Since we were very young, Kathy and I have been creating stories. While we were children, we did them together, making up grand epics with our dolls, model horses, or sometimes with our kittens in the wildflower field. We pretended that we were orphans running away from a cruel orphanage; princesses with castles, millions of beautiful dresses and a stable full of Arabian stallions; or shepherdesses watching sheep (our kittens were the sheep). One time, we threw old blankets over some hay bales and pretended that we were Bedouins traveling the Arabian desert. We used lots of props, including our little baby brother who was either a whale or a patient with appendicitis in our hospital. With our Legos, our creativity knew no bounds. After we watched Fiddler on the Roof for the first time, we built the entire set and played the story. Well, almost all the story. I think a pirate ship made of duplex Legos with a Kleenex for sails somehow made its way in, but the point is, we were always telling some story or another to each other. As we grew older and left our toys behind us, this love for making stories began to translate into writing. By the time I was 15, I had written 4 books about the horse stories I had created and was beginning yet another set with my best friend, Elisha. Kathy was involved in this, more or less, because I trusted her opinion on my stories far above everyone else. This was the girl that read Dickens before she was 12, and she always could talk circles around me when it came to literature. But she never really took the time to set the stories she made up down on paper. Instead, she contented herself with writing in her diary and scribbling down bits of poetry in odd moments. The end result? I think Kathy ended up being a better writer than me. I don’t grudge her this; instead, I am very pleased to see her actually setting down some of those stories. It took me a while to convince her to let me post the follow short story, but I finally succeeded!
By Kathy L. Spangler
Every Tuesday morning Janey woke with the sun. She rushed out to the kitchen where Mama was making breakfast and shoveled pancakes in her mouth as fast as she possibly could.
“Janey dear, eat like a lady,” her mother scolded. But Daddy only smiled at Janey over the top of his newspaper. He understood going to Granny’s house.
When the car pulled in the driveway, Granny was waiting on the front porch, wrinkled and smiling. Janey ran up the steps two at a time.
Granny was a spinner. In the spring, when the farmers sheared their sheep, she bought entire fleeces as large as rugs to card into fluffy, fist-size rolags. Then she spun the rolags into soft yarn on the spinning wheel Great-Grandpa had made her when she was a young bride. Last of all she crocheted it into afghans for friends and neighbors. This was a part Janey could do. She watched and listened carefully as Granny taught her the different stitches.
“Granny, who are you making this afghan for?” she asked one afternoon as they carded a basket of crimpy red wool that had been newly dyed.
“I promised one to your mother long ago, once I found the perfect wool for it.”
Janey wrinkled her nose in thought. “How is the wool perfect? I don’t see anything so special about it.”
Granny’s eyes twinkled. “It has love in it.”
“What?”
“It’s a difficult thing to explain, but the moment I laid my eyes on this wool, I said to myself, ‘there’s love in this fleece,’ and since yarn spun with love is the most special yarn you can ever create, I decided it belonged to your mother.”
Janey twisted the wool between her fingers. She imagined the look on Mama’s face when Granny would give her a cozy snug afghan. She smiled. Granny was right; the wool was full of love.
“Granny, would you teach me how to spin?”
Janey stared doubtfully at the spindle in her hands. It looked like a wooden dowel pushed through the middle of a tire.
“Can I really learn to spin on this?”
“I did when I was your age.”
Granny stood up from sorting through her basket of leftover wool, tied a scrap of yarn to the dowel close to the wheel and wound it up the stick. “The large round part is the whorl and the stick is the shaft. You start spinning with the yarn, add the fiber to it and start drafting, just like you see me do on the spinning wheel.”
Janey plopped on the floor next to Granny’s chair as, under Granny’s skilled hands, the wool spun itself into the yarn, eventually becoming a new strand of yarn. It looked easy, but when Janey tried to draft the yarn herself she forgot to keep the spindle spinning. It unwound and dropped on the floor.
“Try again, Janey. All it takes is practice.”
In the weeks that followed, all Janey did was practice. At first her yarn was lumpy, nothing like what came off of Granny’s wheel, and sometimes her spindle fell to the floor with a thump. At night she lay in bed and gazed at the ceiling, thinking of the perfect wool and the joy in Mama’s face. But there was only grief in Mama’s face when Janey came in from playing one day.
“Mama, why are you crying?”
On the day of Granny’s funeral, Janey stood with her parents as the minister prayed. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she thought of all those Tuesdays her Granny would never share again. When at home she sat on her bed and cried. There would be no more visits to the farm. There would be no more chocolate chip cookies, and stories about Grandpa as a boy, or the time Daddy brought home a kitten in his coat pocket. She lifted her wet eyes and saw the spindle on her dresser. There would be no more spinning. She picked it up and twirled it, thinking of the perfect red wool, waiting alone in Granny’s empty house for her to come and spin it into a yarn full of love.
On Saturday, Daddy drove Janey to Granny’s house. They took a brown paper bag with them and emptied the basket of perfect wool into it. They snuck it in the house when Mama was out shopping and hid it in the back of Janey’s closet.
That whole summer Janey worked on Granny’s gift. She spun the tiny rolags into thin smooth strings and rolled them into balls. After that she plied them, three strings together, into a round yarn. Once all the yarn was plyed she wound it in a skein around her palm and elbow. Finally she washed it in warm water and draped it over a clothes hanger to dry. The yarn was finished, but Janey was not. She ran for her crochet hook.
It felt to Janey as if her secret project would never end. She was tired, and no matter how many afghan squares she added to her stack, the number she still had to make never seemed to lessen. It was with a sigh of relief that she laid them all out on her bedroom floor and threaded a large yarn needle to sew them together.
A few weeks later Janey got out of bed and went to the kitchen only to find Mama and Daddy gone, and the neighbor lady cooking breakfast. Between flipping pancakes the neighbor explained that a baby had come during the night, and Daddy would take Janey to the hospital that afternoon to see her.
When Daddy pulled up in the driveway, Janey was waiting on the steps with a worn paper bag in her arms. At the hospital she ran up the steps two at a time, but slowed down when she reached her mother’s room. Peeping shyly through the doorway, she saw Mama lying on the bed, tired but smiling.
“Come meet your new sister, Janey,” she whispered.
Janey crept close and saw a tiny baby cuddled in Mama’s arms. She had dark hair and a rosy red face.
“I think she’s a beautiful baby,” Janey smiled up at her mother.
“Mama, Granny has a present for you.”
