Blanket Forgiveness

I meant well.

I knew the first year anniversary was coming up. I wanted to send her one of the many blankets I’ve knitted and keep on hand in the guest room closet. Each of them has a little leather tag that reads, “A Warm Hug.” That’s what you need when you’ve lost the love of your life. When you’ve just made it through The Year of Firsts. You need a warm hug. Actually, that’s only one thing you need, but I wanted to send it to her and let her know that I know.

Boy, do I know.

Except I have this problem with procrastination. I might need therapy to get to the bottom of this. Here’s the thing. I don’t like wrapping gifts, mailing letters or mailing boxes. I have actually written and addressed stamped letters that I never mailed. What is wrong with me? We’re talking stacks of Christmas cards, handwritten and sealed in envelopes, that I found in a drawer on the Fourth of July because I never mailed them in December. Since I didn’t finish writing all the cards I wanted to send, I didn’t end up sending any of them.

See? People like me keep therapists in business.

But my dear friend lives in Florida and, since I have no plans at the moment to drive back there, I had to mail my warm hug to her in a box. This required extra effort. I had to package it and tape up the box and address it and follow through by actually taking it to a UPS store.

I know, right? Blister producing, sweat dripping, muscle cramping effort. You'd have thought I was about to dig the Erie Canal.

Please understand. I really wanted to do this. But I knew who I was dealing with here. The person I was dealing with has a mysterious phobia about mailing stuff. So I prayed. I actually had to pray for motivation to follow through on my heart’s desire. Motivation that would turn out to be greater than the inclination to stare at a blanket on my shelf and wish I’d sent it when it mattered.

I am pathetic.

But God is not. He listens to weird prayers like that, and one afternoon motivation struck. I got up like a woman escaping a coma and found a box for a blanket and tucked in a handwritten card and taped it and labeled it and put on my shoes and drove it to a UPS drop off.

I was so happy! Not only did I get up off my keister and do something for someone I love, but I did it in a timely manner and it was on its way, just like that, flying off to Florida to surprise my heartbroken friend. A warm hug en route. I could hardly wait to hear when it arrived.

But.

You knew there would be one, right? I woke up in the middle of the night three days later with a terrible thought. Isn’t it weird when that happens? Why didn’t I get that terrible thought three days sooner in the middle of the day when I could do something about it?

I knit a lot of blankets because I can’t afford the kind of therapy that I really need. Knitting blankets is therapy for me. They also provide a rotating color palette for my living room. I’ve used and worn out a number of these homemade throws by now. Including one lovely green one that was folded on a shelf in my guest room closet in case I decided to repair the hole that appeared in the middle of it after a few months of use.

Oh.My.Gosh.

A cold sweat swept over me at three a.m. Which shelf did I take that blanket from? Why was it separate from all the other new blankets waiting in queue to be sent to someone else after another motivational prayer? Surely I didn’t send my grieving friend a pilled blanket with a hole in the middle of it that smells like my feet? As a surprise????

That’s a terrible surprise.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been nudged on the shoulder by God and brushed it off like it was a pesky gnat. That still, small voice that I’m learning to lean on now that I don’t have Rob’s quiet voice to question my sanity and decision making is often a little too quiet.

I know what you’re thinking. “You’re blaming God for this foul up?” You bet I am. I heard Him say, “Are you sure you put a tag on that blanket?” when I was about to seal the box. But I always tag my blankets. What He should have said was, “Inspect thine blanket for holeyness.”

I think God should have been more specific.

Lying in my bed that night, I hoped I was wrong. I hoped it so hard that I refused to search the other stack of blankets for a damaged one. I hoped when my friend texted the next week that my thoughtful gift had arrived that she would reassure me it was perfect because, after all, at that point this was all about me.

I have never been so embarrassed in my life. When I told a mutual friend what happened, and once she stopped laughing, she said through her tears, “You sent a homeless person blanket to your grieving friend?”

Yeah, I did. And it smelled like my feet.

I forewarned my Florida friend that she might be receiving a sub-par present from me and asked her to let me replace it if that was the case.

            You’re so crazy, she wrote. That’s one reason I love you. 

And when my worst fears proved to be true, and I couldn’t stop apologizing, she wrote this.

Let me put my gift together for you:

The card had a hummingbird. My grandmother loved them and had collectible hummingbird plates.
It was a knitted blanket. I still have a couple of different ones people have made for me. I love blankets.
It was green, like Mike’s soft fuzzy blanket.
It was from a dear friend.
It was from a friend that knows the pain and heartache of losing her spouse.
It was connected to many things in my life. It was so thoughtful, and brought memories along with it that you didn’t even know about.

Like I said, she’s a dear friend.

So, God’s answer to my prayer for motivation was interesting, because I have never been so motivated as I was the day I kept my promise and packaged up a NEW blanket and mailed that one to my friend, too. It had no holes, no body odors, no pilling. And she loved it.

It was one of those humbling times in life when, despite your best efforts, you screw things up. And yet, in the end, it all turns out beautifully. I don’t know what my friend ended up doing with the first blanket, but she really loved the blue color of the next one. It also arrived on another difficult day in her life, a day when a second warm hug mattered.

I’m just relieved that this one didn’t smell like my feet.