Crochet Comfort

At five years old, most children have wild imaginations, but learning complicated hobbies generally isn’t on their radar. They may think about digging to China through the sandpit or flying to Mars armed with only a cape like a superhero. Then, there is me. I was that kid who wanted to know about when and where the dinosaurs roamed and how old Saturn is. I was also that kid that wanted to learn to create things.

Enter crochet. It was a cold, dark late-autumn night in November of 1989. The family had gathered in my grandparent’s living room to stay warm in front of the propane heater. I sat in a folding chair since the main seating was occupied by the adults in the family. A basketball game played on the television, but it was mainly background noise drowned by the family chatter. Yep, I was bored.

I looked at Grandma and saw her with yarn wrapped in between her fingers on one hand and a long thing with a hook at the end of it in the other hand. Rhythmic movements linked the yarn together to add to what looks like a blanket in her lap.

I walked over to her, kneeled on my knees in front of her and just watched. After a while, Grandma asked, “Frances, what are doing?” I replied, “Watching. What’s that thing?”

“What’s what thing?” Grandma responded.

“The metal thing in your hand,” I responded. Being five years old, half sentences were a way of speech for me.

“It’s a crochet hook.”

Curiously, I asked her, “What do you do with it?”

She proceeded to show me how to wrap the thread between the fingers in one hand, hold a crochet hook in the other hand, and use the hook to loop the yarn once more and pull the thread through the two loops that had sat on the hook. I had just seen her make a single crochet stitch, and I wanted to learn how to crochet!

My grandmother had plenty of yarn and crochet hooks to spare. So, I picked up some yarn, sat right in front of her on my knees, and carefully looked at how the yarn was placed in between the first two fingers and in between the last two fingers of one hand, crochet hook in the other. I watched as she looped the hook around the yarn and pulled it through and began to try it myself. I learned the basics of crochet at five years of age as I sat in front of her that night.

Grandma taught me that a good crochet kit will have a variety of crochet hooks sizes, more yarn for the project than you will need and a dedicated pair of crafting scissors, as well as a back-up pair of scissors in the junk drawer in case the crafting scissors get misplaced.

Crochet quickly became an excellent form of therapy for me.

Between the ages of 10-14 years, my stepmother had left and come back ten times over those four years. She also had three babies in that time. Even though only one of them belonged to my father, I considered them all my siblings. I was exceptionally proud of having my first little brother in 1994. I nicknamed him Bub. Yet, I was considerably worried about the second brother, born around Christmas 1995. He had open-heart surgery around his first birthday. Around his second birthday, he was fitted with a pair of foot braces to keep him from walking on the sides of his feet. My sister and I had lived at our grandparents, away from our father for several years at that point, and our brothers also got to stay with us for several days over the summer of 1998. Not knowing whether our family would stay together and wanting to offer some comfort, I crocheted a red baby afghan with blue trim, and I gave it to the younger brother when our father and stepmother picked them up. I saw them only once after that summer, and then their mother left our lives for good, taking them with her.

It was another twelve years before my sister and I reconnected with Bub, and it was another two and a half years when we had our first in person visit with him. At the age of 18, Bub flew from Spokane, Washington to the Ozarks to meet his father and his father’s side of the family. I recalled the summer of 1998 and their visit and the red afghan with blue trim that I had given the younger brother. Bub’s response was clear and heartwarming, as he told me, “He still has it! He sleeps with it every night.”

It meant the world to me to know the love and energy that I put into creating that little comfort blanket was being appreciated even 15 years later!

Enter 2020, the year of the Covid lockdown. Need I say more? I will say this, though. Foster children need every bit of comfort they can get. Grandma’s House, the local children’s foster group home, received a gift from me around Christmas. It was a baby-blue, twin-bed sized afghan left in a lawn chair outside their front door. I called the next day just to make sure they had received it. The advocate said that it was beautiful and well-appreciated. I had only one condition: Give it to the child or teenager who they felt was the most in need of a comfort blanket.