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CAPS FOR CRADLES
By JoAnn Jones
When “Nana Jane” Chifolo left her home in Parma to come to Park Vista of Youngstown, she knew there was a definite reason behind her move.
“Why am I here?” Chifolo said. “To pay it forward. I am thoroughly convinced that’s why I’m here.”
And that’s what she’s been doing since she arrived in the assisted-living section of Park Vista on Nov. 26: crocheting caps for babies and scarves for women living in shelters.
Chifolo said it was a family decision for her to leave her Parma home and go into an apartment at Park Vista, where her daughter-in-law Gayle Chifolo works.
“I told them this, though: ‘If I’m going there, I’m going forever,’” Chifolo said.
“I just love it here,” she said. “The people, the staff. Everybody cares about everybody here. I’m always greeted with, ‘Where have you been?’ You don’t think you’re missed, but you are.”
“And there are so many opportunities to do things for people here,” she added.
Chifolo said she is very active at Park Vista, but that she spends about 12 hours a day crocheting and knitting if she can.
“My family brought me the yarn I hadn’t used, and it wasn’t enough for big projects, so I made baby caps,” she said.
“I filled an 8-by-8-foot table with all the hats,” she added. “Then I put a tag on them that read ‘Made with Love by Nana Jane. God bless you and your newborn baby.’”
Chifolo said she put them in the hands of activities coordinator Kelly Rozzi.
“Kelly is an active gal here,” Chifolo said. “She is everywhere. I asked her if she knew of a place the caps could go.”
Beth Ann Tabak, communications media liaison for Park Vista, said that in July, Rozzi took the 75 caps to Care Net, a nonprofit pregnancy center in Youngstown that is part of a nationwide network. There, the new mothers will receive the colorful caps for their babies.
But “Nana Jane” decided she wasn’t done giving back yet.
Going to exercise class with Rozzi – who she said makes everything so much fun – and also participating in sing-alongs and watching television was not enough for Chifolo. She still needed an outlet.
She began looking online for patterns for scarves.
“I Googled it at the age of 83,” she said with a giggle. “I even swiped a phone for the first time when my daughter-in-law gave me her phone to look at pictures.”
Chifolo – who has her own Facebook page to keep in touch with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – decided to look for a pattern to knit a scarf for her great-granddaughter Emily Jane, who lives in Kansas.
Now she is knitting scarves for abused women in shelters.
“It’s not my original idea,” she said. “It was the same way with the caps.”
Chifolo said she is careful about the quality of the yarn she uses and is wary about buying it online.
“I could order more cheaply online,” she said, “but you can’t see or feel the yarn.”
She said she is hoping a yarn company might donate some yarn so that she can make more scarves for women in the shelters.
She began knitting and crocheting when she was 12.
“My mother knitted for the Red Cross during World War II,” she said. “She knitted sweaters and taught me how to do scarves. I thank God that I learned.”
When she isn’t knitting or crocheting, the former Cleveland-area resident watches the Indians and the Cavaliers on TV, but said, “We won’t talk about the Browns.”
Living in the assisted-living area was tough on her as the Indians made their way through the playoffs, she said.
“The late hours that they finish – I can’t go out into the hallway and yell ‘Yay!”
“Sports have always been very important to me,” she added. “I even watch tennis.”
“They say God works in mysterious ways, and I guess he had to do something very dramatic to get me here,” she said. “I do love it here. And if you don’t make life fun, it gets kind of old.”