The friendly ghosts.

Albino redwoods, pictures here. (Wikipedia)

The why of them, and another picture, here. (San Jose Mercury News) The white needles concentrate heavy metals and leach them away from the host tree, keeping it healthy even while living off its nutrients, given that they themselves are unable to photosynthesize.

Livers for the trees, it says. Who knew.

Finished a quick little project from the cobweb cashmere and silk that I 9-plied on my wheel recently to a fairly thick yarn. The splittiness was a pain but it was worth every minute now, now that it’s warm and so soft and pretty and–this is important–done. (Note to self: US 7 needles.)

Interesting stuff, meantime: an art-quilt wallhanging made for a museum exhibit in Australia pieced from handknit swatches and bits. I particularly like the digitalis flowers. So graceful.

And for those who haven’t seen this article yet, a bit of Viking history, starting with a 600-year-old reused sail found insulating an old church in Norway.

And so we know they were woven not of linen but of wool, shrunken and fuzzed out to a solid surface that was then coated against the water.  They would have needed 700 sheep per sail, and their entire fleet, two million animals. There is speculating that the Vikings set forth in search not of treasure of gold so much but of pastures for their flocks.

There are lines like this one: “Not long ago, researchers found that laundering synthetic fleece floods aquatic ecosystems with tiny plastic microfibers, which made wool look even better in comparison.”

I’d never heard that before. I imagine it’s surely better if you stay away from the fluffier types that tend to shed a bit? But all the more reason to buy wool to keep warm in.

Which you will need while reading a description of sailing in a replica Viking ship in those icy waters. Enjoy.

There was a photo and a note on Facebook: Did anybody want… Free to a good home…

Someone else asked for the big red crockpot. I asked if the smaller one had been spoken for. (Much more our size anyway.)

It had not. I headed over. The doors at Purlescence are locked now but lots of work was going on on the other side as the place was slowly being emptied of its ten years.

Kaye carried the thing to my car for me and, almost there, threw in the thought of, You wouldn’t be interested in a toaster oven?

YES! I exclaimed a little harder than quite entirely reasonable, surprising myself. I had long wanted to be able to warm up just a bit of the kitchen for some small baked thing, but not enough to justify replacing my elderly cracked-plastic simple two-slicer. We don’t have a lot of countertop space. I had not wanted to want one and it all kind of came out in that one-word blurt.

She apologized that it needed cleaning, but I found when I got home that it needed very little. It’s cute. It’s a two-bagel-slice top with a pull-down door in front and not much more of a footprint than my old toaster, a total win.

But the biggest thing about the both of them is the bit of history she offered with them: all those Thursday nights, all those knit nights, they’d had these tucked away upstairs for a quick bite to eat.

So that’s how they’d made it through all those long days over all those years.

These appliances had sustained my friends so that they could sustain our knitting community and now I get to have them here with me. And someone else got to take home part of that history too, and I like that. I like it a lot.

And I love that I now have a toaster oven that kind of looks like an old jukebox.

I need to go toast me some toast. Anyone got a favorite slow cooker recipe? Chicken tikka masala, maybe?

Got lots of good things done today. The evening was a little more problematical.

I didn’t see the irises as I tripped over them in the shadows as I finished up the watering. Made for a cushy landing, mostly, with the thought of, who knew plants could pun? (Head seems fine and that’s all that matters.)

Trying to figure out where the kitchen is re the breaker box. I managed to bump a burner earlier while putting down a pot and it triggered the ignition switch on it–on a burner that has not worked for twenty-three years.

The Thermidor salesman back in the day went on at great length about how you could melt chocolate or cook risotto without burning them, that these two burners on the left cycled on and off just so for that as he spun visions of perfect meals in our future kitchen. Me, I’d never made risotto in my life–on purpose, anyway–but chocolate, yeah, I could get into that one.

Well, reality is that the engineers had clearly never tested their own product: the repairman later told us they were designed so that if you ever turned either of those two risotto burners up to full heat, they fused shut and never worked again. Which you certainly could, and we certainly did, because we had no reason not to, and since the repair quote was about the same as replacing the entire new cooktop, forget that. I really should have taken it up with the manufacturer–it was just barely out of warranty and a design that absolutely should have been recalled.

We have yet to replace the thing.

So. The pilot is trying to ignite on a burner that can release no gas.

And then the pilot on the next burner started clicking.

And the next.

And the next. Sounds a bit like listening to a fire alarm to Richard’s ears; me, I can turn mine off.

Just unplug the stove, right?

WARNING: DO NOT UNPLUG HERE. GO TO BREAKER FIRST.

Still working on this and it’s getting late.

(Coming back to the computer later to finish this post.)

Annnd… #4. Got it. We had to turn the breaker back on because our fridge was on that circuit. Hoping hard…

Blessed silence. And then still blessed silence.

We walked back outside and he held the flashlight while I marked the spot.

Hanging on to that last bit of summer…

Two boxes for us and the one on the left for another family. I delivered it and got to see the thrilled look on the 13-year-old’s face when he opened that door and saw Andy’s peaches. They’ve had them before. He knew.

Michelle had water on to boil (one minute and then quickly over to the other pot) and icewater to cool for skinning the first four about the moment we walked in the door; picture taken immediately after. Those four made enough puree for two batches of sorbet.

I wanted to show it off while not wanting to show it, too, not yet. The not-yets win: creating something for the first time, discovering what it is as it comes to be, undoing, anticipating visual trajectories, redoing, stopping again and is this angle quite the one that I want…

One becomes both more and less aware of time. More grateful for it. More immersed in what it lets happen.

And it takes more of it.

Not done.

The promised picture: Burnside Bridges colorway by Abstract Fibers. Easy four-row lace pattern used in my Water Turtles shawl.

I saw something black in the back and white in front this afternoon that made no sense, so I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. Meantime, it ran not away from my movement but down the fenceline towards me, continuing my way in a great hurry even as I stepped outside trying to fathom just what on earth that was. Too small and movements too short and jerky to be the neighbor’s Maine Coon cat.

It was a squirrel, and in its mouth was a furry bright white object bigger than it was. Was it raiding a hawk’s stashed kill? A wide strip of pelt and an ear? But–white?

It was dashing for the safety of the redwood and the understory tree below it as fast as tripping over that thing would let it run and it was so intent on stashing and not dropping nor stopping that even a human coming in between couldn’t give it pause. It had its prize and no threat could make it give it up. (But the thought that one might could make it run all the faster.)

And so it ran right past me. Definitely not feathers, that was fur. To line a baby nest? Squirrels do produce kits in August as well as the spring, it’s a little late for that, but. But it was white. There is certainly not a whole lot of wild bright white anything around here, if any, mammal-wise; could it have been someone’s torn stuffed toy?

I knew that color would stand out and I stepped back and looked at the understory it had leaped to but they were gone.

I may see it again, like the weirdly coveted bubblewrap that took a similar route a year ago. Or maybe not.

Knitted, finished my project, forgot to blog till bedtime. Pictures tomorrow, then!

I was thinking that after this weekend I could tell the rest of the story.

Only, it turns out there was a lot more to it than I had anticipated.

Back at Stitches West in February, my potter friend Kris told me that not only did they have sheep at the farm they’d bought, but her son had learned to spin and he had a wheel now.

He was there helping her and they surprised me with the great gift of a skein of his very own handspun yarn. From their sheep! So cool.

This is Kings Mountain Art Fair weekend, where I’ve seen Mel and Kris every year since long before they started going to Stitches.

But that new head injury. It’s certainly not bad, but not pushing it is a good thing. Richard wasn’t up to doing that much walking yet–parking is all car-by-parallel-parked-car along the narrow mountain road there with many many many people coming. Michelle couldn’t make it and it would just be me. Which normally I wouldn’t mind.

So I did the only thing I could do: I said a prayer and asked, if I shouldn’t go, please help me feel bad or hesitant about it and I won’t. If I should, please help me feel reassured, because I honestly don’t know what the most-right thing to do here is.

I very much felt reassured. It was a bit of a surprise. I had thought that waiting till the last day of the fair made the most sense, for that matter, but felt like, no, today. Don’t miss out. Go.

Huh. Okay, then. I really wanted to see my friends and feeling that it was okay to helped a lot. (That’s also why I had to be careful in that prayer, so that I was actually listening to the guidance I was asking for, not just hearing what I wanted the answer to be.)

I had wanted to surprise them back with something made from their wool, meantime, because nobody could treasure it like the ones taking care of the sheep it had come from. One large skein of aran weight: a cowl seemed the sensible thing to do for potters and farmers. It could keep one of them warm while leaving them free from having it blowing around in their way.

The yarn refused. It wanted to be a hat.

I started to cast on for a cowl.

I cast on a hat.
I made that hat. I put it in my purse last night to make sure I wouldn’t forget it.

I came around a curve in the hillsides of 280 and found myself driving into a dense fog as I approached the mountain pass and marveled, This is summer. That’s winter looking. It’s way too early for that. (It was bright and clear not too many miles away at home.) It softened the light, which rested my brain from the sharp reflections that otherwise would have irritated it. It was beautiful and it was perfect. As I drove upwards and turned left towards the fair at the spine of the mountain, there were splashes of raindrops from both trees and sky.

Rain here is the distilled essence of ocean: warm summer showers are not even a concept, locally, and I can remember trying to convince my then-young children that such a thing existed. If it’s raining in northern California it’s chilly, and for the first time that I can remember, it was cold at the fair. That forecast of 67 up there was way off–my thick turtleneck and sun jacket and wool knee socks were not enough at 52 degrees but not so bad as to get me to walk the quarter mile (I got a really good spot!) back to my car for the spare fleece jacket that’s always in there. (There’s a chartered shuttle bus for the really-way-out-theres.)

Mel had one on himself but he was still cold. Kris was comfortable in her jacket, but he was in sandals and his socks and warmer clothes were simply out of reach while they were working their booth.

So much for waiting till they’d rung up my purchase before surprising them–he needed that hat now, and I pulled it out. I told them, referencing their son, You guys are all going to have to work out whose this is.

They laughed. They loved it. Mel not only wore it, he doubled over the cuff for extra warmth and I was glad I’d knitted it to a good length so he could, and I could because they’d given me a generous amount.

If I’d waited till Monday like I’d half-planned, then…

If their son hadn’t felt like sharing what he’d made, and when he did…

And yet all that had happened and it had come out exactly right. Mel kept marveling at the chill, exclaiming, In California! On Labor Day weekend!

The show ended for the day and as Kris pulled the covers over their booth, Mel walked my purchases all the way to my car for me. I in turn drove him to where fair vendors are required to keep their vehicles, well away–and to where his socks were. He was then to drive back to Kris to pick her up, but just before he got out of my car, I told him this:

I get to wake up every morning to beautiful art, to Kris’s and your talent, your skills, your colorwork, and your love in my home and it makes every day of mine better and I just wanted to thank you. It makes such a difference.

Come to think of it, I need to go tell my sister that, too. (Edited to add: done!)

The slant of the light and the earlying of the evening: it feels sudden and it’s taking me by surprise every day as if this were new to me.

Last week the littlest peach tree, in full glow of the light sunrise to nearly sunset for months, was shaded by 3:00 pm; now it is by a little after 1:00, and since this is the Baby Crawford’s first year all I can do is hope its six and a half hours (today’s count) were enough. And again I debate whether this is the year the camphor tree comes down to make more room and light for the fruit trees to grow into.

Tree service or airfare to two more weddings coming up. Well that answers that.

It’s cooler, too, and there is this sudden need to knit All The Warmth that is waiting in the skeins of patient yarn.

Was looking for something this afternoon and stumbled across some leftover Burnside Bridge yarn I didn’t know I still had. Abstract Fibers does nice work.

So tonight, regardless of what I’d intended to knit next, this got started. Cowl. Needles US 5. Knit till I run out.