arly December and Quaker meetinghouses all over the country are filling up with blankets for Afghanistan. Quakers have a wonderful history of looking into trouble and figuring out what pain can be most easily addressed right now to curb suffering. There are hundreds of thousands of Afghan women and children without heat or warm clothes at high elevations in a long cold winter. Their poverty, like all poverty, means suffering whatever comes without choices.

The idea of a blanket is easy to understand. It is apolitical. It can only warm. Anyone in any kind of winter knows that a blanket is a comfort, even lifesaving, and a wonderful gift. It can be the essence of kindness during our seasonal time of giving.

Marshall and I pulled out every blanket in the house. I had no idea how many blankets we had or what history could be traced with them. We have to keep the down comforter. We're in Vermont and our own winter begins with a promised snowstorm tomorrow. There's the blanket that Marshall has from Aunt Ramona and her cabin in the California mountains where he spent childhood vacations. There's the thin and elegant mohair wedding gift blanket, perfect for a nap. And the purple wool afghan knitted by Marshall's grandmother. There's the heavy green blanket that my father's mother gave my mother on her arrival from Italy. My mother understood that it was a belated wedding gift but didn't speak her mother-in-law's dialect well enough to learn that Nona had woven the blanket herself on a loom in Calabria. These are the keepers, our comforts and are well used.

But the stacks of those that are going are part of our history too. There's the 3 heavy white wool ones that I found in my favorite thrift store decades ago. Such a find, such a price! There's the king size blue one that never fit any bed I've ever owned and is made out of man-made fibers. It's served many guests well over the years. There's the heavy blue wool one that Marshall brought from somewhere and another afghan from his grandmother. There's the heavy blue hand-made quilt. It says John and Marshall on it in big red letters on a yellow circle. I wonder if we might see this in a National Geographic photo some years hence. There's the huge old brown one that someone gave me 20 years ago when they heard I was living in a barn. The barn was cold as hell and I slept under 15 blankets that winter. All these will go to the meetinghouse before the collecting stops.

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