Having rather un-chair-itable thoughts at certain battery packs that cost $150 a whack and then don’t recharge, because it’s a use-it-or-lose-it and I didn’t try to since…um, Stitches… (Wait, that would be TWO years ago, Sam was pushing me last year ten days out of Stanford. Right. Okay, then.  Never mind.)

Back to the manual one. At least I’ve finally got a much-needed new cover for thisssss old thing.

They teach us patience when they’re little so that we have it on hand when they become too big to scoop up into our arms and make it all better with the simplicity of a hug.

A young mom with two adorable boys ages three and one-something and one on the way was one of the speakers at church today.   Her topic was repentance.

She said there had been an incident, (for which the details were irrelevant because the whole thing was so universal), but basically, her older boy had done some behavior in public that she had felt in a moment of fatigue had made her look bad as his mother.  She’d been cross with her sweet little boy.

And then she’d felt horrible.

Okay, is there a single mother out there who can’t relate to that?  Who doesn’t understand that yes, you are the mother and yes you should be in control of your own reactions, but who nevertheless gets what it’s like to have little ones out in public acting normal for their age in a society that looks down on them unless they’re behaving like little adults with an absolute decorum that even adults don’t always master, to be sleep-deprived, tired, pregnant, and–well, just plain needing a moment in the time-out corner oneself. With perhaps a good pillow.  Or a mug of hot cocoa and a little me time.  You know, I got seriously back into knitting when my own kids were little: it was something creative and of my own choosing, beautiful, and–this is important–that Stayed Done.

She described repentance as being when she and her pride have a stare-down contest in the mirror.

And so she’d apologized to her little boy for her flare of temper.  He, of course, had simply thrown his arms around her and told her “I love you Mommy!” with the complete and utter adoration of a small child. Total heartmelt.

She likened God’s forgiveness, which so easily blesses us when we seek it in acknowledging our shortcomings, to the pureness of her little son’s.

And I sat there and thought, and the other thing God gives us? Grandparents for your children. I include in that category anyone whose own little ones are bigger than they are by now, who remembers the days, who would love to be charmed by that all-NO!-ing toddler, ready to smile or play or sing them out of it to give the moms a chance to regroup.  Even just a smile in a needed moment can make all the difference.

Totally count me in.  That’s what I’m here for.

Julia rightfully warns of carbon monoxide poisoning. If you go here, you’ll see why I’m so glad she brought it up.  Yesterday, a little too personally aware of the subject, we had the sliding door open just enough for the cord to pass through and kept the generator as far from the house as we could manage.  We have definitely had a CO alarm since that day 24 years ago.  I’m glad for that warning to be out there for others before, rather than after; thank you, Julia, for that.

On a more fun subject. More stitches and more rows than last week’s shawl, another five-day project, I did it! A ball-anced life, definitely.

I got home from Purlescence and Michelle asked me, “So how was your cult night?”

I explained to her that they’d just gotten a long-delayed shipment in of some of my most-favorite yarns in my most-favorite colors. And I hadn’t bought a single skein. (I didn’t add, “yet.”)

She looked at me with big eyes, and asked, “How did you DO that?”

“Stitches is next week.”

She guffawed. Busted in advance.

Our city has a reverse-911 system, and so, this morning, the robo-calls began.

Treat all intersections as a four-way stop. And avoid driving!

I got up, wondered, got in the shower anyway, planning to make it very brief just in case, and–Richard knocked on the bathroom door: It’s the city (another robo-call), to say, Don’t take showers!

Rinsing as fast as I can!

And it made me think once again how much water is my insulin.  Since the colectomy I can’t absorb a lot of it anymore and I have to constantly replace what the body is resisting.  Come to think of it, we hadn’t replaced the emergency water in the outside earthquake-preparedness containers in years. Ick.

No ‘Net here.  Even the landline didn’t work, except for the 25-year-old AT&T desktop that drew its power from the phone line.  The ones with the recharging bases kept telling incoming callers the line was busy, while the cell phones were iffy.  Ham radios won the day–John had his on, monitoring in case the Red Cross should need him.  Meantime, the city called Richard in to help run the emergency communications center. He’d gotten his ham license after his aunt’s house had been a half mile from the Loma Prieta epicenter in ‘89.

(Okay, the funny part of his coming in is that they had everybody wear these vivid yellow vests so everybody would know who was who/doing what.  When he got home, I tried his on–it fit me. Note that I am 15″ shorter and a whole lot smaller around than he is.  Yeah, oops.)

Michelle had to take the car into work, because she sure couldn’t work from home today, but at least the traffic lights worked most of the way in that direction. I wrapped up with my knitting in much-needed blankets created by the hands of my wonderful friends; John curled up with a good old-fashioned book.

And every now and then, we opened the fridge.

Backing up a bit–last fall, our friend Ken sent an email: there was a grand opening special that included this type of generator at this price. Richard looked it up, went, wow, that’s better than I ever expected to get for that much, and we snagged the last one.  It had bothered him a long time that we didn’t have one, and now we finally would.

So now we’ve tried it out.  It was far quieter than I’d expected.  The fridge and freezer were good to go.

It was the dumb little things that kept tripping me up; I wanted a mug of hot cocoa fiercely in that cold, to the point even of debating moving the big microwave out of the kitchen and wrestling it into the middle of the family room floor where the cord could reach the generator’s plug-in.  (The generator itself was safely outside.)  Maybe John could strong-arm it for me?  But it seemed like a really bad idea all around and we voted against it.  Don’t overload that thing.  He admitted he’d checked out the Starbucks when he’d gone for gas to power the thing, but they were closed down–no hot chocolate there, and you just didn’t want to be on the road for dumb stuff.

And then, like I say, the car went (carefully) off with Michelle anyway.

One commentator I read allowed as how everybody in town had taken the day off to enjoy the warm California sun, and I thought, ?! Where are you typing THAT from!?  Okay, granted, compared to, say, DC’s snowmaggedon, but, it was in the low 50’s this morning.

But all of this is just noise, and stupid noise at that, compared to what others are going through that they’ll never be able to turn on the lights again and have it just be over with.  To the folks at Tesla Motors, makers of my dream electric car, and your families–our whole city grieves with you in your losses.

And marvels at the skill and care of that pilot in landing on that crowded street with only one wing left, in such a way that despite all the people present in that neighborhood, somehow nobody on the ground was hurt.  You knew you couldn’t save yourselves, but you did everything you could and so you saved everybody else.

His grandmother put his little sisters up to it! She got them to open up the family’s pop-tent trailer we were taking a few days later, make up one of the beds, (short-sheeted it, too, mind you), and throw rice in the sheets!

But then, about fifteen years ago, I happened to mention to Richard that one of my earliest memories was of the day my parents moved into the house they’d just built that I grew up in in Bethesda, MD.  Lots of commotion and comings and goings, but what I remember clearly, from age 3 3/4, was of being hustled off out of the way along with some other kids into one bedroom where there were mattresses propped up against the walls and a dresser next to them, and being told, “Don’t slide down the mattresses!”

And then they closed the door.

Whaddya think we were gonna do? I mean, c’mon!

I remember the drawers being pulled out a bit to make steps to ascend the dresser (I may have contributed to that), while some bigger kids (memory is fuzzy here who)  simply clambered right straight to King of the Mountain status–and then I remember having a grand and glorious time sliding down after them, the thrill no doubt intensified by the knowledge that, while I was copying the big kids, I was also doing exactly what I’d been told not to.  It was a revelation of the possibilities and fears of disobedience.  Which is no doubt why I remember it.

“They did yell at us. ‘I told you not to slide down the mattresses!’ I was there. I remember it.”

Wait–what?!

His parents had lived across the street from mine in apartments in DC when both couples had arrived in town as newlyweds; they’d been friends ever since.  His folks were helping mine move that day.

Richard was 4 1/2, older and wiser, but he did not set a good example.

And so we have a shared near-earliest memory. Of bouncing on the beds.

A number of years later, his maternal grandma knew we couldn’t yell at his little sisters after our honeymoon (if you haven’t read about that skunk, go, click, don’t miss it)  if she had been the one who’d put them up to it.  The little stinker.

Practically an arranged marriage, don’tcha think?

La Restaurante des Oiseaux tends to get its heaviest feather-and-foot traffic at breakfast, lunch, and dinner-type intervals. Curious, that.

And so it was during a quiet time of no activity there that my childrens’ birdfeeder started swaying ever so gently back and forth. Nothing was nor had been on it.  Huh.  I glanced over at the other; same thing, very rhythmic, the two doing a slow dance in perfect tandem.

And yet the leaves on the trees were still. No breeze there.

I’ll just bet you, I thought.  I gave them a little time to record it, then checked the time at the USGS site a little later.  A baby quake, epicenter right about here, not enough heft to it to feel for anyone over the size of perhaps a chickadee.

(Hey, Illinois: yours today was conjectured to have been caused by the earth being relieved of the weight of the ice age, according to this article.  Quick!  Tell Washington, DC to stop shoveling, now, or they’re in for it!)

Kurt spoke briefly today.  I remember him when.  It was inevitable, but it’s still somehow surprising week after week to see a man who’d been riding his bike dozens of miles a day on into his late 70’s now needing help to walk a few steps; when I asked him recently how his grandkids were doing, he both laughed and sighed and admitted he couldn’t quite keep them all straight anymore.

He is the oldest member of our ward (congregation), he proudly reminded us today, and, he said, he hopes to have many more years to reminisce over.

I found myself wishing I could tell the newer members of the ward a little of the back-in-the-days.  You know that when that happens, I end up inflicting it on you-all.

Kurt’s wife’s brother raised his family in my hometown, and the young woman growing up that Kurt’s older son would later marry was also from my home ward in Maryland; meeting Kurt and his wife when we moved here was like putting a little piece of our hometown puzzle together.  Understand that there are many little stories of surprise and small-world overlappings embedded in that sentence.

His daughter-in-law’s grandparents were the founders of a large international business that, if I told you the name, you would instantly recognize it.

So here’s the story, going back to when my kids were little.  Kurt had a tradition of having his sons and his grandsons fly into town here every summer to go on a big annual Scout camp-out our ward held,  Kurt coming along too.  Just like old times for him and his now-grown kids; there were new memories to be made with his sons as adults now and with grandkids–sometimes granddaughters too–to get to know better, up high in the Sierras with a pack and a tent or two in the clear bright air. (My John adds that Kurt and his older son would race to see who could be first to swim two miles’ distance in forty-degree water, and that Kurt did 200 push-ups a morning.)

There was a young dad in our ward, father of a little girl about a year old when he got called to be ward scoutmaster.  So Steve was in charge of those events.  Now, I have no idea how much camping experience he had, but he was game.  Steve, tall, blond, and gorgeous, had met his Hawaiian wife while surfing in the Islands.

She missed home and he missed Hawaii too, and eventually they moved back there.  He got a job working for a large corporation for the necessary nine-to-five end of life. He was bright and good at what he did, but his boss tended to write him off as something of a beach bum.

Fast forward a few years. People move, people you don’t often see anyway you lose touch with, it happens.

Kurt’s son, who was by now a corporate bigwig in his in-laws’ company, and his wife, were out strolling along the beach on I think it was the Big Island, talking to the head honcho of the local facility.  I’m sure the man was nervous; or rather, at least, I know I would be, if I didn’t know the two he was talking to but only their Names.

And all the sudden Kurt’s son was running! Running, and throwing his arms around one of the manager’s employees, that beach bum dude, going, “STEVE! *STEVE*!!  How ya DOIN’!!!” Thumping each other on the back, thrilled like little kids, the wife joining in, wanting to catch up on old times, talking about back in the day, how are the kids, forgetting business entirely.

While the manager stood there stunned, wondering, What just happened here?! How do they…? How on earth!?

I’ve been told Steve got a nice promotion after that.

Kurt may not remember all his family’s stories in his old age.  But we younger folks can help him write down memories of some of the good he created in others’ lives and remind him and cheer him in his old age.

The teachers and administrators did a marvelous job of teaching about upholding freedom of speech and of the values of America while teaching the children how to cope with being hated without a cause. I read today of another poster being held up by dozens at the high school: “There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.”

As for the protestors, telling–a child!–whom you know nothing about except that she lives in California that you are actively wishing for her violent death–that is absolutely, unless there is serious mental illness involved, the essence of evil.

Perhaps that explains it.

At Stanford, a bagpiper played an emotional “Amazing Grace.” Forgive.

Well done.  Brian Taylor would have forgiven them.  It certainly doesn’t come easy, it requires honest prayer for their souls and my own; I’m working on it.

Speaking of Brian.  His funeral was today. His uncle spoke of their worries and grief as his schizophrenia got rapidly worse–and yet he was everybody’s favorite patient, a sweet soul, so much so that a doctor who’d tried hard to save him flew from LA to be with the family today.

Last Saturday, the uncle’s daughter had woken up from a vivid dream of Brian coming for a visit, seeing her, being absolutely radiant and telling her with joy, “I’m all better now.”

There was so much love in that dream and the experience so intense that she told her father over breakfast and they rejoiced in it, hoping and praying it meant there had been some breakthrough with the medications at last.

And then the phone rang…

They will always have the memory of that sense of joy that came first.  The God of love granted them comfort to last a lifetime in the hours between Brian’s death and when they knew.

“There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.”

Amazing.  It looks to me like they accomplished what the grief counselors tried to. The God who loves has the infinite wisdom to be able to make use of the worst that is in man as well as our best.

I wasn’t going to write about them.  Silence–the act of turning one’s back on them and walking away without a word–was the most they personally deserve.

But our children deserve more.  Our children deserve to know that the adults in their lives stood up for them, and so I add my voice here to the crowd.

There is a group whose name will not sully my blog who fancy themselves Christians.  They support themselves by screaming their hate, trying to provoke people into confrontations, hoping to be able to sue to make money.

As one reporter noted, zero degrees windchill factor in January where the group lives, or California sun, well, now, hey, let’s go on vacation.

So they came here.  They filed a report with the police.  They intended to protest at our high school and then over at Stanford University’s Taube Hillel House: to wave placards and yell at our children at their school that they were all going to hell for being tolerant of Jews and gays, and that the loss of their friends at the railroad tracks was very much what they rightfully deserved by the wrath of God.

The high school immediately announced school would start late today. No child had to go through that.  No child had to face pain deliberately inflicted by those who sought power over them in their most vulnerable and most painful moments.  They encouraged people to have the thugs speak to the wind alone.

Sage advice, that.

And yet.

Silence can also, at its worst, convey assent.  And that absolutely could not be.

Children from other schools came, even from as far away as the other side of the Bay.  Parents came. Teachers came.  Grandparents came.  Children of our own town came.  Signs were hoisted in peaceful counter-protest, with most folks staying on the high school’s side of the street, avoiding any possible charges of physicality with the haters (remember, assault means fear of being hit, battery, actually being hit; they could claim fear simply by someone coming close.)

On our side, placards read “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “God loves everybody, even hatemongers.” And one sign later at Stanford asked, simply, “Got Love?”

Listen to one of the thugs’ ugly response:

“You’ll be in front of the train next! God laughs at your calamity!”

No, He doesn’t.  And you, ma’am, don’t know what any one of those children at that school believes–but if you notice, they were preaching and exemplifying the best Christian values to you.  Love. Tolerance. Understanding.  Again, “God loves everybody, even hatemongers.”

Who were facing them across the street.

Our students: “After all we’ve been through, it’s wrong for them to be here.”

“It really helped pull us together. There’s a real solidarity at our school.”

Our children saw human faces that were evil. That took satisfaction in their suffering and hoped there would be more.

Thank you dear God, I think our train tracks just got a lot safer.

For the first time in a long time, I got to the South Bay Knitters group tonight; we did the usual talking about our knitting and showing off and chatting…

…Sometimes, when you need a chance to laugh, one that comes with a serious oh-my-goodness wince will do.

Somehow the subject got onto stolen cars.  To my surprise, several people there had tales to tell.

And then one woman told her son’s story and totally took the prize.

Now, anybody who lived in this area during the Loma Prieta quake in ‘89 remembers where they were, and the news stories and places have their own instantly-recognized buzzwords in the local culture.

Her son had gone with a few friends to watch the World Series–the one my dad was watching on TV, when all the sudden the camera did this weird shaky-shake as the announcer exclaimed, “Hey!  I think we’re having an earth!–” and the screen went blank.

Her son and friends were there at Candlestick Park, looking around to see if that was just the crowd somehow being that raucous in the stands? But no.  The place was ordered evacuated; there was no way to know how damaged the stadium might be, and no way no how were the teams going to continue playing baseball that night.

So they went to go pile in the Jeep and go home.

Only, it wasn’t there.

They called the cops and apologized, going, “I know, right now of all times, you have more important things you’re worrying about, but…”

Her kid got a call back some weeks later.  They’d found the car!

“But I don’t think you want it back.”

An intrigued, puzzled, “Where did you find it?”

“On the Cypress Structure.”

In the kitchen, I without thinking sang a snatch of a catchy little tune that my kids had learned in church when they were little that starts with “I love you, and you love me…”

And all the sudden my grown kids behind me were doing the little fishy-wiggle thing with their hands, being goofy, chiming in, “We go together like the fish in the sea,” and then putting their arms up to make a big smiley sun around their heads, doing the whole little-kid song-and-dance to it.

Which had been choreographed and taught them by Brian’s grandma.

And then we wiped a tear here and there, glad for how the silly song had made us laugh. “And that’s the way that it’s supposed to be!”

When I was diagnosed with lupus, my immediate reaction was, “What’s that?”

I joined the local support group to try to gain perspective from those who had already lived with this and who had experience dealing with it.  One of the things I heard there was story after story of the crazy things various members had done while whacked out on high-dose steroids: one woman described how she cringed at the thought of going back to her doctor’s office where she had shown up at an early hour in her bathrobe and slippers, pounding on the man’s door, screaming, completely paranoid and out of it.

Her doctor had shown up to work, come onto this scene, and told her worriedly, I think we need to decrease your dose. (Uh, yeah.)

And then she had had to live with that etched into the minds of all the onlookers who did not know that she was not, of herself, in any way like that and with her own vivid memory that she had, nevertheless, on those drugs, done that.

And so I utterly refused to take steroids.

Ten years later, I now had Crohn’s too.  I told my new gastroenterologist that I had always said I would never take prednisone unless it were a matter of life or death.  (I didn’t say out loud the feeling, and maybe even then… What if I did something totally crazy from the med and then died of the disease anyway? What memories would I leave my family then?)

But he knew.  Dr. R. held me steadily in his eyes and told me gently, “I think it’s time to give it a try.” And added, “I think you’ll be okay.”

In the moment he said that I felt that he was right. He was.

And that is how after all that anxiety and all that time, I at long last came to learn that my mental health stayed stable on those drugs.

But also that, as it turned out, I was the one-in-a-million autoimmune patient for whom they utterly did not work.

I know what the depth of pain is in being handed an incurable medical diagnosis that takes away every plan you ever had for your life.  (Give me sunlight! Give me the great outdoors!) But I was an adult, with enough experience to know I could adjust to the new situation and cope, and with four small children dependent on me to help keep me going.

And my brain was intact.

For me it was a choice and it was also pure good luck.

The homecoming prince. The good-looking guy. The nice kid. The big brother everybody looked up to and wanted to be around, who liked to laugh and who was so good with little kids.  Suddenly trying not only to cope with a major new diagnosis and with finding out that his entire future as he’d pictured it no longer existed, but now having no functioning mind with which to learn and adjust. He was out of it. He simply did not and physically could not comprehend.

At church today, people were searching for ways to rally around the family. I, for whom writing is like breathing, offered this: write down memories of our Brian.  The Eagle Scout. The ready helper.  That beautiful smile.  Remember out loud for his family the best of who he was and what he did. There would be so many stories; give them to his parents, his grandparents, his little brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles and his cousins.

Tell the good.

Because that is who he truly was.

The first amaryllis to rebloom despite last year’s definite and atypical lack of plant care, and a very bright spot in our weather.

I’d been needing to go to the post office all week, but the incessant storms were making it a nice time to sit down with a good knitting project in hand and my feet up–never mind the hearing aids, where getting wet or not is the $6400 question.

But the skies finally held their breath for a moment, Friday presented the gift of an arbitrary deadline, and at about 4:25, I finally kicked myself out the door.

Driving there, I was surprised at how high the water was in the Baylands.  It would be so easy right now to repeat the February day when my oldest was 16 and, as a certified Red Cross volunteer, had helped run the emergency shelter with my husband: a friend of mine was in there, having gone to bed the night before on one side of the room and having woken up to find her waterbed on the other side now, it having become, yay verily, a water bed.  Hovering near the ceiling.

I’d called my friend Lisa to let her know that folks had been evacuated from her old apartment building by boat.

There was also our friend Brad who’d wondered if the water might be coming up in the street and decided he’d better go open his front door to check–only to see his koi from his back yard right there, swimming past his feet.  So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It raiiiiiiiiiined as I drove.

I got in the post office with my hood over my head, got my four packages safely on their way, I got back to the car and on down the road.  There was traffic, a light, the freeway nearby that everybody seemed to be heading to or from–

–and then there was me.  On a quiet, narrow road.  Going past the side of the San Francisco Bay marshes, the sky thunderously dark in puffy soft clouds that made it hard to take the threat seriously, and right in front of them, suddenly, the sun! Bright, vividly shining as only the rain behind it in the late day can make it, with a strong rainbow arching across the water to land somewhere over…there, where, as I approached, a white egret, standing in the enlarged lake, had its head tucked down.

Hoping perhaps for an incoming koi for dessert.

My parents grew up out West, courted at Wellesley and Boston University after WWII, and lived in Palo Alto, CA, the first year they were married.  So they simply had no personal experience to go on and weren’t expecting…

They were newly arrived in Washington, DC and some friends invited them to join them at the beach.  Now, the Atlantic Ocean is a goodly drive away from there, not someplace you just happen to drop by on a whim.

They got lost.

Mom tells the story that they pulled into where they thought they were supposed to be; they were wondering at first why every single person there was darker than they, when the next thing that happened was all those faces turning towards them: an unspoken, We’re not allowed on YOUR beach.  Do you think you’re welcome, then, on ours?

And that was their first experience with good old Southern segregation: wishing they could explain, No, no, we’re with you!

Her father’s proudest vote, looking back later on his Senate career and having crossed party lines to do so, was for the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965.

Mom had a car full of young children and was driving in Glen Echo, Maryland the day after the King assassination, when a large protest suddenly became a riot, there was a rock incoming, and her windshield cracked.  I remember my parents in the evenings with the TV news on, being distraught, not at the windshield so much but at the loss of that good man.

Joan Baez was speaking locally today about her memories of marching with Martin Luther King, Jr.

I wanted to go.  Glenn and Johnna offered a ride with them, one less car circling for a spot, and what I wouldn’t have given to be able to hear Ms. Baez’s stories firsthand.  That was a part of my story, too, a part of every one of ours.  King belongs to all of us, and she knew him.

Truth be told, although it would never happen in the crush of the crowd, her celebrity, and everything else going on, one very small, far-too-self-important corner of me felt it would be so cool to be able to thank her in person for having granted me permission to mention her name, her singing, and her heartfelt hopes that she’d expressed at City Hall Plaza just after 9/11, the story that had launched my entire book project: I knew I had to get that message out into the world.  I couldn’t let that moment die away unwritten. It was what propelled the whole rest of that project into being.  I owe her much, on top of what we all so much owe King.

Even though my thanks could certainly only have been spoken today by my anonymous face being present in the crowd.  I mean, c’mon, get real.

Some days, however, you know that if you push a damaged body past its point on a bad day, you will pay far too steep a price.  I’m avoiding surgeons this year if I can help it.  I did not go.

Hey, I wonder if YouTube…! (A quick Google result…)

(Edited to add a link to these pictures of Joan to clarify any confusion, and I hadn’t realized the Merc had changed the photo in their article to that of a local judge.)

(The new bag in the background: tomorrow’s post.)

At Purlescence last night, people were swooning–moaning, quite honestly–over this skein.   One person shopping the store whom I didn’t know, oblivious to the conversation in the group, stepped close enough to get pounced on: Here, I told her, feel this!

Her expression went from, yeah, okay, I’ll humor you, whoever you are, lady, to *big eyes* and “WOWWW!!!” and her glance sweeping the room, her expression exclaiming, where do I FIND this?!

Maybe six or seven years ago, I was at Stitches West, talking to a woman who was selling qiviut fiber combed from her herd of Alaskan musk oxen.  She and her husband had devised a holding chute to keep each animal still (and, I imagine, from goring them) while they combed out the undercoat it was ready to shed across the tundra.  They would then pick out the guard hairs by hand to avoid damaging that precious fiber.

Small wonder, then, that her little one-ounce ziploc bags cost $30.

But then she had me touch it.

Qiviut was then the softest, finest legally available and humanely collected animal fiber on the planet.   And given where the animals live, very, very warm.  The musk ox had only recently been taken off the endangered list, and hers was, if memory serves, the first non-Inuit-owned private herd on the continent.

There was a moment of surprised delight last year when my first surgeon mentioned she’d bought a qiviut smoke ring in Alaska on a trip and I asked her, At the Oomingmak cooperative?

How did you know?!

My surgeon owned and treasured Eskimo-handknit lace qiviut, of all things.  I knew I was in good hands.

Back to the scene at Stitches.  The woman had a big black plastic garbage bag full of the stuff, ready to weigh out to order, and I laughed and asked her, just out of curiosity, how much the whole thing would cost.  She eyed me with a grin and shot back, “With or without the divorce lawyer?” (Ouch!) “About six thousand dollars.”

So.  I bought one ounce–a year later, at the next Stitches, after having thought about it long enough. I was going to spin it, I was going to ply it with mere cashmere to get twice the yardage, oh, I had plans.

And then I actually tried to spin it.  It was almost like dryer lint.  It needed to be spun very fine, which one would want to do anyway, but I have almost no feeling in my fingertips and the job would be purely visual.  Pass the microscope.  And that gets old and very difficult very fast.

It sat in the closet. I know, I know.

I finally, talking to my friend Rachel one day, told her that it was criminal to have qiviut, of all things, going to waste and that since she liked to spin finely anyway, I was giving it to her. She was under firm orders not to give it back. This was for her.

Yeah well. Do your friends like to be ordered around? Neither do mine.

And so it was that I got a text message yesterday incoming: “Will you be at knitting?”

I still have yet to manually enter most of my contacts into my new phone; I had no idea who was asking. So I typed back, simply, “Yes.”  Kind of a no-brainer: it’s Knit Night? I go!

I walked in, sat down, and Sandi casually tossed a bag on my lap as she walked by.  ?!??!!  Yes.  And the message sent with it was, You’ll know whom to knit this for.

I instantly did. Oh, I did. I told them, I’ll have to think more about it and pray about it, but–

–And you know, I did all that, too, but, I knew immediately and that was that.  I can’t tell Rachel how grateful I am for her gift of those 186 yards.  It’s for someone whom I’ve needed to knit something for for several months, someone going through worse than ever I did all of last year, someone I would give anything to make her family’s sudden severe burden easier, if only somehow I could.

Someone for whom I’ve gone through my stash again and again and again, looking for just THE right thing, and somehow nothing felt good enough. I couldn’t figure out why.  Now I know.

Maybe, the fact that a total stranger did all that work spinning it for the sake of goodwill towards whomever the right person might be, added in with my own goodwill knowing whom it cries out to be knitted for, maybe, it might ease her burden. Maybe just a little.

A little basic human warmth and kindness.

A little bit of fluff.  But it can go a long way.