I remember as a kid being warned to put sunscreen on or I’d get skin cancer–at a time when nobody I knew actually wore it and getting a tan, which I could never have pulled off even if my freckles had decided to unionize, was something of a social requirement.

Sunblock was not even the word yet.

Whatever anyone said to me about sun exposure hazards at the time, I remember a mixture of inability to believe in it because being actually old enough for that to happen was beyond my imagination, and of feeling a little bit indignant at this vision of a future me I’d never met who was old. Which I most emphatically was not.

But who would want to hold me accountable for what I was doing as a kid, ie, running around and playing outside. As one does. How could I ever be her? And who was she to boss me around? Or to make me feel guilty?

Granted, Sandy down the street liked to sunbathe on that vinyl chaise-lounge by her mom’s rose patch and I knew all I would do is fry and hurt if I tried that. Not to mention I was not one to hold still. Hiking in the woods was my favorite thing.

I wonder if this would have worked better: laughing at pictures of how funny future me could look like. Still with my hair below my shoulders (go me!) but with this scar at the top of my scalp, imprinted like a baby’s fontanelle. (Here, feel that. Like a thumbprint!) And what it does is, any remaining hair there starting a new round of growing shoots straight up into the sky. Which looks really weird while the rest is mildly curly. Finally, months later, it gets long enough to flop over but it still wants to go left instead of right.

I happen to be sporting the hedgehog look just now, conditioner additions notwithstanding.

The photos of me holding Parker as a newborn nearly 14 years ago show that that basal-cell was present nine months before I finally let Richard talk me into taking seriously this spot that wasn’t going away, and got it looked at. I’d thought it was discoid lupus. I lost a fair amount of hair to that procrastination.

Two weeks ago, I found myself scratching at night at maybe a mosquito bite on the side of my head.

Today I finally asked Richard to look at it for me and take a picture (nah, you don’t want to see it.)

I’m sure the thing my dermatologist most wanted to do during the countdown to T-day was squeeze in one more patient appointment and a surgery when she just saw me last month.

Last time it rained as much as it’s supposed to tomorrow, a year ago, I had an appointment with her but the roads were closed and the floods were high and there was no way to get there.

I’m getting ahead of myself. She has to see the message first.

All I can do is wait. (As my brother waits for his melanoma recovery to attain five-year status. One of my children had it at 29 and is fine. Nah, mine’s just going to be basal again if anything. Looks the same as last time.)

Just slow, steady progress on that bright red.

I told him in the course of the conversation, I have enough yarn now that I could actually do three more repeats and make it beyond a baby blanket to a real throw. But would they want that, I mean who needs their neighbor decorating their house for them and if I leave it baby size does that obligate me to make another if they have another child so I’m not creating jealousy and yeah I don’t expect they’re going to have half a dozen more or anything but this could get expensive. And this other neighbor didn’t get any when her kids were born because she was having hers at the same time our kids were having some of theirs and what about hers being left out. But oh well.

He was smiling at this point: “You’re overthinking this.”

He told me just do what you planned to do, let life play out however it’s going to and take it from there when it does.

Of course.

I guess all I really was asking was did I have permission from myself to cast off now, which looks like it would leave it an inch or two wider than it is long (as far as I can tell pre-blocking), or do one more set.

That shape bugs me. The number six bugs me–the eye is pleased with odd numbers. Request denied. One more set. Because I’m the boss of my knitting (my stash just guffawed) and I said so.

I wonder how her life turned out. She would have been able to reach people nobody else could have.

When I was at the end of my first semester of college in 1977 at BYU, facing my first finals, my dad surprised me with an amaryllis bulb kit in the mail for my birthday.

He had given one to my mom every year for hers. To be included in that celebration felt like my dad telling me quietly that I was an adult now in his eyes. And that because of his faith in me, I was. Finals? I could do this!

One of the girls on my floor in the dorm asked me about that box with the pretty flower picture on it and was so taken with the idea that my dad would do that that we got to talking.

And talking.

We found ourselves walking the campus. Around town. Walking, walking, till hours past our bodies ached to be sound asleep. There was no way to stop.

I was her first witness. She had to tell someone.

When she was younger, her parents had lost a child in a house fire.

Her father, well regarded in their community which had rallied around the family, at home was someone who beat her mother. Often.

The day came when Becca stood between them to make him stop. He knocked her out.

And again.

At one point, and I don’t know how she met him, some older man told her he loved her and would protect her and brought her home to his place, where she was his plaything for a week. I think she was 17.

At the end of that week, though, she considered all the Sunday School lessons about waiting for marriage and knew she hadn’t done that and the ones about loving your family and she knew her father hadn’t lived up to that–but that this wasn’t how she wanted to live, either. She went home. College was coming soon anyway.

My father had sent me a flower bulb, simply to surprise me and make my day, and because he believed in me. There were actually people out there who loved their kids and lived that way. That, that was what she wanted ahead of her in her life. Love. Kindness.

She confessed to me then that a few nights earlier it had all become too much and she had sat in a tub with a knife in her hand, looking at her wrists, prepared to do the deed.

But something had made her hesitate. She felt an intense empathy reaching out for her personally, with a question, and I will never forget her saying these words describing how it felt: Yes. This life *will* be hard. Do you want to continue it?

She felt a promise holding her in its loving arms that she was not alone, that it would be so hard, but worth it, worth it, worth it, if she did. And so she lived.

Then she saw my amaryllis box.

And knew that good, loving people were out there, that they were more than just a Sunday School wish, that they were trying to live up to what they profess about following the teachings of Jesus to love one another. They were real. That could be her. She could want others to feel that same sense of being offered rescue that she had.

Yesterday morning, surely from the stress of what last week’s election means for the whole world and worried sick over my friends in Ukraine, I woke up from a nightmare. In it I had relived the pain of her telling me what had been done to her.

Becca–her parents had called her Rebecca when they were mad at her, which had never made sense to her because they had in fact actually named her simply Becca–had, shortly after our long nighttime walk, gone home at Christmas break to her folks in the South and she never came back. She told me just before she left that she had decided to go home, trying to reassure me that it was okay to now.

I never heard from her again.

I have never known if she was okay, and all my adult life I have wanted her to be, wherever she is out there.

She could be there for others going through what she had had to in a way I could never know how to. We opened up each other’s worlds. If we saw each other now we would be throwing our arms around each other and telling how this whole life thing had all turned out for us.

I told Richard the gist of that long walk.

It was a hard story for him to hear on top of the overwhelming grieving going on re the election outcome, wherein half the nation had returned to its abuser.

I had a thought–and went and pulled out the Nautilus puzzle of a sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Pouring out the pieces. Getting out the cookie sheets to sort them into. Heads bowed together, turning each one over to see its true colors, searching for the edges, finding where it turns its corners, slowly, slowly over two evenings going from setting up the boundaries to filling in the center, the rocks and the sky and the river coming to be, slowly and painstakingly at first and then faster and faster towards the end till the picture was complete.

The laser-broken pieces now a glory of a view.

High-frequency hearing loss, ie from age or in my case from being allergic to aspirin, wipes out the consonants of speech but not the vowels. So unless you get hearing aids you can hear someone talking but the words themselves are not clear.

I finally opened a box that came Saturday. One expected thing, one unexpected thing.

I pulled the latter out and looked at it, puzzled. I had no idea what this thing was supposed to be and its packaging didn’t say as far as I could tell.

I handed it to him, asking.

It’s a ah eh i uh.

Me, using my best lipreading skills: It’s a camel biter?

Him: A candle lighter. (Electric, he added afterwards.)

Me, wondering how on earth this thing is supposed to match that description: A candle lighter? Do we need this?

Him, grinning and knowing the answer was going to sound silly: Yes.

The camels will be relieved to hear that.

Why I usually do short repeats when my amount of yarn is limited, but I didn’t this time–I like that tree motif, I wasn’t ready to quit doing it. Besides, it’s a pun: red woods.

So I thought I’d run the math by him.

Me: See, I’ve used 33 g of the current 100 g and done 15 rows for it so that means I get 45 rows per skein. Maybe 46. It’s 38 rows per motif repeat. I have a full skein after this plus 33 g, left over from Ryan’s baby’s blanket, I started those 15 rows at four rows into leaf set #5, and I want seven sets of leaves. And I bought the yarn–how old is Margo now? Two and a half?–so matching that shade of Ravelry Red would be hard. Do I have enough to do that full last motif?

The resident computer scientist: Your what hurts? No seriously, you’re breaking my brain here. What?

Well, hey, I thought that was all pretty straightforward, but then knitting requires being good at math.

Heh.

Actually, I think that means I’d come up 5 g short plus the cast-off. Alright, let’s see how it blocks out to after the sixth set. Which I’m about to start. (And yes, the eye prefers odd numbers visually. Maybe shorter trees on top for the seventh?)

—

Edit: I just finished the fifth repeat plus a purl row and weighed the yarn: 175 g total left. If 100g=45 rows, then 175g=78.75 rows, two motifs are 38×2=76 rows, plus the castoff. And preferably a purl row beforehand. So: maybe?

Saturday: my brother and his two younger daughters came for dinner at my mom’s. My husband and son picked up takeout from Himalayan Kitchen. (If you ever go to Salt Lake City, I highly recommend. Turns out it’s a good half hour’s drive for my brother but that’s still one of their favorite places, too.)

As we were all sitting and talking afterwards, I pulled out the zipped tote bag and told him, Merry Christmas a little early.

He opened the tote. He saw the extra-large ziplock inside stuffed to explode like a gender reveal party, and cautiously opened it up. The blanket came and came and came and came out of there.

He exclaimed over it; his daughters were deep in conversation with their cousin. They looked up–and went oh wow just like their father had.

Mom said something about me being the only person she knows who wants landscape pictures to knit.

And a great time was had by all.

Airports and wheelchairs, it’s the thing, especially at Salt Lake airport, which has more art every time we go. The three-dimensional fabric rolling cloud formations waving out of the upper walls near the ticket counters? (Surely dust hell!) Those now go along most of the mile-long underground walk between the gates and the exits. And the ceiling now. While the floors have sparkle embedded in the bright light blue, a unicorn’s dream.

My brain does not love the visual intensity. Sit. Stay.

Wheelchair story the first: an older woman and I were being pushed side by side while the pushers, clearly friends, were enjoying each other’s company.

About fifty feet before the end of the tunnel I saw and they nodded to each other towards a toy on the floor so as not to run over it. It was a rubbery pink whale, about 10″ long. With sparkles. Some very small child was clearly going to miss that but what could you do.

We got to the elevators, where a young mom was struggling alone with a large stroller trying to get it to go over the gap. I figured the chances were surely zero but asked her, Did you have a pink sparkly whale toy that’s on the ground back there?

She gasped, looked at her toddler, saw it gone, the doors about to close, and did this flustered mix of knowing she needed to run/being sure it was hopeless/trying to teach her daughter not to throw her toy away while knowing a stage is a stage, they just don’t know that young/what do I do! while holding the door open.

My red-headed attendant (who looked to be about 18) took all that in in a heartbeat and went running. Retrieved the toy and brought it triumphantly back. Yes that was theirs yes that was the one thank you thank you thank you.

I reinforced her toy distraction quota with finger puppets for her two kids.

Wheelchair story the second.

Being at the front of the plane, we did our usual of handing a finger puppet (hand knit. From Peru) to every small child. I sat in the middle seat, Richard on the aisle, from my bag to him to the parents to the children. (With a few to the flight attendants just because they were enjoying this so much.)

One dad had seen us boarding and was ready for it: he held up a tiny tiger we had given him on the flight out and laughed, joy in his face. He still let us give them a new one.

A family came on with kids Richard thought were too old for them–maybe six and nine–and he didn’t want the older child to feel insulted, nor left out if his brother got one. So he just quietly let them pass by. I wasn’t so sure about that, but then I was also worried I might run out so I let it be. There were more kids on that flight than we usually see.

So. We land, there’s the wheelchair, we go up the ramp and the guy parks me and runs back down to help someone else.

There was not a second pusher available just then. The fastest thing was to just push the both of us so the other guy, who was about 80, wouldn’t have to wait.

He did not look particularly happy.

I turned to him as we started out and joked, I’ll race you!

I had said that to the woman in the chair just before the pink whale saga and she’d gone from stressed out to uproarious laughter, with the pushers guffawing, too. From this guy, though, nothing–and I thought, eh, I know what it’s like to be deaf and people expecting you to respond to what they said when you have no idea, and I left him alone after that.

I interrupted apologetically and they had to wait for my restroom break. Sorry–but it had been hours.

When the immigrant who clearly had been working hard on learning English finally got our chairs to the security zone barrier, on the other side waiting were the parents and the two boys whom Richard had thought too old for our little toys, and I got to see their happy faces at seeing their grandparents. Jumping up and down and waving hi excitedly as kids do.

As if they hadn’t just been on the same flight. As if, rather than their having gone ahead from the gate, they’d long been separated. They loved their grandparents and they were happy and all was right in their world.

All this time, the grandpa had never once looked my way nor at the attendant. Not even at baggage claim when helped with their bags. Stern as stone. While throughout all this his wife’s face looked at me from time to time with an expression I couldn’t figure out. I would have said stricken? Maybe? Did I do something wrong? What was all that about?

Well, we had left them out, though I have no idea if they knew that. I wasn’t going to leave them on that note if I could do something about it and I found I still had three last puppets. We were at that point just arrived at the Uber pick-up. The attendant left.

I went to the grandma. I said, We were giving out finger puppets on the plane to the kids–but (quizzically) did your grandkids get one?

No, they didn’t.

Would they like some?

The older kid was edging closer at this point.

Yes!

I gave her two (an elephant two days before an election felt a little weird but what would a knitter in Peru know about that?) and she just melted on the spot. Like she’d been rescued. The kids said thank you, and meant it, the older one twice. They were wonderful.

It wasn’t till we got home that I said to Richard that I didn’t know if she’d seen other kids playing with them and had been wondering why her grands had been left out, and was that what the look on her face had been about.

Oh no, he said. She was embarrassed. Her husband from the get-go had been complaining that this was not the level of service he expected and he shouldn’t have to share a wheelchair attendant. And that was before I’d asked for the rest stop. He was so rude to the guy that Richard had almost spoken up to give him a reality dose that they could simply have left him there for half an hour waiting for the next pusher but didn’t even though he was being such a jerk. The parents with the kids had gone on ahead.

Those finger puppets changed the narrative of the night by giving them all something else to focus on, at least in that moment, and I can only hope for all the ride home.

And now I know why the attendant was so focusing on my smiling face the times I looked back trying to hear him, and he was totally okay with those times I couldn’t quite: he mattered to me and he knew it. The other guy mattered to him, too, which is why he’d gone to all that extra effort for him. Pushing two wheelchairs evenly through a large oblivious crowd dragging rollaboards just ahead, making you have to occasionally brake with all that weight to re-accelerate afterwards, is no small thing.

If only the old guy had been able to see it. Instead, he built his inner wall up high to keep the immigrant out, and not just he but his family, at least for that little while, were made to pay for it.

I have not yet blocked the moose afghan. Yes a little water would make the lace trees (especially the smaller ones at the top) lie more perfectly flat, and it would also add a bit to the height of the blanket–but then spinning the water out in the washing machine would encourage little wool-hair-ends to fly free. Yes Rios fuzzes out a bit but not in pills thankfully, and being super wash treated it doesn’t shrink.

It’s just, I like the thing how it is.

And so I’ve procrastinated adding that water to the point that I don’t really think I have time to fully dry it if I do. And I’m not about to miss the chance to hand-deliver it.

So that did it. I figured if my head is daymaring old car accident scenes it’s past time to take on the source of that stress and answer my own admonition. I’d already put in most of the work but there were a few things on that ballot I needed to learn more about first and decide on.

(Really? A guy in LA made tens of millions off a loophole for charities and made himself a slumlord and fought building better and something about a stadium and paid for repeating defeated ballot propositions as a hobby so there’s ‘the revenge proposition’ about his AIDS foundation regarding rent control? We need Tim Walz over here. Say it with me, Tim: Weird!)

Arizona’s ballot made the front page for being two pages long, front and back–it was going to hold up the lines!

Beginners. Ours was three like that. That’s normal. What it does is tell the voters to do their homework ahead of time so as not to waste anyone else’s. (Pretty much a moot point now that our ballots are mailed to everyone.)

It felt contagiously good to go through all that and declare it ready, so Richard sat down with his.

Prop 34 was the weird one. It should have been fixed by the legislature–you know, where different ideas get hashed out, justifications get shot down, motivations get holes poked in them, compromises made, and tax- and ratepayers’ money gets looked after. Supposedly.

We checked fronts and backs multiple times making sure we’d filled out every single thing correctly. The envelope, too. Card A, I went back and looked at one more time.

Kamala Harris. My filled-out oval beside her name. I held that in my hands and eyes and just let it wash over me.

There was a woman my age reading all the print all over the ballot boxes trying to make sure she was doing this right, a little flustered as I approached at being caught in her uncertainty, afraid of potentially doing anything wrong but quickly letting go of that as she saw my face and laughing for joy with me as we saw our ballots, our precious precious at-long-last votes, our declarations of democracy and hopes for all we hold dear to continue as they slowly slid down inside those slots out of sight.

A neighbor. I have no idea who she is, all I know is if we ever see each other again we will most likely throw our arms around each other in recognition of all that that moment had meant.

And then I went home, found this, and watched Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, starting at one hour twelve.

That. That was a speech of unity for the ages. That is my future President. That is what I did my part to help come to be. I can’t wait.

The joy!

425? Isn’t that a little high? he asked, coming out of the kitchen last night.

You start out that high and then turn it down halfway through so the crust won’t burn. Thank you for reminding me–I’d better go do that.

I walked in there just as the end timer went off.

The goofy expression I’d given it on a whim because why not: it suddenly fit. An emoji cherry pie trying to smile.

We polished off half of it for breakfast. Minus the burns.

I didn’t want my cardiologist to later dismiss it as a two-week buildup of unwashed sweat under the monitor that I was complaining about so I put it in writing the morning after I got it: I was fiercely reacting. There are other adhesives out there, and I said I was mentioning this in case he might put a word out with the manufacturer.

The phone rang this morning.

Why, yes, they had a hypoallergenic one–but it’s fiddly. You have to take it off and recharge it every three days and alternate it between putting it back on vertically vs horizontally and you’ll have to put it back on yourself and change the strips and clean the area off with this but not that but did I want to do that?

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

I went in and the nurse went, Wow. THAT’s red!

Yeah… I told her about the adhesives-allergy test they did at Stanford that flamed on for a month afterwards.

Okay, so: I would also have to recharge the phone every three days.

What phone. Wait–you’re sending me home with a cell phone?!

Preprogrammed, yes, here, let’s walk you through what to do. Power on: a list pops up. Shortness of breath? Fainting? Palpitations? Accidentally pressed button?

Now push ‘Accidentally pressed button,’ she said, since we were just training here.

Richard’s take on it later was that that was a great use for old cells–they don’t have to wonder what phone the patient does or doesn’t have, they don’t have to add an app to yours nor know how to program anything, they just hand you this one ready to go and the company got it cheap.

Which you then mail back to the company along with the monitor when you’re done.

So I have gone from I seriously do not know how I am going to make it through these next two weeks and sleepless nights, to, hey. This is so much better. My skin is still close to raw but the thing it was so angry at is gone.

I cannot begin to tell you what a relief that is.

I’ve been determined to get back to Fillory Yarn to try to run into the woman who helped pick out Rios in a color that seemed moose-y two months ago, especially now that I really had something to show her.

She’d particularly liked the golden brown, and I did, too–and even better after I’d paired it with this darker one. I probably would not have bought the lighter without her definitive opinion that it was The One and my moose would have been much less without it.

So. That group meets on Thursday afternoons and today seemed like a good day to try. (The adhesive in the heart monitor is super itchy. A week from now it is definitely not going to be less itchy and distracting, just go!)

So blame it on the heart monitor, but it got me there.

I saw a long-ago familiar face, exclaimed, Oh, HI! and she welcomed me to sit down next to her.

It wasn’t till she said something about once babysitting my youngest and what was his name? that drew a complete blank from me that I finally asked her to remind me her name again?

LILLY!!! Ohmygosh yes!! She’s one of the people I’ve most missed with the ending of Stitches conferences. It’s been years. And–it’s John.

YES! That was his name! He’d come one year to push me around in a chair.

Then there was the time we were both having our scooters repaired beforehand, at the same place, turns out, going in at different times but with both of us saying what we needed it for and it apparently stuck with the guy: a conference. Of knitters. In the thousands. Who knew.

The thing is that when I came in to pick up mine he was dumbfounded. Was I alright? I had lost so much weight. So quickly. Surely there was something I wasn’t saying, but he wanted to know, and said it again, trying hard to be supportive, was I okay.

(what on earth is he on about)

He said something else and I went, Ohhh. You’re thinking of my friend Lilly not me. Huh. Well she does kind of look like my big sister. (And I am definitely not one to complain about people getting faces mixed up.)

Speaking of which, one woman across the table asked if I could pull the mask down for a moment. I did. She studied my face, and asked, Did you ever go to a little yarn store on such-and-such street in Santa Clara years ago called…

I did!

She’d been sure of it. Yes!

That had to have been a good twenty-five, thirty years earlier. Wow, you’re good. (Somehow I remember that LYSO as being younger… When did we age.)

A great time was had by all, the moose-yarn-finder was thanked, showing off happened all around, a ball of Rios was bought “to pay for my afternoon’s entertainment” and wound up for me, and at last I headed out to try to beat at least some of the rush hour traffic home.

Lilly had reached for her cane first–and spent a quick second staring wondering what on earth–as I laughed that wait, she’d grabbed mine. Our canes even matched. Wood, hand carved.

As she had said several times by then, Great minds!

A few years ago I started a second fish-based afghan. It got put aside as baby blankets were knitted for nieces and nephews and then big ones for siblings with more definite deadlines, etc.

I picked it up one time in there but put it back away without adding a stitch.

I picked it up again today just to study the thing a bit and decide what to do. I untangled all those strands, trying to get started.

I had lost my sketches long since and told Richard, I don’t even know what this red blob was supposed to be turning into and I have no idea what to do with it.

(I had had a photo of a coral reef and I was trying a little too hard to replicate it rather than use it as a jumping-off point.)

But, I told him, it does have a big seed stitch border and I love how it looks and hate knitting it and am glad that that much of it is already done!

He went straight to the point: Rip it out. Rip it right down to that bottom border and start over with something you know you like.

I was a little bit stunned. All that work.

He was right.

But…he was also partly wrong. I like this side. I just don’t like the third of it on the right. And that’s the real reason why it’s just sat there.

I told him, Let me think about it for a day.

Sounded reasonable to him.

And then, while doing laundry, it suddenly hit me what the red blob was and where it had been going and how to take it from there. Finally, I could picture it! But if I do? I was trying to squeeze too much detail visually into too few stitches and it will never please me.

I know that if Gracie Larsen were still here she would be telling me how to carefully cut out the intarsia section I don’t want and to knit back up again from there, connecting back in at the sides as I go, even keeping the side seed stitch panels. I could do that.

But do I want to bother with all that. With all those strands on the left, plus whatever I add on the right, when I don’t even know yet what I would replace it with.

Let me think about it for the night.

(Edited to add, after counting: it’s only 26 rows of stockinette so far. He’s probably right.)

Last week on my knitting group Zoom I asked opinions on chain-stitching a line of duplicate stitch to fill in the missing barn wall sides. Up or down?

A couple of heads turned aside just a moment to inwardly picture how they do theirs.

Down, said Kathy.

Up, said Kim definitively.

So after tonight’s Zoom I decided I wanted to be able to say the best thank you, which would mean to have actually done it and I hadn’t yet.

So.

Down was a definite no-go for me.

Up did it nicely.

Barn wall sides, done.

I kept going. Duplicate-stitch leaves on the middle flower that hadn’t quite come out right, ripped out and redone.

Yarn ends woven in, done.

“Created with pride by” tag added, done.

Wait. There was just one other thing. It hit me: that’s what it had been missing all along. I had to go find that color yarn again, all put away because I was supposedly done with it.

My husband would like you to know that since it came from the coat of a sheep my moose is now officially giving you the hairy eyeball.

(IT’S DONE!!! Pictures when I have decent daytime lighting for them.)

I thought last month that I’d bought enough, even though something nagged at me that it wouldn’t be.

It wasn’t quite.

But I didn’t want to infect them, either.

Today was so much better. I washed my hands and put on a mask to be on the safe side for them and went back to Uncommon Threads. Thirteen rows of seed stitch for the upper edge: I’d run out at four.

They were in the middle of a well-attended class with the owner and I got someone else to help me find my yarn; the previous time, Rios in Solis had been tucked away in a storage bin behind where one of the attendees was sitting and I would never have felt I had permission to just go open it/oh ‘scuse me/shove/just, no.

The employee went right to where it was hanging on the wall this time. Oh okay.

While it was being wound up I waited for what seemed a good moment and then asked the owner if I could show off?

Everybody loves a good project.

One woman asked if it was to be a wall hanging or an afghan?

I said, That depends on my brother and his cat.

Ohhh. Cats, she nodded. Yes.

I came away thinking, you know, I’d been wondering for awhile if I should ask him if I should add a doubled-over loop across the upper edge for him to slip a narrow rod through.

I’d also wondered how much the weight of all that wool might stretch the piece out if it were left hanging like that.

But what actually had stopped me was, as the children of an art dealer who’d helped keep the 600-year-old Aubusson tapestry weaving guild alive, we grew up with hand-dyed hand-spun hand-woven tapestries on the walls and my sweet little bit of knitting, I mean, come on….

But somehow that moment clarified it for me: sure I expect he wants his afghan to be an afghan, but why don’t I just ask him what he actually thinks? (Duh….)

I think I have enough yarn…. Actually, probably not. I think I’d have to loop back there.