My seat mate on the plane to Seattle was wearing a teal blue outfit. We got to talking towards the end of the flight; she’d been admiring the hat I was knitting for some time. (It had a specific recipient in mind.) She showed me pictures of her quilts and I found myself exclaiming over and over: the woman was a gifted artist. My stockinette beanie suddenly felt quite plain.

Before the trip, I had gone looking to see just how many things kicking around were FOs that just needed the ends run in so as to be ready to be gifted. I was a little horrified to find that the answer was eighteen.

That’s a lot of Zoom-meeting hats and cowls knit during non-hat-wearing months so they hadn’t gone anywhere and the incentive to spend those last two or three minutes on them just hadn’t been there.

I picked one at random and ran those silly yarn ends into the backs of the stitches and wondered what had taken me so long. And then felt done.

Why was I not feeling the need to do those other, y’know, seventeen, c’mon, hon…  shrug

I stuck the really truly finished one in my jacket pocket to make sure I would have easy access to it in case I didn’t finish the one on the needles. You never know… But also–that shuttle bus from the car rental place can be really cold up there.

The hat in my pocket was teal blue.

She was as thrilled as I would soon be by Heather’s socks.

And that is how you get those 17 other stragglers out of here and on their ways to where they were meant to go all along.

For the record: yesterday was the day that for the first time ever, a Red-tailed hawk swooped around our patio coming right close to the window with me on the other side, wings spread wide and deep orange tail outstretched, to the pomegranate tree and then to complete the circle away to the bay laurel, to look around and check out the digs here. In my yard.

I have seen them up in the hills many times but never here much less right! Here! Glorious!

And for the record, yesterday was the day my friend Heather L utterly blew me away. She was half-afraid they wouldn’t fit or that their stitches might be too uneven or or or.

Oh honey. Wow. Wow. Wow. They could not possibly have been a more perfect gift of love and skill and talent. Wow. And the colors! And trees to welcome that new hawk to perch and observe from: may it forever feel at home here. Wow.