Every now and then a post comes out that is just so close to home.  That last was one of them for me. Thank you all for your kind comments; they are very much appreciated.

Meantime, back on the knitting front, I’m afraid I can’t show this pattern yet, but I can answer the request for a closeup on the colors.  The large tote was a gift from my older daughter for Mother’s Day four years ago that she knew would be absolutely perfect, and it was.

That daughter and her husband just bought their first house yesterday.   Life IS good!  Celebration time!  We got a funny note about their two cats exploring their new place, discovering hiding spots that the humans in the household hadn’t known were there.

I’m remembering how our small boy stuffed our silverware down the heating grates in our first house in New Hampshire, some of it never to be found again, and the day he flipped off the furnace in zero-degree weather.  It had to have been him.  His big sister would never have thought of it.  I can only guess it must have been in a moment I was carrying him to or from the laundry room–toddlers have an instinctive love for switches and an unerring sense of when Mom is just distracted enough that they can get away with it.

And I’m glad cats are small and don’t have thumbs.  Because they would sure have fun if they did.

Someone just introduced herself over at KnitTalk, mentioning her career in a neonatal ICU, and I wrote her a note hoping that the parents of some of her patients had brought their kids back for her to get to see.

Which reminded me of Beth, one of my favorite nurses during my 10-day stay at Stanford, who, when I was about to be discharged after having been in critical condition, I promised I would come back to visit.  The intensity in her reaction surprised me: she exclaimed, “The patients always say that. But they never do!”

Well, hey.  I could do something about at least one patient.  It took me a few months and several trips to find everybody, but I knitted for sixteen people–doctors, interns, nurses, nursing assistants.  Beth got a Rabbit Tracks scarf in a soft merino.  Brian got socks as a thank you for walking in his patients’ shoes. Franklin and Noel got hats.  Robin got a lace cashmere/cotton scarf to match her scrubs.  And on and on.

One nursing assistant had been terrible to me, had hated being assigned to a GI patient and had let me know it.  I was there long enough to go from, why on earth do I have to be stuck with her, to coming to realize, how much pain must she be in, greater than any physical pain of mine, to be treating people like that?  There is more to her story, but this is not the place for it.  But I decided the only way I could handle her and hold onto who I am was to pray for her: to recognize her need to be cared about by somebody, anybody.

When I did go back to Stanford to visit, I came bearing those knitted gifts to convey the depth of my appreciation for everybody’s work and for their caring.  But in their faces, I got to see the great joy for them in simply getting to see me walking back in there, on my own two feet, no IV pole, no longer so gaunt and definitely strong again.  I was coming to thank them in person. That was all they needed.  The knitting was just the icing on the celebratory cake.

And on the visit that I found that one nursing assistant, who knew nothing of the knitting, she saw me first and RAN to me and threw her arms around me and wept.  I held her, too, and then pulled out the bag that was for her…  Knitting is time and love made tangible and undeniable, and of all the people there, she’d most needed that.  And that I could do.

When we care and are cared about, all things that matter can be healed.

Last fall, I was surprised at Stitches East by my friends Deb and her daughter Kate presenting me with this pair of lace socks that they had knit together, one doing the feet, the other the tops, so that the differing gauges wouldn’t matter.  They’re glorious socks in my favorite shade of maroon, and the three of us spent I don’t know how long together, laughing till we ached.  After years of exchanging emails with Deb, and then with Kate, it was such a treat to come together like that and to really hit it off like we’d been so sure we would. We did. And how.

Shortly thereafter they got hit with the first of the out-of-the-blue news.  The followup now is that Deb’s son and Kate’s brother Robbie is in need of a bone marrow donor for his leukemia, and he needs it like, now, and there is no good match in the registry yet.  Here is Robbie’s dad’s blog, a mix of work and their current situation.

I checked, and I’m not eligible to even try to sign up.  Given that I’m waiting for the trials at Stanford to progress so I can sign up of lupus patients’ receiving blood stem cell transplants from their adult siblings, this is hardly a surprise.

Here is a list of FAQs on the bone marrow donations.  It can be a lot more gentle a process than it used to be: it is often done now like a simple blood donation.  Speaking of which, and speaking as a parent with a child also in need at times of platelet transfusions–Robbie needs them far more often, though–the supply in the blood banks is real low right now; if you donate platelets, the process takes longer, but you can do it more often than whole blood because they return the non-platelet parts back to you.

Picture yourself, ten years from now, twenty years from now, knowing that you’d saved a life.  Maybe even getting to see a little of what that person did with that life to thank you for the one gift higher than any other that one human being can give to another.

How many hours of your days can you spend that well?

Laura, you got it.  The Julia.  It’s in the book all ready to go for you, and you can do your choice of yarn types/sizes in two gauges/sizes.  The whole thing is six stitches long, repeated forever. (I know–you said counting to four was your limit.  Heh. I don’t think you have to count with this one, though, so it’s all good.)  Purl straight across the back every time.  If you want to, when the boys are in bed, you can do the zig zaggy optional bottom edge.  Or not.  Me, I finally bought a Weight Watchers scale so I could measure grams so that I could figure out how much yarn I was using per row and thus when to start into the bottom edging and have enough if I knew I was running short.  (Note the lack of bottom edging on this one.  I like the seashell effect of leaving it plain, too.)

The larger-stitch-count Julia, by the way, is the pattern I used for the Knitpicks merino yarn you dyed and totally surprised me with at TKGA a year ago.  It’s a little thicker than most fingering weights I use, and this is how it looks knitted up on my size 9 (5.5mm) needles.  Funny that you should ask for plain and simple, and, hey, looky what I knitted last fall!