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…

Last night at dinner our daughter was recounting some experiences and thanking her daddy for teaching her that science is about the how, religion, the why.

Today one of the speakers at church was a scientist at Stanford. He came bounding up to the stand with a little planter full of beautiful small white flowers, like he couldn’t wait to share this! He talked about discovery and learning and how glorious it was to gain new insights into this beautiful world G_d had created for us to live in.

And then he held up his pretty little flowers for all to see. They were petunias (clearly one of the mini varieties).

But what made them different, he said, though we couldn’t see it yet, was that they had been given the gene from a firefly: they glow in the dark.

Then he invited everybody who was curious to come to the mother’s nursing lounge (where I bring chocolate every week, that’s my assignment) because that was the darkest room in the building that could hold a number of people. (I wondered for a moment about kids finding out what else that room held, but I don’t think any noticed.)

First he had one of the women knock on the door and peek in to make sure we weren’t interrupting anybody.

That is the first time in my life that my camera, not my mom or dad from when I was little, scolded me to hold still for the picture. It managed to capture this much.

So. Cool!

(Ed. to correct what my hearing missed: this NPR article says the firefly gene didn’t take well enough so they used other bioluminescence genes from a mushroom and a fungus. But you can actually buy these now.)

Edited again to add after reading NGS’s comment: so if animals eat them, will their poop glow?

It’s one of those old family stories that it turns out not all our kids knew.

So for the record.

My grandfather was elected Senator in 1951 and served four terms. My grandparents became close friends with Prescott and Dottie Bush.

Grampa was in his 90s and retired for some time when one of his grandkids was going to make Eagle Scout and the proud parents asked if he might speak a bit there.

I have to give a speech! I have to give a speech! He fretted and worried about it; it had been awhile. He was a good writer himself but I imagine he missed having his Congressional staff to vet it for him after having been able to rely on their expertise for so long.

The stress got to him and suddenly he’d lost decades. A TIA? A stroke? Don’t know. He was hospitalized. (Later, the family would tell him it was okay, the Eagle ceremony was over, they were so sorry he’d missed it and that he did not have to give a speech. Grampa bounced back to being himself and was discharged. But on with the story.)

President George H.W. Bush, knowing how close his folks had been to them, called that hospital to offer his best wishes.

Grampa was gobsmacked by the outrageous swagger of the kid he remembered–what on earth did he think he was trying to pull on him!?–and exclaimed, EISENHOWER is President! He slammed down the phone.

The hospital switchboard cut in with an apologetic, I’m very sorry, Mr. President. There seems to be a problem with the connection.

I got word today that my cousin Janna had passed, the one I’d knit all the chemo caps for. The one who told this story about our cousin John and her granddaughter. I’m glad for her that she’s no longer having to go through–waves arm in a wide sweep–all. that. I am so very glad we got to see her and her husband and that granddaughter in early June, and I hope those hats are being passed around her family in remembrance of her love coming back to her and now returning outward once again.

She was a good one.

I don’t know that they could have caught her ovarian in time in any case, but still: a plea from here for getting checkups and screenings scheduled. We need you.

A pre-fab Diamond brand vegan pie crust made of ground pecans and oat flour: I was intrigued when she showed it to me. Sure, I’ll try it out.

I’m sorry we did not get to it before John left, but we looked at each other tonight and knew we could not let the last of the Andy’s peaches age out of their supreme goodness, and peaches and pecans, well, the state of Georgia can tell you those two were meant to be together.

Notes to my future self: my 1952 Betty Crocker said to bake an 8″ peach pie with 3 1/3 tbl flour and 2/3 cup sugar. Also a tbl of butter, but not for the allergic and I forgot to add her Miyoko version in. It’s fine. I added a tsp cinnamon and let the peach slices sit soaking in the mixture for a few minutes.

But that 425F for 40 minutes for 8″ (measured across the top of the interior of the pan) was a bit much for it. I would decrease temp or time next time.

But there should most definitely be a next time and it will most definitely do.

The kids and I went past a clerk’s line on our way to another aisle and from there I made sure we doubled back and checked out with her, thinking, let’s see if we can help that woman feel like she’s cared about. She looked tired.

She’d had a long day and we were her last.

The kids were putting all kinds of stuff on the conveyor I don’t usually buy: resealable candied nuts, granola, flavored water (here, let me give you a Hint), cookies, jerky, roasted nut mix. Stuff that will see you through if your car has any issues along the way. (There was a friend of Richard’s and my parents in our childhoods who’d been in a plane crash in Alaska and had hiked two weeks to find help. He found a Hershey bar in the snow along the way and made a huge impression for life on us about how much energy there can be in a few ounces of chocolate. To our own children: Always always have some food with you when you travel. And take some chocolate.)

I said to that clerk, When your kid drives twelve hours to see you, you get them every fun stuff you can think of for their twelve hours home.

All the sudden our family reunion was her family reunion and it made her day to see us together and looking out for each other and with her on this very fine Labor Day of a day, and the kids had her laughing in the back-and-forth.

My youngest is going back to his own life in the morning. Which is wonderful for him and a little bit hard. The delight on that woman’s face on his behalf helped more than she could know.

The time together is so short. None of us are used to tripping over other people in the kitchen anymore. All of us are loving sitting down to share a meal together. Savoring every minute and bite.

And the surprised delight and big hugs to my kids this morning from old friends who didn’t know they were coming.

Here, taste the tip of a spoon here, see what you think of it so far.

They approved.

Then the kids drove to San Francisco to Dandelion Chocolate for some sibling time and brought home a splurge of bakery goodies and hot chocolate. Not your standard lunch. That orange sanguine entremet–wow!

As my dad loved to say, How many meals do you eat in your life? Now: how many do you remember?

Then John drove me to Kings Mountain Art Fair, with the ocean to one side on that twisty road and Silicon Valley laid out below on the other and the Fair on the spine of the ridge, where we got to see Mel and Kris. Mel knew exactly what I wanted when I broke my favorite tall mug and held the new one up in happy anticipation of my delight. Which he got. I liked it even better than the old one. Kris was there for the first time in several years, her chemo long over and looking great. I picked up one of the smaller mugs–and it had a sheep on it! (With apologies to them that my photo washes the colors out a bit.)

I knew she played with adding hummingbirds and dragonflies and honeybees…

She was delighted that I was the one who bought her first sheep.

Not long after we walked back in the door, Michelle and I ran an errand exploring a store that sold favorite pantry items she hadn’t been able to find in Boston. And because she liked going there; it was part of being home.

John cooked dinner.

We all got to FaceTime with Lillian, who wanted to show her grampa the wart on her foot in solidarity. She wanted to see his foot, too. He gently told her she wouldn’t want to.

And then at long last we turned off that goshawfulloudnoise that had been going in the kitchen for 26 hours at that point (24 is about optimal on the conching) and John and his dad worked for a couple hours more at cooling and re-warming and thus (hopefully) tempering our new batch of homemade chocolate correctly while getting some one-on-one time of their own.

I got to do the honors of pouring it out and did as messy a job as I ever do and we managed not to devour it before it had even set, probably because, really? We had a lot of cleanup to do. And we’d had a lot of chocolate today already.

And all of it was very very good.

I like days like this!

John’s home, John’s home!

And so there are fresh peaches from Andy’s, chocolate conching in the melanger, and our two younger kids being each other’s best friend and I tell you, that is the best.