I knew raptors don’t just give up their territory, but I’ve been hoping it all worked out okay: I’d been wishing I could see one around, just t0 finally feel better about it all–

–and there you go.

I had just walked into the room and sat down and glanced out the window when there, perched just above the other neighbors’ side of the fence, was a beautiful adult Cooper’s hawk. At last! The female, it seemed to me by size and shape. Breathtaking.

She took note of me taking note of her for a goodly minute.

And then she started doing the oddest thing. Now, raptors especially tend to bob their heads before taking flight as a way of measuring the distance with the different parts of their eyes. This one was bobbing its head.

But she was going up and down and side to side rather differently from anything I’d seen before, like she was rocking out to the bird music on her I-clawed. I wondered if she was watching prey in both yards?

Then suddenly she really shook her head, hard! Her shoulders too, though her wings stayed folded in–and on this bright dry sunshiny day, a sudden impressively massive spray of water went flying from her head.

Where did THAT come from?!

Oh wait. I bet you I can guess…

(That was just her warm-up act. Next thing you know, she’ll be singing koi-oke at the Grand Old Osprey.)

But it just might need another two times trip trap trip trapping across those rows. (As I head for the icepacks.)

Tonight is when the teenagers have a meeting at church (and my apologies to the perpetrators for not getting the whole thing in in my attempt at an Iphone shot while not stepping on the daffodils.) Come to think of it, I made a pair of chocolate tortes for them two weeks ago, and I’m guessing that had something to do with this. I had forgotten all about it.

I think someone loves us.

I was sure I already had. But using every search phrase I could think of on the blog, I’m not finding it. So here goes.

They were about to move away, and I know how the impending sense of loss at such times brings friends closer together and the emotions high.

I was talking a moment to Curtis, the husband, at church on I think their last Sunday before they left California, and in that conversation, he started to say something about an afghan his grandma had knit him.

Only, with such a sudden halting sense to his voice that I immediately picked up on it and went, “Does it need to be repaired? I’d be glad to,” before he said another word, hoping I wasn’t getting myself into too much.

The relief and joy and sudden hope in his face!

When he’d been in high school, his grandma had offered to knit him an afghan. Anything he liked; his choice. Years later telling me this, he said, And I asked for black. I had no idea what I was asking of her.

I smiled and nodded that yes, black stitches are hard to see to work with and really hard as you get older. I sympathized with Grandma with him.

But she had knit it because she loved him and he had been thrilled. He held it all the more closely when she died, love meeting loss and finding warmth in the dark places.

And then his cat had gotten to it. It was torn in four spots. He was heartbroken and had no idea what to do with it except to put it in the closet and hope that at some point in the future something somehow could be done.

I would be honored to give it my best, I told him.

And so later he swung by the house with it, knocking on my door to hand it over. One look and I told him, Oh, good. This won’t take very long at all, if you don’t mind waiting.

His wife was in the car with their two little kids, who were sick, and they hadn’t wanted to expose me so they’d stayed in there and he didn’t want to leave them waiting alone and not knowing how long I’d be.

Well then. I picked up my yarn needle and, afghan in hand, walked out to the sidewalk next to their car and plunked myself down. Let the kids wave hi and watch if they want, and besides, I wanted to see them and his wife every moment I could.

The afghan had been fairly loosely knit out of a nice, soft wool. That looseness made it vulnerable to a good cat-claw snag and there were long pulls in it–all I had to do was work the yarn back into the sides to where it belonged, here, here, here, and a little bit over down here. Not a single break.

I told him he had done the right thing: he hadn’t lopped off the loops and that had saved it.

The whole thing took maybe five minutes. There was such an intense joy the whole time. Curtis, Jenna, the kids, getting a little extra time with them before they left–but it was also as if his grandma herself were standing chuckling over my shoulder, glad to see her work restored to go hug the great-grands with.

I love the deadline that is Stitches West. I got a cashmere shawl finished last year out of yarn I’d been hoarding rather than knitting only because that date wasn’t moving anywhere further away and my ego wanted to show off–well, and I wanted to show off for someone else’s ego, too, since Dianne had dyed the laceweight I ran the Cashmere Superior with.

So this year. There’s some yarn that I started knitting back in September: I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it and I had a reason why only that yarn would do for that mostly-worked-out pattern.

I ripped it totally out the first time around. Took notes, made adjustments, tried again.

I got it going, and it still wasn’t… it didn’t…I dunno… Huh. At that point, I was frustrated.

So into the ziploc bag and out of my sight, and time and again I nearly ripped those two new days’ worth of work out to make myself start from scratch.

Well but let’s not, though. There are two balls; how about I just start from the other ball once I get going again with this, just to make sure.

If only.

So four months later, here I was this morning, suddenly thinking how nice it would be to show that off in three weeks.

And in those four months since the first attempt I’ve knitted all kinds of other things that have let other ideas gradually seep through without my quite realizing it until all at once, as I was pulling the thing out of that bag and looking at it, suddenly all the things that previously were wrong about it were what I wanted about it now. It would do, most definitely, it would do. I finally had it! It had just needed that time and experience. Best part is, the first two days’ worth of work were already finished.

It’s humming along quite nicely. I think it’ll be a little different from anything I’ve done so far; it’s going to stretch me a bit, and I may do the last part more than once. But that sense of long-sought achievement is so close and so compelling that I had to make myself put it down and come here to give my hands a break.

And in the midst of all that was a request from my sister: she had started a blog and wanted to link to a post of mine; would it be okay?

Blog, this is my sister Marian. I think you’ll like her.

And Blog, this is my daughter Sam. I think you’ll like her too. If you ever wanted to know (or ever wanted to be able to tell someone) what questions to ask, what things to do or say or not do or say to someone who’s been given a major diagnosis, she’s got posts in two parts, last Sunday and the one before, that I wish I’d had when I was new at this lupus thing. Medical jargon translated? There you go.

Not to mention great recipes at the beginning of what she thought was going to stay a cooking blog.

Enjoy. I’m quite proud of them.

The words themselves were completely lost to me at that distance, though they did seem more garbled than my hearing might account for and I wondered if the speaker had had a small stroke I didn’t know about.

Was that his grandfather on the reel-to-reel, I asked? I actually would have guessed his father if it hadn’t been for the distortion; it sounded that much like his dad.

No–it was Richard’s great grandfather, recorded in 1957 or ‘58 by his grandfather, who also recorded his mother-in-law during a trip back to where he grew up; her voice was next.

I tried to grok how a man whose father had been preached to by Joseph Smith in 1834, a man who had lived his life on a farm in Idaho, could sound so much across the years like how his grandson, who grew up surrounded by all that is official Washington DC, does now in 2012. That easy-going easily-laughing voice. Twins.

The generations are closer together than we know.

It is always easier to get to work on knitting that doesn’t clash with your clothes, and better yet, when the work in your hands will look fabulous with what you’ve got on (even when it’s for somebody else), it’s hard to put it down. A dozen more grams and it’s done.

Oh, and the squirrels and that bag? They quit even sniffing at it. They ignored the nuts in it. Even after I put peanut butter in it. Too scary.

Wow, how do I get them to react to my birdfeeders that way?

I finally took the bag out of the tall flowerpot this morning and put it down across the yard, the mouth open towards where I could see from inside.

It took awhile–and then the bag was suddenly doing a vigorous funky chicken.  A gray was trying the flower pot tactic: if I push this around there must be nuts I can get at underneath. He nudged it. He charged it nose first. He tried to wrestle it out of the way. No dice. He left in disgust.

Hours more and the alpha squirrel approached the mouth of it. (He’s black with a touch of white below his eye, he’s easy to spot.) He stopped halfway across the yard and did an anxious paw up, nose straining forward, tail straining backwards then protectively over him, then he shifted to the other foot and did a little dance.

It didn’t bite him.

A little closer. A little more trepidation. Finally he stepped into the wet cold bag and then freaked as the paper gave way under him and the top of it came down at his head. (The gray had left the thing angled upwards.)

But having gone in once nothing was going to stop him now. None of the others ever did dare come in. Alpha ate at his leisure, then came back for more later when he got hungry again, dashing out to safety the moment the almond was claimed, not staying in there one squirrel breath longer than necessary each time.

Moms rule. I got a squirrel to take just one at a time.

That having worked out so well, a box from his dad showed up two days ago despite our saying we had no such player. Reel-to-reel tapes. Now there’s a reely current technology.

Could we would we?

Uh…

A check of Ebay revealed non-working machines and one listed in the hundreds; Richard remarked that there’s a rubber part that wears out, and at the ages of these…

But the box was here.

Oh and. His dad mentioned that Uncle R had had a machine and had donated it to a tech museum and it was in our town! Maybe we could ask to borrow it back?

Uh…

So I put a note on our ward chat list, feeling like that was our last chance. Someone from church responded almost immediately, saying her husband was determined to hold onto one of every technology that might have family recordings on it, and so, yes, they had a reel-to-reel; would we like to borrow it?

Blessings on Sue and Ken, the problem is solved and now we just have to get started.

(Anyone get that Rose Mary Woods reference in the title?)

p.s. Watched my first Republican debate tonight, transfixed by the political theater. Gingrich wants a lunar colony with hopes for it to be the 51st state by his second term. Really. Maybe they could just aim that $99 billion railroad at the sky.

And I can never follow a recipe, so here’s my version. I rinsed the blackberries and then rolled them gently from paper towel-covered plate to paper towel-covered plate, patting them on top too to dry them off as much as possible.

Oven ready at 350.

Melt a stick of butter and pour in a 13×9 pan and swish around. (I greased the sides with a little extra butter.) Cover the bottom with 18 oz blackberries, ie one Costco package’s worth, trying to spread them across as they hit rather than pushing them around a lot afterwards so that the butter stays distributed as evenly as possible.

Meantime, have 2 c sugar, 2 c flour, 1 tbl baking powder, 1 tsp salt mixed together; pour in 2 c milk and beat. (Okay, so I substituted about 1/4 c super-heavy manufacturing cream in there for that much of the milk.) Pour over the berries and get it quickly into the oven.

Bake one hour. Makes something between a popover and a pancake with its own fresh jam. Note that the measured volume of berries, at about 5 c, nearly equals that of all the other ingredients together.

But be careful: the original recipe said to melt the butter in the pan in the oven, take it out, then pour the milk mixture over and add the berries. That, my friends, is a good way to have exploding glass all over your kitchen unless you’re using a metal pan. Cold liquid should never come in contact with hot glass.

Oh, and the knitting? Got past my roadblock and knitted up most of an ounce of fingering weight today. Love love love how it’s coming out, with credit for the exquisitely soft, beautiful yarn going to Lisa Souza. The cobbler was to celebrate and to get my hands to take a break.