Nina threw herself a birthday party and invited her friends. She told me to bring my knitting so she could work on hers. So I did.

I pulled mine out first, a white lace cowl in Malabrigo Rios at about the 2/3 mark, and then she showed off her much more elaborate project. Gorgeous. Another friend there was also a knitter. And one said with some regret that it had skipped a generation and she didn’t–but she took a picture of what I was working on to send to her (daughter I think? It was loud in there) because she so admired it.

Turns out she was the woman who had translated all those letters Nina had found in her mother’s closet that had been sent back and forth between relatives in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Pattern repeat #12, done. (Checking the time) it really needs at least one more after that, all I can hope for is she doesn’t leave early. She and someone else got quite into a conversation–good, good, keep talking, guys.

Repeat #13 got done. That’s shorter than I normally  prefer but it was just long enough to look okay to my eyes. I cast off.

Sitting next to me looking the other way as they talked, she didn’t notice at all.

I retrieved my purse, where there’s always a yarn needle in the change pocket of the wallet. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen where I knew her view of me would be blocked and wove those ends in. I should have some folding scissors in there somewhere… No sign of them. I asked Nina. She got hers and snipped those two little umbilical cords to its beginnings off and the thing was born.

The interpreter of those letters was dumbfounded. And ecstatic.

I explained that its nubbly texture would disappear and the lace lie flat and stretch out the moment it touched water, it’s the nature of the thing.

Totally fine by her, and she put it on and hugged me.

She took it off again to stroke the softness of the Rios.

And at last she did leave a little early, like I’d had a feeling she might.

I was a little wistful that I didn’t have one to give to any of the other friends but they all said that for all those hours she’d put into doing that great gift for our Nina and her family she had earned every stitch of it. And she had.

Nina said as we were leaving, That was the right person for that. That was perfect.

The dinner was light. Fruit is healthy. We could justify this.

A bag of frozen berries. A quarter cup of sugar, a spoonful of cornstarch, nine minutes covered in the microwave stir stir stir at the end.

And now for the ice cream.

We tried to wait till the fruit had cooled but given that I had an oven mitt on as I brought its stoneware bowl to the table I’d say we failed. I handed him the vanilla ice cream container; he’s better at getting it out when it’s frozen hard.

….Did I want more?

No no stop thanks that’s quite enough.

Then I looked at his bowl. All those three sections needed was a carrot nose and a scarf. “Once there was a snowman, snowman, snowman” I started singing (I think I learned that song when I was three, and so did he) “once there was a snowman, tall tall tall! In the bowl he melted melted melted” (pouring hot berry mix over it) “in the bowl he melted small small small.”

A few minutes later…

There’s a little fruit left. Did you want it?

No, he grinned, the proportions were just right.

Me: I’m putting in an order with Target for paper products. You need anything?

Him, scrunching face trying to think of something fast: A million bucks.

Me: In paper money? Nah, wouldn’t want that in the house.

Him: agrees. But still: Money in the bank and world peace!

Me: They don’t sell those at Target.

Thumper’s Admonition, I’ve been reminding myself the last few days.

But oh man this is such a howler of a mansplainer.

A cotton and ramie sweater from the ’80’s is good quality because it doesn’t pill much.

I can’t think of any cotton sweater I’ve ever had pilling.

This wool sweater (picture on left) has been worn by two generations!

Yeah, your mom wore that till one of her kids put it through the wash and now the body’s shrunk with the arms gone gorilla by comparison and your little sister wears it now. AmIright? Wool sweaters and high belly button exposures don’t normally go in the same season.

Manufacturers wash sweaters again and again like distressed jeans to soften them but it makes them wear out faster!

What manufacturer? Where? Has anyone ever heard of that? Yes a few bespoke ones will wash the mill oils out of the animal fiber yarns so that the customer will get the full effect of the softness they’re paying for. That coating is for keeping stray fibers from blowing all over the mill, but it feels like dried hair mousse (or whatever they call glop-for-hair now) so that’s something you want them to do. Again, that’s to remove part of the manufacturing process from the natural fiber and I can assure him they only do it once.

Then he goes on to say that the older the wool sweater, the softer. See this old Norwegian one? It’s soft because it’s old.

Absolute horsefeathers. If we dig a wooly mammoth out of the permafrost we should be able to just about melt into its butteriness, right?

Age has nothing to do with it. You cannot make it softer by wearing it more.

Wool’s softness depends on the micron count of the fibers, with much varying between sheep breeds and on how tightly it’s spun. I once made a bit of angora rabbit feel like the roughest burlap on my wheel. Putting twist into fibers is how you make yarn in the first place: you add friction to hold them together. The more twist, the rougher feel but also the less pilling, the harder it will wear and the less soft it will be. It is a direct tradeoff that every cashmere manufacturer in particular has to make on how they want to present their wares to their customers. Longevity? Or immediate swooning at first touch? With good hand washing either one should be fine.

He mentions sending it to the dry cleaner to keep it clean. I have a number of $5-10 thrifted cashmere sweaters that came my way because someone did exactly that and lost what they’d paid all that money for.

Dry cleaning wrecks the softness of cashmere. A very careful hand washing restores it. Like magic. A second hand washing even more so. Water+temperature change+agitation=felting. That means use lukewarm water, NOT cold despite anything anyone ever told you. Lower it into the soapy, still water, let it soak, raise it back out, fill the sink with rinse water without letting the water pour over the sweater–that counts as agitation–and lower it back into the now-full sink again. Lukewarm lukewarm lukewarm, I can’t stress it enough. Roll it in a white towel to get the water out.

You can spin it out in the washer *if* the water won’t spray on it, but the force of the twirl will encourage any fiber ends to fluff out of the yarn. A friend of mine who went with the washer kind of half-bemoaned that her cashmere looked like angora rabbit now and to her eye less professional wear when she wanted to be taken seriously as a lawyer.

Etc. Most of you all know all that, I know.

He recommends merino or (blink) shetland wool as a substitute for cashmere if you want something soft.

Now, historically one of the reasons for raising Shetlands was the variability within individual fleeces and their dual coat, rare in domesticated sheep. The neck hair was for the finest, softest fit-for-a-queen (literally, historically) lace shawl that you could pull through a wedding ring with the fiber as fine as 10 microns, and I’m sure that’s where the notion that shetland is soft comes from. Cashmere is under 19 microns, often 12-15. The rest of the Shetland is in the mid-20’s on up to as much as 35.

That scratchiness and the guard hairs help keep you warm when it’s really really cold. I never knew that scratchy wool was a plus till I lived in New Hampshire, but one -27F day taught me things I’d never known. Anything to keep your blood flowing near the surface. So go stab your skin a little.

I moved to California instead.

Anyway, so you have a male writer quoting a male blogger and trying to explain how to pick out a quality sweater, and his editor was surely male, too.

Because it clearly never occurred to them to run his piece past Robin Givhan there. Who wrote about fashion and style so well that she got promoted to more general commentary. She might be able to tell them something about choosing clothes well.

But she is female. And she is black.

And so the guy wrote this absolutely ridiculous piece full of misinformation that he was sure was true because what could she or any other woman who’s ever bought a sweater ever have told him?

And they not only put it on the front page, they put it in their Optimist newsletter to get it a bigger audience.

At that point it was, I’m sorry, Thumper. But I’m sure you understand.

My gardener cleared out a spot among the California Coffeeberry plants, dug a generous hole, didn’t knock himself out with the spade bouncing back at his head like I did one time when I tried to do that, and planted one of my Anya apricot seedlings that had been waiting for that moment for four years. Finally finally finally in the ground!

I may do some more pruning back of those Coffeeberries. Let some more light in.

I was feeling pretty exuberant about it all when the phone rang: my friend Karen, wanting to stop by. Sure!

We had a great visit and I dragged her out there to see my tree. I had four. I’d chosen the one that had leafed out the latest in the year last year so that its future blooms would be less likely to get hit with a freeze.

Which turned into her being thrilled that she got to go home with another one, the only one in a small enough pot that I could carry it to her car. The first time she’d driven, she told me, since breaking her arm. Much better now.

Ohmygoodness!

Her son would get it out for her and help her plant it, no worries, and meantime we were both pleased at how the tree and pot fit in there just so so that it wasn’t going to fall over and the thin limbs weren’t going to break.

Another hour or two and I was taking the trash to the curb. The new neighbor stepped out the door just as I got to the sidewalk, taking her toddler for a walk to see the sunset.

Even 350 miles away, we’re having spectacular ones from the fires down south. But anyway.

I mentioned about Andy’s and how they sell these particularly good and juicy apricots and (taking a leap) I had seedlings from them; would they like one?

Her face lit up. I would love an apricot tree! How big is it?

She had her choice, I said, with the biggest being 53″ tall, but they would have to help me get it to them. Check with her husband and let me know.

Meantime, if anyone wants to try to grow some of these from seed, let me know. I have some this year.

Like several hundred thousand others, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when Bezos interfered as he had promised the Graham family on buying it that he would never do, and killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

And then he flew to that place that had had the stolen–they were, they belonged to the National Archives, ie us–top-secret documents in strewed boxes in a gaudy chandeliered bathroom. To go kowtow to autocracy in person to show that he meant it.

But Jennifer Rubin, a fine legal mind, still wrote there. So did Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri and Eugene Robinson. Robin Givhan, I want to read anything she writes. Monica Hesse, too. Oh wait they just eliminated her position.

Milbank wrote a passionate piece in defense of continuing to support the Post in spite of its owner (who let them publish that.) With very mixed feelings, I resubscribed.

It’s my hometown paper. It’s the one that reported NIH’s weekly press conference on the latest discoveries in the world of medicine when I was a kid and I looked forward to that every Wednesday. Watergate. Meg Greenfield. Didn’t find out till after she died of cancer that the reason she’d always had the inside story on what Washington insiders were thinking was because she regularly threw grand parties at her Georgetown house in DC and mixed all kinds of people in politics together at the table. Katherine Graham’s autobiography. Woodward and Bernstein. This was and had always been MY paper.

But now it’s the place that fired Wesley Lowery for writing too well about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.

So I was thrilled today to find out–not from the Post, which still hasn’t announced that Ann Telnaes angrily resigned after they refused to run her editorial cartoon blasting the obsequiousness of the various billionaires seeking the felon-elect’s approval–that now Jennifer Rubin is out.

And not just resigned! A new (online) paper! Norm Eisen, her co-founder of The Contrarian, was legal counsel to the first impeachment hearing. Look at this list! (scroll down to see it) of people who’ve signed on to write with them!

Completely subscriber-funded.

I know a quarter million like-minded people who would be interested, just for starters…

It’s like Katherine Graham, who embarrassed her atheist parents as a kid by asking one of her friends who this Jesus guy was and why was he a big deal because she’d heard his name but had no idea, just figured out how to do this resurrection thing. Of something she’d made her life’s work.

I am really hopeful about this. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d needed that. Man, it feels good. Power will be met by truth after all.

The microphone wasn’t working and I couldn’t hear a thing and the Zoom seemed to be turned off during the second meeting because the mic wasn’t working and there was a borrowed temporary setup and the program’s attempts at captions earlier had been utter gobbledygook.

I got pulled away a moment and on coming back in at the rear found myself sitting in the way back so as not to interrupt.

Not at first, but eventually, I pulled out my carry-around project and hoped I wouldn’t bother anybody but there was no reason to waste the time and just sit there. I don’t usually knit in church. I knit in church.  Just not the main meeting.

Later I put in my two rows on the afghan and then played with colors to see what should come next. The sun sneaked off with their intensities though and I put the project on hold till it brings them back tomorrow and apologizes for the theft. Sunsets are like that. You’ve got to watch them.

I did my knitting group Zoom with my carry-around project in hand till my wrists needed a rest.

I sat at my computer awhile thinking, but nothing happened today. I didn’t do anything.

And half a merino cowl sitting there eyed me with a wry, And what am I? Chopped sliver?

We were invited tonight to a screening of the 11 minute film “Miracle at Gapyeong” by its producer, whose family we’ve known forever.

Brad and his wife gave a presentation beforehand to offer some background information on how the film came to be and the unexpected connections made between people who knew people who’d been there who had offered more information for it.

It’s the story of 240 soldiers from southern Utah who had been promised that if they stayed faithful to God they would come home from the Korean War. They were sent to back up the front with no prior combat experience and found themselves suddenly surrounded–and yet held off a major offensive of 4000 Chinese and North Korean soldiers who had just about surrounded them.

Per President Truman’s Presidential unit citation later, 830 soldiers surrendered to those 240 Americans! They were having to climb the mountain, where they were fully exposed, to try to escape our men’s fire.

Brad said the men asked each prisoner of war, as they were supposed to, why they were surrendering.  Again and again the answer was, We shoot you and you don’t fall down.

Fifty years later the Americans were invited back to South Korea to see a park built in their honor. That sculpture of a book? The pages on one side are written in Korean, on the other, English, telling the story of that battle.

And for those old men to get to see Seoul a beautiful city now, living in a democracy and free from war.

It had such a pull on me and I tried to figure out why. Yes it had the curved shape I prefer: for twenty years now I’ve used a shepherd’s crook-style cane and twirled it like a cheerleader with a baton to shift it onto my arm when I need my hands free; it’s just an extension of my body by now. Plain, practical–and the wood was starting to crack at the curve right where the weight of my hand goes.

So I ordered a pretty one. I love it. But you can’t twirl it, you have to hold it, and I find it easy to accidentally drop. (Not a friendly-looking move.) Reluctantly I find I save it for church. As I said to Richard today, Sometimes you find what you need by buying the wrong thing first. (Although I do not regret that one, even if it’s unwieldy when you’re not actually walking.)

So yeah, this one was cool and it reminded me of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it had a long enough of a curve–hopefully–not to fall off my arm doing cool cheerleader moves.

But since its artist was in Ukraine there was no way to try it out without paying for it.

There was a video on one of the listings of the guy whittling away at the wood to create his designs: the (sold out for now) Great Blue whale at the crest of a wave. There’s a shark with teeth, a more simply carved killer whale.

Or a gentle blue dolphin.

I didn’t *need* this. Although, for the price, I could get another cheap rustic crooked crook probably from China just like the old. Meh.

I debated for a week before finally caving.

It wasn’t till ten days later after checking the tracking many a time that I realized why it had been so compelling.

That was three days after I had finally started working on the abandoned afghan again. The indecipherable red blob whose chart and plans were long gone had by then morphed into a fish I really liked, the whole thing finally taking on life and becoming delightful to my hands and eyes. I had needed that for so long.

It was the cane that did it. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on it in person yet. Maestro Syvatoslav Lashkiv’s art had at long last offered the spark to revive my own. Since I began it several years ago I’ve thought this afghan would need a dolphin near the top of the water, like the previously knit ocean, because, well, I like dolphins.

I kind of held my breath hoping the cane would live up to my hopes, too.

It came today. The blues swirl down its back like light on the movement of the waves. Like the ocean itself laid out before the eyes of all those grieving homeowners in LA: the Pacific is still there for them. The tides, the sounds, the water, stillness and motion all in one.

It always will be.

Unasked for but included was an unobtrusive arm band to attach if I wanted to, or not, so that this cane will never have to be dropped. But the choice is left up to me.

My cousin Kathryn’s funeral was held today; I watched by Zoom.

Her sister recounted how she always knew everybody’s birthday, always connected with anyone she met, and she had always had a note, a card, a message ready any time for anyone, and added, “And she’s probably sent one to you.”

I realized with a surprised start that that’s exactly what had happened and I felt the truth of it in my bones.

Because yesterday I had reminded myself that the funeral was at noon and Do. Not. Miss. It!

Suddenly, as if in an aside in the middle of an ongoing conversation I felt the words, Remember that’s 11:00 California time.

Whoa. How could I have been so dumb as to forget to notice that, and how had I suddenly remembered in spite of myself?? Because I was sure *I* hadn’t remembered, and yet–yeah, no way was I going to forget now! And I didn’t.

Her sister was right. I would have been devastated to have missed it, especially after not having been able to go in person.

So Kathryn made sure I didn’t.

Our niece’s childhood home, per fire reports given the family, is gone.

My nephew has a mother-in-law unit downstairs that walks out to their garden, a beautiful spot; last Monday my sister and her husband were there from Atlanta helping our mom to move in. Mom is great at taking care of herself but at 94 she needs not to be alone anymore. Her young great-grands are looking forward to having someone who’s not their mom helping them with their homework and reading to them, and my niece-in-law is a treasure. So’s her husband.

They also own a house in southern California that is a rental, which I totally get: it is an aphorism here that if you ever sell your house in California you can never afford to move back. So. It had a plumbing problem.

So said nephew left Gram in his wife’s good hands and flew with his folks to fix that thing and my sister was looking forward to a little California in January.

Which is how she found herself taking pictures today as the smoke came closer and they were packing the car and then suddenly the fire itself leaped over the mountain top and came barreling down at them from less than a mile away in the Santa Ana winds as they rushed to evacuate. They were turned back three times because of the spreading flames. Official guidance: Go this way! No, no wait, don’t! Traffic was gridlocked.

It took them four hours to get off that mountain and get the wildfire behind them. But they did it. Our niece, meantime, had booked them a hotel room from the get-go so they had a place to land.

I debated adding one of my sister’s pictures here and thought, nah, the last thing she needs right now is me pestering her for permission, that is just not something she should have to worry about right now.

I don’t know how long it will be before we know if the house is gone–but they are safe. As of this typing there are zero known deaths from the fire. Praise be.

Octopuses: how the oceans doodle fireworks displays.

Two rows a day, I promised myself. About 45 minutes each. That’s all you have to do. And I have. A right-side row then a wrong-side row so that you’re ready to see it clearly on the right side again the next day and to plan any new colors or motifs from there.

It surprises me how much shows up below my needles when I just keep doing my one small part for the day. I have finished two fish.

I also know that the further along it gets, the more I see how it’s coming out, the more I’ll be able to see how I want the rest of it to come out and the more I’ll be working on it. So it’s okay to be slow in the initial discovery process.

(Photo: about a third of them.)

There’s a big zipped storage bag that’s been moved around again and again these last four years. It had the leftover yarn from the original ocean afghan. It had the added deep royal skeins for the background of the coral reef one. It had the leftovers of any Malabrigo Rios seen coming or going since those were started.

Some of it had become a tangled mess.

Today was suddenly somehow the day to just go deal with it.

Every ball that needed it is now rewound. Every tangle is banished. Every yarn is ziplocked away squished in with its nearest peers and only then put back into that big bag. I know now what I have, I know for sure what I don’t have, I know none of them have room to run around and cause problems again inside those, and I know how to find exactly the color I want amongst the dozens of others. Greens here, blues here, purples…

And it all started with wanting a close but different shade for the next section of coral. All the times I’d gone through that bag, I stared in amazement, I had not seen that one; how could it be so.

Then a sense of determination: so what else was hiding in there?

And now they’re not.