Last winter, while my husband, my mother, my friends and readers, my doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, a housekeeper at Stanford–everybody played a part and everybody played it well in taking good care of me, strengthening me, being there for me, and I am so grateful–I, of course, could take no care whatsoever of my collection of prized amaryllises. They were the least of our worries.  They were outside under an awning, up high on an old picnic table so as to be out of reach of the snails that would devour them.

But that also meant the winter rains couldn’t reach them. And when I came home, I could not lift the weight of a water jug as my long incision healed ever so slowly.  The others remembered to once or twice each over the months.

When at last I could do my part, the pots just sat there with the bulbs desiccated. I was sure most of them were dead.

A few were.  But the others, I could feel that the bulbs still had some heft left between my fingers, enough for hope’s sake.  So I kept on watering those pots long past the point that leaves should have started to show already.  They did not. I watered anyway.  Throw in a little Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!”  I hadn’t been, so they weren’t allowed to be either–have faith in that heft and keep trying.

This went on for months.

I finally got a few leaves here and there.  I figured that was the most one could ask for, really; if they could produce four, the chances were high they’d bloom next year, and that would be wonderful, but if it had to be the year after that, then so be it.

This bulb produced only two.  And yet–I glanced outside two weeks ago and was very surprised to see a bud.  I brought it inside. Eventually, I found six pots with buds so far, and not wanting the wildlife to develop a taste for the flowers, brought them inside and out of their squirrelly little reach.

I really had wondered if they were dead after all.  It had just been so long with no response I could see.

The first one opened today, is opening today, the flower smiling wider and wider in slow motion as I type this.

It is standing there reminding me what I so easily forget, how much Life is a gift, beautiful and powerful beyond all understanding.  It is not limited, no matter what our expectations may be at any one time.  The life force is strongest when we hear its call to cheer someone else’s day–as so many brightened mine when I was in dire need.

Pouring water into flowerpots.  Typing an email to someone lying in a hospital bed, sending up a prayer, Thinking Good Thoughts.  A small moment to each patient bulb, and then another, and then another, adding up.

To pure joy.

Thank you, everybody.

And remembering, as I write this, the One who endured all, rose above all, and loves all, Happy Easter!

I’m not sure why I find myself wanting to catch up on old yarns as Stitches approaches.  But I do.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I bought a wholesaler’s closeout of natural-brown 90% cashmere 10% nylon cones at–are you knitters ready for this?–$15/lb, and I bought ten pounds of it, all they had.  And then they found a few more in their warehouse and I bought those too.  They were giving it to me at their cost to get rid of it.  It needed a strong washing, and not just for the mill oils.  It was single-ply and cobweb fine, impossibly fragile; I plied it on my wheel into all kinds of useful, stronger thicknesses, scouring after spinning, and I made so many things out of it for several years.  Afghans, yarn that my mom knitted up into the most glorious Aran sweater, you name it.

Till I was down to the very last few pounds.  The idea of actually running out of this resource after all those projects… The rest of it kind of got tucked away, waiting till I could bear to let it go.

At some point, though, I wound some off, 64 g here, 66 g there, and threw them in the dyepot, one into a little red, the second a bit of purple.

And then those hanks, too, simply sat there.  I certainly didn’t do any spinning last year with all the stitching they did on me.

I got some Handmaiden laceweight silk awhile ago. Hey. While I was working on the shawl in Cashmere Superior and Dianne’s laceweight, the fuzzy and the colorful, I wondered if this new silk would look good with those two, and it would definitely add strength…

So today I tried it.  Plied the cashmeres first, then the silk around the other two. The yarn is balanced; no twisting in the finished skein, it hangs straight. So my being so out of practice didn’t hurt it.

The silk glistens, the cashmere fuzzes around it.  160 yards, drying now, waiting.  There’s a whole lot more, potentially, where that came from.

Hey, Dad, look what’s blooming now–thank you!

Twins by a different color… I was already into the green hat today before I realized that oh, right, I was going to use superwash for all these. Misti baby alpaca isn’t, but oh, does it feel wonderful; I decided, well, hey.  One doesn’t always have to be entirely practical.  Meantime, I definitely have enough of the Blue Moon skein left to make a third, although I’m going to do another girl hat while I decide what to put with it.

Thought I’d show the finished fuschia-orange one, ends woven in, so Ellen can let out a sigh of relief. There you go.  Done.

I remembered today what I already knew, that when it comes to knitting ribbing, two by twos knit up so much faster, so much easier on the hands, and in a fair bit less time than one by ones.  Y’know, there’s a parable waiting to leap out of that.

On to the next, after I decide what it’s going to be.  The whether-or-not  report is predicting bright and sunny, with chance of scattered colors.

The first amaryllis to rebloom despite last year’s definite and atypical lack of plant care, and a very bright spot in our weather.

I’d been needing to go to the post office all week, but the incessant storms were making it a nice time to sit down with a good knitting project in hand and my feet up–never mind the hearing aids, where getting wet or not is the $6400 question.

But the skies finally held their breath for a moment, Friday presented the gift of an arbitrary deadline, and at about 4:25, I finally kicked myself out the door.

Driving there, I was surprised at how high the water was in the Baylands.  It would be so easy right now to repeat the February day when my oldest was 16 and, as a certified Red Cross volunteer, had helped run the emergency shelter with my husband: a friend of mine was in there, having gone to bed the night before on one side of the room and having woken up to find her waterbed on the other side now, it having become, yay verily, a water bed.  Hovering near the ceiling.

I’d called my friend Lisa to let her know that folks had been evacuated from her old apartment building by boat.

There was also our friend Brad who’d wondered if the water might be coming up in the street and decided he’d better go open his front door to check–only to see his koi from his back yard right there, swimming past his feet.  So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It raiiiiiiiiiined as I drove.

I got in the post office with my hood over my head, got my four packages safely on their way, I got back to the car and on down the road.  There was traffic, a light, the freeway nearby that everybody seemed to be heading to or from–

–and then there was me.  On a quiet, narrow road.  Going past the side of the San Francisco Bay marshes, the sky thunderously dark in puffy soft clouds that made it hard to take the threat seriously, and right in front of them, suddenly, the sun! Bright, vividly shining as only the rain behind it in the late day can make it, with a strong rainbow arching across the water to land somewhere over…there, where, as I approached, a white egret, standing in the enlarged lake, had its head tucked down.

Hoping perhaps for an incoming koi for dessert.

Can Nut Lady come out and play? Pretty please?

It’s just the one, the red-bellied medium-black squirrel of the three siblings, that has decided my purpose in life is to open the door and toss it a walnut.  It has now learned that if the walnut goes past it, it’s still there, and will now turn and go find it.

It has surprised me the last few days (I apparently learn slower than it does) by perching there in the morning, watching me at the computer, waiting patiently for me to get with the program.

I am utterly charmed.  It’s training me well.

Okay, question for everybody: I succumbed to Margo Lynn’s mention of the Cherry Tree January sale and ordered some suri lace.  They threw in a grab bag with random additional skeins, a pair of SWTC needles (size 8, 32″–perfect!) and these two… black plastic hearts?

Anybody?

Is there some cosmic knitting significance to these that I’m just not grasping?  I am at a loss. Huh.

Meantime, Phyl, the purple flowers you gave me for my birthday are still blooming the winter away, as are the first of the amaryllises, a gift from Richard.

Happy January!

I’ve been a little discouraged at how tired it makes me to do things I think should be simple, and last night I was too wiped to post.

Mostly because I’d finally hauled the water out, gallon by gallon, to break dormancy at last on my waiting amaryllises yesterday.

A little time, a little perspective, a little browsing through old photos (this being one of the most fun) of my favorite flowers.

Now time for a little yarn.

It’s a surprise. I don’t know a thing about it. I’ll distract you with an amaryllis photo (Lene, that’s yours in the white container, far left).  The thing is all wrapped up in bird-themed wrapping paper over there, right next to the 25 lb bag of birdseed. I wonder what it could be.

Michelle was wondering out loud yesterday what the family should get me for Mother’s Day.  My friend Robin then sent me a link to one of her favorite stores when I mentioned to her that a birdfeeder would be really cool. Our next-door neighbors have one, with the result that I’ve seen a red-tailed hawk right outside our window here, and there was the never-to-be-forgotten moment when I pulled into my driveway, got out of my car, and there, perched at the edge of the neighbor’s roof at the closest point of it to where I was, quite close, stood a golden eagle. It looked at me. I looked at it. It looked at me.  Hmm. A little big for prey.  Came in a crunchy container, and it might get back in and you know how hard it is to undo that overpackaging with one’s talons.

So I wanted something that would help pull the outdoors up closer to my window, a little friendly competition with the feeder next door.

Robin’s link was to the local Wild Bird Center.  Michelle and I hopped in the car today and headed down to Los Gatos.  We were helped by an enthusiastic ornithologist who wanted to know what kinds of birds we wanted to attract?

“Pretty ones.”

She laughed.  Ooookay…  Obviously a fussy customer here.

I asked about the feeder I’d seen online that flips the squirrels off. No, literally. She told me the price of those (yowsers!) and that they have a $30 part that has to be replaced about once a year, and added, the squirrels learn quick to avoid them so then where’s the entertainment?  She doesn’t sell them.

Ah. Well, it was just a curiosity.  Besides, then I’d have to keep the feeder close to the ground and I’d be watching the little beasties anxiously like a mom whose 16-year-old just took off on their first solo trip behind the wheel.

She sold Michelle one that closes up the restaurant at the weight of a squirrel and is perfect for songbirds.

And I don’t know a thing about it till Sunday.  (Michelle wanted me to come with her to make sure the one she got would be one I’d be pleased with.)

I’m all a-twitter.  Heh.

I spent today watching this little Picotee slowly open up.

Quite a few of my older amaryllis bulbs have been blooming with unusually short stems this year, including these two and the budding one lurking behind them.

They’re typically marketed as Christmas presents and bloom around the winter holidays on towering two- to three-foot stalks, their leaves lasting eight months or so.  Then you quit watering them, let them rest for one and a half to three months, start up again and wait for them to rebloom.  Rinse, rest, repeat.

I like to have some in full flower as far into the year as I can, so I stretch out the drying-out periods to stagger the timing; last year I had flowers all the way to the end of May.  Cool!

So. Around the middle of this past December, I did a mass watering of my several dozen older bulbs to get them started, knowing some would respond quickly, some slower.

But I was already three weeks into my Crohn’s flare, and as many know, it got bad fast after that. Carrying heavy pitchers of water around was something that got given up real fast. I worried about killing my bulbs off–one watering in the middle of five months?  But there was not a thing I could do about it.  And they just were not the first thing on anyone else’s mind during those days, as one might well imagine.

Mom eventually planted the ones Dad gave me for my birthday and took on the watering.

My older bulbs could have put all their energy into sheer survival mode, green only.  Some did. But some, with the beginnings of buds already formed inside the bulbs, were determined to bloom the moment it became possible, however  it could be done.

And those are the ones with the short stems now, giving it all they’ve got. A green hummingbird enjoyed them a few days ago.  And suddenly our roses are blooming en masse to celebrate spring too; I almost caught a honeybee in this picture.

Lene? The bulb you gave me a year ago started to send up its first two leaves right away, then they died off in the drought. I started watering it anyway when I could again.  It took it weeks to respond, long enough that I wasn’t sure why I was still trying, but now it’s got two unusually wide, healthy young leaves making up for lost time.

Amaryllises need four leaves producing food for the bulb for them to bloom the next year.

I can wait.

I’ve got all the time in the world now.

Our friends Glenn and Johnna bought a new house and invited a few friends over to see it last night. One fellow there whom I didn’t know looked at my gray hair and commented that he was right behind me. I told him, yeah, but I’ve already got the hearing aids and the cane–beat you!

What I didn’t know, is, he was Glenn’s friend from New York City who happened to study composition under Thelonius Monk. Joel Forrester, whose tune is the theme song for NPR’s Fresh Air, sat down at Glenn’s piano and launched into a performance on the spot for everybody.  Absolutely incredible.

Now, it was Sunday, and my family and I live by very old-fashioned ideas about not working and trying to live in such a way that we don’t make other people work on Sunday if we can possibly help it.  (Or for others, to honor whatever day they choose to celebrate their own Sabbath if we can.)  Which is why I told Joel I wanted to go to Amazon when it wasn’t Sunday anymore and buy all his CDs.

He promptly handed me three along with his card, adding his autograph when I asked, and told me he lived by the honor system and to send him a check whenever the day felt right to me.

He will find that it was postmarked today.  And I happily have new music to jazz up my knitting time.

So much to say. I can’t do justice to any of it.

I want to say how my friend Lisa, 20 years ago, decided she and I should go visit John at Children’s, that we did once a week while he was in there and how we got to have the joy of watching him coming back.  How the day Highway 880 was on almost total shut-down from an accident, the one day John’s mother Nanci couldn’t get through–Lisa had previously been a cop in Hayward and knew all the back roads.  She and I got our visit in, not knowing his mom was still stuck back there on the freeway.  It helped her later to find out he hadn’t been left alone after all.

Our time and sense of purpose together during that is what deepened our friendship to where, when I was diagnosed with lupus a year later, she was willing to volunteer to take my preschoolers every morning so I could go do swim therapy. She asked if I would then watch hers while she worked out.  Tara’s Redwood Burl shawl story in my book?  We’re talking about that Lisa.

I want to say how stunned I was to sign today for a package from Canada and find another afghan!!! and then, not only that, it was not one but TWO afghans made from squares people had started knitting in January via a Ravelry group to try to wish me back to good health.  Thank you, everybody, and especially Anne for putting all of those together.  (And for chocolate!)  All the well wishes, and arriving on the day I saw my surgeon, whom I adore, for a follow-up… Wow. What can I say? Wow.  How could anyone be anything but well after that?

And it was kind of funny, because for a moment there when I gave my surgeon her black cashmere shawl as I’d waited so long to be able to do, it was almost as if she might protest something silly like I am not worthy!

And now here I sit feeling myself precisely in her shoes. Wow. What I haven’t said on the blog, is, I had that allergic reaction but also a staph infection on top of it and we’re still fighting it.  The afghans are a great comfort–this little bit of illness now is nothing.  I WILL get over this.

I’ve only begun to look at that Ravelry site. I want to savor it, I want to take it in, I want to soak up each post.  But for just this moment I can’t give it what it so much deserves, because I’ve got so much to do because I need to bake a cake and go to the grocery store and and and…

I want to say happy birthday to my Richard!  Maybe that’s why there were two afghans  in there?  Wow.  (You see? I can’t possibly do justice to all these subjects at once.)

And especially because.  (Wishing her amaryllises from afar.) Kay of Mason-Dixon Knitting just lost her husband after a brief illness, someone far too young to go.  (But. But. NO. *I* got better, so everybody else should too!)  I am so sorry for her loss and her children’s.

Love your dear ones.  Life is so terribly short sometimes.

And thank you all for loving me so dearly and so knitterly and so well.  I am utterly gobsmacked. Again.

So much to say…

There was a photo in the paper yesterday of tree pieces being cut up and removed from the roadway after a heavy windstorm the other day.  My outside amaryllises, however, being used to a bit of breeze out there, somehow did just fine.  It did help that they had an awning overhead and two outside walls of the house for shelter, but still.  Not such a fragile plant after all, if you give it a little experience with the elements of life.  These, even though they had buds starting to open that would easily catch like a sail the wider they got, gave way in the wind just enough to still stay upright and no more.  I know–I was watching them nervously and debating bringing them in.  But they seemed okay.

And then there was a green hummingbird at my tall one today! I was afraid to move, then finally reached for my camera, at which point it of course skittered away.

So I tried to get a picture to at least show you the flower it had gone to.  At first, standing on my tiptoes with my arms held high over my head, I got this, which gave me a pretty good hummingbird’s-eye view as it zeroed in.

And then, looking up from ground level, this:

Well, okay, but I really wanted a good shot of that flower, so I tried standing on a chair.

We’re getting there.

Oh, and: my surgeon’s shawl is blocked, yarn ends run in and trimmed, and ready to go. The cashmere seems so fragile to me! I keep telling myself that all knitted up into a fabric like it is now is much different from testing a strand held taut to break it; the finished shawl has a greater strength and resilience than how the yarn alone immediately seems.

My second Dancing Queen of the season has opened up.

Company coming.  My cousin and his family. The chocolate torte is ready (recipe in the comments.)   Happy Sunday!

It’s pretty much a tie.

The one inside is an Appleblossom amaryllis.  Behind the outdoor one is a Dancing Queen getting ready for her Ginger Rogers number.

Meantime, as an experiment today, I threw a microfiber cleaning cloth in the laundry with a pair of wool socks I once bought: they were supposedly machine washable, but I found that every bit of available lint in the load glued onto those socks like burrs from the first time through.

I wondered if that small cloth would do anything.   Worth a try.

The socks came out nearly free of all that had plagued them, aside from a few leftover pills.  The difference was pretty incredible.  So now having experimented with commercial socks first, I know it’s okay to put those cloths in with the handknit ones, and since it was so successful, I thought I’d mention the idea.  Most sock yarns wouldn’t need it, but I did once knit a pair of socks that had the same problem. (Okay, I’m waiting for Don to come up with some variation of his “Squaw burr-y Shortcake” pun.)

Meantime, the view out an upper window. It snowed a foot yesterday where my brother lives in Colorado; here, we’re snowing Bradford Pear petals.

It’s a race, and the outside amaryllis is winning by about half a day.

But the azalea laughed and opened this afternoon and beat them both.

The first picture is of a money plant, so called for how the seedpods look like a silver dollar; I sowed some inside that planter box 15 years ago, never again, and to this day there are a few upstarts. This year they’re growing on the outside of the box, just to be cute. I guess I got my money compounded with being interesting over the years.

Meantime.  Someone my husband works with stopped by last night, and I was all prepared: I’d found the perfect one.  Plastic pot–no ring of white growing on clay.  Needed watering–no damp spots on the floor of his car.  The stalk just starting–no top-heavy tipping over while he would be taking it home.

We showed him the huge dark red amaryllis in the kitchen so he could see what this plant in this pot I was offering him was all about. Then the Hercules amaryllis in the living room. I told him I thought his was red but I wasn’t sure; it should bloom in about two weeks.

“I’ll stop by your house more often!” he grinned.  And he took it home in great delight, eager to show his family.