Bucking my usual tendency to overdo at Christmas, I gave each of my children one gift this past season: a crocheted wall hanging.
These were not Etsy-worthy specimens, mind you. These were rudimentary swaths I'd made, hung with crooked twigs instead of polished dowels, scattered with beginner's lumps and bumps and bits of wayward yarn poking through each misshapen piece.
I'd never knit or crochet before. Although I come from a long line of women who sew, although I once spent 20 years making a quilt by hand, knitting and crocheting intimidated me as perfectionists' crafts.
But then, immobilized in the weeks before Thanksgiving with a severe groin pull I thought would never heal, I came across an article about the accessibility of crocheting. Crocheting is easy to learn, the article said. Unlike with knitting, only one hand is required to hold the sewing implement. Most of all, with its ease of correcting mistakes, crocheting is "forgiving."
It was this word that stuck with me, as, using a YouTube tutorial for guidance; I first stitched a long skinny strip with gray yarn until the skein ran out.
People asked me what I was making.
"I'm not sure," I said, a little sheepish, a little euphoric.
Into November, I sewed, freestyle, never with a pattern. Maybe one day I'd be interested in precise design. For now, I simply wanted to feel myself sewing, as the leaves changed outside my window and my leg slowly knit itself back together, as then came the bigger reason the universe must have drawn me to yarn: The chronic, deadly leukemia I'd held off for 10 years had come to roost, in life-threateningly low platelets and red-blood cells.
Headed out the door to the emergency room and eventually to the big-city hospital, I grabbed my phone and my yarn, and as I waited for the doctor, I sewed.
As much as friends and family and the generosity of other people's blood, it was the free flow of yarn that saw me through. Through that first transfusion and nine more days of blood drips, observation and uncertainty, I sewed. I fell asleep with yarn warm in my hands and woke, ready to sew, the soft texture of wools and acrylics passing through my fingers mindfully, yet mindlessly at the same time, my eyes at once on the machine displaying my vital signs and then back to the color running through my fingers like a river that has no end. When visitors asked what they could bring, I asked for yarn. I sewed with lavender and orange, variegated blue and green, deep mustard yellow and burgundy.
I got better. I went home with orders to return to the cancer center three times a week for blood checks. Still, always, I sewed, as I waited to hear numbers, as I watched platelets drip into my arm, until at some point, at least at this point, I didn't need new blood anymore. I still needed to keep going back for checks into the new year. I still needed to go home and rest.
Even as Christmas loomed, I did both. I got stronger, my lab work reading better than it had in years. And I sewed.
My children reminded me this was one Christmas when I should do nothing to prepare for the holiday, including buying gifts, which I knew would be hard for me.
And then it dawned on me.
Secretly in my room, I began to piece together all those bits of stitching and to add more yarn where needed. I got myself to the craft store and the photo shop, where I bought muslin and fabric markers and printed out photos to glue to the back of each hanging. Out for a walk in the woods one day with the kids, I collected sticks.
On Christmas morning, I presented one gift of love to each of my children, and even my husband, from whom I am separated, after which I continued to stitch anew, knowing a little more about why I am sewing, but still not what.
I think now, this time, as I continue to sew one color to the next and the next and the swatch grows bigger than my lap, as my improving health defies the odds with still no guarantees of anything, it must be a blanket.
This is despite the fact that the piece is neither a rectangle, nor flat like a blanket should be.
Those, of course, are all the things it isn't.
What it is, among other things, is a cornucopia, of umpteen colors and textures of my personal choosing, and a metaphor for letting things unfold as they will.
"Wow! What are you making?" a nurse gushed as she scurried past me in the hall where I was waiting for blood to be drawn last week.
"I think maybe a blanket?" I said tentatively, holding my creation to the light, always seeing it for the first time.
"It looks like a work of art to me," she said, both of us smiling now, as she returned to her patients, and I, to the lesson of trusting what comes.
