It’s not even Stitches yet and I’m exhausted. Got up early, drove everybody to work, ran the errands, did the dentist thing, had my fob fall off my keyring and had some stressed minutes retracing my steps with help from the good folks at Trader Joe’s till I found the rest–and at dinnertime got a surprise of a note from a friend saying he’d hesitated to say anything because you don’t want to jinx a friendship if something goes wrong, but he knew we needed a car and as far as *he* knew, his was in great shape, just old…

And he’d just bought a new one to celebrate a new job.

He was asking less than our van’s estimate. If only we’d known sooner.

It was gorgeous. And a tight fit for my 6’8″ husband, who didn’t want to test drive it with a migraine but was willing to sit in it and let me drive it and fall in love with it. Volvo makes nice vehicles. It’s got a ton of miles, I wouldn’t use it for a major commuter car like our friend did but then I only putter around a bit–and Michelle will be doing her own car shopping Saturday.

Quite reasonably, Richard didn’t want to pay for a car till he had actually driven it. And I have Stitches the next few days and another couple is (as one should) taking it to a mechanic tomorrow to have it checked out: the only way to be sure we could claim it was to hand over a check on the spot. With regrets on the unintended, unwanted pressure.

I think that quite reasonably means we won’t get it, but it was a nice dream. At least now we know there are possibilities out there.

And did I mention the battery on my scooter for Stitches, after lo these many months of my testing the scooter and not keeping it plugged in because the batteries need to be run down and of running it deliberately downwards, doublechecking the charging, and of the scooter being fine, is being iffy only starting today? Not last week, not Monday, not all those times in the whole year when I tried to keep it babied so it would behave when I needed it, just and only today? That needle dips into the yellow warning when I go halfway across the house. It’s supposed to stay firmly, solidly green. It did it did it did it did and now it doesn’t.

What could I do? Tomorrow’s the day, so, I plugged it back in and could only hope it would recharge all the way just because, please oh please, oh pretty please, I need it to.

——

(Edited in the morning to add, after the first few comments were already in: as we were going go bed, Richard said, Try unplugging and replugging.

I did, twice.

Try again; couldn’t hurt.

I did, and that time found out that the cable between the chair and the power box plugs in to both of those, it’s not built into the power box side like I thought. Guess what had come loose? Saved! That seems to have done it.

“The oil light flickered on in your car, Mom, just as it was stalling out.”

And so Richard drove an extra almost two hour commute time today to take her to work and then to his own office and later back while I took my car in. I haven’t driven it in a long time, and it felt very sluggish going those few blocks to the mechanic. I walked home and waited to hear.

The engine is fine.

The transmission is toast, and so is one axle. The car is an ’00 with 116k miles.

Stitches West is this weekend, the one time a year I need a minivan and the only reason we still have it: so that I can set up the ramp for the electric scooter.

You put a hundred fifty vendors of balls of yarn and thousands of people in one convention center with someone who had the connections between the balance and visual centers of the brain severed by a speeder, and you have the neurologist who looked at that five-day brain EEG and warned me, “You’re not epileptic yet–but you’re real. close.”

My balance is tactile and visual and when the visuals are on extreme overload and I’m trying to walk through it my brain feels like water droplets skittering across a smoking pan. Scooter. Period. Not worth the risk.

You can take the machine apart and put the pieces in the trunk of a car but the heaviest part still weighs 60 pounds; I wrote on Facebook, I can’t ask anyone to do that.

Jasmin says that Sam offered. I wrote back that I already had the manufacturing cream bought to make a chocolate torte in thanks.

And I’m quietly marveling over that: with no plans in mind, and certainly not with any idea of what was about to happen with the car, I had splurged and bought some at Milk Pail on Saturday. Because it just felt like I needed to be able to make chocolate tortes right now. It wouldn’t be anywhere near what I owe in thanks, given how much going to Stitches means to me and what his generosity does, too, but it’s a start.

At this stage, that little flower reminds me somewhat of a mountain laurel blossom back East, my most favorite tree flower ever and something that grew wild and lovely in our yard, growing up. Light pink edges, dark pink inner part and those stamens just so–it is achingly beautiful to me. Tropic Snow is supposed to be the most ornamental of the peach trees I planted and I put it where you can’t see it from the family room window, thinking I might regret that later, and I just might–all I knew at the time was that Dave Wilson Nursery says these are pretty.

And how.

I found a source for the mylar ribbons to scare critters away from the fruit: put it up just before things ripen, they say, take it down after. Five bucks a roll. Hey!

Only, my squirrels have never waited for my Fuji apples to ripen before they’ve stripped the tree. This may take some working out.

With my sun sensitivity and my lupus, it’s been twenty years since I’ve walked around Wegmans Nursery in Redwood City–but it was still there and still had good reviews, they still know their stuff. I had done okay with the sunblock and the hat at the funeral and it was past time the two of us had an adventure of a day, and so add in a sun-protection jacket, wait till near closing time, and off we went.

“So what are we going to get?” Richard asked on the drive up.

“Uh, I was going for that birdscare tape,” says me.

“I thought you were going to get a second blueberry plant.” (They are much more productive with a second variety next to them.)

Me, unspoken: (YES!!!)

We got there. The guy totally knew what I was talking about when I said limb spreaders, plastic thingies with v-shaped ends for keeping the youngest plum limbs from overlapping. Those will be in on Wednesday, he told us.

Richard went hunting for the stuff to protect from peach leaf curl. Organic only. He told me the variety of blueberry was totally my choice, and although the O’Neals were pretty picked over, that’s what I wanted and I found a healthy one–and a whole lot bigger than the little one-year-old plant Stark’s had changed my mail order to (without telling me) after I’d ordered a larger two-year-0ld one: I was perfectly willing to trade a very few dollars (maybe six?) for a year of waiting for berries. Lesson learned. Stay local.

What about the soil type, Richard asked the guy, who took us to where there was blueberry-specific potting soil and put a bag in our car. (Earthworm castings are particularly important for O’Neals. Man, I sound like a real gardener. I assure you, it’s still all pretend at this point.) What about staking the new peach trees, my sweetie asked me, and I had something at home already that I thought would do. The guy told me they had a product coming in that would help support the weight of the peaches while protecting them from wildlife.

Richard had another thought. Did I want some annuals to put along the front of the house?

I was amazed. He was really getting into this. Cool. (I’ll plant some seeds for that, was my thought, trying to hold today’s costs down.)

I asked the Wegmans guy whether letting the Tropic Snow grow a few peaches now would stunt the growth of the roots? I mean, I’d only just planted the thing.

No, and he told me with a grin that I’d lucked out.

Cooool.

Got home. Snapped the picture up there. Found out that the reason that big pot always wobbles when a squirrel jumps up on it is that by golly one bit of the underside was broken off–who knew. Propped it up with a broken piece from a small pot the squirrels smashed off the table, and steady as she goes.

I finished planting the O’Neal in it, ran some water over my hands with the hose, checked on the plum tree–it was dormant Tuesday, it’s totally covered in tiny growth buds now–went inside, closed the sliding glass door, turned back to see…

…And there was a little house finch perched on the new blueberry plant, the one that was happily big enough to support its doing so, watching me watching it as if thanking me for all its blueberries to come.

Maybe I should plant a cherry tree to the birds in thanks for their entertaining me.

My hands still smell of rich soil with a side of sunblock.

And I even got some knitting done too.

Richard worked from home today, still under the weather; it was clear we weren’t going out tonight. He encouraged me to go to knit night, get me some Purlescence time in.

I took the Manos Allegria project with me, made from the new yarn the shop had just gotten in the last time I went four weeks ago, and time after time it got a sharp intake of breath and “Oh, that’s GORGEOUS!” Two knitters asked, “Is the pattern out yet?”

“Not yet!”

“Hurry!”

Did my little ego great good, I tell ya. (Thank you, guys, I needed that–I frogged today’s new project five, count’em five times trying to get it just so, killed my whole afternoon.)

“You’ve been missing awhile, haven’t you?” asked Juanita.

The funeral, the cold from the guy on the plane, yes…

And I won’t be there next Thursday either because neither will any of them: one more week till Stitches!

My cousin, it turns out, has a binder with all my grandparents’ love letters to each other while they were engaged and were in different states for part of that. I had no idea.

“Frances Marion, dear,

….I am just begninng to realize how completely the thoughts of you filled up my life. I wonder that I got anything else done. I watch every corner with a half conscious hope that you will come around it. As I sit alone at lunch or dinner, I look up suddenly once in a while to catch your eye–not there. I am most happy to know that I can go peacefully on now , secure in the knowledge of your love and faith in me. It stands about me like a guard, and an inspiration. May God always keep it so.”

Signed and dated June 22, 1922.

And as another cousin chimed in, “m’dear” was Grampa’s word.

And world. They were married 72 years.

I like the fact that when you knit from a cone, you only have to weave the beginning and the end ends into the fabric. No joining of skeins in the middle.

It’s not that the skein lengths are the problem: it’s my memory of the baby quilt a friend lovingly made my youngest. It was a great quilt, bright and cheerful and colorful and with little shiny slippery ribbon ties all over. (With, thank goodness, a cotton batting inside that could never bunch up.)

John at a year old discovered that he could undo those red ribbon ties. I would put him to bed and he’d work his fingers carefully into those little knots and tug here and there and pull. Great dexterity very young, interested in fibers, clearly a future knitter. (I’m still waiting.) Once he was asleep I would take it away from him, retie all the ties (0r at least the ones he hadn’t pulled all the way out) so that it wouldn’t become a game with Mommy to him because then we’d lose them all, and then cover him back up again with his favorite blankie.

I know what little fingers can do to ends.

My daughter-in-law would like a baby blanket made out of a soft synthetic such that it can be dragged around and abused and used without her wincing or gasping over what her little boy or the laundry might do to it. But I just wish I knew how to find a baby-soft worsted synthetic/blend on, you know, a cone… Any suggestions?

And yes that is an announcement. We are starting into the third trimester now. Parker is going to be a big brother, and the new baby boy is due on my husband’s birthday.

And we are home.

Which seems both so very ordinary and so strange.

Had a great visit with my parents while we were in Salt Lake: my mother-in-law had wanted her ashes  buried next to her daughter’s grave there.

Her brothers and some of their families would be able to attend that way (not to mention my folks).  There were people who’d retired there after careers in Washington, DC, and I had people re-introducing themselves to me who’d known me since I was born.  Who knew. Edna Lou, who said she’d worked for my dad (wow, that would have been, what, 1953?! ’54?) Wow.

And there was the doctor who–I asked Richard later, that was him, right? Yes–was a close family friend of my in-laws and my parents and to whom my in-laws took their daughter when she was a teenager for some diagnostic tests. She was given a contrast dye to scan her kidneys, in the hospital as I remember the story, and promptly went into anaphylactic shock. It took a team working hard to bring her back, and in that moment of relief as she came to, she looked up at this good man she knew from church and declared, “My dad’s a lawyer and” (with extra emphasis) “my brother’s 6’8″. You better watch it.”

Everybody in the room cracked up.

And here my Ft Worth sister-in-law was, with her three grown or nearly-grown kids.

Cousin Michelle, younger than me, is fighting breast cancer and it was not caught early. “This last year’s been real rough,” she told me.  Her husband looked around at the happy crowd at the luncheon, laughed at the toddler who played games with the cane with me and declared, “We need to all do this again. For a happy reason.”

This morning as we packed up the rental car to go, somehow it caught my attention and I found myself bending low for a closer look. I knew I would want a picture, but even with the fingerless gloves on knitted by (you know who you are, and thank you), it was too cold to pry everything open to get to my Iphone in the this inside the that. We needed to go.

There was tiny frozen rice everywhere: as if the wall of fog had shattered into perfect little frozen grains of it on the ground. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it before and I’ve certainly lived in snow in my life. It was like the weather was trying to throw a wedding. Or perhaps wishing Michelle and her love a long and happy life together.

We were coming in for landing when my seatmate opened her window at last and I had a sudden moment of, wait, it looks like snow on the ground here, too?! But of course it was the late sun coming blindingly white off the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

We are home.

I filled the birdfeeder.

Things are so much the same and so different.

Saturday, graveside. The family had wrapped things up–when our niece Jessie turned back. Her brother’s small children had started to quietly play in this exotic ice you could slide a little on; snowballs had not yet been invented in their world. They’re California kids.

Jessie showed them her mother’s grave marker and told them about their grandma. Their eyes were fixed on the spot: in their experiences, Grandmas were people who loved you, always ready with a hug, not gray rectangle stones with words carved in them like a book. And soon there would be two, for their great grandma we were laying to rest.

A little later that day they were gleefully chasing yellow balloons and coloring Curious George pages at the surprise birthday party for their great- grandpa after the funeral luncheon. To Life!

Raised cane with a small toddler Saturday: I offered it to her, she got it, walked away on me, teased me over her shoulder with an impish grin and then turned back all the way around and carried the trophy over her head, presenting it way high to me. So big!

I would say thank you with a big smile and a slight bow. She would grab the cane back. Repeat.

I tried a variation where I asked for it when she was only a few steps away; that was breaking the rules of our new game and she said No! with a little dance. She knew how to say that word.

And so we went on for some time. Twice, someone tried to rescue me, stranded in the luncheon crowd without my balance-on-a-stick. I told them we were fine, no problems.

Richard’s cousin’s second daughter might not remember much later, but in this crowd of family but strangers to the little one I wanted her to come away knowing she was loved and to be happy she was there. And her big sister too. And that, that was worth the sitting and the giggling for a little while aside from the adult conversations.

Not to mention how fun it is to have a toddler accept you as her friend.

He had a sniffly nose and he didn’t like being in a strange place at nap time. He started to let it be known.

My sweetie had replenished my Peruvian hand knit finger puppet supply for Christmas.  A bright, multicolored bird.

Ah bah duce, he confirmed to his mommy as she got out a bottle while I was quietly purse diving.

Richard and I offered the puppet to the parents. All three faces lit up. “Duck!” as the little one reached for it.

It was the perfect toy: new, soft, pretty, and just the right size for the moment.  The dad grinned and gave a thumbs up.

I just wish I could thank the knitter in Peru. She saved their day.

Called my sweetie adorable, and he says he’s not a-door-able, since he has to duck to go through them.

Silly person.

Meantime, same pharmacy, different clerk, again, this one looks at the total and is staggered. I try to explain that $468 is so much better than last time. Now I think we’re at least where we’re only having to pay 20%.

This doesn’t seem to make her feel much better.

(Yeah, me neither.)

But while I was sitting waiting for it, another knitter watched my first few stitches for my new project and promptly plunked down next to me and we had one of those wonderful conversations that a shared love of yarn helps happen so easily.  I told her all about knit night at Purlescence, a store she didn’t know about, and that it was tonight…

…And then, my apologies, I just didn’t make it there. Things got done that needed to get done but I simply ran out of time to make the trip.

But I do hope I get to see her there next week. *waving hi*

It’s become a joke by now.

Is it done yet?

I model it for him, past my knees, towards my ankles.

He grins, tries it on, it’s shorter than fingertip-to-fingertip, and looks at me not quite laughing–but he hasn’t sung Short People at me. Yet.

This is the man who never in his life had had the luxury of a sweater with sleeves long enough to fold back the cuffs, so I’d made him one with an 86″ wingspan. Fits him perfectly.

I knit some more. The scarf is at 82″ now, surely…? But there is more of this fingering weight baby alpaca, I can keep going. It has fond memories: anyone else out there remember Russ of Robin and Russ Handweaving? He bought a truckload of this stuff back when nobody had ever heard of baby alpaca yarns. Sold it in natural colors at a buck a ball, 40 grams each, not on cones, not his usual stuff but oh so very soft. Mine started out a soft fawn.

I dyed several pounds of it ten years ago, the skeins presoaked for an attempt at color evenness and shoved in that suddenly small-looking pot as best I could. I didn’t take the time to hank and then rewind all those skeins for the dye process; I had just gotten out of the hospital a few weeks before. I lifted that pot.  It felt heroic enough. An afghan for the doctor who’d saved my life–and it had cashmere I dyed to match knitted into it, too, and my mother-in-law played a part in that, and I so wish I could find the rest of that yarn in time for this project because of that connection to her.

But. I have the baby alpaca. The leftovers seem to be the skeins that were the most felted and tangled and the least matching and oh well.

But I am knitting three strands crammed together on size 9s for softness and warmth and the shades can waver  between themselves all they want. One browner, one lighter, one redder, repeat at the 35″ mark.

My husband has never had a scarf long enough that it doesn’t look like a tall man trying to fit into normal people’s sizes. Partly too because we live where you don’t need one. This, though, is going to be long enough. I had to ice my hands several times today (the seed stitch part of that pattern is a bear to work) but I’m. Almost. There.

(Parker, three months ago, with apologies for the tilt.)

I came home from the grocery store to find my husband on the phone.

“Who are you talking to?” I said softly after a moment.

“Parker!” and he asked him if he wanted to talk to me.

With speech much clearer and surer than it was even in October when we saw him–the difference between 22 months old and 25–Parker said in delight, “Hi Gramma!”

“Hi Parker! I love you!”

There was a moment’s pause, and then *click*

I looked at the phone, going, wait, did he just…?

Yup.

After all, what more can anyone possibly add to that?

“In 2001, the Faustman Lab reversed type 1 diabetes in mice with end-stage disease, a project that is now in human clinical trials.” That really got my attention: there is so much research that never succeeds that far. They hope to expand their findings to other autoimmune diseases, lupus and Crohn’s specifically mentioned. Hey!

My cousin Heidi was diagnosed four years ago, out of the blue, with Type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune version of the disease, and her husband’s employer donated an Ipad Mini for her to raffle off towards raising funding for that lab. The link goes to her blog post about it. Heidi asks that people donate directly to the lab, no middleman on her part, three bucks per chance, you get the tax write-off, and then come tell her to be entered in the raffle (and to honor the legalities of it, there’s a no-money option).

And just for fun, in addition to changing the world for the better, someone gets that Mini. You can name it Cooper.

A cowl for the cold should be long enough that you can pull it over your head from the back and still have the bottom of it puddle around your shoulders in a warm scarf, right?

Didn’t have quite enough of the sheared-mink yarn for that–close, though, and it is done and like so many other projects, once it actually touched water and then was laid flat, the small bit of lace in it blossomed beautifully. The pattern was something untried and new…. It’s perfect. (Phew!)

Next up: a warm soft scarf for my  husband, who, after 26 years of not needing one, does not seem to actually own one.  Or rather–there was one from scratchy cheap dimestore acrylic I made him nearly 30 years ago when we lived in New Hampshire, in a rather gaudy stage-prop green (you could see it clear to the last row) because it was the best that store could do. It was in no way warm, and ugly as all get-out (the stockinette with poofs of purl rows curled in a lovely seasick poodle effect) and the very memory of the thing makes me cringe: it made me not want to be a knitter.

There are good acrylics out there now, but not then and not this. (Dear, tell me we don’t still have that thing around!?)

Time to make it up to the man worth far more than his weight in qiviut.