12 Moments Where Kindness Found Lonely Hearts Before They Stopped Believing in Happiness


The first frost takes the tomatoes, but a crocheted garden on the windowsill lasts all winter. That’s the idea behind this season’s craft boom, where yarn and a hook turn garden vegetables, flowers and plants into handmade home decor. Crocheters are stitching whole succulent and cactus gardens, tiny vegetable baskets, radishes, eggplants and harvest fruits, plus garden-themed baby blankets and bouquets, and one embroidered autumn harvest has joined them for good measure. Many of these pieces were made as gifts, from flowers for a baby shower to a bouquet for a 90th birthday, and none of them need watering. Here are 16 new crochet designs and trends bringing the garden indoors this fall.
I spent 4 days in the hospital alone with no insurance. The woman beside me crocheted a cactus and gave me one. 3 weeks later, the bill arrived. $11,000. I nearly cried. Then the hospital called. “Someone called this morning and paid your balance in full.” I said who. “Your roommate, Dolores. She said you’d know her by the cactus.”
I’m not kidding, I sat on my kitchen floor for like ten minutes. I didn’t even know her last name. Dolores was 79, there for a hip, and we talked for 4 days straight about her husband’s awful chili and how scared I was about rent. She did ask me one night if I had insurance and I said no. She kept crocheting and I thought she was being polite.
Nope. The nurses said my full name and birthday every time they gave me meds, so she had everything. Called the billing office every Friday after she went home to ask if my bill had come through yet. Apparently they told her they weren’t supposed to say, and she said “then just tell me when it’s about to.”
I went to her house to say thank you. I brought a pie from Kroger because I can’t bake. She opened the door in slippers and said “oh good, you’re here, sit.” Her crochet group of 9 women has a coffee can they put money in for, and I quote, “whoever’s in the next bed with nobody.” They’d been saving it since the early 2000s. Dolores covered the rest herself. I tried to give her something back, she waved me off and handed me a hook.
Edit: Yes, I go every Wednesday now. My first cactus has one arm and looks like a sad starfish. It’s next to the one she gave me on my windowsill.











