When Shira wakes the next morning, she finds her mother propped against the loft’s far wall where thin shafts of sunlight stripe the barn. Her mother has the hook and yarn Krystyna gave them and she looks to be crocheting something very small, her fingers up close to her face and her eyes squinting.

“What are you making?” Shira whispers.

“You’ll have to wait and see.”

Relieved to hear a playful tone in her mother’s voice, Shira covers her eyes with her hands. Her legs wriggle and she shifts side to side with anticipation.

At her last birthday party, a picnic by the Narew River, Shira covered her eyes while her grandmother brought out the cake. Everything seemed to smell better with her eyes covered: the sweetness of the frosting, the match’s flame, the waxiness of the candles. Shira opened her eyes when she heard her mother’s cello sound out the first deep notes of the birthday song, and she couldn’t believe what she saw: the cake had three tiers, like a fairy castle. It had delicate loops of white piping, with five pink candles for her and twenty-five white candles for her mother—because they were born twenty years (and two days) apart. Some of Shira’s friends thought Shira should have her own party, but she loved sharing it with her mama. As soon as one year’s party was over, they’d set to planning the next.

“There, now you can look,” her mother says, yarn still laced between her fingers.

Shira leans in to see the tiniest hat (her mother must have sized it to fit her fingertip) and a thin scarf, just three stitches wide and ten stitches long. She looks at her mother, unsure.

“They are for your bird.”

“Oh, thank you, Mama.”

Her mother isn’t mad at her for yesterday! Shira takes the tiny clothes in her hands. Carefully, she drapes the scarf around the bird’s nape and places the hat on top of its crested head.

Her mother crochets other articles of clothing: bird earmuffs (two of the tiniest granny circles connected by a strand) and a beak cover. “Because it’s gotten so cold.”

Shira loves it when her mother is silly.

“And here’s something elegant for him to wear to the symphony,” her mother says as she hands Shira a little cape.

“Mama? On the night of the concert, will we have a fancy dinner?” Shira remembers the night when, with her father’s help, she accompanied her mother in a “grand concert duet” and afterward they ate a delicious roast—but she doesn’t say this.

“Yes, Shirke, and we’ll set pretty flowers at the table.”

“Daisies?”

“And bright red poppies too.”

The skin on the underside of her mother’s arms is mottled bluish pink, a pattern that makes Shira think of the wallpaper in her grandmother’s dressing closet.