Socks of the Sun

The first light of morning always found Nani before anyone else in the house did.
Not because the sun favored her — though some would swear it did — but because she rose quietly, as if waking a sleeping world required gentleness. She would sit by the window, knitting needles tapping in a rhythm older than any clock, her yarn glowing gold even before the sky agreed to brighten.

No one understood why she insisted on knitting socks. “Scarves would be easier,” her granddaughter Mira once said, watching her from the doorway.
But Nani would only smile, her fingers moving with the surety of someone stitching memory into matter.

“Scarves keep the cold away,” she answered. “Socks bring you to where a day begins.”

Mira didn’t understand, not then.

The first pair she received was on the winter after her mother’s passing — soft, warm, threaded with a golden thread thin as sunbeams. When she slipped them on, the world around her softened. Her breath caught; light flickered behind her eyelids. And suddenly she wasn’t standing in her quiet, grieving bedroom anymore.

She was six years old again.

Her mother stood next to her on the rooftop, wrapped in a shawl, holding a cup of tea that fogged the cold air. The sunrise they watched that morning glowed like a blooming flower — gold, then rose, then fire. Mira could feel her mother’s hand brushing her hair aside. She could smell the faint cardamom in the steam. She could hear her mother humming, the tune she had forgotten she remembered.

And just as the sun crowned the horizon, Mira blinked — and the memory dissolved, leaving behind warmth where sorrow once settled.

She went to Nani in tears, and the old woman held her tightly, as if she had been expecting this return.

“It worked,” Nani whispered. “The sunrise always knows its way back.”

After that day, Mira began paying attention.

She watched how Nani chose yarn not by color but by mood — ochre for tenderness, amber for courage, pale peach for forgiveness. She noticed the quiet way Nani closed her eyes before each stitch, as if reciting a verse only she could hear. The socks she knitted were not garments; they were invitations. Maps. Keys.

Each pair held a sunrise from some chapter of Nani’s long life:
— the morning her first child was born
— the dawn she left her childhood village with nothing but courage and a cracked suitcase
— the golden sky she saw the day she learned to stand alone again after widowhood

Every sunrise had shaped her. Every stitch carried the story forward.

When Nani’s hands grew slower, Mira began to knit beside her. Not well — not gracefully — but earnestly, which was what mattered. Yarn tangled. Needles clacked without rhythm. But every so often, when the room was quiet, Mira felt something warm pulse through the thread, as if sunlight itself paused to listen.

One spring morning, well after the apricot tree had bloomed outside the window, Nani placed her half-finished knitting in Mira’s lap.

“It’s your turn,” she said. “You must choose which sunrise comes next.”

Mira stared at the open sky through the window, imagining the woven morning she would one day pass down. She thought of her own beginnings — the dawn she decided to leave home, the dawn she found love again, the dawn she realized grief didn’t erase memory; it preserved it.

She picked up the needles.

Outside, the horizon lifted its first breath of gold.

Inside, the thread glowed.

And in that soft shimmer, Mira finally understood:
Sunrises were not just moments in time.
They were stories — and she was learning how to write them with yarn.