Jan Mordenski

Even after darkness closed her eyes my mother could crochet. Her hands would walk the rows of wool turning, bending, to a woolen music. The dye lots were registered in memory: appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan, the stitches remembered like faded rhymes: pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell. Tied to our lives those past years by merely a soft colored yarn, she’d sit for hours, her dark lips moving as if reciting prayers, coaching the sighted hands.