The forever question: if you were making a baby afghan out of  a very good natural-fibers yarn, would you stop at baby size if you had enough yarn to make it toddler/young child size or even bigger, or would you continue on? Receiving blankets are so necessary but have such a short need time.

I was going for continuing on, knitting all afternoon with the stereo going. A break for icing my hands and a two hour break for picking everybody up. (When the VP grabs you on the way out the door, the taxi driver cools her flats in the parking lot.)

I almost but didn’t take my knitting along just in case. My hands needed me not to.

Mixed with, the sense of impending arrival is strong and I want it finished by tomorrow night and all ready for him.

It’s slow knitting. There’s still easily seven hours’ worth of work left if I’m going to go for every last repeat I can squeeze out of this yardage.

How do you decide how big to make them?

To clarify on the last post, we can put trash bags in the recycling bin, where some poor schmuck has to grab them out and hoist them onto the trucks going south to the landfill and deal with any mess they make.

Two days ago, we were at two flower clusters and holding on the Fuji apple and the green was starting to pop out so it seemed like that was going to be it. Only two? I wondered if the snails had eaten all the flowers in the night (which they will do) and I just somehow missed them all? Went out tonight and there were new buds bursting out all over the place on the Fuji and new petals all over the other apple. Oh me of little faith. Well there you go.  (And I scattered more of that Sluggo, an organic snail-only-killer, and around that August Pride peach with the new nibble in the leaf, just making sure.)

Meantime, I lost six non-spare pounds in the past week and I’m still pretty wiped so we did Japanese barbecue take-out for Michelle’s birthday and I baked angel food cake. They came home with strawberries. And hey, those berries came in a clear plastic clamshell of just the right size and will be holding one apple or one peach out of some critter’s paws or beak. Perfect.

I told Michelle she shared a birthday with someone.

Oh? Who?

Sandra Boynton.

She looked very pleased.

And the grandson baby blanket knits on (made good progress today). And the baby, unlike his big brother, waits. So far.

They grow so fast…

Yesterday’s Tropic Snow peach is noticeably bigger than yesterday and the last of the flower that was attached to it is gone. It’s almost April and it’s supposed to be ripe in June, so I guess it’s not wasting a moment. I stuck a finger down into the dirt, which could use some mulch: good. Still moist enough, don’t have to water yet.

I saw the beginning of two on the August Pride, too; they weren’t discernibly certain yesterday. Now they’re well past the just-a-guess, along with the new green plum needlepoints on the tree facing them. That little bit of rain last week didn’t hamper those blossoms after all.

I really like that planting those peaches has gotten me in the habit of walking around the backyard in the evenings and taking in the green and the growing and claiming it for my soul. Watching a bit of God’s knitting coming to be as the daylight stretches slowly longer.

Meantime, it looks like I’ll be able to make the baby afghan go further down towards my feet than I had thought the yarn would be able to reach to, good, and…after a week of dodging it, I’m finally catching Richard’s bug. Hoping that a cold will just be a cold.

(There was a get-together tonight that I was really looking forward to. My chocolate torte got delivered but my conscience needed me not to share the germs and I walked the garden here instead. To the vector, go the soils.)

The new grandson is due in a month.

His big brother came three weeks early.

My daughter-in-law’s mother had her kids early like that, too.

I figure I’ve got me about a week to finish this and everything else I can think of. And after all the decades of not wanting to knit baby sweaters or booties, of fighting too hard against the knitting-is-for-grandmas stereotype (I mean, I was ten when I started…) on my second go-round now of actually being a grandma I think I’m finally getting over myself; I can’t wait to knit a baby sweater after this afghan is done. There is hope!

(But just in case I waver, I’m outing myself. Again. Peer pressure: it’s a good thing.)

How did I not know this?!

Okay, we need Muddy Waters playing a soundtrack in the background as I type this.

In all the conversations across all the years, and even with the worries of the San Bruno pipeline that blew up up north running within a few hundred feet of our house (they dug up around the corner here after the explosion at the other end). When the water main broke in ’08 on suddenly-perfectly-named River Road at the back of the neighborhood I grew up in in Maryland, in front of the side street friends of mine still live on, creating such a whitewater that people on their way to work and school had to be rescued from their cars by helicopter. All those times.

He never mentioned it.

Or maybe he did years and years and even more years ago (I mean, I’ve known the guy since I was about a week old) but he just never really described it and it didn’t sink in for me?

I told him this morning that my friend Robin had had to go the long away around on an errand because of another water main near River, and that there had been a big break yesterday on Connecticut Avenue, too.

Which runs alongside his old neighborhood.

“Did it make a big hole in the ground?” Something about the way he asked that sounded odd: there was a sudden tightness in his voice.

“A huge hole!”

“Yeah, they do that.” He sounded like he knew, no, really knew, which had me looking quizzical, and that, finally, is how his story  came out.

He had been a teenager, running errands with the family car that day; everybody parallel parks on the steep hill that is his folks’ old street, there are only a few driveways on the other, flatter side, none, theirs. Turn the wheels to the curb at 10007 and walk up the steep steps to the door.

He noticed some utility workers. Top of the street, bottom of the street, with his folks’ house about halfway down. Turns out there was a water leak somewhere and they were trying to find it.

Turns out it was under his car.

Turns out the jackhammer, when they tried there, simply fell downwards–not through and vanishing, but, there was nothing for it to hammer against. They sent a rod down in the spot and swished it around: no resistance.

There was no there there anymore.

“I was right there!” And sending vibrations and pressure down again and again as he’d driven in and out, parked and pulled out and parked, oblivious.

And so that area was cleared out, everybody thanked their lucky stars nobody had fallen through the sinkhole from the water erosion, and it was a huge mess to have a giant hole where the street had been till it could all be fixed.  But everybody was safe.

Thank heavens for those Maryland utility workers who were aware of the sensors or whatever it was that had tipped them off and that they followed up on it.

(Edited to add: After Don and Debbie wondered, I asked, and Richard says they asked him to move the car so they could test there–and then went holy cow, and got everybody to move their cars out of there.  They had been testing for eight hours at that point and it had been gushing hard under the surface for at least a day and there was just nothing left underneath.)

Dad took the paper and the comics to Mom for her to laugh by and reported to us children on her progress, and I know they’ll be making her walk on that knee soon.  She did not finish all her hospital food. I commend her for trying.

And here, quietly, as I knit…

Squirrels have this imperative need to go up.  Which is why they’ll do things like jump on a wobbly plant pot that certainly offers no protection to scan the skies for danger.

The lemon tree with its thorns growing next to the Tropic Snow peach, though, is not something I’ve ever seen them in and in 26 years they have stolen one, maybe two lemons ever–one bite and that was that.

So I don’t know if it was one of them that had just been spooked and went for the closest fur-friendly trunk or if possibly a bird tried to land on a perch that wasn’t ready for it yet; all I know is, everything was fine when I planted this and sometime after it started blooming, one branch became bent down and a few days later a second was half snapped at the base.

And yet. Still attached. Since then, both limbs have started leafing out just fine; how, I don’t know.  But to a peach tree, it is imperative that it bloom and leaf and that it grow so it can give. Already the tips of those branches are reaching in the direction of the sun: up!

These pictures, taken at dusk today, are for my mom most of all.

While waiting to hear from Dad, I took my need not to be worrying about things out on that afghan: *ripped back, started over, repeated from * once and then I had it. It’s on its way now and finally beautiful and I love it and it’s such a relief.

Meantime, my mom had struggled with a torn meniscus for months and finally had knee surgery today (correction via Dad–they did a knee replacement). Dad reports that she is pushing the familiar green pain-med button every 15 minutes. The worst is over, the good part’s coming, and now my mother, who loves to take a good brisk walk, will be able to again when the healing is done.

And just for Mom, this red amaryllis that Dad gave me for Christmas a few Decembers ago that sat for several months this year refusing my entreaties to come up–and then finally did–opened its two flowers today, the universe sending my parents flowers. I quite like that.

And the first two tomato seedlings sprang out of the pot and then straightened their nodded heads to look up and show off their first two leaves to the sky, too, today. Tadaah! They’ve got a Spring in each step.

“No flashlights in eyes, Parker,” said his daddy.  We were investigating with our little grandson. Holding a flashlight to Grampa’s hair and making him the fiery redhead of his youth (more or less.) Yes! Holding a small one under my chin: “Grandma’s funny!” (Mostly he liked to say Grampa, so getting a Grandma and a compliment too was a real coup.) Parker’s toy truck with the flashlit-up front was good, but he wanted one our size and type and went running for his daddy’s (who wasn’t so sure about how good an idea this was. Oh oops.  His was heavy.)

We played light wars. Super nebulae camera-to-camera (slightly offset on our end). A Tonka digger truck excavated his daddy’s heavy one from where Parker had put it down and he pushed it across the couch cushion while he told us all about it. That little toddler who was so shy about trying out his early words around us last October? He’s talking paragraphs on pages now.

And we wore him out with all the playing and talking and lifting and lighting and it was time for bed. Night night!

A friend of mine who moved here a few years ago posted a picture on Facebook of her toddler reaching up into a thicket of green leaves (her tree looks much younger than mine) for a big, juicy-looking lemon.

The California life. Her relatives back where it’s cold and snowy commented in ways one might imagine, and I was recounting this to Michelle when she got home, telling her my own crack about, “When life gives you lemons, make–”

“–lemon meringue pie!” she grinned.

“Is that an offer?”

And so tomorrow we shall bake.

(Back to Glenn Stewart’s book. His friend was scooping up sleeping pigeons in the dark from city billboards in the early days of the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group to feed the raptors they were trying to nurse back from near-extinction on a nearly-zero budget–and found himself surrounded by a swat team. The man does have a story to tell!)

The August Pride peach blooms on, the Babcock joins in.

Back when our older children were babies and toddlers, Richard wanted an autoharp. I had my piano, but he wanted to have something he could play too.

He and I had both had a county music teacher who traveled to our elementary schools and taught us songs to sing while she played one, the happiest part of the schoolweek. Probably the same teacher. Fond memories for both of us.

Autoharps were not found in great abundance in southern New Hampshire in the early 80’s.

And yet somehow we found one. It had been a public-school music teacher’s–perfect!–offered up now at a music store an hour west in a small picturesque old New England town near the Vermont border.

The place was magical. Stepping stones for our oldest to jump along on cleared the way through the last bits of snow scattered about the melting winter’s earth, taking us up to the door of an old building at the top of the hill amongst the trees; inside it was warm with old wood shelves and walls and age and stories to tell.

The shopkeeper hefted and opened the slightly battered case with affection, telling us of this autoharp’s history, glad to see it go to a young family that would appreciate it.

Our kids have grown. The instrument has been quiet awhile now.

I got an email today and forwarded it to Richard at work: a young mom was looking to borrow an autoharp for a week while doing some volunteering in the schools, and if she could buy one, all the better; did anyone know where to find one?

I struggled to remember the name of that shop in that small old town in the mountains in a land far, far away. I wondered if it had continued to remain through the years.

We would not sell. But we could share.

She thinks she has a lead on one to buy, now, but we are her backup plan in case it falls through.

Richard came home from work, and, after dinner, having had it pull at him ever since her query, pulled that battered case out, improved with further age only in our own eyes. He found the tuner. He worked at it awhile then strummed quietly, remembering the chords, the fingering, the sequences.

He came into the kitchen behind me at one point and the music was infectious by now, the only possible response to dance for the joy of making music together again, for all the memories, for making new ones right here right now.

But our outer cases are getting a bit older, too, (Mom and Dad: I can hear you guffawing) and at some point I sat down over here, he sat down in there, and as he continues to play and I continue to listen I write this down for Parker and his little brother and all the other grandchildren to come.

Parker’s parents say with a cheerful smile that they have forgiven us for giving him a Christmas present that was a roll-out plastic pad like the old Twister game, only the picture was not rows of colored dots but of a piano keyboard. Which does indeed play the notes little boys might have fun stomping on to create their own tunes. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands!

Start’em young and watch them blossom.

I got far enough past the ribbing to fall in love with how it was coming out.

And then I had to choose: tink or frog? Three 180-stitch rows. Silk? No way. Tink it is.

I want to show off the pattern but I’d like to keep some bit of surprise to it, not to mention that first I have to convince myself I can carry it off. With a brain injury, I don’t do charts well at all, I just don’t. And my first attempt at transcribing this one…

And yet. This is worth it.

But when I found this pattern, there was this one change, just one thing I would have added. And I guess the artist thought so too, because he offered a second chart with a variant in it.

There were no written-outs.

There was no picture of the variant version.

But it seemed to be exactly what my eyes were looking for, and besides, I needed a little extra width on the thing without having those stitches be excessive, yardage-devouring ribbing, even with the new cone on the way; I wanted it done the way I envisioned it. My stitches were set up for that added panel before I even found the pattern in the first place–I’d started the ribbing and launched into the afghan, whatever afghan, here’s the yarn now GO, figuring the rest would fall into place. Because somehow it just felt it would.

And it did. And the second time the set-up row came out right.

I can now delete my earlier draft here where I said I was torn between, shoot me now, and wow, this is going to be so cool. It IS going to be so cool. (Note to self: transcribe with comfortable posture and the stronger light over at the kitchen table, not at the computer.)

Meantime, in the last two days we have been celebrating Kim and John. Happy Birthdays!

No replacement cars yet.

Drove Richard to work for an early meeting. Drove home. Drove Michelle to work (a goodly commute). Drove home, a lot of stop-and-go. Answered email, a quick lunch, just enough time to get a load into the dryer. Drove to get Richard, then while he worked from his Ipad along the way, drove to the audiologist to discuss the newest-technology hearing aids that came out in the last few weeks, drove to Los Gatos Birdwatcher because it was right nearby and I was low on birdseed, drove home for long enough to grab a quick bite, drove to San Jose to pick up Michelle in go-but-mostly-stop traffic, put some gas in the car, drove home long enough to swig a glass of milk and dash back out, drove to Purlescence for the last hour of knit night–

–all of this in the rain–

–and man, did it feel good to stop. Sit. Knit and talk with old friends and get a hug from Juanita and a laugh with Rachel and actually get something done, yarnwise, the hat a portable project that made no demands on my attention, just slowly turned beautiful almost of its own (while unfolding to me what the next two iterations of it are going to be.  Cool. I can’t wait.)

Yesterday, re the baby blanket, I weighed and calculated yardage used so far and realized I was hosed. I emailed Colourmart:  they didn’t have another cone of that blue silk…? Thinking, of course not, I bought all they had and took the risk of it not being enough, and it wasn’t enough.

With the time zone difference to England, I didn’t hear back all day but wasn’t really expecting to; I checked my email one last time before bed. Nothing.

Woke up this morning to two messages: Yes we do. It’s on its way. Oh, and, (an hour later) here’s the invoice.

*deep sigh of grateful relief*

And tomorrow I will knit.

One other thing about Saturday: after the oven shopping, Richard thought, and I happily agreed, that, hey, it would be cool to go for an ice cream about now.

This is a rare impulse for us.

We had no idea where such a shop might be in the town we were in and neither of us felt like walking through the mall that was back thataway.

I fiddled with my phone a moment–how do you get Siri to come up again? I’d been able to hear her in the Verizon store’s demo when I bought the phone, but in real life, not so much. And Siri doesn’t come with closed captions. (Wait. If she actually does, tell me quick!)

But I knew how to get to the local Whole Foods from where we were and so we headed there for some single-serving Ben and Jerry’s. Not quite the same, but. Happened to pass a frozen yogurt shop on the way, actually, but didn’t pull in there but just kept going. Huh.

Found a cart out of habit, and, walking in the door, while Richard turned left towards the freezers I found myself turning right into the bakery section–I realized afterwards in order to have a moment to observe out of the corner of my eye before deciding. Reached for a vegan doughnut to bring home to Michelle, put it in my cart, found I did have the courage by that point, and went back a few steps left and stopped a man a moment.

A new veteran, was my guess. Maybe thirty at most. Not much past the entryway but standing in place, staring at the store laid out before him. Tall, muscular,  close-cropped hair, with a hard-looking face fiercely clenching an unlit cigar in angry defiance of all the preppy-health-obsessed-self-righteous-overprivileged-lifestyle and sticker shock that Whole Paycheck can be to some. (Though it’s great for people with food allergies.)

And coming from his hand was a cane with four very small walker feet at the bottom, like a child’s toy of the grandpa’s version. The cane itself, though, was an unexpectedly beautiful piece of woodwork for something with such a Medicare-suggesting end.

Mine, though nowhere near as nice as his, was carved and stained in two colors of varnished wood candycaning around each other. With the usual thick ugly black rubber tip.

I lifted it a little and looked up into his eyes, and because of what was in my hand, he was willing to meet mine.

“If you’ve got to use’em, might as well be a nice one,” and I complimented him on the woodwork in his.

His face changed entirely. He almost laughed but for that cigar he wasn’t about to let fall.

I don’t know who he was. I knew in my bones he needed that moment and that that’s why we had had to go there, and so, turns out I needed that moment too and didn’t even know it till afterwards.

Sam saved the day and picked me up again this morning. Go Sam!

Usually, when I go to Stitches, I zip around the whole place, chat, see who’s got what, avoid temptation for the first day and figure there’s less around to buy the second day so I’m safer that way, right?

I’m torn between guilt, minor innocence, and being really glad I bought the yarns I did my first day this time, which were not a lot but which I really love and can’t wait to knit–because I didn’t know and the car transmission was bad enough, but today…!

We woke up to no hot water. None.

Richard was wondering whether the pilot (is there a pilot on that thing?) had gone out and was about to get to it to check at the time Sam came.

I had a grand day at Stitches all over again. It was Saturday, lots of people were there, friends I’d been looking forward to seeing. Got a few texts from Richard–we’re working hard here. Hot water heater blew. Plumber wants $1400–and I bought not one single ball of yarn.

And all the while I was reassuring myself that the last time this happened, it flooded out the master closet and the laundry room that it sits between, so the whoever-he-was plumber had charged us extra to set it up so that should it go out again, it would drain to outside. Far easier to deal with.

Towards closing time, I was chatting with Rod and Lisa Souza again and a friend of theirs they introduced me to, Heatherly Walker. Heatherly got to asking me about my pattern writing; did I use any software?

No, I just hash it out on my own.

Was I interested?

Did she know of any good ones?

Sure! and she told me about how she and her husband had come up with what she’d wished were out there so that now it was, and she told me a bit about it as she reached for a copy in her backpack.

I had visions of transmission and plumber estimates dancing in my head as I asked her how much I owed her.

A direct quote: “Nothing! I LOVE your book!”

(Jaw. On. Ground.) Wow. Thank you!!!

I talked to Melinda and Tess at Tess’ Designer Yarns, and I apologized for my lack of buying this year; I so love their yarns. Next year, as I explained why.

They offered me to just have a skein of yarn, whatever yarn. Everybody at some point has a week like mine had been; they wanted to make it easier. I thanked them but told them hey, they have to make a living. (And there will be more customers who might want it tomorrow, so.) But I very much appreciated their generosity, and I love the softness and the colors in their yarns and I wanted to give them a shout-out here. Good folks.

Time to go. Richard was stuck with the plumber. Sam had something else going on but still offered to come get me, good man that he is. I told some of my Purlescence friends and they conferred: when Dannette’s husband arrived, Kevin and other-Richard lifted the scooter into her minivan. Dannette had been about to go out to dinner with the others but they all decided to work around taking care of me (they invited me too but I was just too tired and too broke) and Dannette, her husband, and adorable baby drove me the ten miles home.

The plumber who had set the water heater in a pan with tall sides and an overflow pipe to outside? Balderdash. That pipe was spraying all over the inside of the heater enclosure nonstop as more water pumped in, which is why Richard sloshed through standing water going past the closet after I left. Michelle helped him try to rescue our things.

At some moment of stupidity in my life I had put some of our older family photos back in there. He thinks they’re dryable.

There was a zipped cotton bag on the floor full of handknit sweaters: the infamous 86″ wingspan Aran I made him when I was newly back into knitting 23 years ago, the cabled Kaffe Fassett in llama where every half of every cable is a different color against a background of navy (wet, and next to that white aran, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to inspect the aran quite closely quite yet), the handspun handknit baby alpaca/silk cardigan with the wooden buttons, five other handknit ones…

A pound of 90/10 cashmere/nylon cobweb weight that I’d bought at $15/lb years ago, pounds and pounds, and had plied a lot of it up into thicker yarns; nope, still had a cone back there. The bag was wet but the yarn seems okay.

And on and on. We are running the washer nonstop. If it was near the floor, it’s wet.

I wonder if homeowners will replace that wall?

(Edited to add in the morning: the white aran seems to be okay. Phew.)

Correction, Monday morning: I got the details wrong. It was the *top* of the water heater, somehow, that rusted out and was spewing at the wall. The plumber’s setup was good for your much more typical failure, and the new guy made good use of it.

I edited last night’s post to say I thought I’d found the problem.

Partly, it turns out; the battery still just doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to and I had to stop and plug it in awhile and wait three times, but hey. Thanks to Sam, I got to go!

Disneyland for knitters: we get to see friends we only get ever to see there and to catch up on each other’s lives while surrounded by all the best yarns any of us could ever hope for.

Four and a half years ago I was at Stitches East and met Karida Collins, the dyer who runs Neighborhood Fiber Company, her color inspiration being various neighborhoods around Washington, DC–back home for me–and Baltimore, where my daughter now lives. Karida decided to do the Stitches West show for the first time. And so there she was! Cool! And she recognized me!

She had exactly THE fiber with the perfect amount of yardage and twist, the exquisite softness, and the perfect color (Charles Village) all wrapped up in one sublime skein of silk yarn. She had come all this way to make it possible; there you go.

The owner of Wild Orchid Knits was there with her daughter: camel/silk, cashmere, mink; she uses only natural dyes. I had met the mom two years ago, been unable to find her work online since, didn’t see her there last year and wished for two years I’d bought a particular yarn from her to cheer her on in her good work. Well now.

A note from Jan helped me pay more attention than I might have to the softness and inherent baby-friendliness in some  James C. Brett Marble Chunky acrylic from Yarn Barn for Parker’s little brother to drag around the backyard and playground someday, and so now I can get to work on his first afghan.

Years ago, when Signature was just starting to make needles and they came in straights only, they brought their new product to Stitches West and I wasn’t interested. Now they have circulars but they weren’t coming–but my friend Anne just happened to email me to say she would be working at Southern Yarns’ booth and there would be Signature needles there, just in case I wanted her to reserve me a pair.

I read that just dumbfounded. How did she know?! I have a particularly well-loved pair of rosewoods 3.75mm that had somehow gotten a divot clipped out of the tip. I needed a new pair, and I’d wanted to try out the Signatures. They are green.

And then. There was my dear friend Lisa Souza and her husband Rod, reason alone to come. I was wearing the Julia shawl in her Pacific colorway from the book and I had people stop me constantly, all day, wanting to touch it, telling me how gorgeous it was, to ask where I’d gotten that yarn. Lisa!

A friend kept me company while Sam and I waited for each other in different places at the end of the day till we finally texted–oh there you are! Just because she wanted to, and when I apologized over the cold outside there by the drive-around, she laughed it off, telling me about the snow she’d traveled in from and that this was warm. Ah. Okay. So you know Real Weather, that’s right. We watched a flock of geese fly overhead against the darkening sky.

And a fabulous day was had by all.

I can’t believe I had the energy to type all that out.

Oh and: a bar of good Valrhona chocolate, other than the length of it, feels just like an Iphone when you’re groping blindly through your purse. Reception is ec static.