She wore her blue cardigan almost every day. She had ordered the blue yarn in the summer of 2024, the night Kamala accepted the nomination for President. It arrived a few days later, and she opened the box quickly but carefully, and happily sighed as she squished the blue merino sport yarn in her hands. The manufacturer had named this particular blue “denim”, but she thought it was so much more vibrant, so much more intense than her old jeans or her dad’s overalls. It was a blue hard to describe, though – maybe the blue of Lake Superior? The blue you see intermixed with the purple mountain majesty of the Rockies? Maybe blueberries? For sure, she saw in the squishy blue yarn the hope all knitters have upon starting a new pattern, a new project, a new era. She had also ordered three skeins of thin blue mohair (very demure, very feminine) to hold with the merino, as was popular with knitters that year. She pulled her #5 needles out of her knitting bag and cast on a swatch; it was a joy to watch as the two yarns melded into a fluffy blue square.
She took her sweater project everywhere with her that fall,
knitting not only at home, but at football games, waiting rooms, in the car as
she waited for trains to pass and of course, to her knitting group at her
favorite little coffee shop downtown.
First the collar appeared, then the raglan increases at the shoulders and
then the body of the sweater took shape.
On October 1, Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, after finishing
the ribbing at the waist of the sweater, she went back and picked up the stitches
for the right sleeve, then a few days later, the stitches for the left sleeve. She dampened it, then carefully blocked the
sweater on thick towels on her bed, shaping it so that it appeared more like a
garment than a blue octopus. Then she
sewed on the pearl buttons, put on the sweater and went out to vote. Early. She wore the sweater on November 5th
in anticipation, and on November 6th in celebration and almost every
day since in remembrance.
She wore it through the turbulence, then through the complex
time of coming back together, then in
the time of peace that came from heartfelt – sometimes angry – discussions and truth. She patched one of the elbows carefully with
some soft red wool cut like a heart. She
replaced buttons, scolding herself for not taking more time to sew them on
correctly the first time, but then reminding herself how excited she had been
to finally have it completed. She wore
it to vote again in 2026, then 28, 30 and 32; she liked the nice round numbers
of election years. She wore her blue
sweater and sometimes voted for Republicans, if she believed that the Republican woman would be
best for local schools, her congressional district or the US Senate, which once
again worked across the aisle – so much more “all of us” than the “us vs. them”.
She wrote in her will that she would like to be buried in
that first blue sweater (over her pajamas)
and would like her daughters and granddaughters to
wear their blue sweaters to her funeral; she had knit a blue sweater with pearl
button for each of them. She had knit
blue sweaters for friends, for charity and even one for Gwen Walz, a woman who
knew the power of a good cardigan in a chilly room.
She became known in town as the old lady in the blue cardigan, and that was ok with her.
She
was warm. She was comfortable. She was full of joy.
Peace.
