I was sitting at my daughter's last soccer game of the season today covered with a stripped zig zag afghan. It has stripes of all different colors of yarns, perhaps leftovers from many other projects and its normally on my bed every night. My dear friend Liz gave me this afghan and I love it dearly. Before I took up crocheting (taught to me by this same Liz), I loved afghans and thought they were quite wonderful--but now the blanket takes on a whole other dimension. I've been sitting here tonight crocheting myself, putting in a few rows on an afghan I'm making for my brother's baby boy. He's not born yet, and my brother and sister-in-law live a world away in Mongolia. Every time I take it out, I am thinking about my brother, thinking about the baby and how much I can't wait to see what he looks like, and so forth. Nearly all of the things we wear, the things we sleep on and under, are shot out a million miles an hour by machines in a big factory and I think we loose a little something in the process--take for granted those things that should be special. I'm not finished with my little blanket yet and it already has 6000 individual stitches in it, I don't know how many hours, but 6000 stitches full of my thoughts and fears, my joys or my laughter while watching something on TV, even conversations with my brother on the phone while stitching it. And its only a little blanket, so when I think of how many stitches are in the afghan given to me by Liz, how many hours of her life are soaked into the yarn, how many hopes and fears and joys and laughter passed through her mind as the yarn passed through her fingers--it truly makes the afghan more than just a blanket, its a physical piece of meditation and I'll always cherish it.