Thursday Th(inks) - February 19, 2026

From Prairie Fridays to Thursday Grace

“SWEEP!”

It’s Winter Olympics season, which means somewhere a nation is sweeping ice with moral

exactitude. For those of us raised where winter was not a suggestion but a six-month sentence,

the Games are less spectacle and more reunion.

“Oh yeah? I tobogganed down Collier Hill just as fast as that guy!”

“She calls that skiing? You should’ve seen me on the black diamond at Sunshine!”

“That hockey rink’s got nothing on the one Dad made in our farmyard. Nothin’.”

We didn’t watch winter—we survived it, played in it, dated in it. So let’s take a little Thursday-

years wander down a snowy Alberta lane.

Raise your broom if you own a curling sweater! I still do, handknit by my Danish grandmother

(Bedste), hunting dog motif and all. Deep blue, scratchy wool, shawl collar, # 10 zipper—perfect

for Friday night bonspiels. Never “cute.” Entirely practical. A girl’s gotta be warm to perform

well on the ice. Besides, most of us had grandmother-made curling sweaters. They were the

norm, not the trend. We would’ve social media-ed the heck out of our curling sweaters.

Curling was, and still is, winter life on the Alberta prairies. It even showed up in my high school

Phys. Ed. program (alongside “Hunter’s Survival”). It was the perfect Friday night date,

especially if you were on a team. And I was. Okay, insert old joke here: more a drinking team

that occasionally curled. But still… pulling back that 42-pound Scottish granite rock and sliding

it into the “house,” teammates sweeping and shouting “make way!” with minor-medical

urgency—that was Friday night magic.

Getting picked for a curling team was like being asked to dance to the Moody Blues’ “Nights in

White Satin.” We girls who never made the debate team had to have something, right? We were

the curlers, the expert tobogganers, the winter roller-rink queens.

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Life is full of memories triggered by a word, a glance, a song. One look at my curling sweater:

icy rinks, sweaty wool, stale coffee, musty scarves… and old boyfriends. (Bless them. They

peaked in 1972.)

And the shoes. Like church shoes—leather, slippy-slidy, your feet frozen inside. Lord help you if

you led with the wrong foot: one shoe gripped while the other trusted. A slow ice dance, never

hurried. And don’t you dare slide past the hog line—disqualification! Back to your beer.

I haven’t needed my curling sweater in Southern California, but it rests inside the trunk labeled,

“Things My Children Will Have to Sort Someday.” At least they’ll know what it is, who knit it,

and why it mattered. Because they know about the contents of this trunk and they too, are

Canadian. Woot woot. They know what a curling sweater is.

Aging hands us these artifacts—if we’ve kept them. That sweater is more than bad wool; it is

family, culture, love looped into yarn. It carries my grandmother’s quiet care, the steady

faithfulness of hands knitting what was needed because she kept watch.

One day my daughters will lift it from the trunk. I hope they smile—remembering their mother

who once believed she was an ice queen. And perhaps my grandchildren, long after I’m gone,

will pull it over their shoulders and feel the weight of wool and history together. And if they

decide to thrift the old thing, may there be a California earthquake—because I will have rolled

over in my grave.

This curling sweater was never meant to fit only me.

In youth I wore it.

In midlife I stored it.

In age I understand it.

Bedste knit that sweater slowly, faithfully, stitch by stitch. And so has God shaped my

life—quietly, patiently, in patterns I only now begin to see.

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And that is pure gold.

Big Brains: "In the lane, snow is glistening A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight Walking in a winter wonderland." Richard B. Smith

Old Souls: "Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own." Charles Dickens

The Ancient of Days:

"She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet." Proverbs 31:21

Norma Jean:
Make sure the next generation knows what’s in the trunk. It might guide them when deciding what to thrift, what to store, what to wear—and what simply needs to be breathed in.

Thursday Chat: A curling sweater. A Danish grandmother. A trunk waiting to be opened. In the Thursday years, we begin to see that what once kept us warm was quietly knitting us together.