Baba’s loving sentiments that the all-but-forgotten promise conveyed were dear to my heart

I was a teenager living on Long Island, close to an hour away from the hub of greater metropolitan New York, when I chose to attend a Bais Yaakov in Brooklyn for high school.

Although there was a school bus that brought several of us hick-towners to Flatbush and Boro Park daily, I was excited to stay at my grandparents’ home, a ten-minute walk from school, several times a week.

My gracious grandmother made up the pretty little pink-and-cream bedroom. It became my own, replete with my aunt’s beautiful old vanity, flowered linen, and an extra heavy, puffy, real down blanket.

Oh, how I loved that comforter. And my grandmother loved how much I loved using the “puchene kuldra” as she called it (in Yiddish? Polish? A combination?). I felt pampered, like a princess, as I drifted off each night in regal comfort.

As soon as the winter winds blew into Brooklyn, my grandmother climbed her ever-ready step stool and removed my puchene from its cozy, moth-ball-filled summer home to air it out.

I think it was that spring of tenth-grade that, taking such pleasure under that duvet, I decided to use it all year round, pumping up the air conditioning in the little room on warm nights so that I could still luxuriate under my puchene kuldra.

Baba went along with it, clearly enjoying my enjoyment.

It must have been just around then that Baba affectionately promised 15-year-old me that she’d buy me my own set of down blankets one day when I’d get married. The sentimental notion lent a rosy haze to a far-off and dreamy future.