Penicillin was a few years away yet. My grandmother, a young mom, pleaded with her older sister to live. Her sister, deathly ill with childbed fever and knowing by then that it was not to be, yearning to comfort her, asked her, Frances? Where are your children?

My grandmother said they were being watched by (whoever it was) while she came to see her in the hospital.

Her sister assured her that her own children, too, would be taken good care of.

And so my grandmother took in the little boys at her sister’s death, her brother-in-law feeling too overwhelmed to cope on his own and needing the help.They stayed for a few years, and my mom considered them almost more her brothers.

Years ago, talking to someone at church after we moved to California, in a chance remark I found the woman was the daughter of one of those boys–we were second cousins. Who knew.

Today we celebrated at the wedding of her daughter, laughing at our daughters being third cousins and why did it matter anyway and the improbability of having made the connection, glad we did just because it’s fun to claim each other.

We are all, in the end, each others’ brothers and sisters.

Made good progress on the Malabrigo I hadn’t expected to work on today, because I…

Took a good hard tumble this afternoon. Did a straight-forward splat on the carpet, bent my glasses, the item in my hands going flying ahead of me–

–and thought of my mom’s reaction.

My mother’s mother broke her hip when my mom was in college, and Mom, small-boned and thin, was always afraid of that happening to her. And so it was that one day, about 16 years ago, she was carrying one of my sister’s twin then-babies and found herself suddenly falling down the stairs she’d been heading down, her full focus on protecting that child from harm.

I can just picture him wanting to ask, Doozitagin? He was fine.

And Mom brushed herself off just jubilant: the baby was fine, and she hadn’t broken her hip! If it didn’t happen then it probably wasn’t ever going to–she was fine! Yay!

And at 81 now, she’s still fine.

I yelled for my Richard. He came.

My 6’8″ husband is incredibly tall when you’re looking up at him from the floor. He helped me up, I brushed myself off, whined a bit–sorry, Mom–and my balance seemed a little worse for the jolt. But hey.

Michelle told me, Mom, you need to sit down, put your feet up and KNIT!

Well, when you put it that way…

Michelle was sorting in the kitchen and advocating for Goodwilling a bunch of old Tupperware: lime-gray green, Peptobismal pink, long shoved in the back of the cabinets.”This looks like from the ’80’s, Mom!”

Fancy that. “Trust me, those were the best colors they had at the time,” and the measure of an organized kitchen back then was how much and how well placed and how color-coordinated your Tupperware was on your shelves. There is nobody who will say I came close to succeeding at that.

OXO is taking over here now. Out with the random that kept changing to a new shade every time I tried to add a bit more as my budget allowed. In with the airtight, consistent-over-time, easy-on-the-eyes with a shape that fits side-to-side. Meantime, hopefully someone out there will be shopping the thrift stores for something, y’know, vintage. (I can only hope it doesn’t have BPA–I did find this, and so far, so good.)

And Michelle found–some old wedding presents.

It was the most sweltering for the date on record in Washington DC. We can tell our kids: we were totally hot.

Red roses tonight. Dinner for two at Flea Street Cafe. We kn0w how lucky we are.

The plumber came. He looked at the job, pronounced a fair price and went to work. When he was done, he asked me to come see something. I ducked down under the sink and went Wow!

When we had redone the kitchen 17 years ago, that plumber had glued all the pieces under there together, and this guy had never seen anything quite like it–and a ring was broken.  Tilted up and high, which was good, but really obviously broken.

I told him, yeah, our contractor cut a lot of corners that we found out about later. But glued? Why? Huh.

He had that ring piece in his truck. He offered to fix it for $45, which I thought reasonable in the extreme. Done! And the fluids at the front of the fridge were 37F this morning. We have a working kitchen again!

Meantime…

Michelle was cleaning a cabinet and came across a butter dish that had been a wedding present ages ago in Washington DC, the surviving one; the other we were given had been (are you ready for this) platinum-edged china, I kid you not, broken in the Loma Prieta quake and long gone. The glass one, however, had made it through.

Did you know that butter quarter pound blocks sold on the East Coast are long and narrow and butter quarters sold on the West Coast are short and squat? And do not in any way fit our East Coast butter dish? I explained to her, and she told me that, Oh, you can buy butter shaped like that at Piazza’s. You’ll pay an obscene price for it, but you can get it.

Designer butter. Who knew.

(So, can I get rid of it, Mom?

Not on your life. Call it a quacamole server.)

Ed. to add–remember how I said I was really really hoping no earthquake tonight with that sink full of Drano’d water to the top? The universe laughed. We had a 3.3 at 1:13 this morning just south of San Jose. Not enough to do damage, not even enough to splash (as far as I could tell); just enough to grin mischievously back at us.

The kitchen sink, which has been grumbling, backed up last night. The Drano helped some but it didn’t finish the job.

I took a break and bought a gallon of milk tonight. It was a gamble.

I came home and at last we finished that job. I hope.

Now, for 32 years I have marveled at the things my 6’8″ husband can reach; this time, he was marveling at me as I easily squeezed head and shoulders into the 13″ wide freezer side to screw the shelf runners back on after we had visually confirmed that its coils were finally totally de-iced. (Didn’t we thaw those last Saturday…?!)

A week. The freezer side has been pretty much okay, but.  And it’s 17 years old.

Over the last few days, I vacuumed the bottom, I put a tall metal bowl full of ice on the fridge side, we troubleshooted via the ‘net and talked repairmen and (oh please no) replacements. Richard has a nifty laser pointer thingy that reads out the temp of whatever it shines on, and at 58 degrees–62, yesterday–buying milk by the half gallon seemed a good idea.

One last try. Richard and Ryan pulled the behemoth out from the wall this morning and Richard squeezed somehow down on the floor in the small space behind it and unscrewed the back panel. I gave the insides the best I could with the vacuum, cleaning and resting and coming back again and again to have at it. It took us all morning.

It helped some–we got to 55.

Note that if you’re going to stick a vacuum nozzle in there, *turn the fridge off first.* See that motor? In its speed, I thought that was a solid piece there. Do you know how fast it can throw that light piece of plastic back out at you? Yeah, I asked for a flashlight after that. I have been assured it would moan and groan if I’d done any damage.

Hours later, Michelle saw the ice peeking out at the seams inside the freezer. Oh no…

To actually see the coils we had to unscrew the innards to be able to lift the metal back. And wow–all that *hairsucking haircutting hairdryering we did last week, where we thought surely we’d gotten everything thawed behind there because the metal was so warm? We had done that much hairdryering again tonight when we lifted it open and finally saw.

Iced nearly solid behind there. After half an hour of high heat blasted at it. Who knew.

THIS time we knew when those coils were done. I squeezed in and screwed the rails back together. Richard got the shelves back on them. I filled them back up from the cooler. It is done.

THIS time, if it doesn’t work…

Meantime, we put more Drano down the sink and till that works, no dishes can be done.

I really, really want to finish that single row of silk I started today before I go to bed.

*Ed to add, I didn’t blog about that? Make sure your hairdryer has a nearly-solid hairproof screen at the back. I later checked at Target: they had 16 on display. Thirteen were good; three of them had backs that were open enough to suck your hair right in if you held it pointing towards in front of you, and the only way to get that hair out–believe me, we tried–is to cut it. I’m going to have a bit of a frizzy Mohawk for a few months.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee wrote a much calmer post about All That than I did. Good for her, and I’m grateful she did and for her example. (And thank you DebbieR for the heads-up).

And after some discussion around here, too, here are some more thoughts. The patterns that clearly mimic the Olympic logo? Infringe if they’re for sale, if they’re free, no, unless the things made from them are sold.

The USOC thinks the word ravelympics infringes too. Personally, I think it’s close but that it does not and that nobody’s going to confuse the two. The USOC’s letter was far from well thought out, though, and it just didn’t help their cause when, after having called ravelympics “denigrating,” they then apologized (though they did not retract the cease and desist) and added an offer to let (you know that’s a  non-knitter, right there) us knit for the athletes. Trying to make peace in the storm.

Wait, wait, guys: knitting usually takes mega-hours. You have to let people calm down first before you can just assume they want to give up their life’s time to you.

They handled it badly. So did I by letting it get under my skin so thoroughly. I apologize.

Meantime. Bryan left this morning. He’ll be home in New Jersey in time to see my oldest on her way during a move; he saved the last cookie for breakfast before his trip, grinning when I made sure he’d gotten it.

It was a small batch last night. I pureed about a half cup toasted hazelnuts with an egg and three packets of Splenda. Baked them as cookies that came out of the oven looking cake-like but quickly fell and looked cookie-ish again. Then I spread them with premium Bergenfield unsweetened chocolate, melted with packets of Splenda mixed in to his taste.

I saved them all for him. We like good stuff around here and that one he could eat.

All those good nutty chocolatey smells…

I just took a chocolate hazelnut torte out of the oven.

(Ed. to add: Channon got me thinking of when we went to hear Sally Rogers sing at the Folkway Inn in Peterborough, NH, ~26 years ago. I’ve hoped to live up to this song ever since.)

My brother‘s here, my brother’s here!

Michelle and Ryan cooked the dinner. Kim and Richard and Parker Skyped with us. Phone calls were made. A great day.

And. In anticipation of Father’s Day, my sweetie took me shopping yesterday and bought ME a gift: a replacement for my jammed, suddenly unworking squirrel super soaker. He’s a sweetie.

Celebrating Klutzes… (Klutz Press’s Intergalactic Headquarters, ie their retail store, is a few miles up the road.)

I mentioned the hairdryer incident yesterday because I wanted to warn off others. It didn’t burn the hair, it just wrapped it around and around the insides and Richard couldn’t even take it apart to get at it without cutting my hair off anyway.

This morning, I checked the back of that one (Michelle’s) and then my own: mine had been designed to be much better at deflecting the possibility; hers, designed to be lightweight for travel, had sideways plastic stripes with equally-wide open gaps between them at the back. Be careful out there.

She said later that when I’d yelled “Help!” she had never heard it from me like that but once, the time that…

When our kids were little, the girls were in a bunkbed with Sam on the top. Age gave privileges. One evening, tucking them in, I put one foot on the edge of Michelle’s bunk to hoist myself partway and then hopped up on top of the tall dresser to have some quiet end-of-the-day time with my eldest, much enjoyed by both of us with me at eye level up near the ceiling with her. The novelty of coming into her territory for a moment.

And then I hopped straight down.

With my pocket catching on the drawer knob and pulling the whole dresser crashing down on me.

A stunned not very loud can’t get my breath have to say something “Help?” The kids yelled for their dad.

Richard came running and then stopped, bowled over laughing in the hallway. I knew, yes of course it was funny–but tomorrow, okay, hon, can we do something about this first, I’m still under this thing okay? And I’d landed on my wad of keys in the other pocket–getmeouttahere. He got it off fast, apologizing for his initial reaction. But he was right–it WAS funny. It was so classic klutzy us.

I did not know that all these years later, Michelle remembered exactly how I’d sounded in that first moment.

And it was no big deal, I was okay.

And it’s no big deal. I do have about a dozen random stray hairs sticking up on top of my head, but they’ll just add character to the family photos in another nephew’s wedding coming up. Like when my then-four-year-old son cut his hair instead of the construction paper on the long car ride on the way to my brother’s. Family tradition.

Anybody got a klutz story to tell?

It was Ryan’s birthday today, and his girlfriend’s parents invited us all over to dinner.

Our part of it: one homemade angel food cake.

One bag frozen raspberries cooked with about a half cup mango juice and a not-full 1/4 c sugar in the microwave for about three and a half minutes, then cuisinarted so that the seeds (which do add to the flavor) become one with the puree. Pour over diced pieces from six ataulfo-type (smallish yellow kidney-shaped) mangoes.

Chocolate sauce: fill a measuring cup to yay high with pieces of good dark chocolate, then pour coconut cream to almost that high. Dunk every bit of chocolate below the surface once before nuking so the chocolate doesn’t seize, then one minute for my about a cup and a half’s  worth of chocolate.  Stir hard while the pieces melt. Can serve as sauce or refrigerate till hard, scoop into balls, roll in cocoa, and call it truffles. (Mine was still sauce when it was time to go; it’s all good.)

One portabello mushroom/onion side dish, sauteed by Michelle.

Two other cakes, one by the girlfriend and hers was the best. Chocolate pear torte. I’d really like the recipe.

And a good party was had by all.

Michelle was hoping for lemon cake: Please? (Bambi eyes.) It always came out wrong when she did it, she claimed.

And then she just happened to mention that she and her father had bought a big box of raspberries on Saturday and we should eat them. Soon. (Checking, she added,) They all look great so far.

I protested, I never write it down, I just do, and I haven’t made it in awhile. (I should have checked the blog.) So I forged ahead: only, this time I used a cup of just-juiced lemons and a half a cup of almost-too-healthy Earth Balance. Butter would have been better, only, not around her dairy allergy.

Meanwhile, she rinsed the raspberries; we had about 10 oz left to play with. We patted them dry over and over with paper towels. Then I sprinkled them across the top of the cake (you have to work fast with that recipe) and about 1/4 c brown sugar over them.

Got it right this time. Oh most definitely.

It was, to be softspoken about it, an intense day.

We went to the wedding reception this evening of Marguerite’s daughter. Beautifully done, the couple and their families so very happy. So much joy. The way it should always be.

And here’s the funny part: they held it in the Rotunda at City Hall in San Jose. Okay, picture me jumping up and down in surprised glee when that invitation came. Wow!

And to top it off, with what I can only ascribe to the choreography of God, we parked the car and were on the plaza walking towards the Rotunda door when, looking up, I said to Richard and Michelle, Do you see what that is?!

No, what?

The peregrine falcon casually turned a half-circle around the circular building and away towards the direction of the nest, the one I used to be on the camera crew for. Just. So. Perfect.

As were the bride and groom.

The other thing that happened. The phone rang this afternoon. “Hi, Mom!”

“Hi, Richard!” (Wondering what the occasion might be.) I found out soon enough.

I have always thought that that freeway bridge was an example of old and, at the side near the airport, poor design. The kids were on it in heavy traffic when for reasons no one knows, someone slammed their brakes hard. And were hit. A third car hit. While our son Richard in the other lane was braking and trying to avoid and so the guy behind him slammed into him and threw him into the others and if we heard right, our kids were then hit yet again.

And they are okay. The car, not so much. One person left the scene via paramedics, braced and collared, but nobody was killed.

Cars are only so much scrap metal anyway. I told him that my big accident when I was hit, the doctor told me to keep moving gently all day, all day, while consciously relaxing and that that would keep the muscle damage to a minimum.  He was right. (He missed the brain swelling and the damage to my balance to come, but maybe it was too soon after to know.)

They’re okay. Repeat. They’re okay. Two hours later we were in San Jose, watching old friends finding old friends, everybody embracing the happy couple, four years after we were doing the same thing with our own kids and now grandson who had us holding our breath today.

Love your dear ones. Life is far too fragile for anything less.

It is 6/6/12. Now, if you could take the two sixes, turn the second one around, draw that number 1 across the top with the bottom of it as the rear fender and the 2 above it providing the rider in race mode, you’ll have it: my son on a bicycle.

Actually, the word bicycle itself kinda looks (especially if you flip the e onto the top to be the rider’s smiling face and the l to be its arms) like one pulling a baby trailer with the little traffic flag flying at the back.

Which totally fits.

It is our son’s birthday, he of the bike and baby trailer and of letting his Grampa go first. We Skyped; Parker said “Hi” and put his pacifier in, eyes wide, when his dad asked where his ears were. Heh. We knew he knew. Then he decided it was okay to be shown off and he was all ears. And nose. “Where’s your mouth?” A plug for a plug and acute of the cute.

After awhile, he decided enough of this not-here–BE here! And he tried to climb into their screen so we could really be together, and maybe even get a hug!

Workin’ on it, kiddo, workin’ on it.

Happy Birthday, little Richard!

Years ago my mom had a co-worker who was close to some kids whose parents were going through a nasty divorce. She wanted them to have a promise of hope: to see a couple who were long married, who’d raised kids together and gotten them off on their own, who were living a full life. Together. Who cherished each other. So she set up an appointment and Mom and Dad said sure, come on by.

The locals will understand when I say I grew up in an Eichler-esque house: floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room at the back of the house looking out on the woods, highly unusual architecture for Maryland, only, different from the Eichlers in that the living room rose to a cathedral ceiling.

It was the season of Christmas.

Every year Dad would get the ladder and hang globe ornaments from the top beam between the living and dining room. These were huge, deeply colored, beautiful, but something you couldn’t put in a normal ceiling without someone bonking their head. We got to have them. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. The whole area was decorated as only an art dealer and his wife could do: things collected from trips to Europe, happy-making and pretty, only the lights being your average store-bought. And even then… I was so thrilled when bubble lights finally came back on the market a few years ago.

Anyway.

For whatever reason, Mom got delayed, the co-worker and kids came early, I don’t know, but when they came only Dad was home. Mom apologized profusely later to her co-worker.

Who told her no, that was perfect.

?

My father had loved those children and had wanted the best for them before he ever laid eyes on them; I imagine the very request got him thinking how blessed his life was and how much he wished it for them too, and he welcomed them in and joyfully showed them around as they talked. I picture him showing off the painted and glittered plaster-of-paris ornaments we kids had made for years growing up, with varying levels of skill and childhood showing–Mom and Dad always insisted on putting those up long after we kids thought we’d definitely outgrown the scribblings or sloppiness or whatever lack of perfection might be in them. A little snip of twine was embedded in each to hold a hook for the tree.

Come to think of it, the best birthday party I ever had growing up was having my friends come paint a newly-cast set of those ornaments and letting them take theirs home. December birthdays rock.

Those kids went home that day with the joy of the season. It was infectious. My dad is the most joyful celebrant of Christmas you could ever hope to meet.

And the best celebrant of his children’s lives a daughter could ever ask for. Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you.

As if anybody ever doubted… (Again, here is the link to her paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Moms get to brag like that.) With a heartfelt thank you to every teacher and her every source of support along the way.

Sam’s thesis defense was today.  We all knew, of course she would, (hold our breaths…)

SHE DID IT!!!  Dr. Hyde! I can’t begin to tell you how proud we are. Go SAM!!!