A woman sat knitting at a window in an old folks home in Indiana. The place reeked of old urine, but the people were nice enough. They tried.
The old woman was blind. She'd been knitting all her life, and gloves and scarves and hats and mittens fell from her needles with great regularity. The problem was, no one wanted the gloves and hats she made. She thought they were being sent to Bosnia then Chechnya and Tibet, and it pleased her to think she was helping someone far away stay warm. The truth was that the aides at the home unravelled everything she knitted and rolled the yarn into balls which they returned to her. This day the woman was knitting a hat. She had been told the yarns she was using were purple, orange and white, but then the cleaning woman came in and said ``It would be nice if someone would get you some new yarn. That stuff is so worn out you can't even tell what color it was.''
The old woman was shocked. She put down her knitting and turned her face toward the light of the window which she could still perceive.
``All that work!'' she said, ``All that work just to keep me happy!''
She was thinking of the aides who so carefully unravelled and rewound everything she knitted.
The cleaning woman sat down for a minute.
``How do you do that?'' she asked.
``What?''
``That knitting. How do you do that?''
The old woman started showing the cleaning woman how to knit. It took a while. A man who had been a motor cycle dispatch rider in World War One joined the knitters. Soon needles were clicking all over the home. Many mangled and disreputable mittens and scarves were manufactured.
It was a woman with late Alzheimers who completed the first perfect glove. She died half way through the second one. It wouldn't have matched anyway. Family members contributed bright new yarn. By October there were enough things to have a Christmas Bazaar. There was excitement for a while. The smell of urine disappeared from the hallways and was replaced by the smell of cookies baking. Hot punch. A man who spoke no English had carved wooden whistles. There were rag dolls and teddy bears and strange wooden puzzles that didn't seem to come together. One of the aides did a pencil portrait of the blind old lady. It was quite good though everyone agreed it is hard to draw blind eyes.