Something unexpected!

A few weeks back I was heading off to the Salvos where I work on Friday.

     “Don’t come home without beanies,” called Tony as I left.  “We need them for camping.”

     Tony and Kibby were heading to Koombooloomba Dam for the weekend and it was going to be cold, very cold.

     As soon as I walked in, I grabbed the only two beanies in the hat section.  One was chocolate brown, the other British racing green except neither one had the richness of their true colours.  They were severely pilled as if they had acute dandruff and they'd stretched so much I wasn't sure they'd stay on.

     Then something happened, something that could have featured in a not-so-sinister episode of Tales of the Unexpected.

     At morning tea time, Patricia Evans walked in with a box of beanies.

Patricia Evans and some of her beautiful beanies.

     “You can have them," she said, "and sell them.”

     Then she left to fetch more boxes and boxes of beanies she was donating to the Salvos.

     “Would you like a cup of tea,” I asked her when she’d lugged the tenth box up the stairs.

     “Oh, yes.” She dropped into a chair, breathless.  "And could I bother you for a glass of water?"

     How unexpected, I thought, eyeing the beanies I was going to buy for Tony and Kibby and everyone I knew who had a birthday in the year (except friends on TI).  But first, Patricia seemed too interesting to be true, to walk in, unannounced with hundreds of beanies on the very day I needed to buy two.  And there was something exotic about her looks.  I had half a cup of coffee to finish and a bit of time to yarn.

     Till she was ten, she grew up in the Amazonian jungle where her father worked with the UN.

     “You don’t call it jungle, anymore,” she said, “it’s rainforest now, apparently.”

     I asked if she had South American ancestors for her exotic looks.

     “Oh, no.  I’m a hundred percent Australian.”

     When she was ten her father moved the family back to Darwin so the kids could get an education.  Patricia now lives in Mossman and knits beanies in her spare time.

     “It’s a dying art,” I said, “knitting.  Young women just don’t learn those good old skills women handed down.”

     “Oh, I never knew how to knit anything,” she said.  “My daughter-in-law taught me.  And beanies are the only thing I can knit.”

     More of the unexpected!