It’s your decor, I texted my sister, showing her colors but no details, and your choice. Do you want bright? Or subdued?

Subdued, she wrote back.

I’d been thinking more and more that she would; I’m glad I asked. The one I knitted last year does match her paintings better.

My fingers were getting antsy after spending yesterday and today trying to figure out what the next big thing was supposed to be. All this yarn, all these half-baked ideas, no sense of certainty.

I cast on a new one tonight because the Matisse Blue said that even if I knit it early last year it was next. I told Richard it was to make Y design. But Z is already going Hey! No, me, ME! I counted the stitches again to tell it to hush.

Let me go knit a single row while I remind it that I, in fact, am the boss of me. Not my yarn.

Sometimes.

We almost never get trick or treaters. We always hope.

It’s the day of the hat, the Cat in the Hat hat that makes him about eight feet tall. After all these years of being scrunched into a box 364 days a year, it was just slightly wrinkle-ish in the middle but once it was on his head it stood proud and tall in its fine bright stripes, trying to make his intimidating height into a relatable and good thing from a small child’s vantage point.

Not once on the doorbell.

I just walked in the other room where he was and guffawed. His hat! (While he looked at me like –What?)

The top half had fallen in on itself and then flopped over. Like a tired kid on candy overload needing to be put to bed and put over its parent’s shoulder as they carry their little dragon home.

(Now if I can just get a photo of the finished afghan to come through here.)

Radiology department. They took him to the exam rooms for awhile. Sent him back to me. Made him wait. Made him drink something. Made him wait. Ran him through a CAT scan.

The waiting room was very small. There were five chairs, full most of the time; the receptionist let someone take the sixth chair next to him from time to time since no one else was on duty just then. Except for when there was.

I had two hours to knit quietly.

I had put on a green turtleneck this morning, and before we’d left had decided the only gerdan I had that really went with it was the huge sunflower one. (Photo is from when I got it.) It’s kind of loud, but–why not. It might make someone’s day. So I did.

Two women came in. They were clearly mother and daughter, the ages of mine and me.

The younger woman checked her mom in and settled her in a chair in the other corner, standing next to her.

And from there she glared at me.

I considered whether to offer her my seat. But the only place I could go other than where she was standing just then was behind the door swinging open, and I cannot stand for long periods of time and it would be weird to move over close to her mom in her place. There was no other spot, there was no room.

Just then they called Richard back, so hey, that makes it easy, there you go.

She tended to her mom a moment and then returned to glaring at me. Standing. She refused to come sit next to me.

Huh. Okay, whatever.

My knitting did not distract her eyes, though the receptionist or her mom did a few times. Right in the eyes. I’d never seen her before in my life. I was the only one she glared at and that glaring was what she wanted to do with her time. It struck me as unspeakably sad. And yet her mom smiled quietly at the staff and was clearly grateful for their efforts. I was glad I had wool and wood needing my attention and distracted myself with thoughts of some future happy recipient loving that shade and softness.

Finally they were called and the mom shuffled painfully, slowly down the hall with her daughter looking out for her. Good for her.

I mentioned them to Richard on the way home. They had passed him in the hallway, turned out, with the daughter translating for her mom.

He voiced the same thought I had had, the only one that made any sense: maybe they were Russian. Maybe they have a son or brother fighting.

We do have a number of Russian ex-pats in the area.

But why, I wanted to somehow ask them, would you find fault that a stranger supports people who don’t want to live under Putin’s murderous rule when you didn’t want to either and you got out?

Many many moons ago, there was the annual December Birthday Club party (we unwrap a present we got ourselves and sing Happy Birthday To Us) where Virginia, who always got something funny, gave herself a hand mirror.

Only, when you picked it up it activated two things: a light sensor and a laugh track. (This is the closest I could find to it.)

Put it down flat, it’s silent. Pick it up to check out that wisp of hair out of place and it guffaws at your vanity. Loudly. Busted.

It was hilarious and I had to know where she’d gotten it. Alright then. So I ran down there and bought one for my dad for Christmas, because there was no one who could laugh like my dad.

How to ship it across the country, though, between the glass and the electronics.

An arriving package solved that problem: it was full of those (hated) styrofoam peanuts.

I took a plastic grocery store bag and filled it full of those peanuts and slipped the box inside and tied the top, then put that inside a larger box with other stuff for the folks with the bag safe at the center of it all.

I got comments from my folks Christmas day about how that was such a good use of those peanuts: they didn’t go flying all over the room when they opened the box, they cushioned everything while at the same time they were contained. Nice. They talked about the other stuff we’d gotten them.

But what about…? I had to know and finally asked, That bag. Did you look inside it?!

No, why would we?

Dad…

It had been tossed. It got retrieved.

And that is how I later got told that Mom and Dad threw a party and Dad snuck that mirror onto the long low (mid-century modern and all that) side cabinet to see who it would catch. Which of course it did. Thankfully the victim had a great sense of humor, and the friends of my parents I knew growing up all found out where that had come from. Busted right back.

Virginia loved that story.

And I mention all this because I got my Aftober Prize of No Particular Worth ™ from Afton today: the ever-changing annual item in celebration of having finished a project in October that everybody in our online knitting group looks forward to every year.

I opened the envelope and went oh that’s cool, I like that. Put it down and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later I walked back–and spotted what was now half-hidden in the rug. Oh wow, look at that!

I’m not going to describe it because others haven’t gotten theirs yet, but, it had been well packaged and hiding inside that envelope and then flipped out without my seeing. I almost never knew it was there.

And I laughed and laughed and missed my dad and thought of my mom (I can just picture her going Oh you didn’t at Dad when she heard that laugh track going) and of Virginia too, gone about 25 years now. Look what she started.

Thank you, Afton!

The A-fib thing when he was in the hospital: cardiology put a heart monitor on him after he got out to see how well the meds were working.

Two days later, it fell off. Just, plunk, on the floor just like that. Now what do we do??

They had a solution I’d never heard of, although it took a long wait for an operating room: an implanted monitor, good for five years of readings. About the size of the tip of a matchstick, they said.

(Can’t we just buy an Apple watch? I guess not.)

Looking at the incision tonight he said wryly, Y’know, they didn’t say whether that was a wooden matchstick or a paper one.

Get there by eight, they’d told him; we’ll have you out by about 11:00.

Last night I considered dragging the afghan there and decided emphatically not. I went stash diving. Did I find a ball of yarn for the rheumatologist I wrote about yesterday? I did not. What I found was just the one, it felt like, for the cataract surgeon. I had a few already-done Mecha hats but none had ever felt quite right and this skein in my hand demanded to be it instead. It totally was the boss of me.

In Rios. In ribbing, like for the retina guy; they’d operated together, let them be twins.

It felt so right that I didn’t even mind doing the 1×1 stuff again. I figured I wouldn’t get very far during his operation but at least I’d get some of it done. I cast on and did two rows before bed just to give it a running start.

Heavy traffic. Different town. Eight o’clock. Signed in. Waited.

They finally called him back, and once he was set up on the gurney with his pretty new bracelets they called me to come join him while they waited for the surgeon. (It always amuses me that at every surgery setup I’ve ever seen, spouses are not allowed to be there to watch the other undress for it. Ever.)

It was after eleven when a nurse pulled back the curtain and basically said, You guys still here? Let me go check on that doctor.  …Followed by, She’s almost ready. She had someone ahead of you.

Waiting…

I read a news article on my phone from time to time to give my hands a rest. But I did learn that I can knit on size 5s comfortably for longer than I can the larger sizes; I’d forgotten that.

But then it’s been a long time since I’ve done a six hour long block of almost continuous knitting.

Two more inches, then the decreases. And here I’d thought it was going to take me a week.

After several renditions of Are you sure, given that I wouldn’t hear it and he would and he’d be having to wake up just to wake me up when it went off, I set the alarm last night for 4:45 a.m.

My plan, discussed ahead of time, was that I would get up to say goodbye and to make sure her ride was coming and if there was any problem with it, I would wake her father up all the way and we would take her to the airport: him, to drive, me, to make sure he was safe coming back and not falling asleep.

At 4:42 a.m. I dreamed a bullhorn going off right in both ears and jump-startled awake. Oh. Right. Turned off the real noise before it could start.

Hugged my kid, who just glowed, and all was well. The 36-year impromptu wool stole for Rebecca is in Boston now.

I hope all who wanted to got to go to the No Kings day today. I so badly wanted to and we were going to, but I never did fall back asleep and by the time ours started at 1:00 p.m., I just couldn’t pull it off. I was with you all in spirit and onscreen (BBC video here) since I couldn’t pull off being on scene. I was so wiped.

So how was it in your town??

Doorbell.

First, the plumber, who looked at the installation below the wretched refuse of the teeming tides of the kitchen sink and shook his head at whoever had set it up like that.

Yeah, I told him, we spent $40k on repairing the mistakes the remodeler left behind (like the rain that had come into overhead light fixtures here and poured out an electric socket there, for starters. That was fun) but that we didn’t know about that one.

He shopvac’ed our attempt at Drano-ing the darn thing, poured it out at the toilet, and got to work on the rest. Those pipes had to go.

While he was under there making noise…

Doorbell.

Hi! I said brightly, Are you Dotty?

She looked at me like what the ??? No, I’m Sue, as she walked in, while I was like, ??? I moved the bin of yarn over to her. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to please get it out of her way.

Ohhhh. The home nurse who comes every two weeks to inspect the wound on his foot? (It wasn’t the nurse I remembered and they always came on Friday and this is Wednesday) so okay then sorry about that.

Because she had come sixteen minutes after Dotty had texted that she would be here in fifteen to twenty.

Right on cue:

Doorbell.

This time it WAS Dotty, and we introduced ourselves to each other. I’d been sure she couldn’t possibly want all those pounds of 2/28 merino (ie 1400 yards per meter) on cones, but she very much did and was thrilled with all of it. Alright then!

She’s a weaver but this was to be a gift for her cousin, who had looked at my photo and said, Yes please!

We got a good laugh out of each other when I tried to offer her the bin to take it home in and she groaned, I have..so..MANY, and I laughed that I did, too, that’s why I was trying to get rid of it. Fellow fiber enthusiasts: we were friends on the spot. We compromised on a trash bag and dumped it all in. She was walking down the street to her car (it was a little crowded around our driveway) and I started to run after her with one more lace weight left behind, she didn’t see me and it hadn’t been in the photo nor the list I’d sent her; I went, nah, she’s good, and went back inside.

The nurse needed cheering up.

I went out back and clipped two pomegranates off the tree. They do not give them up willingly–you have to show them who’s boss. I put a bright pink-red fruit by her, saying, That’s for you; she looked up in surprise and smiled for the first time.

The other one went to the plumber.

He finished up after several hours’ work and I asked, having waited for two days for when I could finally do this, if I could turn the dishwasher on now.

I already did, he smiled.

Good man.

Oooh. I replaced a hearing aid battery. They give a loud little tune at death but his machinery must have been louder.

The nurse stopped to say thank you for the pomegranate on her way out. I mentioned the face blindness and you could see her going, Ahh, now I get it. (It was her second time here.)

Meantime, while she and the plumber had been working, I finished the scarf rescue of the UFO. No side ribbing; my fashion consultant liked it with just the top and bottom done. Stop now.

Twist my arm.

I’ve been quietly thinking how glad I am that I dumped a large number of cinnamon sticks out by the pomegranate tree when the squirrels started showing up. It actually did keep them from stripping the fruit this year, or at least, so far. The plumber was happy for his but the nurse was the one it really made a difference to. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before Dotty left.

It feels so good to be able to run water in the kitchen again.

An antique of a UFO unearthed in the dig, started before I’d ever even heard of Kaffe Fassett, that’s how old it is.

For cabling, it’s kind of…plain.

I slid it halfway off the needle to get an idea of how wide it was in real life. 48″unstretched. I remembered it only vaguely: I had stopped because it was using up yarn faster than newbie me had anticipated and what I’d wanted, it could never be. There were a few skeins tucked away with it.

Whichever baby missed out on a blankie probably has a kid in high school of their own by now.

It was fascinating listening to my daughter instantly knowing who it had to be for and how I could finish it off so as to be usable for them. It was washable wool, it was soft enough, you know she’ll love that you made it, do it, Mom!.

How then could I not?

There was a glacier at the bottom of the freezer where the water dispenser had leaked; it’s been there for some time because you couldn’t get at it without going without a fridge. We’d tried previously, with two hair dryers on it full blast nonstop but it just didn’t dent that block.

I’m still on take it pretty easy mode but her time here is winding down.

And so we ate down the stuff in the fridge over several days, she moved stuff into the big freezer and then put ice packs around the little bit still in the fridge, opened the freezer door, and left it to sit overnight.

She had emptied the ice maker. I scooped the cubes up into a quart container for one last try at keeping the fridge side cold.

Then I tried putting a pan of hot water on top of the ice block. Five times. I taped the open door button closed so the light could go off. We’d slid the “Colder_____Off” to Off already. Huh. Couldn’t unplug the thing without moving the whole fridge and nobody’s back here was going to be able to do that.

There was still impressively solid ice in the morning. But surely underneath it was quietly giving way.

But the towels arranged against and below it were not soaked. At least the one on top was damp.

I tapped at the block. Nope! Wow.

At 11:03 a.m.–she laughed when I told her what time it was–I smashed at that ice once more and then gave a mighty yank to the wire drawer and it came! Freed at last! I knocked the ice out of it into the sink.

About four hours later she dumped some hot water on it to make that clump finally finally go away for good and that was that. (I was thinking, No wonder it takes a week to thaw a turkey in a fridge!)

Now we can fit dairy and dairy free ice creams in there without the twain ever meeting. Look at all that space! Organized, too!

But the real incentive was, that fridge was bought in 1994 and this was either going to prove once and for all that it and its broken shelf support here and missing cover there had to go because the fridge side just wasn’t staying cold enough–

–or it would fix that problem.

It’s been 24 hours since I put the ice cubes in to help the fridge side stay cold overnight. There was just that quart container.

I typed the above and out of sudden curiosity walked back in there and dipped my hand into it.

There was one last ice chip still floating at the top there.

They used to make them like they don’t now, didn’t they?

That green and blue that slipped onto the other side of the back of the bag.

Mo-hair, Michelle remembered with a laugh from one teenage recipient asking me quizzically thirty years ago. MO-hair! Tell me, he demanded, What kinda animal is a MO!?

He was in foster care and admired Richard’s and my Kaffe Fassette coats of dozens of colors and in his enthusiasm ended up with a vest of his own from the leftovers.

I saw him recently and thanked him for changing my life: his reaction to what I’d made was what got me started on seeing how important it is to knit for others.

There might still be a few other skeins in there all these years later, here, let me see.

Backing up a bit: I was thinking some of the bins in the family closet had some empty space by now that could surely be put to use, but it’s really hard to wrangle them out of there and heavy lifting was out of the question.

A certain someone was happy to dive in there for me if I would go through them. It would make it easier to get at the puzzles and games, too.

Consolidation has begun.

Five games (how did we end up with three Balderdashes? Answer: because people kept gifting it to us) and a stack of puzzles that still had the original shrink wrap on them (no missing pieces on those!) all got claimed by friends today.

Some of the yarn… Showed its age. Not by its condition–I store wool well–but by the archeological dig of my knitting history as I went through stuff.

Thirty-five years ago really soft wool yarns were hard to find.

I remember the first time I found baby alpaca. The late Robin and Russ sold it in–I think it was 25 gram skeins. (Edit: 40g.) Today I re-found some of that, all dyed by me because at that time you could have it in brown or you could have light brown but I didn’t find white anywhere till later.

Back then, too many of the really fine-fibered alpacas were being turned into shearling rugs rather than sheared, while the farmers were paid by the pound for the wool, and spikier thicker fibers weighed more for less work.

But as the hand knitting market for the good stuff grew, the quality improved. I thought my discovery was so great then, and compared to the rest of the market it was. But (picking up skein after skein today) I’d hesitate to even grade it as baby alpaca now. It’s okay, it’s just not swoon-able.

So I’m stuck with the same problem I had the last time I did a major overhaul of that space: what do I do with these? I have them because I liked them but to actually sit down and knit I’m always going to reach for something that my hands love as much as my eyes do. The really good stuff is stored in the other room.

In particular (eyeing one bag of white loopy boucle and measuring it at 1.23 lb including its ziplock) what do you do with this (it came out of the alpaca bin but I’m sure it’s wool) that just isn’t getting any more enticing over time? How does one in good conscience keep the good stuff for oneself and fob the lesser off on someone else?

And yet, at the time I bought it, I was that someone else who was delighted to find a natural fiber yarn I could afford.

Oh, and, the seven ounces of aran weight purple-blue wool/angora. Who put meh wool with angora in 2002? Or: given that the words angora and mohair were at the time used interchangeably to describe mohair goats till the trade association came down on it to stop the confusion, is there actually any rabbit in there at all? And yet, it does have that softness mixed in. Hmm.

I’m not driving yet, re the post office, and Michelle’s flying home soon. Hmm.

Michelle looked around at all those bins and exclaimed, clearly trying to undercount it to be nice, You need to not buy any more yarn! And the stuff in the other room–you have enough for, for, like, two years!

We both heard Richard guffawing quietly in the other room. Oh honey.

When my kids were teens there was a shop at the mall that made me wonder why a place that sold bath salts and the like smelled like a cookie as you walked past.

Turns out vanilla was their most popular scent.

I like vanilla too but I don’t want to bathe in it. (Man, can you imagine what that would cost now? With shortages and crop failures, vanilla was the most expensive spice in the world last I checked.)

Fast forward: Trying to come up with a solution for me, Michelle was talking about dry shampoos.

Me: Yeah, I tried one of those–about 40 years ago; I wasn’t impressed.

Well, she said, they’re basically just starch.

Me: I know! The potato starch in the pantry!

You should have seen the look of horror on her face. I had to assure her quickly that I was totally joking.

But I was thinking of that shop as I said it: Man, *sniff* isn’t it a little early for Thanksgiving? If I walked around smelling like mashed potatoes because I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet, how would you even be able to wash it out at the regret of it.

If you’re going to be weird, yeah, I’d go with the vanilla first.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

To my sister Anne: don’t look.

I’m debating adding a splintered-off base of the tree to the end of that top log on the beaver lodge, and if I get really determined and if it works out okay, maybe the beaver itself. Maybe. And add a stitch to the turtle’s front leg on the far side to balance it a little better. Etc etc.

And of course eventually it will have a border all around. I don’t usually do white for a border but in real life it matches bright for bright and I quite like it. The only thing is that the gauge of that particular yarn came out looking looser than the others in the body of the thing. But hey. Ribbing can have its own character.

My memories of West Virginia are of gleaning huge peaches two weeks after the commercial harvest (for $2/bushel if I remember correctly, Mom?) and of visiting Harper’s Ferry and standing above where our Potomac River and their Shenandoah River come together in a huge rush of water.

I knitted in that little beaver lodge anyway. Just to let nature speak up for itself. 

Last week I went in with Richard to his appointment with the wound care specialist.

The doctor barely made eye contact with him, and me not at all. He dealt with the problem at foot, competently so. All business, all seriousness.

He had a follow-up Tuesday this week and again I came in in case there was anything the doctor wanted to teach me about taking care of those injured toes, since he had changed the protocol a little and who knows if he might again.

This time, I was wearing Galina’s gerdan with the small beaded bird perched on a Ukrainian bandura, singing its heart out. (Wow, that article: there was a time when you could be shot by the Bolshevik Russians for being a Ukrainian playing one. No wonder Galina used that imagery!)

The doctor came in, nodded hello, and did a slight double take as he seemed to be taking in the heart of that bird for a moment. Something in him seemed to let go of I could only guess what, and he exhaled.

He talked to us. He made eye contact this time. He took off the bandaging. He saw that all the open wounds but one were now healed and that that one was making progress, and that was very gratifying to him: last week he had said this could still go either way (meaning he could still lose those toes), but now, six weeks in, he said with clear relief that we were finally getting there.

That 7mm kidney stone that they hospitalized him for five weeks ago and then it moved and stopped hurting but wouldn’t go away?

It finally, finally got laser-sprinted out of there today.

A few hours later, we took him to the wound care doctor he sees twice a week, who looked at his foot and was pleased at the improvement.

There’s a batch of chocolate in the melanger in celebration. And typing this I just realized–it’s being stone-ground. I’ll see myself out…