Remember that truly brilliant idea someone gave me to freeze a paper cup of water and then put a penny on top, so that if you ever had a power outage happen while you were away you could check to see if your frozen foods had thawed and then refrozen and were unsafe?

I kept thinking the last few months that evaporation was getting to mine and that I really ought to refill that cup, but the penny was frozen onto the top and, eh. It’s cool.

The door on our garage freezer bounced slightly open and was apparently like that overnight–on a night that hit 31F. (Unless we had a very small earthquake that shook it ajar. Dunno.)

There was this moment of horror, followed by the realization that I could actually know something about the effects: check the penny!

It had slipped to the edge of the cup and then slid down the side and was frozen in place upright. The door had not been closed yet but the ice seemed solid. The food seemed solid, even the bag of cranberries on the door right next to that cup. Small things thaw faster, exposed things certainly do, and they weren’t.

Lucked out.

More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.

It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.

James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.

It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.

All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.

Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.

That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.

Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.

My grand niece is three today. She will tell you that she is not little. (Her dad called today to say they’re expecting in two months; that might have something to do with it, although you know she has no idea how her life’s about to be upended.) She will also say firmly that she is not big.

She is medium.

She runs a tight ship, observed her dad. She will tell you how it is.

Flood the zone, the felon-in-chief’s favored fellow felon advised. Put more out there than the media can deal with at once.

And so 17 Inspectors General, those tasked with rooting out abuse or waste in government, were fired in an illegal manner yesterday, today all Federal grants were suspended in an illegal manner (meaning as part of it not just school lunches but that all Medicaid disbursements were stopped, till a Federal judge stopped the stopping but only for now) while ICE agents raided elementary schools for anybody suspected of being an illegal immigrant even if they were too young to know what that was or that they were born here and are citizens. And even if they weren’t.

Traumatizing the children. Y’know, when you let any disturbed individual buy a thousand rounds of ammunition for their many guns once they’re 18 but not yet fully myelinated, you just might want them to have the happier childhoods their loving parents were planning on instead. Think ahead.

Two million Federal employees were told in an email that they had the choice of emailing back “resign” and getting paid through September or to assume they’ll be fired or at best demoted.

Don’t do it. All of that was in violation of the law, too, including the sums any severance could entail per person. They want you to be the guilty party on losing your job. Air traffic controllers? Who needs them, right?

An old friend reposted his friend’s experience of having multiple ICE agents pull him over and wave guns in his face and yell and threaten him and lie that he had done things just now that he absolutely had not while he called the local police, who came to his aid and told the agents to get the hell out of there and leave the guy alone. And that was in a red state.

And if they’re already doing that to a citizen based on his name or looks…

Are there Republicans who are as outraged as the rest of the world looking on in horror? Are they hearing from their constituents?

We must speak up–like an individual stitch in a sweater, every voice matters.

I know they want us to throw up our hands and not look. I’m making myself look because I owe that to my dad’s memory for his service in WWII. The rule of law. Integrity. Compassion. Democracy. Those are ours and we will not let them be taken from us.

And then I knit four rows of afghan and started some bright new fish. Because that felt wonderful and hopeful, picturing a grandchild’s future delighted face.

Slowly, slowly getting there.

Never seen them before.

Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.

(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)

Then I saw her brother.

Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.

The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!

The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!

Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.

When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.

I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.

We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.

They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.

It’s late, we’re home, and we got to listen to a Tongan choir tonight.

One thing I like about living here, you get to meet people from all over the world. Sometimes you even get to hear them sing, in a language I do not know nevertheless fully shared in the music and the faces of the choir that was giving of themselves and their time to bring those notes to the rest of us.

It’s been in the low 30s at night and in the morning the family room has been very cold. Jacket required.

Richard got a box that came with much-regretted large pieces of foam and styrofoam padding. Non recyclable. Has to go in what is a very small trash can out there. I could drive it to another city and pay for it to go away, or we could just break off pieces and squish them in there over the course of at least a month if not two because man do those take up space.

I started with the two smallest pieces that didn’t need breaking down.

On impulse Monday night I put one of the big ones against the doorframe to the garage. We’ve never had mice in the house, but that rubber sweeper piece across the bottom of the door surely wouldn’t be enough to stop them if they wanted to badly enough so why not. The block came an inch short of filling the frame so I jammed in a smaller piece sideways at the bottom and what the heck, went and put another big piece on top of the first. Costco-sized un-rice cakes for rodents.

It did not make me the top home decorator of all time but at least it amused me.

I walked in that room the next morning and to my great surprise it was nearly the same temp as the bedrooms.

Huh. We don’t have that problem with the front door. But we do there. I had always thought it was all the window space, but those are double-paned and it’s clearly the door.

I stopped throwing away the foam for the moment while trying to decide: how on earth do you insulate a door for real? The freezer’s right on the other side, so we go through there all the time with our hands full and minds preoccupied; you wouldn’t want a wallhanging swinging in your face and catching on your frozen foods.

Meantime, that foam effect is definitely being real (I was starting to get cold at 8:00 pm and went oh, right) and I set them back up every evening now. So glamorous. Just don’t look.

I gotta do something about this. Somehow.

It was a do you know somebody who knows somebody question, and in fact I did and they were happy to reach out and offer info and I’m hoping that works out.

Meantime, from someone else, did I have this person’s number? I did, and would you help this other person with…? He would.

Next: Would you say a prayer for, and of course I would and did and suddenly had a thought of something I could actually do that sounded really good that hadn’t occurred to me but was so obvious once I did so I did, and I’m hoping that turns out well for person four (or whatever number we’re on at this point.)

A busy day of logistics. A day of people looking out for others, some they knew, some they didn’t, just because they could.

A day of increasing hope.

Baby Mushroom corals can move! (Shared link, New York Times, it should work whether you’re a subscriber or not.) They take a deep breath and then go Pop!

Anybody up for a game of hop scotch down there?

Notable quote of the day from Robin Givhan of the Washington Post: “Patriotism is like the love that a parent has for a child; nationalism is akin to believing that one’s child can do no wrong.”

Meantime, I did six more afghan rows and I figure if I can keep that up I can finish it in under two months.

But what feels like the big thing is I went out there and pruned back the pomegranate tree by a third. Not even the tree companies like that job, or at least not their employees the one time I hired it out.

We were running out of January, though, and January is the time of year not only when it’s dormant but when its needle thorns are the least stabby (oh look there’s a splinter), though they are definitely still there. I skipped the pruning last year. Bad idea.

As I said to Richard afterwards, It was encroaching on the sour cherry and I would much rather have more sour cherries than thorny pomegranates. And not be stabbed at while I pick them.

So. Many. Branches. Thin, flexible, and in no way up to holding up the heavy fruit to come; instead they bow way down under the weight, like a cross between a porcupine and a weeping willow wearing jewelry.

Its haircut improved it immensely. I finally wised up and went looking for heavy gloves before reaching for the pile of cuttings.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

(Picture taken most of a shark ago.)

Phyl, an experienced diver, looked at this and started naming the striped orange fish.

I looked at her and declared, G_d makes His creations, I make mine.

Well alright then! as we both laughed.

Nina threw herself a birthday party and invited her friends. She told me to bring my knitting so she could work on hers. So I did.

I pulled mine out first, a white lace cowl in Malabrigo Rios at about the 2/3 mark, and then she showed off her much more elaborate project. Gorgeous. Another friend there was also a knitter. And one said with some regret that it had skipped a generation and she didn’t–but she took a picture of what I was working on to send to her (daughter I think? It was loud in there) because she so admired it.

Turns out she was the woman who had translated all those letters Nina had found in her mother’s closet that had been sent back and forth between relatives in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Pattern repeat #12, done. (Checking the time) it really needs at least one more after that, all I can hope for is she doesn’t leave early. She and someone else got quite into a conversation–good, good, keep talking, guys.

Repeat #13 got done. That’s shorter than I normally  prefer but it was just long enough to look okay to my eyes. I cast off.

Sitting next to me looking the other way as they talked, she didn’t notice at all.

I retrieved my purse, where there’s always a yarn needle in the change pocket of the wallet. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen where I knew her view of me would be blocked and wove those ends in. I should have some folding scissors in there somewhere… No sign of them. I asked Nina. She got hers and snipped those two little umbilical cords to its beginnings off and the thing was born.

The interpreter of those letters was dumbfounded. And ecstatic.

I explained that its nubbly texture would disappear and the lace lie flat and stretch out the moment it touched water, it’s the nature of the thing.

Totally fine by her, and she put it on and hugged me.

She took it off again to stroke the softness of the Rios.

And at last she did leave a little early, like I’d had a feeling she might.

I was a little wistful that I didn’t have one to give to any of the other friends but they all said that for all those hours she’d put into doing that great gift for our Nina and her family she had earned every stitch of it. And she had.

Nina said as we were leaving, That was the right person for that. That was perfect.

The dinner was light. Fruit is healthy. We could justify this.

A bag of frozen berries. A quarter cup of sugar, a spoonful of cornstarch, nine minutes covered in the microwave stir stir stir at the end.

And now for the ice cream.

We tried to wait till the fruit had cooled but given that I had an oven mitt on as I brought its stoneware bowl to the table I’d say we failed. I handed him the vanilla ice cream container; he’s better at getting it out when it’s frozen hard.

….Did I want more?

No no stop thanks that’s quite enough.

Then I looked at his bowl. All those three sections needed was a carrot nose and a scarf. “Once there was a snowman, snowman, snowman” I started singing (I think I learned that song when I was three, and so did he) “once there was a snowman, tall tall tall! In the bowl he melted melted melted” (pouring hot berry mix over it) “in the bowl he melted small small small.”

A few minutes later…

There’s a little fruit left. Did you want it?

No, he grinned, the proportions were just right.