A is for...

Welcome to my new Friday feature. Every Friday until we hit Z, I will share something about myself that starts with whatever letter of the alphabet we're on. Bit of a change from the same old same old, and I thought it would be fun. So here we go.

A is for Afghan.

My mother crocheted me this afghan when I was a little girl. We were living in Massachusetts at the time, and I had a yellow room. Not a nice pale yellow, or a soft butter yellow, but BRIGHT YELLOW. The walls had a flowery sort of wallpaper on them that I helped my mother hang. It had been her bedroom when she was a girl, and underneath the old wallpaper we pulled off was this pesto bismol pink wall. Just one. And in the middle of that wall was a big painted heart with my mother and father's names. I remembered thinking that when I grew up, I wanted to be in love like that. I didn't know any better, but that is a story for another day. Anyhow, back to the bedroom. I kept this afghan on my bed. It's big enough to fit a twin size bed, and I loved it from the very first.

When I got older, and we had been living in NH for many years it found itself on the back of one of our couches. I'm not sure how it got to be there, but it was OK. I would pull it down when I wanted to snuggle and be warm, and that was just the way it was. My mother was mortified on the day I moved out when I told her I wanted to take it with me. "That ratty old thing?" she said.

That ratty old afghan is the only thing I have that my mother made just for me. It is old, and pilly.It has a hole in it from the dog's nails pulling on the yarn. It has pulls from where it gets caught on the staples in the apple basket that I keep it in. The boy jokes that it could hardly keep me warm with all that open work. But I don't care. It does, and I love it. More now than when I was a kid, because I know first hand how many hours my mother must have put into it. Did she work on it at night when the house was quiet and everyone had gone to bed? Did she work on during those lonely weeks when dad would go hunting with his buddies in the winter? Could she ever imagine how much it would come to mean to me later on in life? I don't know. But it's my favorite afghan, and I plan to keep it forever.