The first weekend in April is the Mormon Church’s semi-annual conference time, two two-hour sessions Saturday and Sunday each, streamed live.

Two cowls.

Started the second this morning and was very nearly done with my ball of yarn when I looked down and realized at long last why it had been acting so odd in my hands: I had knitted it in a mobius strip. And not noticed. Which is fine if that’s what you’re going for, and fine even if it’s not, but to not even register that that’s what was going on–well, a, they were good talks, and b, yeah, the head smack thing. There is a little bit of concussion relapse going on after all.

But the talks! One man with a British accent, Patrick Kearon, spoke this afternoon of talking to Syrian refugees who had made that horrendous trip in those rubber boats, of what it was like to try to meet their needs and be physically present as a witness to their suffering. He declared he wasn’t speaking to the politics of what was going on, he simply wanted to speak of the individuals he’d met. He spoke of the children. He said some of these people might someday be our doctors, teachers, nurses, engineers–as some of them already were.

Re their plight, “This experience will not define them. But our response will define us.”

President Uchtdorf, who was conducting the meeting, was fighting tears as he stood afterwards and his voice choked and we knew his family had been refugees too. They had escaped East Germany with their lives, barely, his parents at separate times so as to try to avoid suspicion immediately before the wall had been built.

In an earlier session, he had described watching the lightning that came from the sky during the war that had fascinated him as a small child. A picture of Dresden flashed on the screen: a thousand years it had taken to make what it had been–and then it was gone (crumbled stones at the foot of what had once been. Breathtaking, heartbreaking.)

And then.

That beautiful old church had stood for so long.

Another photo. They decided to reclaim all its old stones that could be and now there are dark gray polka-dotting squares scattered in the lighter new stone walls as a memorial to what had been and a declaration of renewal. A new landmark church. An Easter setting in its own right.

Today’s refugees are between the rocks and the new place.