One winter afternoon, I arrived at her house and found her sitting beside the heater.
She looked at my shoes.
Then she frowned.
“Your feet are freezing.”
“They’re fine.”
“They’re not fine.”
She disappeared into another room.
A few minutes later, she returned carrying a pair of ugly green knitted socks.
She threw them at me.
“For you.”
I looked at them.
“They’re terrible.”
“I made them.”
I immediately stopped joking.
“Oh.”
“Put them on.”
I did.
They were too big.
One had a crooked stripe.
The other was even worse.
But they were warm.
And somehow, that mattered more than anything I’d owned before.
Part 5 — We Started Talking
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