Before I forget. Actually, I wasn’t there because it was held outside in the sun, but Richard went and helped flip pancakes at the Fourth of July celebration at church Monday morning. I knew the old veterans that would be stepping forward in turn to say where and when they’d served, and I knew there would probably be younger ones that might surprise me to see them in uniform, too.

But hey, lupus, and so you get this report second hand.

He told me who one of the speakers was–a young dad who’s here for grad school and because his wife grew up here.

It took me a moment as it sank in. A Brit?! On the Fourth of July?

Richard was grinning as he recounted the tale. The guy had started off by taking a good, appraising look all around and then back to his audience with, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

And then he’d said some of the things he’d found that he liked about America.

People in the stores call him sir all the time. That would never happen back home!

You can have all the water you want at a restaurant.

He named a particular fast-food joint.

Drive-ins. Drive-ins!

(And actually, at one of those drive-ins, his little boys can come inside and watch the people slice the potatoes and then fry them up and hand them to them to eat. High entertainment for small children while still at the pace of the actual food.)

One of the things Ann mentioned in passing on Saturday was that her husband was not a morning person and sometimes you just stayed a little out of his way first thing till he cheered up and became his normal self.

“So that’s where you get it from,” with a wry smile from my husband: clearly it was a family thing.

That said…

Last winter my sweetie went on a business trip to the East Coast.

And I found myself at midnight with a very very cold house and a thermostat that refused to play nice, to put it mildly.

We had installed a Nest, which was operated by our cellphones. It was paying attention to his–and his said he was 3000 miles away, so it had automatically gone into keep-the-pipes-from-freezing mode.

But I was right here! I grabbed my phone and Nest didn’t recognize it. Richard had set it up and I had no idea what username or password were supposed to be nor where I might look it up. Calling him at 3 am his time to ask probably wouldn’t go over well.

I’d okayed it, he’d bought it and installed it and I don’t remember so much as even seeing an owner’s manual. Wait, he’d mentioned something about you can squeeze the thermostat to change the temp. So I tried that.

One degree, two–and then suddenly it flipped way over to Cool and the air conditioning clicked on. NO! Fast, I tried to turn it back but no dice.

I tried again. At some point I did get the AC to at least turn off but other than that, it went into “a little child is playing with me” mode and went dark and refused all attempts to reason with it. No heat for you.

It is safe to say we were not friends at this point.

I gave it a few minutes and tried again. As I turned to heat it flipped to AC, I let go quick, and it went dark again.

It was not a happy night.

My husband, once he found out in the morning, overrode the control to go back to normal heating and saved my very tired day and said he’d figure out what was wrong with my phone’s app when he got home.

When the thing works it works so well you just never think about it. You don’t have to worry about resetting between the furnace and the air conditioning as seasons or temps change, it just takes care of it and most of the time it’s a huge improvement over the 25-year-old thing it replaced.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was getting hot (how?) and I knew I shouldn’t have had that chocolate that late.

At 2:45 am the room lit up: his Samsung tablet, which was supposed to be on night setting, was at full-blast-lightshow. Dang. I got up, walked around the bed, put it face down and half-covered where it still light-leaked, and got thwacked by my husband’s arm as he rolled over asleep.

And it was hot. This made no sense. It was 55 degrees outside. Yes it had been a warm day and we’d run the oven for a roast but that had been hours before and how on earth was he sleeping when it was this hot?

I went over to the Nest. Who on earth set it to that for nighttime? (Neither of us. C’est une mystere.)

At nearly 3:00 am the brain comes up with not-serious thoughts like, Did Nest conspire with the city? The state? to conserve power and turn everybody’s thermostats? What IS this? We paid tens of thousands from what would have been retirement funds to install solar, that’s OUR power and it’s clean energy and if we want it comfortable we earned it, give me my AC back! (I could have opened the window. I knew I would probably also have fallen on my husband’s head trying.)

Checked my phone. Nest still didn’t recognize me there, dang it. Went to the thermostat and re-enacted last winter, in reverse: squeeze, turn.

It went to heat. NO! Tried again. “A little child is playing with me” mode. Dark.

Time out.

Came back. Tried again. Got it down to 72, let go quick before it threw another hissy fit while I had it that good, hauled myself to bed directly below the vent as cool sweet cool began to blow down on my face.

But I did not sleep. My brain was writing scathing Amazon reviews of, I LOATHE this thing.

Dawn came. Well, that was a waste of a night. Thought about getting up but for the chest pains.

Now, I mentioned to my doctor Friday about the chest pains. They come and go and they’re generally an annoying but non-threatening part of being a lupus patient and he found nothing wrong, but when they’re persistently there at night or in the morning one really should mention it so I did, and now I have a cardiology appointment and a mildly worried husband. And they’re gone for the day and I’m fine now but it’s the middle of the afternoon and everything’s better then.

So. One of the first things I did was proclaim the tablet banished from the room if it did that again. (In normal life I might mention and we would talk it out and easily come to an agreement, nobody orders anyone around.) And I asked my nerd husband why he still hadn’t fixed that *%( iPhone.

Because it hadn’t updated–that’s why Nest hadn’t recognized it.

Oh. (Feeling very small.) And it didn’t update because I have too many pictures because I haven’t moved them to the computer because I want to still have all the baby pictures of the grandkids on it and I don’t want to sort through the thousands of not-grandkid ones. And you told me that when you got back from that trip.

Right.

Oh.

I tried to get up, did the dizzy thing in a grand way, went back to bed, and owned up to the accompanying chest pains. I was getting a little less growly but it was a process and there were things I’d wanted to do today but I was in no way driving a car this morning and if I don’t drive him to work well that’s that for the day–we only have the one.

And usually we like that. He gets to decompress at the end of the day and we get time together that’s just for us with nothing else calling at us.

By the time he left for work I was, I hope, closer to my normal daytime self. He was a peach and I wanted to live up to that no matter how tired I was.

A little after noon I checked Facebook to see if anyone needed to be wished a happy birthday.

And read this:

“It has been a long road with many unexpected bumps and turns, but I am glad I have had Alison Hyde by my side for the journey. Happy Anniversary to my sweetheart!”

It’s the 27th already!? It is?! Dang. Forgot. Busted. And loved. All at once. It’s been a life. Love you, too, honey, happy anniversary!

It’s always a good day when your daughter comes over with homemade strawberry pie…

There were visiting speakers from out of state tonight, a mother and son, and we went to hear. One of the perks of college towns and all that.

At the end, Ann, the widowed mother (not to mention a professor), told the story of why she’d never met her mother-in-law: the woman had died when Ann’s husband had been two.

His mother had contracted childbed fever (I could have added, and it was immediately before penicillin became available. Like a month. So close.)

Her sister Frances had come to visit her in the hospital, where in grief she implored her sister not to die.

Her sister, fully aware she was losing that fight, asked her visitor, a young mom herself, Frances? Where are your children?

A surprised, Well, I left them with…! They’re in good hands…! I won’t be away from them for long, it’s okay!

And that was Frances’s answer, the words echoing through the years to come and in memories past: her own mother had died when she was eight. Her grown sister had taken her in.

Frances took in the motherless newborn and raised him with her own five children for six years till his father felt he could cope with the day to day, while Ann’s late husband would be taken care of by the older surviving sister till then.

I went up afterwards to mother and son and said, Let me re-introduce myself. (I think I’d been a child the last time I’d seen her and not much more than that for him.)

Frances is my grandmother. Her daughter Frances is my mother.

I got a gasp and a hug and a “How is your mom?! I LOVE your mom!” and in an instant the world became a smaller, better place.

Mom and Dad? Ann says hi!

(Background chatter after that: Your mom was always so energetic. Is she still energetic? Is she…? …Oh yes she’s still energetic and they’re both in great health! …Oh good!)

So many things to learn there.

Friday 6/10. The mountain goats as seen from the boat. Barely. But when they lifted their heads you could tell they really were what the captain said they were.

And Monday 6/13…

Reindeer’s antlers, while they’re growing in, are full of not only the blood that nourishes that growth but nerve endings, and we were told it would be painful to the animals if we were to touch those. So we didn’t. Instead, they passed around a single antler that had been shed at this same velvet stage to satisfy our curiosity, and it was very much as soft as it looked.

(I did not ask if a bear had gotten the little guy for that to have happened. There were children around. And a sleigh for them to climb on and think that Santa knew this place well.)

They told us that elk, unlike reindeer who use their flat upper jaws for hammering against, do have upper teeth and they can bite you. Watch that little guy with the dandelions, those are their favorite. (His mom was right behind him.)

Saturday 6/ 11. A river, whose name escapes me, and one of the trees on our son-in-law’s mom’s property. That water was melting glacier, cold and moving fast. I splashed my hand a bit at the edge in its honor, like I traditionally do at the Potomac River any time I go home: to make this one a part of me, too, now–and I think to claim all his family as our own in the gesture. We met some of them Sunday and I got to thank his mom for raising such a fine man.

Devin pointed out the cowslip and the devil’s club, two plants whose leaves looked very much alike and yet one was welcome but the other was infested with poisoned spikes. You do not want to walk through that one.

We stayed on the trail.

Here, this one over here is cowslip. See that stalk that looks like it has an upside-down fig at the top? There are no spikes on its leaves. It’s safe to go near. But see, this is devil’s club right next to it. It will stab you right through a pair of jeans.

I discovered this evening that, actually, it’s being studied as a treatment for TB.

Wishing good thick gloves to the ones doing the studying.

One last photo, sent to us tonight: Maddy is eighteen months old this week. Already. Somehow.

Someday she and her brothers will go visit their aunt and uncle and learn to look carefully at big pretty leaves.

And then go feed the reindeer.

(Surprise Glacier, a closeup during its calving, and the ice floes in front of it after we pulled up to them.)

The two and a half mile WWII-era tunnel under the mountain is one narrow but tall lane. It is also an active railroad line. Each side each way each type, train or car, has designated hours when they are allowed to proceed, with strict warnings that there are cameras and that the 30 foot distance between cars will be enforced.

Yeah, you don’t want an accident under there. Nor for a straggler car to find a train coming at it. Yow. So yes, that tunnel is carefully monitored at both ends.

But when you get to the other side!

We took the five-hour Klondike Express tour of the Chugach National Forest via Prince William Sound. I kept looking at all that vast, vast space and being agog at the idea of cleaning all of that up post-Exxon Valdez. How on earth had they done it? The Chugach, they said, was bigger than the state of New Jersey. The captain pointed out one part of the shore a goodly ways off and mentioned that it was 30 miles away at that spot.

And here’s the surprise: Chugach is also a rainforest. Yes, a lot of it falls as snow, but 80-100″ worth of precipitation a year, and it being summertime, there was a dense, lush green between the water line and the tree line towering above.

Icebergs, glaciers, sea otters, harbor seals on the dense field of ice chunks where the orcas did not want to go, a humpback whale breaching, a much larger black whale tail (Minke? Orca?) slapping the water in front of us, blowholes blowing, mountain goats, the tiny white dots on the rocks pointed out to us by the captain. Surprise Glacier in the very act of calving. The captain pulled up close to it and a member of the crew dipped a fishing net into the water. Not for salmon: he wanted us to be able to touch a piece of glacier.

Then one large one was broken up onboard and a glass of glacier was offered to all, a little water on top.

It took a long, long time to melt.

We drank the glacier.

One tall mountainside, hemmed in by all that white ice, was itself a sheer gray rock face top to bottom. In 2003, we were told, that was all glacier, too–but it is no more. Trees would start growing out of the crevices soon.

(Pointing around the bay) See those sharply pointed peaks? they asked us. Now, see the ones that are smoothed over at the top? The smoothed ones had glaciers grinding them down.

The brochure for our catamaran said we would go past rookeries, and we did see a seagull one at a distance, but overall they seemed sparse just then and the captain opted to spend enough time trying to give us a good view of the whales that he knew he had to get us back in time to make our tunnel time.

(Iceberg photo because hey, you have to have an iceberg photo after they made sure we knew that was one.)

As we finally disembarked after a little over five hours I was quietly just a little disappointed that I hadn’t been one of the ones who’d seen a bald eagle overhead. Wrong side of the boat at the wrong time.

Just then an adult bald eagle in full striking black and white flew low over our heads right there.

And was promptly dive-bombed from behind by the only crow I saw in all of Alaska. The eagle utterly dwarfed it but was willing to mosey on out in nice, slow motion, letting us tourists get that good view first.

We would later see more eagles soaring overhead, twice, on other days. But that was the one that welcomed us to Alaska on our first full day there.

(And to Sam, who drove through that tunnel, occasionally having to flip her windshield wipers on as the mountain spilled its drink on us: I am in awe. Nerves of steel. Thank you for opening this whole world to us.)

We visited the Anchorage Museum, which is partly sponsored by the Smithsonian: the place was gorgeous (those long vertical strips of wood around the stairwell–so, so pretty) and a lot bigger than I expected.

There were native artifacts and history. There was a piece of oil pipeline. There were representations of native and settler homes and boats from various times. There was the obligatory taxidermied musk ox, “lovingly donated” by the family of the late hunter who had taken the trophy.

I read that and quietly guffawed at the mental image of his family dividing his estate, everyone groaning at all the living room space it would take up, the fact that shooting one was for a time highly illegal (relative to theirs I do not know, I saw no date), and trying to foist the thing on each other with someone finally going, I know! The museum!

Maybe that’s not fair of me, but it amused me.

Almost white, almost plastic-looking waterproof traditional jackets made from tanned Arctic animal intestines for easier weather days out fishing. Coats with fur turned inwards for colder ones, and sometimes, they said, a second coat would be placed over the first. Brrr.

I had resisted pulling out the iPhone, not having seen any pronouncement on cameras being used but knowing they’re usually frowned on, while feeling that my quilter mom just absolutely had to see this gorgeous quilt: it was done in the tiniest pieces of the thinnest hides–I knew she would know just how much work went into that thing. (And Bev, I thought of you, too.) It showed the influence of the Russians who had come for sealskins and converts, mixed with the natives’ own patterns.

I let a certain taller one talk me into their going back upstairs and snapping a photo of it for me.

Then there was the woolly mammoth tusk. We are talking some serious ivory here.

And there was Donna Druchunas‘s Arctic Lace book in the gift shop. I bet it flies off the shelves there, too.

Sam, a knitter herself these days, asked us if we wanted to see the musk ox while we were there? She’d never been.

Hey, couldn’t keep her from having that experience, right? And so Saturday we went to the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer and took their walking tour of the grounds.

Domesticating a species takes 250 years, they told us, and we’ve had 50 so we’re on our way but we’re not there yet–so please don’t put your hands past the fences.

(A few days later at a different farm we would be told, as reindeer walked freely among us and looked us in the eye while licking alfalfa from our hands, that the difference between caribou and reindeer was that the reindeer had been domesticated for about 250 years. Alright, I see where that number maybe came from.)

Parents were asked to keep small children close so as not to spook the animals into thinking small creature=wolf. On the flip side, when the man who set up the farm with its first set of animals 50 years ago was approached by a small dog, the musk ox had taken their human’s small size relative to their own as meaning he was defenseless and they closed ranks in a circle around him as they do to protect their young, horns pointing outwards and ready to charge the threat on his behalf.

Cool.

The white along the tops of the spines of many of them: the guide said they weren’t sure but they think that’s to reflect the sun away during the summers so they don’t overheat.

The curves in their horns? Those tell you about how old the animal is. Short and stubby, you’ve got a young’un; the next year they start to turn forward, and at I think she said four you get those iconic half loops in front. Most of theirs have their horns trimmed to protect the humans but she pointed out this one old guy over there that had the full set.

Back in the museum/gift shop, my sweet husband was the one who picked up the musk ox-topped knitting needles and asked me if I didn’t need these? Then the grampa in him wanted me to take a soft little stuffed one home. And we couldn’t come all this way without some qiviut. We just couldn’t.

We’d just been told about the musk ox playing with a fifty-pound ball given to the farm after the oil pipeline had been built, y’know, something for the animals to play with or rub their backs on or something.

They’d managed to get it rolling down the hill, and bam! Right through the fence! Oops.

So for now, mine is playing with a ball. It’s a deep red. It’s a mere ounce, because I just could not bring myself to spend that much more money on yarn when a single ounce would make me just as ecstatic.

The book? While we were out in the fields (yay sunblock and hats and I’ve been holding my breath but no major flare yet) I’d asked them if they had it and explained that Donna Druchunas, the author, had been the text editor for my own knitted lace book.

They were delighted at the connection and told me enthusiastically, Oh yes! It flies off our shelves!

I had previously wondered what on earth was holding me up that I hadn’t already bought it. Now I know. It was waiting for me to support the husbandry of the very animals Donna had written about as well as Donna herself with that purchase. It was worth the wait.

(Christmas light bulbs in the background.)

I’m told there was heat while we were gone last weekend. The mango thought so–after sitting there since February, this bud tip finally started remembering what it was there for.

And that’s that for now. The house will be sat and we are off to Alaska in the morning to see Sam and her husband. If I don’t get to the blog while we’re gone, know that we are glacier watching and moose dodging and I’m told there’s a stuffed 12 foot grizzly in the airport to show tourists what not to mess with. I will need to verify this for myself.

And this time I’ll remember my phone.

Grabbing a quick moment on the run to say thank you everybody and the head is reasonably okay, all things considered. I was afraid of it being dangerous and it’s not. I do actually have a padded leather helmet these days, I just wasn’t wearing it at the right moment.

Meantime. One person here on dietary restrictions can eat raspberries as a particular treat and the raspberries got eaten.

Oh.

My youngest walked in the door from the grocery store not too many moments after with 24 oz of fresh raspberries: it had been anticipated. There’s plenty out there, no problem.

Looking out for each other. It’s what the day is for.

Clearing up after dinner tonight, Mom dropped the peppermill. I sat down on the floor to to pick up the strays rolling briskly around; they were near the trash can and it seemed the easiest way to get them.

Coming back up I misjudged distances and hit my head on the bottom of the table. Which should have been nothing.

Note that about a week ago I noticed with quite a bit of satisfaction mixed with relief that I seemed to have finally gotten over that last concussion.

It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it wasn’t a hard bump, it’s all psychosomatic, I told myself as my head started to feel pressure a few minutes after Anne’s son Grant swept up those peppercorns. I have no idea what happened to the ones that had been in my hand.

A little later, I asked my husband, Where’s John?

He looked at me and said, He went home. He said goodbye.

Oh. Did I say goodbye back?

You did.

Oh.

I had another question: did Anne change her shirt?

Anne overheard and moved across the room to me and said, Just different lighting.

No–did you change your shirt? Was it turquoise and navy stripes before?

No. Purple and darker purple, all day.

My brain insisted still that it had been turquoise and navy. Every time I look at the purples-striped shirt it knows this for a fact even though I know it’s wrong.

Yeah, I think we’re definitely starting concussion #8.

Heaven is finding out that not only is Bernie Sanders doing a rally in Silicon Valley, he is doing so a two-minute stroll from my house.

Some may remember that my oldest used to live in Vermont. Sanders was her Senator, and before that he’d been mayor of the town, which sets at the edge of Lake Champlain.

That waterfront was coveted by developers who knew that view could command big bucks.

Sanders said no: once it’s gone it’s gone forever. He rallied the town around the idea that it had always been for everybody and it should stay that way. The hotels could be built further out. They could even have more reasons for people to want to book rooms in them: and so the waterfront was made a park with biking and hiking trails, and that is why, snow levels and all, Burlington recently got named the #1 nicest city in the country to live in. And let me tell you, it is gorgeous.

I liked Sanders’ vote against the Iraq war and his willingness to stand up for what he felt was right again and again–coupled with a willingness in The Amendment King to reach across the aisle to make small changes for the better when the big ones were out of reach. Ethics and practicality both.

I don’t agree with all his planks. And yes, he could stand to freshen up his stump speech and I wish he were younger. But I value his character and his experiences, going all the way back to his Civil Rights Movement arrest.

I paid each year’s college tuition in the late ’70’s with summer jobs; my daughter paid $60,000 tuition for a one-year grad school program. The cost of living did not go up by a hundred times in between to justify that. I don’t know that public university tuition should be free but it should definitely be a lot more like it was when the Greatest Generation was sending its kids off to college. You want people to be able to choose to get ahead, you make it so they can.

Anyway. So. Sanders is having a rally and it’s right there and how could it possibly get more convenient then that?!

Hell is finding out…

…that it’s at the same day and time that you were going to be leaving for the airport.

And remembering all those news stories of people camping out in line before dawn.

All those thousands and thousands of people trying to find a place to park will also be hoping for a two-minute walk. From my street. Whether security will be stopping cars to this far out I have no idea, I’ve never been through this before.

I’m missing getting to see the guy who likely won’t win at this point, but whose voice–and ours–still matters. There have been a lot of Presidential-contest losers whose ideas still won out over time because enough people wanted them to.

This guy champions my grandchildrens’ future and I have long wanted to see him in person to cheer him on.

Only for you, Daddy. Gladly, for you, Daddy. Happy 90th. I love you. Mwah!

I love being a grandparent in the age of Skype.

Parker, 5, had lost his first tooth and wanted to show us.

“Did it wiggle around a lot before it came out?” I asked him.

“Yes!” Said with his finger exploring the unfamiliar new hole in his lower jaw.

Hudson, 3, showed us with an impish grin that he still had all his.

Maddy, 17 months, toddled up to the camera and grinned and grinned and grinned at us. She knew exactly who we were. She even said–something, don’t ask me what the two syllables were supposed to say but she was definitely declaring something and that she was happy.

As the old Ma Bell ads used to say, it’s the next best thing to being there.

1. That Black Jack fig tree planted March a year ago has a tiny fig for fall growing at almost every leaf junction and one single big spring fig left that the squirrels didn’t quite get to before I clamshelled it away from them.

I’ve never picked a fig before. I assume I wait till it’s darkened (given the variety) and softened, right? Still hard as a rock.

2. Somebody went to the AT&T baseball park in San Francisco a few days ago and put their drink down in the cupholder attached to their seat.

And–sorry, couldn’t get the link to the photo to work, it’s inside a Yahoo group–a fledgling peregrine falcon landed and perched on the edge of that clear plastic cup, its talons huge and in each other’s way. A small red straw poked out between its big yellow toes, its big eyes taking in where it had suddenly found itself.

Well hello!

3. And most important to me. My friend Carol is a knitter whom I get to catch up with every year at Stitches and, when I’m lucky, by random chance at Purlescence during the year. She worked on the recovery post-earthquake and tsunami of the nuclear power plant in Japan (side note to my local friends: that Carol.)

Ever since I met her years ago I’ve been trying to put my finger on just who she reminds me of. And now I know.

Yesterday I was off to see my much-loved Dr. R, the doctor who saved my life in ’03, to wish him well in his imminent retirement. I left early because there was no way I was going to be late for that one.

Which means I had time.

I stepped off the elevator to a very surprised face as someone did a double take at seeing mine. A lupus event damaged my visual memory years ago: I was stuck on, Carol? Wait. That’s not Carol. So, so close, but no. I know I know…!

As the woman in great excitement started catching up with me almost instantly the question was settled. Heather! I hadn’t seen her in 24 years! She’d been a lifeguard at the therapy pool where I met Don Meyer and his wife Amalie the year my lupus was diagnosed.

“Your face is the same! It hasn’t changed!” Heather exclaimed.

Everybody who had attended that now-closed pool had to have a prescription to get in and everybody knew it: for the most part the people there were the types who looked out for each other. It was a good place.

I told her I’d run into Don a month after Amalie had passed and that because of that, he’d had some support in his last five years. (I didn’t add that his son had moved in at the end to take care of him nor about his setting up a blog with our encouragement here and all the interaction he got from that–sometimes the details are too many and need to wait for later, so I’m putting these in here and hoping Heather sees it.)

Amalie was gone. Don was gone. She took that in, sorry to hear it.

I got to see happy photos of her sweetheart and her son.

And I’m just now realizing I can’t believe I forgot to tell her that Conway? Remember my tall, large, stooped, slow-moving, cheerful friend Conway who used to chat with me every day after his exercises? They’d thought he had ALS. Turns out he’d had bone spurs growing into his neck and spine, which they operated on and he started to regain mobility before he died. From a heart attack at that pool. I was across the country at my 20th high school reunion, but I’m told the lifeguards, joined soon after by the paramedics, did CPR for 16 long minutes trying to save him. She might well have been one of them.

If you read this, Heather, his widow moved to San Diego to be near her grandkids. Then she passed. Then her granddaughter there went off to college–and met my son: and they are the parents of my three sweet little grandkids, ages 1, 3, and 5.

Small world.

I got to see Heather today.

Small world.

Who told me who her favorite doctor was, so much so that she drives in from across the Bay to be seen by her.

I asked Dr. R. whom I should go to should my Crohn’s come back; he demurred a bit and asked which others had I seen–at the hospital, the clinic, whom had I liked best?

It had been seven years since my surgeries but Heather had reminded me of that one that had done my throat endoscopy and I said her name.

He was pleased. He told me she was very good and that I would be quite happy with her.

And between my experiences and Heather’s, I knew he was right.

And I probably would not have thought of her first had I not run into my old friend, been recognized by her, and had the time to talk.

The philodendron (The Man Eating Plant as it’s always been fondly referred to around here) will from time to time produce a tiny leafy bit that encloses an actual new leaf and then that green outer covering dies away. The plant grows a little faster than geologic time, but not by much, so I’m sure we get a new leaf in the summer but I’m not sure we get much more than that in a year.

The latest new leafing out seemed…different this time. I noticed that just enough to remember today and go oh, that’s why!

Because that abnormally swollen not-actually-a-leaf-cover finally opened up.

We’ve lived here for 29 years and we have never seen the thing bloom before.

Hiding in there was this weird blob that instantly reminded me of Margaret’s wool.

Years ago, this elderly friend at church gave me some wool yarn she’d had since the ’60’s or so, when natural scratchy wool with the lanolin mixed in was the fad. Over all those years, the lanolin had splotched and dyed it randomly yellow and I knew from my handspinning classes that there was no washing that out. It just was.

I didn’t love the stuff but I was determined to try to at least do something with it, for her sake. And so I stuffed the whole two pounds’ worth in my dyepot to make the coloring a little more deliberately random. The bad part is, I did it without tying enough ties around the hanks because I didn’t want to bother and I told myself it wouldn’t matter even though I knew I knew better.

It. Felted.

I mean, it felted! Like crazy. Random parts of random balls, all in one big hopeless tangle. I threw the whole mess in a closet and didn’t want to deal with it and was grateful Margaret never asked.

My folks came to visit awhile after and Mom discovered that wad. She insisted on pulling it gently apart and untangling it. I tried to say it wasn’t worth her time, but she wanted to do this for me and so she did.

It took her two days.

Only a mother… A mother who knits, that part helps, too, but still, only a mother loves us enough to take on such a task.

So yeah. Looking at that blossom? I had to look it up to find out I should be calling it a spadix. But to me there’s really only one description for that thing. Yarn barf.