This is the first day in memory that I haven’t visited our new home. Instead I visited the mother of a friend who is in an assisted living facility and learning to crochet. (To be grammatically clear, the mother is in the facility, not the friend.) It’s 180 degrees from the hurry-up pace of trying to move. I got to Ruth’s around 10:30 this morning, strong steaming coffee for the two of us in hand. We chatted a bit and then got down to business.
Ruth is making a winter scarf for her daughter and has chosen, unintentionally, a most difficult pattern. I volunteered to help her do it, since I learned to crochet when my sons were little, back in the seventies, and have tackled various projects of various difficulty since.
One challenge to this particular pattern is that each of the 26 rows involved is different. So it’s hard to find a rhythm to sustain the entire project. This morning we worked on Row Six. I have no doubt Ruth will master this, for she is highly motivated; but I’m not sure we’ll have it done soon. Maybe it’s a winter scarf for a year from now.
In the meantime, I’m learning too. Learning that older people have various skills in spite of possible visible infirmities. Ruth uses a walker, but she grasps the concepts of fisherman’s crochet. Her fingers might struggle to do it, but that doesn’t mean her mind is struggling. She will persevere, and I’ll wait for a phone call that she’s finished Row Six. Then I’ll return, regardless of what’s happening with our moving project, and we’ll master Row Seven together.
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