Nancy, 79 (Part 2 of 2)

“I once lived in Italy for 14 months. I finished nursing school in 1969. My husband had been drafted and he was stationed in Vicenza. We lived in this little apartment that we rented from a family, and I ate lunch with them everyday, so I learned how to cook Italian. I also learned how to knit. The mother taught me how to knit in Italian. She would go to the window, and people would walk down the street and she would say, ‘Do you like that sweater?’ in Italian. My grammar was horrible in Italian but they understood everything I said. She would look at the knit the sweater and she would tell me how many to cast on and what to do. It all came out of her head. I could never believe how she did that. So I knitted two sweaters for myself and one sweater for my husband. And I got home thinking, ‘oh boy I can knit.’ And I go to the store and buy a pattern box and I don’t understand a thing that it says because it’s all in English and I learned how to knit in Italian. So I went to someone who was a really a good knitter and she told me what it meant, and I’m still knitting.”