Two texts from me:
Your mail is here.
(There.)
She wasn’t home and was utterly baffled as to why I would be saying that. (She reassured me afterwards that the box was pretty safe where it had been left.)
First, as she opened the box, a pack of three soft thick wool socks with a post-it note attached: Toenail guards. Please use. (Yeah, they said Last One when I bought a set for me previous to that. They say men’s, but they’re not too big on my feet after running through the hand wash cycle on the machine so I knew they’d be okay, maybe even for both of them.)
Then a Lands End zipped medium tote bag, and inside that, a ziplocked…
And below all that, several sheets of paper from different stages of plotting how I was going to knit this with a post-it note on each describing the journey. Including one sketch I liked but didn’t use after discussing how to get the the angle of the side of the house within the stitch count I had: “Don’t try for perspective, Mom, do it head-on.” And so I had.
Carolyn was absolutely blown away. She told me she had never been so surprised in her life.
And later that of course I could use her picture.
It is finally, finally in its natural habitat, where it looks the best it ever has. It has at long last come home.