My favorite part of Thanksgiving? (Well, there were several, but here you go.)

Our kids are nearly as old as Aunt Mary Lynn’s kids, so they grew up together and definitely relate to each other.

You never know, though, where a Facebook algorithm is going to take anybody on any given day, so I asked the ones who’d arrived late, Did you hear Sam’s news?

“No, what?” with faces searching mine for a clue good or bad.

A heartbeat’s pause. “Mother’s Day.”

That’s all it took. I wish she could have heard those two long sharp astonished gasps in unison and then the whooping for joy for her. Yup, they totally instantly got it. Meantime, someone else was explaining to “the man who is calling upon” their sister who was meeting some of the family for the first time that this was something their cousin had thought she could never have, and so he was really happy for her, too (we really like this guy.)

Meantime, that impish grin I’d tried to suppress just might have tipped them off.

Thanksgiving dinner was at Aunt Mary Lynn’s up in the mountains, with cousins, bouncy little kids, old folks, and us middle types in between.

A widowed elderly neighbor whose daughter had recently died needed the noise and the joy and she relished all the sounds of small children playing, laughing right along with them. She walked carefully in their presence, though, and as far as I know did not hold the heavy, wiggly baby. Jean was a bit stooped and a little frail looking–and she was a treat to get to meet, and when she mentioned something about her persimmon I got her talking about fruit trees.

How many do you have?

Oh, about twenty.

We could really talk fruit trees here! She really knew her stuff.

But she admitted that she doesn’t do so much with them these days. (Yeah, I wouldn’t want her on any ladders either, that’s for sure.)

She did all these years, though, and to every thing its own season. It’s okay. She’s got one of those fruit picker things for reaching stuff, and oh, yes, me, too.

We drove home just in time to have our nephew Ryan and his wife, visiting her folks from New York City, over for an hour or so before they had to head back; they had to leave early in the morning. Ryan lived at our house for one summer while courting her and it’s deeply gratifying to see them so happy together. We had a great time.

And having gotten my cast off yesterday but told to wear it when I might fall or be out and about and need the protection, my balance was a little more wobbly than usual and it stayed on most of the day. I’m with Jean.

But it’s really nice to be able to leave it at simply two fingers velcroed together when I want to. And the velcro ties fit inside the splint, so, no losing those. Yay.

And a blessed, grateful day it was.

I threw the idea out there on a lark, and she said, Sure!

And so for one last time before Michelle’s move Friday to her new job in San Diego, we drove down to Andy’s Orchard together. The last fresh fruit of the year was apples and persimmons, including a Giant Fuyu that truly was and a variety I’d never heard of.

But the best part was seeing the woman I’d given Andy’s hat to last month. She had always seemed like someone who needed a good hug and a listening ear somehow.

Boy, not this time. She was glad to see us and laughed again and again as we chatted.

Then the total, the credit card, and the sudden realization: how am I supposed to sign this?!

No problem, Mom, I can do it.

Wait what?

She told me of some long-forgotten (by me, anyway) time when she’d needed my signature in high school but that hadn’t been possible so I’d told her to just go sign it. Turned out she could do a darn good job of it, and today it was, here, let me show you. Our handwriting style’s a lot the same anyway, Mom.

(Actually I didn’t think it was but never mind.)

And then with my okay, go ahead, she did.

I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t have been able to tell you I hadn’t written that. She was disappointed it didn’t come out better while I was going no, you’ve got my old-age version down pat.

The clerk was bowled over laughing at this point.

You have found your superpower, my child. Use it only for good.

Typing left handed.  Slipped on mud in dark do still have teeth after picking/spitting mud out of them iced hand didn’t help called urgent care got told yes come got there apologizing for coming in four min before closing they splinted swollen finger–bones look okay though why did they ask about my head oh right of course they gave me info on head injuries and it took till just now to remember the word radiologist. Wasn’t in. Will call.

And Richard is my hero. Took good care of me.

Rueful.  Not what I planned. But the new Rios Solis yarn came with the mail about 7 pm and it’s a wonderful match: now I can finish that baby afghan and I wound the first one up immediately right before I went in the backyard because it’s really getting cold and an extra frost cover was going to be a necessity. (I did get it over the tree.)

Oh wait.

p.s. Earlier this evening while doing the first covering up the mango for the night–at sunset, reasonably, when there was enough light–I moved a board away that had been part of a border along the edge of the plants but had come loose with exposed nails (how did it get turned nails side up?) and I decided it had given up all pretense of being decorative, it was a hazard. Out.

And that is why, three hours later, I landed on soft mud only. My face would have landed right at those nails.

—–

UPDATE 10:20 am. They called a few minutes ago. Fracture of fifth knuckle.

From the woman who likes to think that she never, ever starts a project without having enough to finish.

I did that. Inadvertently. Who knew I was going to make all the changes I did after I got going.

(Can you just see baby boy fingers yanking at those white tic-tac-toes on the back? Especially should he ever get a new sibling? As in, *remember this? I might have to make him another baby blanket after this one just to, y’know, make sure he stays toasty warm up north there.)

Knowing they stock Rios, I went to Uncommon Threads yesterday for the first time in years and was well rewarded by running into an old friend who was as thrilled to see me as I was to see her–we were in a knitting group together when our children were babies. Jamie!

So. I am now at the end of my first skein of the blue/green Solis and I don’t have enough to get the afghan as long as I want with it. So I thought I’d make wide stripes: a skein’s worth of Solis, done, one of somethingelse, Solis, somethingelse, ending with Solis. That I could easily do.

I know, I tried this at Cottage Yarns last week and came home with two and then decided they were too gray.

There were just two that could work at all at UT, too, but they were a lighter shade of my Teal Feather border and I was going to need this settled pronto.

Tonight I knit a tiny swatch of it, the best test of color. The light always plays off the surface differently in the stitch than in the skein. I held it against the solid teal border under the light.

Yet again I knew even if I didn’t want to know. But hey, it looked great as a contrast to the Cottage Yarn stuff–they can go and be too gray together.

Distance and parking and time in the sun vs inventory. Imagiknit is the American distributor for all things Malabrigo.

I sent them a note: not too yellow? No gray? No streaks of black? Just happy blues and greens shading in and out? Maybe I could do it all in Solis after all, alternating the dye lots.

—

*Ohmygoodness, there was a comment there from our late friend Don Meyer on that post. Wistful. It was like a wave hello across time.

Remember when I was celebrating Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s great news about her first grandchild being on the way and how the joy of it triggered a whole round of nesting-instinct housecleaning here?

Two days later we got this surprise photo from our daughter Sam and her husband. 

I can’t begin to tell you how nice it’s been having her a mere half mile away.

In the phone call between my middle children today after it became a done deal, Parker instantly caught on to what this meant: “You mean we get to see Aunt Michelle more often!?”

You got it, honey.

And now for some pictures.

Richard the younger and Kim threw a Halloween party for their friends’ and her sister’s kids and rented a bouncy house for while the grownups visited. Makes it easy to keep an eye on them all while keeping them happy. The costumes got shown off, with Hudson wriggling in and out of his several times.

We were warned before we left that Maddy has firm ideas and she does not allow her aunt to pick her up and not to be disappointed, that’s just how it was. So it didn’t feel quite so bad when I got in the car next to her at the airport when we arrived, hoping she would recognize us from our Skype chats, that she looked at me like how dare you and cried. When I offered her a flamingo fingerpuppet, she arched hard away and screamed inconsolably. A little bit of soft soothing singing? Okay, not so much. Time to focus elsewhere and let her have her space a moment.

She might not talk much but she understands plenty. So after lots of rounds of peek-a-boo after we got home that got her smiling, I asked her questions. Maddy? Do you want to…?

Do you want to…?

Do you want to…?

It wasn’t long before one of those questions was, Do you want to hold my hand? to go outside and inspect that newly-arisen bouncy house, and there was her arm reaching up towards mine. We walked out hand in hand.

Maddy? Do you want me to pick you up?

And she let me pick her up.

Do you want to go in the bouncy house? (Photo from the umpteenth go-round later.)

She wanted to try to climb in herself, but the entry leaked and sagged a little and made it hard to push off from. I helped her up.

And from there she let me pick her up quite a few times. Several of those times she asked for Ma Ma or Da Da and I took her straight to them.

She decided I was quite alright.

I kicked off my shoes and got in there with the kids for awhile.

After being bounced all over by the bigger kids, suddenly it was just Hudson in there with her (and me, but I was sitting down just then) and it became clear that Maddy had just hatched an idea. A personal challenge.

She stood up and walked careful step by uncertain step down one raised blue row that wobbled a little underneath her. Hudson bounced. She did not fall down this time when he did. I held still for her. On the other side of the wall the bigger kids were leaping onto and down the slide and it was a little like balancing on Jello.

She turned, wavered, almost fell but didn’t, and still staying in that one lane she walked back the other way faster. Then she turned at the end again without a flaw and without touching the walls and this time she ran joyfully back–she could do it! She could stay in the lane and stay upright! I mentioned it to Kim, who was just then coming over, so she could know why Maddy was so proud of herself and share in the moment.

Cousin Hayes (yes that Hayes, and he’s totally fine long since) is in the orange shirt. He and Hudson, three months apart, are best buddies.

What was amazing was how energetic Hudson was: he’d had a 103.5 fever and a trip to the doctor the day before, and the kids had warned us in case we wanted to cancel the trip.

Had it been anyone else, but no. I grinned, I don’t scare off that easy!

We’re both slightly under the weather today. We earned it, and we’d do it again any day any time.

It looked like a Cristo art installation, as we first few passengers came around the corner onto the plane: bunches of giant plastic buttercup flowers, suspended from black coils, set after set after symmetrical set all the way down both sides of the plane as far as the eye could see. It was actually rather pretty, as if the interior had been decorated for the holidays. What holiday, I couldn’t tell you.

It was a brand new plane and the pilot had hit the wrong button.

The crew herded us back out of there, their faces a combination of embarrassment and suppressed laughter. Almost too late one remembered, Don’t touch those! That makes it take a lot longer!

I don’t know how you scrounge up a spare plane in an hour, but Southwest did it. We asked the crew just before the replacement arrived, How long does it take to put all of those back?

Four hours, and then they have to recertify the plane.

Ouch… And you know that, given that that was at the start of the day, that would be a hit throughout their system or at least on the West Coast.

In other words, we took a very early–okay, not too early but we got up for very early–flight to go see the grandkids this morning. It will surprise no one that the last flight home tonight was likewise an hour late.

Now, this yarn I did remember to take in my carry-on and finished it on the plane East. White cashmere, spun into a braided tube, and it was a splurge a few years ago that I had been saving for some future bride. The reason for spinning it that way is to give some strength and structure to it without having to add the friction of any extra twists you don’t have to: you want to keep it as soft as it deserves to be.

Did I mention another niece is about to get married?

While we were back home.

Karen and Richard and I went to go see our old friend Scott, whom she and I grew up with. He’s an avid birder, and I often think of him while enjoying my Bewick’s wrens, favorites of mine and a life bird of his, wishing I could share my little flock and somehow help reestablish them on the East Coast: they’re extinct there but plentiful in this area. And only in this area. All those songs those tiny birds sing!

It is safe to say his health issues are more than a match for mine.

It was so good to see him and hard to leave when we had to later that afternoon, but Kathleen would be waiting and this was a time in her life when she particularly needed her friends present when she could see us.

We turned on Waze (which routed us around more than one accident in the rainy days we were in town), pulled the car away, turned a corner towards the left, another left–

–and there was a Cooper’s hawk. Fully in view, close to the street, an actual, perfectly-placed, of-all-the-things-it-could-have-been, a Cooper’s hawk on a large low stand-alone branch of a tree in someone’s yard.

It silently watched us as we continued on our way and away.

And everything was going to be alright.

The beautiful bride and groom and the reason for the trip East. My generous childhood friend Karen put us up and enjoyed our marveling at rain, real rain, real East Coast rain and oh that depth of green everywhere!

Meantime, our mutual close friend Kathleen’s brother, diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer three months ago, rallied and somehow hung on yet a little longer.

We got to spend the time with her she’d needed, when she wasn’t caretaking, and his hanging on helped her feel permission to come unload on us; it’s hard and we knew it and we needed to comfort her as much as she needed that comfort.

It was a rare gift to be able to be there for her. My niece could never have known when she scheduled her wedding that her timing was exactly right for someone she’d never heard of.

And in possibly related news…

Friday, Richard and Karen and I picked up Mom from where she was staying and it having been ten years since the folks had moved away, we drove Mom around old haunts for the afternoon.

My old high school, where she had worked: it was gone and a completely new building was there now, still red brick (another familiar essence of I’m-home re the style–bricks crumble in quakes so there’s very little of it in California) but so very different.

The house I grew up in that Mom and Dad had had built for them: it looks like a single story at the front but opens into light and warmth at the back, built into the hillside dropping behind it with Californian floor-to-ceiling windows upstairs, and downstairs, windows nearly that big, taking in those beautiful woods.

It had been remodeled and looked very different–but I had seen it during that process and she hadn’t and I knew how much she would love what they’d done with it. Outside, those plants covering the side screens alongside the wheelchair ramp to the front door were new to my eyes.

I tried to talk Mom into knocking on the door with me. She just couldn’t quite.

It was to be a six-patient assisted-living facility, which the folks did not know when they sold the place. Turns out it never took off and now is simply rented to a man and his son.

Which we found out from Barbara when…

We pulled the rented navy Camry into a driveway on the side street up the hill. The lace curtains had not changed but Mrs. N. wasn’t home, so Richard backed back out and Mom directed him across the street and up just a bit.

Where Barbara was. She had seen us walking up to that first door and then pulling into her driveway and was wondering who and what on earth was going on.

And then I knocked on her door.

Her daughter Elaine opened it and staggered backward–and I think I did, too. “What are YOU doing here?!!!” she exclaimed in thrilled disbelief.

She lives in Tennessee and she knows I live in California and Mom in Salt Lake now. What I didn’t know was that this was the weekend of her high school reunion. With a December birthday I had just missed being in her class, but still we knew each other most of our growing up. We had reconnected on Facebook but hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in decades and I was absolutely the last person she expected to show up right there at her mom’s door. Or my mom either for that matter but there we were.

We had a great time. Richard and Karen got included in it, and Kathleen’s brother in the conversation; no, Elaine didn’t quite remember that name, but she wished him well in his current journey forward.

And Susan, I have to tell you: I have particularly enjoyed how perfectly placed each pointillist dot is on a cowl I made out of your yarn, Burnside Bridges colorway, evenly balanced everywhere. Elaine admired that cowl, too, and as the conversation and our time there was winding down she mentioned again how very pretty it was.

“I have another one, this is yours,” as I took it off my neck and offered it for hers.

A gasp, “NO!”

Again, “I have another one,” I grinned persistently.

She was grateful, she was disbelieving, she loved it, she was thrilled–and she made me want to go knit for everybody everywhere right now. I had needed that, which she couldn’t have known, and that was her gift back to me. And it was no small thing.

I do have another. In Koi Pond, not quite the same colorway but close. And, because I didn’t find where it had fallen out of the suitcase while I was packing till after the trip, it’s, uh, not quite actually finished yet. Close enough to claim it, though, right?

And I think that’s why Kathleen’s brother was, and as far as I know, is, still with us: it was his reunion, too. There was a chance to see his old friends one last time who might be coming into town, if they came to him. I so hope they did.

In the end, not even the badly coughing woman last Friday at the audiologist’s who came up to ask me about my knitting before I pled being immunocompromised and begged off could stop us: by Tuesday I was well and we hopped on that plane, with the encouragement of everyone at the other end.

Last night, on the second leg of our flight home, the pilot himself stood at the front of the cabin and announced, “Everybody’s on. Let’s leave early. Let’s get there early.” And so we were out of baggage claim and on the freeway before we were even supposed to land.

Meaning we fell into bed at 3 am our time.

A whole lot happened in between. I am so very, very glad we went.

More later.

Something was wrong towards the end of the spring–it wouldn’t turn off automatically anymore. I unplugged it and called it done for the season.

A little troubleshooting and reprogamming (thank you Richard) and the automatic mango warming lights are now back in business.

Meantime, I started this with a recipient in mind but as I worked I found myself thinking of someone else. Incessantly. How much she would enjoy it. It kind of annoyed me at first because I really was making it for–

–wait what. Am I supposed to be getting something here and is it just going right past me.

So I stopped and said a prayer and let myself just feel whom it was supposed to be for: person A or person B? (Or anyone else, for that matter.) There’s no point in offering them ones they wouldn’t love as much. Or made of a fiber they can’t wear, maybe?

Person B.

Why it makes a difference, I have not a clue, and they’re both getting something from my needles. Switched, is all. And that’s fine.

The sore throat finally caught up with me and Michelle drove me in. The good news/bad news is it’s not strep. If I need a doctor’s note for the airline next week, I’ve been offered one.

My brother’s daughter is getting married back home in Maryland and I badly want to go.

And on a more somber note, a childhood friend’s brother’s funeral is most likely also to be there next week, his prognosis measured more in hours now–and I want to be present for her sake, too.

This is why I work harder at avoiding crowds before traveling. I am not going to be the one who should have stayed home but instead made everybody sick; when knitting just takes a bit more oomph than you’ve got, there’s no way I’d inflict that on others. We’ll just have to see how it all plays out.