pattern, written out in pencil in Ida’s square hand.
“Someone has to keep the basket full,” she said. “Just until we find a permanent person.”
I was thirty-seven, with a five-year-old daughter just started in kindergarten and a job at the school lunchroom. I said I would do it just till spring.
That was thirty years ago. They never found a permanent person. I am the permanent person.
The pattern is simple. I cast on forty-four stitches on size five needles, four needles in the round, for the regular size. For the little ones, the babies the nurses call peanuts, I cast on thirty-six. A ribbed brim, an inch and a half of K-one, P-one. Then plain knitting for a few inches, then the crown, decreasing at six points until there are only a few stitches left. I thread the tail through them and pull it shut like the mouth of a drawstring purse.
It takes me an evening. I knit them at the kitchen table after supper with the television turned down, and I can do a whole cap during one game of Wheel of Fortune and a half hour of the news, if I do not look at my hands.
The hospital has rules about it, and they are good rules. The yarn has to be washable, soft, and plain. The caps go through the hospital laundry before they go on a baby. No ribbons, no buttons, no pompons, because a button is a thing a baby can swallow and a pompon is a thing that comes off.