I have not gotten much crochet done these past three days, it seemed I had encountered a crochet impasse.

As I was working on the Peter Max alpine hat, I noticed that there is something about the hat I am making that is not quite turning out as I would expect. So I went back and read the pattern, and then re-read it, and in my reading and re-reading, I gave a great deal of thought to a particular turn of phrase that I had previously both noted and then glossed over.

After some reflection, I have a suspicion that this detail is what is causing me the anomalous results.

Ideally, I would have simply gotten out a light color yarn and begun working the hat in a solid color to sort out the problems, but instead, I got sidetracked by another tangentially crochet-related project, so I pretty much have no new crochet to show for the past three days.

Zero. Zip. Zilch.

But while I did not generate any new crochet these past few days, I did get some good news about a previously finished project.

As my very long-time readers may recall, in November of 2012, I wrote a blog post about my great-uncle Pete, a relation whose existence my mother had not known of until I unearthed his name several years earlier in the 1920 U.S. Census.

He had, in the intervening years, remained a mystery until that fateful November when I managed to learn a very little bit about his life here in the United States.

What I did not know at the time was that he returned to his home in Serbia, remarried, and had four children. Eventually, those children (long since grown) had prevailed upon a family friend who often worked in the United States to track down “Nikolai’s children,” of whom my mother is one.

By the time the family friend has made his way from Los Angeles to Fresno, California, and spoken to people in the church community who knew my grandmother and my grandfather, my mother was the only remaining child of Nikolai’s, her brother, my Uncle Don, having passed away in January of 2012.

Since that time, however, my mother and her cousin Bosa have on occasion Skyped, and it was for Bosa that I made this shawl:

It was a labor of love, and it was with some trepidation that I packed it up and shipped it off across this ocean late this past December. When the clerk at the post office asked me if I wanted additional insurance, I said no.

I knew that I could not place an accurate dollar value on a piece of crochet that embodied so many hopes and so much love. The shawl is much more than a garment, and it contains elements of the past and the present and the future on which it is impossible to place a value.

So it was with some relief this weekend that I learned that the shawl had arrived safely and that Bosa was very very excited to have received it. The message relayed to me was that she has never in her life had anything with such beautiful colors.

It has been more than a century since my Great-Uncle Pete began the journey that brought him to these shores and then back to his homeland, and now this shawl, in it’s own way, is a thread that runs through the time and distance that both separates and joins us.