The doctor started her day by making mine: the biopsy results were in, and they were negative.

I was getting ready quickly because there was a funeral at 10:00 and I was picking up a friend who lived in the opposite direction, and one is not late for those.

Agnes was 87 and had passed quietly in her sleep.

When we moved here, we were young parents far away from family. Agnes was this tiny woman from Puerto Rico who loved to laugh, who with her sweet accent called me Daughter, so I called her Mom. We would laugh some more when I would say Mom and we would see someone who didn’t know us do a startled double take and try not to stare while trying to figure it out. Good times.

Her son and daughter-in-law had toddlers in the nursery at church just like we did, and I remember their Nathan was always looking out for his little sister. Protecting her. Helping her. Being her big brother was something he took great pride in. They were so adorable together.

The whole family moved to the next city over a few years later.

Nathan, at twelve, was made an honorary fireman by the firefighters there while he was fighting cancer.

And here I was today, in that same building where his funeral had been attended by enough firefighters that their red trucks parked lengthwise had filled the back of the parking lot.

His mother was so inspired by the loving care her son had gotten that she went back to school and became a nurse at that hospital so she could be that and do that for the next families walking in those shoes.

After the remembrances, the laughter, the heartfelt musical solo that left my face mask damp, I talked to my old friends about their mom.

And found myself asking one 30-something a question he probably had not been asked in a very very long time.

Are you Nathan’s brother?

He was.

I told him how Nathan had always looked out for his sister, and his face just–someone remembered! Nicole, he answered, eyes moist. Yes. Yes he did.

When we love someone they are part of us forever. His grandmother will be remembered. His older brother is remembered, and now he knew that. The good that we do does in fact live on.

So, there’s two ways to do it, he was saying: take twenty years while you carefully weigh every possible variation of every possible part or event or choice–or build fast go smash blow things up and learn and then go do it again.

Like Elon Musk on the latter? I asked.

Exactly. NASA vs SpaceX.

This from a man who’s quite proud of having been part of a software group that worked on the Mars Rovers, so I guess he does have some idea of what it’s like to work with NASA, actually. (You should have seen his excitement over that perfect landing. But I digress.)

He was thinking I’d Musked it, but, no, not at all. I explained that (while knitting lots of hats and a few cowls) I hadn’t just dithered over it these last three or four months–I’d drawn, redrawn, googled for images for inspiration, drawn some more, but I just couldn’t picture it in my mind; that brain function was lost to injury years ago.

I told him, I pulled out the–remember when I made that landscape of Alaska in a completely impractical baby blanket for Lillian, out of baby alpaca and silk, and then made it over again in washable wool? I still have the original. I looked at it again today and again worked out how I could riff on it.

I even dreamed the silly project a few nights ago and got some of that visualization down and it has stayed with me.

I had collected so much cashmere for it from Colourmart’s half-price sales (and had quite a few lace weights plied into the weight I wanted for an extra $5. The offerings are few this month but there are some.)

So I felt like I had NASA’d the thing to death. I had long had the bottom edge finished and waiting.

But what it came down to was, I was afraid of it. I was afraid after all this build-up of totally botching the thing. (Thinking of Carolyn’s tire swing that I embroidered lawn scuff marks under so it would not look like–yow and never mind and I was thrilled when one of her neighbors marveled in delight, Is that the tire swing?!)

It felt like a huge triumph today when, first the Alaska, then pulled out the latestest sketch, the yarn, then lined the balls up together, okay that no no that one okay and that and put that back that no that’s going to be sky not river that won’t go but that one…

…and at long last I committed to it and sat down and knitted that first row of color work. It felt like cutting into one’s first steek (man, could someone who writes Autocorrect go learn how to knit?) But it just didn’t have to be that hard. At all.

I’ve wanted to do a creekside and it has wanted to be a mountain landscape for all this time.

Mountains it is.

For the first inch, anyway, unless it decides otherwise–proving that my yarn is still the boss of me–but I think. I think. I’ve got it and I can take it from here.

(Let’s draw it in colors rather than purl stitches, and change those antlers) okay, where should I put the elk?

Someone asked the folks who run the baking pages at the Washington Post how one could find frozen pitted tart cherries.

Since I have never seen them sold frozen in any grocery store anywhere I’ve lived, I thought I’d pass their answer along.

Granted, 25 pound buckets and 7 pound buckets times two would take a lot of freezer space. But oh, they’d be worth it.

With planning and a bunch of ziploc bags I got about twenty pounds of my English Morellos in mine last year, but that’s a small and malleable amount per and mine weren’t frozen yet.

Still. The pitting is already done. (It takes me about an hour per pie’s worth; tart cherries are small.) You decide how much sugar. Orders can be split if you don’t mind hacking at frozen stuff–or just get the case of two.

The shipping sounds like a lot till you figure in the cost of dry ice etc, and yet to my house at least it totals out to $5.57/lb for the 14 lbs and $4.50/lb for the 25. Which is less than they cost fresh here.

Those carefully hoarded last of the ziplocs are suddenly looking warily my direction.

Stoneware pie plates make the crispest crusts.

I just might need to do some baking tomorrow.

Done. Finally.

First I had to sign that I knew that I was going to lose eyebrow hair follicles permanently. I told her, well, then it’ll match the other eye: I fell down the stairs with a glass baby bottle when I was a baby.

She did a double take because she hadn’t seen that, looked closely and marveled at the scar, That must have been big!

Well, I don’t actually remember. But I was very lucky.

The biopsy results should be in in a week, but if it was anything it was skin cancer, in which case they’ll do Mohs surgery to make sure they got every cell of it. She thought likely it was not. I told her one of my kids had melanoma in her late 20s, caught by an astute doctor who just didn’t like the looks of that (and it wasn’t what she’d come in for at all, but he caught it.)

She was glad I’d brought this in and gotten it dealt with.

My lump is gone, that part of my face is numb, and the relief is intense. It is done. Thank you all for your prayers, your thoughts, your messages, and your friendship. It means the world to me.

And doing all the things to keep myself productively busy.

Thirteen more hours….

We were visiting our oldest’s for Thanksgiving when she offered me some lupus-protective sunblock for the walk we were about to take with the grandkids: and that is how I found the lump in that upper socket.

I just figured a zit was about to pop in a weird spot. It didn’t. I mentioned it to the optometrist, who immediately referred me to the right eye doctor.

It has grown since then. Not a lot. It is harder. A little. But definitely.

They could not get me in before January.

All this time I’ve been ignoring it, going, it’s no big deal, I can’t do a thing about it yet if it is, things have always turned out okay so far so this one will, too.

The theory on that anti-tumor-necrosis factor that granted me these last 20 and a half years is that it could cause cancer about twenty years out, and since I was trying really hard at the time to still be alive the next day that sure sounded like a bargain to me. It was.

So it’s kind of interesting to find myself trying not to freak out after all this calm nonchalance now that the appointment is only two days away. I don’t know if I’m finally giving myself permission to feel the possibilities?

No! Because I said so. Look at all that yarn and plans (acknowledging that I have let myself down with a bit of a knitting slump of late) and hopes waiting on me. My grandkids. Time. I want all of it.

Just typing that out loud makes it sound pretty overwrought. Good. I’m quite happy to go back to the no-big-deal.

I just want to know–but when I do, maybe I’ll just want to be back to where I didn’t have to know yet, and I know that, too.

You know exactly what I need to do here: get those needles moving. Create some love to put out into the world.

Being told out of the blue today that an old friend has inoperable stage 4 cancer says that sometimes things turn out a very big deal and life is so fragile and you just never know. Love your dear ones.

Me, I’m looking forward to helping my oldest granddaughter in her pursuit of learning to be a lifetime Knitter with a capital K.

Happy Birthday to my sister!

It’s finally getting down to cold enough tonight that I had to cover the mango tree for the first time this season. This has never waited till January before.

Meantime, last Labor Day I mentioned heading to the Kings Mountain Art Fair via the shorter route that I’d forgotten I’d promised myself I would never drive again, even more so with part of the northbound lane, it turned out, having fallen down the mountain from last winter’s storms. This is the much easier road I took home with much better visibility.

Um.

And yes that’s an origami-style (totally stole that description) Tesla Cybertruck that that guy probably made history when he hit. I’m picturing the high school basketball chants of, We are #1! Hey!

Poor kid…

Laying flat it’s 22.5″ across, 16″ shoulder seam to shoulder seam, 25″ long, and 26″ from bottom of the cuff to top of the shoulder seam.

I mean, it sounds like I did a pretty good job of following whatever pattern it was, but it sure doesn’t look that way on me. The yarn isn’t terrible but it’s nothing special; it’s either a third or a quarter mohair mixed with acrylic. I had just started knitting again after reading Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness after my lupus diagnosis and this was back when wool yarn was only described as wool, not sold by breed nor micron count nor softness (or at least not as far as I knew.)

The ’80’s were all about the mohair anyway.

So I have this very plain white hand knit sweater that swamps me, particularly those Princess Diana wedding dress-style puffed sleeves. The photo understates them: they are not shy.

If anyone wants to save this from whatever fate awaits it in the Goodwill box, let me know and I’ll send it right out to you. If you’d like it on you, it’s on me.

(Edited in the morning to add with a laugh, hey, you guys, didn’t mean to scare everybody away. It’s okay to come out now.)

Yesterday I asked my brother if he’d like some Andy’s apricots.

He knew what those slab Blenheims are like, and Yes he would absolutely love that.

He texted today that he was coming home. (YAY!!!)

Emergency room medicine, I told Richard.

My non-apricot-loving husband got this impish look on his face and told me that that was copyrighted thankyouverymuch.

It doesn’t count if it’s not ice cream on the way home from the ER?

Nope! he grinned. Tradition!

It would be kind of hard to ship Cherry Garcia…

I found a box big enough for a single pound; there was space for more but not for another box, so I emptied most of a second pound into a ziplock and used that for padding.

I’ll just call it emergency medicine. It is on its way.

(I had no idea what was about to happen when I suddenly decided on Friday to make one last long trek down to Andy’s farm before he closed his shop from January 1 till May. I had some of his apricots to tide me over–but I bought a few more anyway. And there you go.)

That amazing evacuation of a plane on fire with smoke already in the cabin.

Turns out, Japan Airlines not only gives a safety lecture at the beginning of their flights, they show a video of inflated emergency chutes and how wheeled luggage and high heels can destroy them. How reaching for your luggage (and having bags fall towards people as you rush and then stop to pull up the handles) means you and those behind you might not make it that far anyway.

Although I imagine the actual flames on the other side of the windows might have concentrated the mind.

Not one person on Flight 516 grabbed their baggage. All three hundred seventy-nine people got down those steep chutes and off that plane in time with not a single serious injury.

Because they’d been informed when there wasn’t an emergency on how to think it through when there was one.

And on a different subject: things are much better and it looks like my brother might be able to go home in a day or two, now that he’s post-op. Going straight to the ER had been the thing to do and they got him in time. I am so grateful. Thank you all so much for your prayers and good thoughts sent his way. You guys rock.

The view out one side of the house vs the other, just before nearly an inch of rain let loose. That patch of bright blue was gone in not much more than the time it took to walk back over there.

Somehow, I didn’t knit today: I wound yarn. I got it ready for when I’d be ready, and it felt just right.

(p.s. This has nothing to do with anything, but I saw this photo and went, Wait. Who thought that was a good idea? What homeowners insurance would be caught dead covering that house? Who would buy a house that couldn’t be insured? Who *did* this? And if the Zillow link doesn’t come through, it’s the 23d photo here on Redfin. “And she’s buying the stairway to heaven…” Can you imagine hauling a couch up to that loft?)

The tops of hats are my least favorite part to do: to keep from growing any gaps between the knitted-together pairs of stitches and those around them, I pull the yarn consciously taut, and I tend to keep it taut all the way around those rows. It makes for a dense, warm top of the head, but it’s a pain in the hands to squeeze those needle tips in there over and over.

But hey, you’ve got two pairs of size sevens tied up till you do, so….

I needed to go finish yesterday’s hat. I didn’t really want to–I wanted to start something new, something brighter, something cheerful on a gray day.

And then the phone rang. It was my mom.

My brother is suddenly in the hospital and he’s going to have a rough go of it for the next little bit and we are all praying hard.

I sat down with that hat and realized it was offering a chance to control one small thing in my life and have it come out the way I wanted it to, right now, no waiting. Make it.

Even working the ends in felt like a relief. Whoever it’s for, including possibly a doctor or nurse taking care of him, it’s ready, and I need to go start another one.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on….

I hoped to see a particular someone at church today and gift him with a hat in thanks for a kindness of his, but I found myself wanting to make extra sure he got a color he liked.

Turns out he was off visiting elsewhere–but so were McKay and his bride, only, here.

McKay grew up with my kids, so much so that when he ran into my daughter in college someone asked her later if they were seeing each other and she told them, No! That would be like dating my brother!

His family moved away when he was in high school; I was in the hospital when they left, which makes it easy to remember it was 2003, and I hadn’t seen him since. Although I did get to send him and his bride best wishes via Facebook when they got married.

He wanted her to see where he grew up.

And I had two Mecha hats, no sign of that other guy, and plenty of time to knit more for him. But only one time to be able to hand these two theirs in person.

And with that bit of incentive, the cowl I was working on got finished this afternoon (picture pre-blocking) and the next hat went from an unwound hank of good intentions to 2/3 of the way done.

You never know when you’ve got to be ready for anything.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all.

Knitted. Boots. Made of a fine strand of leather. $4,100.

Huh. Wouldn’t those be scrunchy socks in no time? The designer’s gold button will help pull those right down.

Yeah, I did. I looked. 1 mm “yarn” is as fine as I could find but you’d want a longer skein of it than I was finding on Etsy. Kind of a fun idea, though, and leather slipper bottoms are easy to find.

What I want to know is, how does it look where they ran the ends in and does it feel okay to walk on them?

I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s an article in the San Jose Mercury News that describes how this happened yesterday.

Agitate a particular plankton type at night with the energy of the waves from the correct angle and intensity and have the moon’s light just so, and–

–you get bright glowing blue waves in the dark in southern California. So cool. YouTube link.