A blue hat tucks in among others, soft and warm on a cold Monday.

The hats sit in a basket, on top of a file cabinet, next to racks of magazines. There’s Woman’s Day. There’s Good Housekeeping. There’s Redbook. There’s the fall issue of Living with Cancer.

The magazines sit in a room where comfortable nurses’ shoes scuff across tile floors, past TVs that mumble and people who sit still as chemotherapy drugs flow through their bodies.

They take the hats, sometimes.

And when they do, they see this sign:

FREE HATS

FOR CHEMO PATIENTS

THESE HATS ARE MADE OUT OF LOVE BY BERNICE DAY, A LOVELY

88 YEAR OLD WOMAN …

Across town most days, that 88-year-old woman sits in her chair, needles clacking, TV humming.

Bernice has always loved to knit.

But now, she knits all morning and all evening, fretting over styles and supplies. She thinks of the past, worries about the future and passes her days quite contended with her new work as The Hat Lady.

— — — ♥ — — —

Bernice’s elegant, pink-manicured fingers reach over and click on a table lamp, shining a circle of light onto her lap.

She takes up her knitting — an unfinished blue hat — and her nylon needles begin their dance.

It’s time for “The Price is Right.”

She turns the TV on, like she does most mornings, from the beginning of “Rachel Ray” until the end of “The View.” Bernice flips to the right channel just as the border around the screen begins flashing and Elizabeth O’Shea becomes the next contestant.

“Here we go,” Bernice says.

Her fingers go back to their work. Slip and knit and yarn, over and knit one.

Who knows when she first learned to knit. She’s 88, you know, so she’s been knitting a long time. Bernice was born in Romania and came to St. Joseph with her parents when she was 1½ years old.

Her mother taught her to knit, and once, Bernice remembers knitting a rose pink dress with a popcorn stitch around the bottom.

She married I.C. Day in 1939. They had one son, Joel, who now lives in Chicago with his family. She sees them a few times a year, but they talk often. Bernice has a stash of tea towel bibs and knit blankets, hats and scarves for her future great-grandchildren.

I.C. didn’t mind her knitting, not that she worked at it like she does now. But there was a lot to do then.

He died on Christmas Eve eight years ago.

And Bernice can’t work in her garden anymore, what with the sore hip after the fall and the neuropathy and the vision problems that keep her from her needlepoint. But it was a beautiful garden.

Bernice mutters to herself as she works, keeping track of each stitch like she has for every hat she’s made, for everyone she knows, for her next door neighbor and the neighbor across the street, for friends in California and St. Louis, Chicago, New York and Israel, for the girlfriends she plays Mah-jong with.

She makes them scarves, too.

“They don’t want to wear the hats because it messes your hair up, see ...”

A pile of finished hats sits on the couch, and when Bernice can make a few more, she’ll send them off.

It’s become her daily work.

Just imagine, in this cold, having no hair to cover your head, she thinks. It must be like that one winter when they lost power here. Bernice and her husband threw extra blankets on the bed, and they were all right, except for her head. The cold felt like a huge weight on her head that night.

Then, one day at summer’s end, Bernice wondered what to do with all the hats she’d knitted — they filled drawers in the bedrooms, in the dining room and she was always making more. At the time, Bernice had a new cleaning girl. Her cleaning girl’s husband had multiple myloma.

Maybe she’d donate them to a school, Bernice told Jacquelyn Hunt.

“She just didn’t know what she was gonna do with them,” Jacquelyn remembers.

So Jacquelyn suggested The Cancer Center. She’d even deliver them for Bernice. Soon, Jacquelyn got a nice basket and a ribbon and wrote a note, explaining who’d made these hats.

“MS. DAY SPENDS MUCH OF HER TIME MAKING THESE HATS BECAUSE OF HER COMPASSION FOR PEOPLE THAT HAVE LOST THEIR HAIR. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO THANK HER, YOU MAY CALL HER …,” Jacquelyn wrote, including Bernice’s number and her own, in case people wanted to donate yarn.

And people took the hats. And people called in thanks and donated yarn.

And suddenly, Bernice realized she had work to do.

She added more colors and tried to make some of the hats more feminine, some more masculine. Sometimes, when she finished a batch, Jacquelyn takes them in. Sometimes, Bernice calls The Cancer Center and they send someone. Bernice was able to take a few batches herself, which made her so proud and got some hugs.

Soon, she started calling The Cancer Center weekly for a status report. How many are left? she asks nurse Kim Wells in those frequent calls. Go back and check. And see what colors they like. And make sure people only take one.

Bernice wants to make sure everyone gets a hat, Kim says.

And over time, the employees at The Cancer Center started referring to Bernice as The Hat Lady.

People do sometimes make donations. But never like Bernice has. She’s a determined little lady, Kim says.

And perhaps the hats, which each take Bernice between six and seven hours to complete, do a little something more than offer warmth.

To Jacquelyn, it’s a ministry of love. She’s only worked for Bernice since the summer but considers her as close as a mother. They talk about every other day.

It also lets people going through chemo know that someone’s thinking about them, Kim says, and often, people don’t think about cancer until it barges in.

And, as you could probably guess, it’s good for Bernice, as well

“I’ve gotta be feeling like I’m doing something,” she says.

But it worries her, too.

“The trouble is with them, I don’t know how long I’ve got. And I don’t know how many more hats I’m going to make. And that worries me.

“But,“ she says, “I do the best I can.”

— — ♥ — —

Blue yarn slips between Bernice’s fingers. It’s rougher than most she’s used, but this hat’s for a man.

“I wish I lived closer to the hospital so I could see what they take and what they don’t,” she says. “But I can’t.”

On TV, a shiny red convertible rolls out as the next prize.

“Oh boy,” Bernice says.

The door bell rings.

“Who’s that?” she says. “Everyone I know is here.”

A moment later, Bernice sets the medicine from her pharmacy down and takes up her knitting again.

She does feel a little lonely sometimes. At night, she falls asleep with the TV on, that way when she wakes up, there’s something to watch, no time to miss her husband, no time to start thinking.

It’s the same with her knitting. It keeps her busy, ‘cause she can’t just watch TV, you know.

Knitting is something to do.

Turns out, it’s something really nice to do.

And she’ll make more hats, every morning and every evening, through the winter and into the spring.

“That’s when I’m gonna build them up so I have a bunch of them for winter,” she says. “I’ll keep knitting hats, I hope, if I’m able, I’ll keep knitting more.”

Then, she glances up at her TV, where a lively game of Plinko is just beginning.