No, I’m not showing pictures of the project yet. Today’s Picotee amaryllis, not quite all the way open yet, will have to stand in for it. Gotta have some surprises. (Right, and I’m as good at holding off on anticipation as a five-year-old on Christmas Eve, we’ll see how long I last.) I came down with a cold the day after I got the yarn, had to put it away for two weeks, and finally now I can safely knit it up for them. At last.

I got a note from Andy a little while ago that totally made my day, telling about his having taken a walk outside of the hospital, at last, on a beautiful day, wearing his “magical scarf.” There’s nothing like a knitting recipient who loves what you (and Tina!) created to make you want to create more. I offered to knit his wife a shawl or scarf, whatever she’d like, asking for shaping and color suggestions. I wanted to get it right. I wanted them both to feel supported and thought of. The family of the patient has it, in some ways, harder than the patient. They need not to be forgotten.

I was going to dye something from my stash, but when I heard back, I knew none of the base yarns I had would quite get to the colors she liked. I went to four yarn stores, searching.

The last one I went to, walking through it, wishing for lace or fingering weight in a nice soft yarn in just the color, why doesn’t anybody carry colors that–

–there was one. One only. It leaped out at me. It screamed, I am THE shade! Right, yarn, tell me, how do you know? But I just knew. And it was so soft. So perfect.

I still, no, no way. I can’t…

I stood there in Creative Hands in Belmont, then, flashing back to the Crohn’s of five years ago: lying on my side in a hospital bed, too weak to hold up the edge of the page I was trying to read, too far gone to register a lot of what it said anyway: every lab mouse that sneezed was written up in those pages. But my husband and I needed to understand what we were deciding on. The doctor had his (positive, it turned out) feelings on the subject, but he wanted our input before telling us his gut feeling. The side effects of the experimental med being proposed included MS and lupus. (Hah. Beatcha.) Absolutely not to be given to patients with those or any neurological diseases, since it damages nerves. It depresses the blood pressure. (Great. I’d already done 63/21 once, memorably.) And on and on. My lupus had killed off the previously-working main nerve to the right side of my heart; there, as far as anybody could guess, would go the rest.

And I utterly knew in my bones that that med was the door to life for me, and not to risk it would be to die. I was so close. Whatever the outcome, let it happen, I wanted to live. I fully expected never to be able to digest food normally again and to be on TPN (tube feeding) for life, but if that’s what it was going to cost, I’d take it. I remembered my friend Neil’s dad with much gratitude, telling me that getting a pacemaker was no big deal. You just do what you’ve gotta do.

I stood in that store, knowing that one does not choose something like a bone marrow transplant except under circumstances where it comes down to the simple choice: I want to live. Remembering not knowing how I was going to find the strength to take the next breath. Nor the next. And my doctor coming in just then, needing me to live, imbuing me with that strength I needed so much simply by his caring presence, in a way I cannot begin to describe.

It was one of the defining moments of my life: our presence and our caring matters. It matters.

And the med worked. Pass the Green and Black’s mint dark chocolate. That small frivolity became a great joy.

I stood in that store, flashing back to Andy’s words: his trying not to complain, his briefly mentioning the fatigue beyond fatigue, his thanking me for recommending the book “100 days” by a doctor who had had a bone marrow transplant too, someone else out there who knew what it was like. Fatigue beyond describing to the living–Andy only barely touched on it in his note, but it was okay to tell me. I knew it well.

I pictured how that exquisitely soft yarn would beckon Andy to lift his tired arm to put it up around his wife’s shoulders as he continued to heal, finding both strength and softness in her presence.

I mentally apologized, and am still doing so, to every person I’ve ever knit for who didn’t and won’t also get a project made out of Jade Sapphire–but hey, please know, you’re in good company. I’ve never sprung for it for me, either.

Although, you know? Truth be told–I guess I just did.

My friend Nancy was helping me out with some stuff about a month ago, and I gave her her choice of amaryllises in bud to take home. Last night, after our knitting group meeting, she gave me the bulb back and then emailed me a picture of her Dancing Queen while it had been in bloom at her house so I could put it on my blog. Cool. Thank you!

I have to tell you about her turtle, since I have a thing about turtles anyway. She opened her door one day years ago to find a small box turtle on her doorstep, unable to reach the doorbell but trying to knock to come on in. Well, hello, who are you?

See that area behind the amaryllis? The rock, the cactus? Her house has an enclosed atrium: you walk in the front door to a glass-covered outdoorsyish spot, complete with bubbling fountain and plants growing in the ground, a greenhouse, basically. Continue down the flagstone pathway, enter the sliding glass doors looking onto the atrium, and you’re the rest of the way inside.

I grew up next to a ten-mile long watershed preserve in Maryland, where people didn’t fence off their yards and the wildlife was pretty prevalent in the heavy woods surrounding the houses. We had box turtles in the backyard munching on the jack-in-the-pulpits and mayapples in the understory. But here in California, the housing is far more dense and the creeks were turned into cemented-in troughs decades ago to keep them in their places. (After 21 years here, I still wince. It’s just so wrong.)

Somehow Nancy’s turtle had survived all that development. She and her husband took care of it for decades, and when it finally passed on, the vet had guessed its age to be 130. It had seen Mark Twain’s day.

And it had beaten every odd thrown against it, and at about 100, had found the place where it was welcome and warm and comfortable and fed and had lived surprisingly long and quite happily ever after.

Go Nancy.

(Update a little later: Nancy just called. We talked about her turtle, and she said its carapace now belongs to a turtle group that takes it to schools to teach with. So its shell lives on doing good.)

Where’s a flowery phrase when you need one.

If I knew the chemistry of the various possible mordants and their effects, I might well have been able to alter how the color came out.  Still.  I like what I got.  Eight hundred seventy-five yards of April-blooming amaryllis-colored alpaca/silk.  One of a kind.

I was clipping off the spent amaryllis flowers to try to get a good photo of the ones on the stalk still going, and, as I often do, got red dripping onto my hands.

Staining my hands. It took some scrubbing to wash it off.

Hey.

Wait a minute.

Them’s protein fibers there, hon. Okay, I know you’re supposed to have so many pounds of natural dyestuffs per pound of fiber, but this is what I’ve got and I’m curious to see.

Which is how I found myself stirring at the stove, searching my stash, wishing I had just the right hank, and then checking my calendar: the 18th. Third Friday of the month. YES!!! Richard and I very quickly found ourselves (he’s a good sport) driving together over to Purlescence, where they were having their monthly late-night movie night: come bring your knitting and watch the show. I was telling him, “We’re having a yarn date!”

“If this is a yarn date, I get to have radio dates.” Okay, I’ve gone to a few of his ham radio meetings already, and I threatened to (again) bring my knitting to those if he said that. We called it a truce, and pulled up to the store.

I snuck in on tiptoes (while various friends waved silently hi) and whispered to Nathania, “I have a yarn emergency!” Okay, me whispering is a bit funny, because I can whisper but I can’t hear whispering back and I can only guess how I sound because I just plain am totally deaf to it. But I didn’t used to be, so I think I can guess reasonably okay. She was patient with me. They all were. I didn’t need words in answer anyway, just a nod that yes, it was okay to buy yarn on movie night. She laughed. Bottom cubby at the end, I knew, I went right to it.

I knew how much yardage I wanted, I knew what I wanted to make, and I knew I could never make it with anything thicker than laceweight–there just weren’t enough blossoms, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to break off any still in full splendor.

Not that I didn’t think about it. The Lady Jane looked right back at me and declared frantically, You don’t wear orange and you know it! …Okay, you’re fine.

And thus I had spent the afternoon boiling old flowers, checking Google–let’s see: the bulbs are poisonous. For cats. In large quantities. I decided I was leaving it in my dedicated dyepot to be safe, which ruled out various other methods of dyeing. I debated with Richard as we drove home from Purlescence with my prize, some baby alpaca/silk white Fino (they had one skein left! YES!!!) Do I soak the hank first, or let it dye “blotchily pretty?”

“Pretty and blotchy don’t normally go together.”

“Oh, but in a handpaint they can. But if I do that, people will think the blotches are from the amaryllis. But if I don’t–will more of the dye take up if I put it in dry? But whatever hits the water first will soak up most of it, thus the blotches.” He put up with my working it out out loud.

I decided I was going to have to wash the hank first anyway, just to make sure there was no leftover mill oil that might keep the dye off. So that means it would be wet and would take up color evenly. Fine.

We got home, and I fished all the flower parts out of the now-cool water and turned the heat back on under it. I put the Fino in and the yarn kind of put its hand on its hip and went oh, yeah? So what? Oh. Right. I fished it back out with my dye spoon, glugged some vinegar in while holding it aloft, swished it around a good one with my free hand tipping the pot back and forth, and put the hank back in.

Alright! That’s more like it!

It is bubbling away, and so am I. I’m having way too much fun.

Last night, just before Sean posted his Change of Shift edition–you have to love how his Coliseum picture looks like the open mouth of a roaring lion, including the teeth! Hey lion, you’ve got a few cavities there–I found myself suddenly grabbing that amaryllis pot and plunking it in front of the azaleas, hoping there was still enough daylight left for some good shots. There was. That post came tumbling out of its own volition.

And I wondered afterwards who it was really for. I referenced my nephews because they’re family and they’re the identical twins nearest and dearest to me. But I kept thinking, the timing of that sudden impulse. Curious. There would be people in the medical profession who might happen to see it if they read more than just the post Sean linked to–ya gotta love Amy’s story–and I wondered if Anne’s teasing her boys or especially the amaryllis analogy might be used to help some other twins out there whom I know nothing about. I quite hope so.

As for the how many of those things do you have question, that got me to go count their pots. (No, I don’t plant them in the ground outside: if they freeze, they die, and the rampant non-native snails in California adore them, I’ve learned.) Now, I’ve got some flowering right now because I’ve gradually staggered the timing of bringing them out of their annual dormancy period, trying to stretch out the blooming time well past December. Note that the stalk on this one is very short: that’s because the bulb was kept dry so long that it needed that extra energy to stay alive–but I’m getting my favorite flowers in April for it. Next year it will be toweringly tall the way it was meant to be and will have made the full transition from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern.

I always tell my family that an amaryllis bulb or two is all I want for my birthday. Though I give quite a few away–nowhere as generously, truth be told, as I do my knitting–I do get many of the ones I keep to bloom from year to year. (Hint: start with the bigger bulbs, not the tiny drugstore cheap ones.) The current count: a nice even 50.  My age plus one.

I’m writing this post as a message hopefully long into the future for two of my sister’s sons. This blog is, in many ways, my version of Randy Pausch’s book, having had an it-could-kill-me-tomorrow-and-nearly-did-yesterday disease for 18 years now. A friend of mine once remarked to me that the best gift a person could be given is a life-threatening disease and then to keep on living, and I would add, and to do so quite happily at that.

Speaking of Randy, I was watching his video about a month ago and my Richard came home from work, looked over my shoulder, and marvelled, “I know that guy! I sponsored some research at Carnegie Mellon, back at DEC…” Small world. Randy, if you see this, our prayers go out for you, your family, and your doctors, and I’m grateful for how you live your life.

Okay, back to the nephews. My sister and her family were visiting here from Atlanta back when those boys were four and a half, ten years ago. They are identical twins. I, being the doting aunt type, took lots of pictures of all her kids and gave Anne copies.

Anne looked them over–Chinatown, the redwoods at Muir, Stinson Beach, you know, got to get all the good touristy spots done–and she got this big wicked grin on her face, went over to the twins, and asked them, “Which one of you is in this picture?”

“Spencer,” said Spencer, in a tone of, like you even have to ask, Mom?

“TREVOR,” said Trevor, in a brotherly tone of, boy am I going to set YOU straight, dude.

“See! *YOU* can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anybody else!”

And now, since I tend to see the world in wool or amaryllis, I want to show you guys: someday, one of you is going to get sick. It happens. It’s an ordinary part of the process called living. And the other one of you will wonder when that same Mack truck is going to smack you broadside too.

See these flowers in these two pictures? Born on the same stem, on the same plant. Identical twins. Do they have the same number of petals? Do they curl the same way? Are they even the same color? Do their stems bend the same degree? (Notice that I had to get under the first one to shoot it, while I could stay above the other.)

Trevor. Spencer. You have identical genes. Not outcomes.

(p.s. See those azaleas in the background? The nursery promised me they were all the same purple variety, cloned from the same original stock. I think rather those were fraternal twins at best, what would you say?)

They’re new at church. I had given it to her two weeks ago: “Honey, this lady knitted me a scarf!”

He responded with the confidence of an authority figure on the subject, “Oh, nobody knits anymore.”

His wife and I looked at him–um, what did your wife just tell you?… I wanted to tell her, while she stood there agape, it’s okay. Let him be bloggable like that. Heh.

Rachel’s washable wool baby blanket.

And a few celebrants cheering it on.

Not much UV at this hour. I ventured forth. Curious how many buds have opened up alongside the window on the azaleas, while the rest further away wait awhile longer: is it the extra warmth? The extra sunlight from the reflection?

The allium from outer space (don’t know if the squirrels planted it or the birds) doing a Bill-the-Cat impression:

And inside. My tall Dancing Queens look different each year they bloom. From orchestra to jazz to a simpler folk melody sung along to a guitar, whatever may be playing, they dance freely with the tune.

(Okay, this was actually funny, I had a mysterious ghost of a post when I hit publish–where did most of the text and one picture go? Cut and paste, let’s try again. Hey, up there, I hear you guffawing. This is what I wrote:)

Hey, Albert up there (don’t we all do that?) if you’re looking: it’s done. Not finished–it needs water, it needs the blocking wires to stretch it and show more clearly the pattern that is already there, in each stitch following along its proper path as it connects to the next one over, stitch by stitch, row by row–but the knitting part. It’s done now.

Thanks, friend.

It’s a beautiful day out there.

And inside, as well.

I looked at Nicholas, who was running around like any normal kid last Sunday, and thought in gratitude to a year ago when he’d fallen 30 feet off the ski lift just to the side of where the picture in that link was taken by his dad. Look at that shot of light there. That’s how it felt, seeing the grin on his face. You would never know now what he’d gone through, what his family had gone through.

I never did get to find out who this knitter was to thank him or her, though I did hear from a member of a knitting guild in Reno who was asking around, but whoever you are out there, thank you for giving a huge amount of comfort to everybody here; you made a tremendous difference when it was urgently needed, to Nicholas wrapped up in his afghan every day and to every person who saw him with it. And you will likely never know.

Time to get ready for church.  Happy Easter!

With the old Godspell song playing in my head, thus the post title. Here are two amaryllises, taken last night.

And today.

My project, meantime, completely stalled out for the day and I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to work on it; finally, it hit me that, I was nearly done, I knew who I wanted to knit for next after I finished it, and I had not a clue what to make that person. I was avoiding not knowing what to do. So I went off on an errand this afternoon, I think not for the errand’s sake, really, but rather, to get away from the house and the problem for a moment, and by the time I got home, I pretty much knew. I went through my stash, and one ball after another, one color, one texture, then another, confirmed that yes, that one. No, not that: almost, almost, but go back to the first, yes, that feels right.

Now I know. It feels like such a relief. Back to work!

The hubby looked at the camera again tonight. “Where’s the door?”

I ran back into the other room and retrieved it. He held it in place against the camera, pushed the power button, and poof there you go. “See, I told you you had to tape the door on. I bet there’s an electronic sensor” etc etc.

Huh. Whodathunkit. Well, him, obviously. “Isn’t it nice to be right?”

“I’m used to it,” he shot back with a grin.

Don’t miss the caption on that first picture. And hey, Lene, that stalk to the left? That’s the second one from your bulb.

There were a few years way back when where my knitting needles were on an extended vacation. But I did do a lot of smocking back then: I bought a pleater to gather up the fabric, which I then embroidered over to make fancy outfits for my babies and for my daughters for awhile longer.

When my youngest boy was just starting to walk and talk, I got in the mood to make some more smocked baby dresses, even though at that point there were going to be no more baby girls in this family; we were done. I made three. It somehow felt important to do.

My oldest sister, whom I’d thought was done too, suddenly announced she and her husband were expecting; I waited, wondering, and, yes, she had a girl. Tadaah! I forget now who got the second dress–it’ll come to me–and the third one was the most important of all.

A foreign student at Stanford found out she was about to become a single mother. She was from a culture where you didn’t, didn’t, didn’t do that. EVER. She didn’t know if or how she could return to her home country or what to do next. She could probably never marry there now. But she decided she couldn’t possibly give up the daughter she loved for adoption–that was her child. No. My friend Renee, who found out about her, found out that she took the baby home from the hospital with only a shoebox for a crib, and Renee asked around at church and managed to round up some essential supplies for her and, we dearly hoped, a sense of emotional support as well.

And I had that smocked baby dress, brand new, to give her for her baby girl. Something to celebrate her birth. I sent it via Renee with a card with the message that I felt that every new child in this world deserves to be celebrated with something handmade with love just for them. And that it had been: I’d just had to wait to find out who that baby was, at the time I was making it, and now I knew. It had been for her.

Renee moved, and I never knew how life turned out for that woman and her daughter. She would be about 18 now.

So often, life is like that. We don’t get to find out. We only get to know we played a part that mattered at the time when it was most needed.