THE COUSIN’S GIFT

Once upon a time, a young girl living in Vancouver sent her cousin a beautiful blanket, made in Scotland. It was as soft as Scottish thistledown, white as snow on the top of the Cascades and lacy like spider webs in the early morning sunlight.

When the baby girl was born, on January 25th, 1971, her mother wrapped her up in that wonderful blanket to take her home. In a few months, when the California sunshine made a blanket somewhat unnecessary, and the realities of a casual, crawl on the grass and in the dirt lifestyle would have destroyed the blanket, the young mother washed it carefully and placed it in a drawer.

Through moves around California, over the seas to Australia and back again, from house to house to sailboat, the blanket was packed along. It found a home at the bottom of a sweet scented cedar chest and was only taken out to show the baby, now a toddler, now a little girl, now a teenager, the lovely blanket given by a cousin that she knew only by name.

Time turned for another 22 years and on 8/31/93, the girl in turn became a mother. Her daughter was born in a Sacramento hospital, and when the infant was ready to go home, her mother wrapped her in that same lovely blanket. The grandmother had stitched some of the cobwebs back together and carefully washed it, then gave it gladly to her daughter to bring another child home to a life’s beginning. As the early months passed, the young mother folded the blanket up, putting it away in a drawer for that someday.

The blanket stayed safe through moves to the far north of California along the Mad River and the wild coast, then across the Continental Divide to the land that Daniel Boone kept wandering away from. Leaving Kentucky, the blanket was brought along to Texas and finally, in a wide circle, returned to central California. The baby raced her way through time and grew faster than her grandmother’s eyes could follow. In the way that time is measured by women, there came the moment when she was awaiting the birth of her child. Those who know these things told her that soon she would hold a son in her arms.

The woman who would soon be a grandmother opened her drawer and pulled out the blanket. Gently she laid it out and saw that time had been kind to the soft fabric. She threaded new needle with snowy white thread and began to reconnect the few strands of spider-floss that would help cuddle the baby boy. She talked to her mother, sharing the experience and the long thread of memory and time that the blanket represented. And that woman, who had once been a young girl awaiting her own child, could see the threads of binding that the blanket had become. It binds her to the land where she had been born, through her shared bond with her cousin, and it bound her to the future, to the face of a child she has not yet met, but who shares those ties with the women who brought him forth through the ages. It binds her to her cousin who made a chain of caring with a simple gift of a small white blanket.