As was a child, I often spent at least a week or two at my grandmother’s house during the summer, and on at least a couple of occasions, I was at her house when I came down with a cold.

I was reminded of this as I sorted through boxes this past week. While looking to see what was in a large plastic bag in a broken down cardboard box, I found a down filled, satin trapunto quilt. It was one of the coverings that had graced the bed where I slept whenever I went to my grandmother’s house, and when I had the misfortune to get sick at my grandmother’s, she would bundle me up in a wool blanket topped off with the very down filled quilt I discovered in my sorting.

Her strategy seemed to be to smother whatever summertime illness I had in blankets. After several August days under covers meant for December, I would successfully purge whatever had ailed me and be sent outdoors to play. As I emerged victorious from each illness, my grandmother saw no reason to change her methods.

The past few days I have been battling a cold, and while it is a spring rather than summer cold, as often happens in such instances, I have more things to do and less energy to do them, but today, after dispensing with the tasks that absolutely, positively had to get done, I finally had a moment to sit and take stock of my crochet.

The first thing I worked on was the Easter bunny crochet basket. I had gotten the ears attached, but there was still a bunny face to be embroidered and a Romanian point lace cord handle to be secured.

Working slowly — the only pace permitted by my cold — I did get the basket done:

and because I was physiologically incapable of working in a hurry, I made fewer mistakes in the embroidery than I would have had I been working at my usual pace.

This efficiency of slowness did not, unfortunately, work as well with the Frankston crochet market bag.

The first six rows of the gathering for the second side of the bag was completed without incident, but I quickly tired of reading the directions for the subsequent rounds, and as the first round went well despite not reading the directions thoroughly, I did the same for the second round.

I was midway through the third (and final) round when I realized that whatever I was doing, it wasn’t quite right. So I went back over the directions, found my error, and frogged all the way back to the seventh stitch of the second round. This time, however, I crocheted the last two round correctly, albeit rather slowly:

By then, my dog was ready for me to call it day and use what energy I had to walk him. As for the cold, I will be glad when it is finally gone, but the truth is part of this day is somehow stitched into the fabric of these pieces, and they are joined not only to this day, but to a long ago day in August when my grandmother bundled me up against the elements doing what she could to keep me safe; one blanket at a time.