My dad’s not here to hear my latest anymore, so you’ll just have to suffer through it.

What does your fruit tree make when it’s a half-dozen years old?

Six fig-years.

Oh right. The blog. Was so busy talking and Facetiming with kids and grandkids that I suddenly realized that anything else will have to wait till tomorrow.

Which makes for a pretty great picture of his having had a happy Father’s Day, actually.

40″, past the part where I constantly have to think about how I’m going to do it next, on to the trees above the surf!

Meantime, there was a small dinner party tonight. At the end, people were to ask a question of a randomly-assigned other person in the group and they to them in return and then share with everyone.

I marveled at how, having known each other for decades, there was so much we didn’t really know as to what our back stories were about why we like what we do and why we do it. I shared a story that was old to me but not to them.

Mom, the woman your age in our ward is in awe of you and Dad at the trip you were willing to take with six kids and a camping trailer in a circle around the country and across Canada and down the West Coast (with a stop in Mexico) and back to Maryland for most of that summer where you taught me to knit. She has eight kids. She was going, And you were all in one car?! For two months?!

I said, And then in high school I found a sweater in my mom’s knitting magazine that I really really wanted and I asked Mom to knit it for me. She told me, Go make it yourself!

I wasn’t about to admit I didn’t remember how. I did have to ask to be reminded how to cast on–and then, playing snotty teenager, I went in my room and worked out how to do it myself.

Which means I do it totally different from how my mom does.

Which meant that when my lupus began and my arthritis was severe in my hands, I found I could knit–my way. Had it been the more elegant way my mom was taught I would never have been able to become anything of the knitter that I am now. Grab then drop the yarn in the right hand each stitch, and I can do it really fast, too (or thought I could, till I saw Stephanie Pearl-McPhee knitting in person. Wow.)

I asked C how she got into theater, and she said her dad was in a play when she was a little girl and someone had to watch her so he took her with him to rehearsals–where she quickly memorized every person’s lines and corrected them when they got it wrong.

And I laughed, thinking of trying to speed up a toddler’s bedtime story: they always know. You can’t get away with it.

I knew she’d grown up on a farm on the plains of Alberta and I had always wondered how on earth theater and she had found each other.

Clearly someone else out there, whoever they were, refused to not have theater in their lives and I wonder how many communities in how many places have benefited because that person kept doing what they loved doing no matter what ninety years ago. And roped C’s dad into it.

C has written plays, she has produced many, she has given so much to the community. She has definitely played it forward.

Costco was a zoo. Oh right, Father’s Day is Sunday.

So I offered him something nobody could buy: to make him a batch of fresh chocolate in the melanger for the first time since Christmas.

That certainly got me an emphatic YES.

I didn’t even notice that the name of the variety was Kisinga till it was going. Cute. It’s time to go start adding the sugar.

Got to the hospital ugly-early, they recommended I go home because I wasn’t going to see him at all for the next several hours anyway, he told me to go take a nap, so I did. Which helped a lot.

Immediately after the doctor messaged a few hours later to say the ablation had gone well and he had tested negative for other problems, yay…

…I heard someone trying the front door. What?! Like he’d skipped out on the whole shebang and Ubered home? I don’t think so!

Next, the doorbell rang. I saw the young man, I don’t think he saw me, and I don’t open my door to unexpected strange men. Especially not one who tried to get in before he tried to ask to.

He jimmied the doorknob again.

I picked up the phone and called the cops and AT&T committed the hell of killing my landline dead just as the 911 operator picked up:  from working to “Check tel line.”  I grabbed my cellphone. The cop was at my door within two minutes.

I told her that after that, I saw him going up to the door of the house across the street but the angle is such that I can’t see if he went in and I didn’t see him after that.

The neighbor next door came out and said he’d come up to their door too.

Just then, there was the neighbor across the street.

She said he was her pest control guy. She was horrified that he’d tried to walk in unannounced, but since she’d vouched for who he was and he hadn’t actually gotten into my house, the cop decided we were good and left.

Went back to the hospital to keep my sweetie company for several more hours of observation on their part and found he’d gotten a message that someone dear to us got hard news today–but it could still be benign.

Bleep all of that that needed to be bleeped. We headed to a local ice cream shop that makes all their own from scratch and now has Indian immigrant owners and got (oh look what they have now!) Alphonso mango milkshakes. Two. Size large, and I never order large, but I did.

So good. Totally rescued us. That, and having him home, safe and sound.

Today walked me back home.

A post from eighteen years ago was found by the granddaughter of my childhood piano teacher this morning; we messaged back and forth and it was a treat to hear from her. Those lessons were a big part of my life–and they were not just for me, in the long run, but the effects extended forward throughout my kids’ lives and now my grandkids’. I told her about my son minoring in organ performance and playing the Mormon Tabernacle organ for his final.

Then I put down the computer and went off to Leeanne’s funeral.

Her sister-in-law was of course there.

Richard and I grew up with her in Maryland. And with Leeanne’s cousin, small small world. There was a lot of catching up to do.

This evening I saw another note from my piano teacher’s granddaughter and told Richard she’d gone to his high school. Note that we went to rival schools and have been teasing each other over it for decades.

His face lit up: She’s smart! I win!

Cracked us both up. Nope. I win!

I win!

We both do!

Our parents lived across the street from each other when they were newlyweds, and he’s the part of my growing up that has stayed with me all along this sweet road called life.

We were out celebrating a friend’s birthday when a call came in and when he saw who it was he excused himself and stepped outside a moment.

They will know more soon and right now there’s nothing we can do. And so, while we pray, we wait.

The mail came.

I’d wanted darkening gradations of the color mix I had in an out-of-print colorway and I could not have asked for better than what was in that package. I opened it in the moment of truth hoping hoping almost not daring to hope–and then stood there just staring: They. were. perfect. Thank you Alison in Australia!

Then in the evening we went to hear our niece’s husband playing in a band in a local park. He’s in the symphony but he also plays bluegrass for fun. This was the fiddle’s turn and those guys were good.

A kid put on a purple dinosaur costume that I hadn’t seen coming. He had to pull the clear chest part down a few times so he could see but eventually he got the hang of it.

A two-year-old girl with a big princess flower clip in her hair ran over to investigate this brand new thing in her life.

He pulled his head out from the opening just below the clear part to show her not to be afraid and waved hi.

Next thing you know he was back inside and they were dancing together to the music in wild abandon.

Oh! her face said. I stepped on its tail. Is that allowed?

Yes! Dance!

Yay! (Twirl.)

It was just the most adorable thing you could ever have hoped for.

So there I was, finishing up that fifth repeat before the distance between the waves starts to shrink going towards the shore, and I was remembering that time we went to the beach with my little brother and his wife. Pacific Grove. After a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The tide was out and there were large rocks strewn across that beach. Not much in the way of sand, just smaller stones everywhere. The kids started climbing up to play king of the mountain and they were having a good old time, so, hey, why not. We’d already cautioned each other about never turning your backs on the ocean and sneaker waves and all that, even if the water was a fair bit away.

So I climbed up on one, too. Above waist high as I remember. So did our visitors. We were all a little spread out.

Now, this is a really dumb thing to do when your sense of balance died in a car crash and there’s this ocean thing that means the visual ground isn’t holding still.

My sister-in-law took in the situation and quickly ditched her rock to climb up on the platform that mine made, and just barely in time–I suddenly in spite of myself started to pitch forward headfirst onto the rocks below and she grabbed me hard and fast and pulled me back to safety.

We took a deep breath and I thanked her as I got immediately off that rock, common sense reclaimed. I was and will forever be grateful to her.

Stitch after stitch after stitch… What would make this more interesting and more of a memory…

That day at the beach!

I started thinking how I could add rocks. With yarn overs? Add stitches, since lace expands and crossed stitches contract, then cable them? I tried to visualize possibilities.

If you make like a honeycomb cable, only bigger, so that you have three or five stitches in the center at the widest part, you could with that center do a yarnover-p2sso-yo. It would be a depression within the cable-raised circle with a focal point at the center. You could have another bit of Old Shale bumping up against it with the k2togs split and the purl ridges sweeping around the outer edges. I’ll have to try it out.

I might not have perfected rocks yet but I just figured out how to knit tide pools by texture rather than color and I am inordinately pleased with myself.

A friend’s funeral is tomorrow, and there were so many people in town today whom I hadn’t seen in years. Kids I saw grow up who now have their own kids going off to college, or in some cases, kindergarten. Hugs and catchings-ups and grief and love. George with his music would have loved that we’re doing an encore in his name in the morning.

And then we bugged out of there to go hold the baby and see Richard’s sister, who had flown in to see the new little one and be yet another surrogate grandparent for what time we have together.

My little brother and his best friend from across the street, the photo gifted to our family when the Colberts were about to move away. Paul was my older brother’s age, Peter was mine, Little Stevie and Bryan were the babies of our families.

You know you grew up on a quiet street when… I’ll just quote my brother here:

The coastal afghan on small needles is just long enough that I can begin to see how it really is going to be, but there’s not really enough to show it off yet. Eight and a half by 49″, five rows per inch or six and a half as the black hole yawns, either way, it takes time.

I found the color I’d wanted all along but couldn’t find and didn’t think existed in Rios: a near white with a touch of not gray but blue for the fog. Littleknits had it. Cosmos. It’ll be here when I need it.

I just got a good reason to push hard and get this done at a not-leisurely pace: there is a third person I really need to knit an afghan for between now and Christmas, I mean, like, I really really do.

P.S. Peregrine update here.

Pretty sure my reaction was, Damn!, because at 2:00 a.m. and the fifth time of this I was not at my best, but I was asleep immediately before and after reaching up for it and I don’t remember.

Decades ago, my husband changed some of the light switches to dimmer-function ones including in our bedroom. What we’d forgotten, because it’s an old system and that part stopped working long ago, is that you could control it remotely.

Someone else in the neighborhood has that same old system. Someone else’s remote was getting to our bedroom. This only started a few months ago. And that someone else does not live by our time zone.

I know exactly which house those hours would track to–but I don’t *know* and I don’t know them and how do you ask your neighbors which one of them is turning your own lights on at you at dammit o’clock repeatedly when how would they know that that’s what it was doing?

I was so done with this problem.

He looked up what was available these days, got the package a few days ago, got out the tools today, and that switch is out of here. My hero.

They decided to do something a little different for today: so they asked ten people to give two-minute talks on Mother’s Day.

I was second to last. I didn’t mention all the national parks, I didn’t reference Simon and Garfunkel’s “We’ve all gone to look for America,” I kept it short.

I said, When I was ten my family drove from Maryland to Wisconsin, where we rode a boat up the Wisconsin lakes, to the Peace Bridge, across western Canada, then down the West Coast, to Texas, into Juarez, Mexico, and home. Six kids and a camping trailer. Two months on the road. Mom spent it knitting my sister a sweater and I wanted one like that and I would study her hands. She taught me how to knit on that trip.

I said that my brother as an adult had told Mom he didn’t think he could ever have the patience she had to raise a future family like that.

Mom answered in astonishment, How do you think I learned it?!

I said, If you wanted any help, if you needed something done, if you needed a kind word, my mom was–is, at 95–the one to do it. I want to be like my mom when I grow up.

A friend told me afterwards that the two little girls sitting behind her, sisters, had protested in unison out loud in outrage: “But she IS a grownup!”

Like, She KNOWS that, doesn’t she?!!!

66/34 cashmere/cotton. I finished it this morning. The weather is going to be cool through Friday, then start being hot–I wanted her to have it now.

And so I broke my own rule: I did not block and dry it. I figured those were both limp fibers and the pattern wasn’t curling up like it would in wool. Good enough to go.

This was for a friend who looks out for everybody. When Richard was in the hospital for nine days, she brought me a half gallon of homemade soup to eat when I got home from the hospital for the night not wanting to do anything but just sheer survival.

She told me not to worry about bringing that giant Ball jar back.

Today she was talking to her cousin, who is going through a rough patch, and I slipped a small handled bag next to her trying not to interrupt; I got a small nod of acknowledgment and got out of the way.

Richard had watched me with bemusement as I’d pulled a sheet of blank printer paper into a circle, put the ends of it into that jar, stuffed the cowl in the center, and pushed them both on in there. I adjusted the paper so there was no gap to let one see what was inside it and with the lid on top, there you go.

I didn’t have to be there when she pulled the jar out of the small bag to put it away. When she went What? over the paper. When she opened the lid. I got everything I needed just out of anticipating it all and yes when she did she immediately called, deafness or no deafness on my part, to exclaim over it to me.

I told her her husband had told me her favorite color.

And now she needs to tell me her cousin’s.