I drove four hours to go two miles to see an old friend today and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Kelly’s kids and mine grew up together, or most of the way before she moved away. It’s been way too long.

Today also happened to be one of the very rare times when my husband had to go into the office, one of those, weren’t we going to buy a second car one of these days? days.

I can affirm that morning and evening rush hour across the Bay Area say the economy’s doing great!

As I was coming home, there were three people walking by taking in the feel of the area, a couple and, lagging behind a little, an older gentleman, whom I had to wait for before I could pull into my driveway–just as the woman was about to get into their car across the street.

I got out of my car. She closed the door on hers after seeing me looking her way and we all four converged eagerly on the sidewalk to make introductions.

They are putting an offer on the house next door tomorrow. I had the same reaction to getting to meet them that she’d clearly had to getting to meet one of the neighbors before doing so: YES!!!

I asked, Does it still have the koi?

A quizzical, Well, it has a pond, I didn’t see any koi…

Me: I used to feed Alma’s koi when they went out of town, and they forgot to tell me it was on a timer. Went over a bit late one day and got zapped hard with water by their raccoon defense set-up.

They laughed. We talked gardens briefly.

And I thought, that full bath Alma and Jim added onto one bedroom for a caretaker’s use would be great for their family’s grandpa to have his privacy.

I came away so hoping they get that house. But there have been so many people coming to see it in person since Saturday that, well, whoever gets to have these good people as their neighbors will be very fortunate. I just selfishly hope it’s us.

I booked it. Then I did the math. What have I done to myself, knowing how much I’d wanted to hand my brother his afghan in person and computing just how many rows per day at 268 stitches (six strands per row currently and six rows per inch) I’d have to do to get it finished by then. I’m not even quite to the halfway point.

Every time I’d gone to book that trip I’d found myself going to a certain weekend. No matter how many times I checked the fares further out–and Southwest, for all their sale emails enticing me towards them, kept giving an error message that was very frustrating.

But that set of dates worked.

Okay, then, that one, I don’t want to wait any longer to see Mom. It just felt right. Done.

And then I sat down and spent most of the last three hours knitting like crazy even though that’s too much because I have to at least try.

To make myself give my hands a break I went to go check to make sure I’d written the flights on my calendar. I had not. Okay, looking up at the itinerary and then down to the page as I flipped to the–

–there smack dab in the middle of when I’d booked it for were the words in my own hand, written small and emotional at the start of the year: “Miss you Dad.”

It will be the fifth anniversary of his passing. My mom misses him so much. We all do. And so that brother and my oldest sister and my son and I will be there with her on that day, celebrating the man with the best laugh any of us ever knew.

I can just picture Dad doing just that at the moment it finally got through my thick skull. I’m sure he’d been trying to get my attention for awhile. For Mom. For all of us.

A talk in church today:

He grew up in the more rural outskirts of DC, not all that far from where we did. His parents grew up very poor, the children of immigrants, one grandfather a refugee Ukrainian Jew.

His family had bought a small wheat farm in Maryland with the intent of as much self-sufficiency as they could manage in order to supplement their paychecks.

But it needed a new well, so his father took a branch from, he thinks it was a peach tree, and used it for divination.

Nathaniel hastened to add that divination has been debunked, there’s no science in it, it’s an old folk tale, he made sure we knew he knew that. But that’s what his father could afford to go on so that’s what he did.

Seems the peach seemed to tell him there was more water where everything was greener. Worked for him. So he got some help and dug himself a well and when there was a drought it kept right on going.

On finding out his neighbors’ wells had gone dry, he shared his water with the farmers around him–because when you’re in a position to be who and what someone else needs, that is a gift from Above.

And then Nathaniel read the scripture that whoso comes to God to take part in His love, “It shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Love thy neighbors.

Help them water their much larger fields. Because that’s the one thing they most needed that they couldn’t do for themselves right then, and his family with their very small farm could do something about it.

The children and their children have never forgotten the lesson.

Spent lots of time doing that staring I talked about, then drawing, attempting to chart, repeat. I can’t wait to see how the rest of the afghan turns out.

And in between, rested my hands while reading about the third of a mile wide and long rock face that fell into a fjord in Greenland last year after the glacier beneath it had melted just enough that it collapsed into the water after lo these many millenia and took the rock above with it.

Which was found after scientists spent days trying to figure out why seismographs around the world were putting out a reading as of a nine-day earthquake but without quite the zig zags.

There had been a tsunami inside that fjord 650 feet high and it just kept sloshing around in that bathtub.

There are often cruise ships in that fjord. But not the day the mountain fell. Metamorphically speaking.

A photo before today’s knitting began.

I ran to Andy’s to try to get some of the last peaches of the season to share but they were sold out. I did get some Reine Claude Green Gage plums, which Trees of Antiquity considers the best stone fruit of them all.

As the couple in front of me in the line turned to go, I said to them, If you’re going home by way of 101 north there was a brush fire just starting on the northbound side near Capital Expressway as I came down–you might want to go a different way.

I can only imagine the traffic snarl, much less the risk of being hemmed in that close to it. They thanked me.

I went the other way, too, with visions of how fast those flames had spread down the side of that onramp. Not high–things had been mowed recently enough and I saw no bushes nor trees–but the smoke! Whoosh!

In the emergency of the moment, I told Richard later, I realized I didn’t know how to make my 6S phone call 911 without my touching it while I was driving and I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road for fear others were looking at it rather than where they were going. There were so many other cars; surely someone else reported it, I wouldn’t want to flood their lines.

He, a former county and Red Cross emergency communications volunteer, told me, Actually–almost no one ever does.

Sounds like I need to get up to speed.

It’s 20″. Hey, that was two weeks ago, pre-water leak and pre-guests! There are lace parts (they’ll stretch out the moment water touches it) and stockinette (not so much.) It’s 25″. It’s whatever length it wants to be in the moment, but whatever, my needles say I’m back to work and making progress and it feels good to be back.

One thing I do know: I’m at the point where I need to put it on two long circs tomorrow so I can lay it out all the way flat and just stare at the thing awhile to make sure that what I think I want is still what I actually want from here.

Can I just, y’know, squeeze a Great Blue Heron in on this side? Could I make that picture work on a small enough number of stitches that it doesn’t look ridiculous in scale to the moose?

James Fallows is both a reporter and pilot and you’ll often get a cockpit’s-eye view of the world from him.

One of the first things they teach you about flying in DC, he writes, is how absolute the rules are on restricted flight space there.

Last Wednesday a plane took off from DC National Airport (now called Reagan.) It flew straight.

There is only one take-off runway and every plane on it must immediately turn left over the Potomac River.

It did not.

Its flight path was about to take it directly over the White House.

The air traffic controllers reminded the pilot to make that turn. Still no turn.

Finally, they commanded the pilot to call a number upon landing. Fallows says no pilot ever wants to hear that command. He doesn’t say outright that their license is forfeit but it’s certainly an implied possibility, along with I’d guess potential criminal charges.

To my knowledge, this is the first time that airspace has been breached by an unauthorized plane since 9/11. This happened last Wednesday. The name of the plane was the Eastern Express.

It was the chartered campaign plane of one Donald Trump, with JD Vance listed as passenger.

One can only wildly guess at what was going on: was Vance trying to say this will all be mine soon? Was the pilot a MAGA who’d fallen for the rules don’t apply to us mentality of his boss? Was the pilot out to lunch?

But you just can’t be, and certainly not there.

By the time Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 there were fighter jets scrambled to take it down rather than let it continue its course to crash in DC now that we knew that day what those planes were doing.

And a week before that anniversary Trump’s plane threw away the rules and invited that kind of response. Why? Just, unfathomably, why? What message were they sending?

Springfield, Ohio is being destroyed because Haitian immigrants are pouring in and they’re, like, they’re eating everybody’s cats and dogs. They’re eating them! He had to say it twice because repetition makes the lie true.

It does, right?

And then in his closing statement he claimed our military is destroyed because Harris had given all our weaponry to Afghanistan.

What the what now?

He seemed to think she was already President. At other times, he had to be reminded that Biden was not the candidate.

Twice, the moderator asked him point-blank if he had any regrets about January 6. Twice, he turned it into a snarl of self-pity and self-justification–and he claimed nobody had died.

And then blamed “their side” for the death of the “beautiful woman” repeatedly warned and then shot while climbing through the window towards the terrified Congresspeople in the chamber caught on the other side with a mob trying to beat the doors in.

Meantime, Harris had the perfect “Please continue” face. Re Jan. 6th, she reminded him that she. was. there.

She didn’t have to say any more than that.

She told what she was offering the American people in terms of policies and plans, to expand the caps on drug prices to more meds–the concession Biden had had to make on Medicare negotiating drug prices having been that they would start off with only so many being regulated in the first year and the second and the third, etc. Child tax credits. First-timer housing support. (Let me raise my hand here and say thank you USA for the FHA loan on our first that got us in.) Small business support. The return of manufacturing these past three+ years, and the jobs that came with. A tax plan that builds the middle class back up again (and one quite a bit less liberal re soaking the richest than Biden’s.) And, always, the right of a woman to make her own medical decisions, while citing cases of women miscarrying and bleeding in hospital parking lots after being refused care for fear of jail time on the part of providers.

And that’s not left-wing talking points–that has happened. Including sepsis from that lack of care.

Mean, angry, self-centered, chaotic, and, frankly, nuts, vs calm, knowledgeable, competent and caring about others and the future we offer our children with our votes.

It’s just really not a hard choice. Let’s do this.

They left for their 7:00 a.m. flight and we woke up to a house that felt far too quiet.

Walked in the laundry room and eyed the distilled water bottle next to the iron: Wait. That one was new, right? I hadn’t opened it yet. Why then…?

…!!!

And so life with its wry sense of humor handed me back one of those blankets nice and wet again along with just a few other things in reach of that water. No mildew yet, not this time. After all, I needed that extra laundry to distract me from missing them so much, right?

Our guests were back here in time for dinner. They’re leaving around 5 a.m. for their cross-country flight home and I will miss them so much.

Heading out, the burning question is, will those Reine Claude Green Gage plums from Andy’s grow in Maine?

I told her Trees of Antiquity not only sells them but considers that variety the best tasting stone fruit they have. They’d be a good one to ask–and I reminded her that our Sam grew a Meyer lemon in Vermont because she wanted to enough. Go for it.

Her glasses are bright pink with sparkles and they fit her gregariousness perfectly. You would want to be her patient. She’s a nurse.

The lace cowls: I had handspun lime-ish green silk with sparkles. I had a solid vivid red silk from a tubular yarn. I had handpainted merino in a heathery bright turquoise, the yarn bought from Serendipidye at Kings Mountain Art Fair last year.

I lined them up flat in a ziplock and pulled it out of my purse today and asked her to pick one.

She loved them all, she assured me, but that red! Definitely the red.

I quietly remembered knitting it a few months ago thinking, someone out there is going to love this color so much and I have to knit it right now and not put off weaving in the ends. It has to be ready for them.

I had not at that point actually met her yet.

Today it was the most perfect thing.

So is she.

My friend who took me to Kings Mountain? I took her to Andy’s Orchard today. It was only fair.

Meantime, how is it that never in my life did anyone tell me that young zebras are brown with black stripes? This picture a few days ago made me do a double take and eventually sent me looking for more.

There’s an extinct type called a quagga that, after sequencing its DNA from a museum specimen and finding out how closely related it was to a particular subgroup, researchers are trying to bring back through breeding and luck. They’ve got a small herd going that looks pretty close.

The stripes cool the animal against the heat. Quaggas were the southernmost type, living in cooler temps. They protect against biting flies. There were fewer of those flies there. And thus of stripes.

People were still talking in the 1800s about trying to domesticate that most gentle of zebras when they found out they couldn’t. They wouldn’t breed in zoos. They’d been hunted by colonizers. Animals that are less afraid are easier to catch.

There weren’t any left.

And now, or close to it at least, there are beginning to be some again.

On a side note, I kept trying to figure out why the name made me think of clams. The answer is, there’s a Ukrainian quagga mussel whose fading stripes are such that it was actually named after that zebra.

How on earth did I ever hear of a type of mussel in a river in Ukraine. Oh. That’s the invasive one they’re fighting in the Great Lakes.

Rabbit hole, I tell you. But fun to learn a little bit more about the world.

So much laughing. Such a good time.

It was the daughter of my high school best friend and the daughter’s husband, doing a long driving trip of a lifetime to see sights never seen before, with our house as a crash landing spot mid-California.

Amy and I each took a turn at generational double taking: she said they were going next to see her aunt, her father’s sister.

I started to say, I didn’t know he had a sister–and stopped and realized I meant her mother’s father, and of course she meant her dad and he did and silly me.

Just before they left this morning, I told her she reminded me of her grandmother: she was a sweetheart.

There was this flicker of confusion and she was trying to figure out what I meant. The only grandmother she ever knew was a step; her grandfather had been widowed around the time she’d been born and had remarried to someone who’d never had children, to whom Amy had been her only grandchild.

Your mom’s mom, I said gently. The one you never knew. I did.

She took a deep breath inhaling the essence of that thought and held me in a long, long hug.

I know what it’s like to grow up missing a grandfather lost to an early death. I know that wondering and I feel that strong wistfulness.

At long last, at least for her, I knew I could do something about it. The connection is real.

I sent them off with Andy’s peaches to share with her aunt and they will be back here Sunday before turning in the rental and flying home across the country. I cannot wait to see them again.

You know house guests are coming when you finally, finally head to Home Despot to get a new toilet seat via prepay and pick up.

My phone is old and the battery’s on its way out. I know that other people just wave their magic wands, but…

The clerk at Pickup looked about 20.

I’m old, I told her with a grin as I handed her the paper, I printed it out.

She laughed.

And the car? The mechanic got me in at 10:00, checked the code, reset it, and sent me on my way no charge after saying that the check engine light on the Prius is an emissions monitor only: if it comes on and stays on, keep driving. (I’d already told him I’d unscrewed the gas cap, screwed it back on, and clicked it three times like Dorothy’s ruby red slippers so he knew he didn’t have to tell me that part. Thank you to DebbieR’s husband for what to try.)

If it comes on and flickers, he said, get the car in here.

And that is why we’re now the proud owners of a new slow-close no-slam no-slip etc etc. Are we excited yet.

Tomorrow, though, for that I can’t wait!

This is a long shot, I wrote to the church’s chat list, but my check engine light… If anyone happens to want to go to the Kings Mountain Art Fair on Monday…

And that is how I ended up spending the afternoon catching up with an old friend so that I could catch up with more old friends. Sometimes people just need to know what they can do that would help. She found a wedding present for her son at a neighboring booth; I found the time I had hoped for of visiting with Mel and his son Korey.

I bought some of their gorgeous work and surprised them with soft Mecha hats. Korey was amazed at how well his was going to go with his favorite sweatshirt.

As I was leaving he picked up this beautiful little bowl and said, looking me in the eyes, I made this. He wrapped it quickly in paper and added it to the bag on my arm, knowing how much I would treasure the gift.

I now have something much prettier than that old plastic case to put my hearing aids in at night.

And all of them got peaches from Andy’s, because of course.