Because what fell into my palm was a little cedar spool, about the size of a thimble, with a lock of hair wound around it under a bit of tissue.
Fine hair. Almost white. The kind babies have.
We had a son in October of 1989. He lived four hours. His name was Peter and he is in the ground at Bethel Chapel under a stone the size of a book, and in thirty-six years my wife and I said his name out loud to each other maybe a dozen times, because we were young and nobody told us how, and then we were not young anymore and it was too late to learn.
Eleanor knitted him a blanket that summer. Gray wool, because we didn’t know. She finished it in August.
He never used it. It went in a hatbox on the top shelf of her closet and stayed there thirty-five years, and I knew it was up there the entire time and never once looked at it.
She took it apart. That’s what the scarf is. She unraveled that blanket stitch by stitch, washed the yarn, wound it, and knitted it into a scarf for me, and knitted his hair into the fringe where a man would find it with his thumb someday.
Wound around the spool with the hair was a strip of paper cut narrow to fit:
“It was a blanket for a baby who never got cold. Now it’s for you, and you can carry him around in the weather like you always wanted to. Thirty-five years is long enough for it to sit in a box.”
I said you didn’t have to go to any trouble, meaning the opposite, and I put it in a drawer.
She caught my tone. She always caught my tone, and this time she did not say one word back, and six weeks later she was gone in her sleep and I never got to know what I’d done.
The coat I bought her is in the closet with the tags on.
I wear the scarf. Every day it’s cold enough and some days it isn’t. I have been asked about it twice and both times I said my wife made it and left it there.
I went out to Bethel Chapel in November for the first time since about 2011. It took me a while to find the stone because the grass had grown over the corner of it.
I sat down on the ground next to my son wearing his blanket.
Thirty-six years and it took a scarf with a dropped stitch or two to get me out there.