The glass on my phone screen was cold under my thumb, the light from the display the only bright thing in the gray October kitchen. I was scrolling through the local community page, past notices for lost dogs and flyers for the high school bake sale, when a post from an old state archive account made me stop. It was a digital quiz about mid-century nursery styles, showing four small photographs of babies from decades ago.
In the third photo, a dark-haired infant lay on a knitted yellow blanket.
Well now, that yellow stitch is something I would know anywhere.
I pulled the phone closer to the window where the morning light struggled through the kitchen blinds. The blanket in the picture was not just yellow; it had a double moss stitch running through the center, framed by three uneven rows of seed stitch along the edge.
It was a mistake I had made late one Thursday night in September of nineteen seventy-eight, sitting in the armchair under the sixty-watt bulb in my mother’s living room.
My mother had told me the blanket was ruined in the laundry at St. Jude’s Hospital after my delivery, that they had thrown it away along with all the other things I had prepared. She told me there was no sense in keeping reminders of a baby who did not make it out of the delivery room.
I adjusted my silver watch strap, sliding the small metal tongue into the third hole, then back to the second, my skin pinching slightly under the clasp.
The infant in the photograph was very much alive, looking toward the camera with a quiet, bright gaze that seemed to reach straight through the screen.
I zoomed in until the yellow yarn turned into fuzzy blocks of light, searching for the top left corner where the blue border yarn had run thin. There it was, the clumsy spot where I had simply carried the yellow thread through to the edge to finish the row because I was too tired to go to the store for more blue.
The caption under the photograph did not give a name or a location, listing only a reference number from the county historical collection.
