I almost didn’t go to my once-a-month knit night at Commuknity last night; it’s a big group, there’s always an exposure risk, and it’s a bit soon since my big bug. But I needed to see my friends–I had no idea what was coming–and I’m so glad I went!

There was someone new there, Becky, sitting behind me, who’d brought my book and was working from it. When it was her turn to show off, she said she was doing a shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort.” One guess as to who everybody pointed at. Oh! She said she’d looked at me, she’d looked at the picture in the back of the book, she’d looked at me… It WAS me!

They had decided to hold a “show your Alison” night: Diana, Lisa, Susan, Jocelyn, Julie, Lyn, Vera, Nancy, Margaret, Candace, Cris, Fae, and Chris had all made or were making shawls from my book. Catie wasn’t able to show up, but sent word that she was working on one, too. At the point a few years ago when I didn’t even have a publisher yet, Catie tried on my Kathy shawl and told me emphatically to hurry up and get it out there because she wanted my patterns! She gave me her thoroughly quotable reason for vastly preferring the circular shaping on my shawls vs. the more typical triangle ones: “I don’t need an arrow pointing at my butt.” Her much-needed vote of confidence helped keep me going re trying to get published, and I loved that it looked great on her: it showed me how well those shawls could fit a variety of body shapes.

Susan had been one of my test knitters. She signed a page of the Kathy’s Clover Shawl, which she’d knitted. Susan is about to move away, and my heart about broke with love and aching when I read what she’d written. You can’t tell a friend Please Don’t Go, you can only wish them the best on their journey. (Hey. Susan. Please Don’t Go.)

Chris surprised me with socks she’d made using Cat Bordhi’s new book. Which happened to match what I was wearing and fit perfectly–actually, even though I avoid knitting socks, I have some handdyed sock yarn that has stubbornly refused to be knit into anything else, which means it’s just been sitting there. I wanted socks in those colors. It’s really close to Chris’s yarn choice. She’d nailed it.

You know, I could get a little too spoiled. Thank you, everybody!

A curiosity of mine: in American English, the word “gray” is spelled “gray” except in reference to the soldiers of the Civil War, in which case we generally take on the British spelling of “grey.”

We got a letter last week with a handwritten note added at the top, promising that this was going to be the last Christmas letter of the year. My husband gleefully reacted, “No it’s not! My sister hasn’t sent hers out yet!”

My friend Nanci was talking about her 92-year-old mother-in-law, mentioning her son’s speculation that Bashie was probably the last living person whose father rode in the Pony Express. You heard that right. And he fought in the Civil War! He was 75 and his wife was 45 when they had her. Now imagine this: if his father had been that old when he had been conceived, his father would have been a teenager during the Constitutional Convention.

And that would then be his granddaughter who is alive right now. We’re a young country!

I asked Nanci if I could post this, and she said sure and added more to the story. Here’s her note:

“Of course, we’d be flattered for you to say something in your blog about Darryl’s grandfather, Joseph A. Fisher. He actually was serving in the Civil War and a pony express rider concurrently. There was a big problem with the Indians raiding the mail, so President Lincoln asked Brigham Young for 100 men from Utah to help with the war effort in the special assignment of being riders, and he was one of those 100 young men. (It might have been 1861.) He was actually hit by an arrow and left for dead, but miraculously was found, the arrow was pulled out, and Bashie’s brother remembers a big hole in his back that as a boy would like to put pennies in where the arrow had been. He served for 9 months. ”

Try going through airport security with that.

(Got it now.)

We were among the bunch of Nina’s friends who took her out to dinner Saturday night to celebrate her birthday, which is today. She grinned at me at one point, and said, “You need John! John’s your best hyacinth hunter.”

It was about a dozen years ago that I was out looking for a birthday gift for her, and I happened to come across some hyacinths blooming in pots. I didn’t know why they seemed just the thing, and I wondered whether they were blooming in more my colors than hers, whether buying one would be a donvier–pronounced DON-vee-ay, a gift you give someone else because it’s what you want for yourself, not because it’s what they want–but still. They appealed strongly to me and I chose one. It was just a little thing, but it smelled so heavenly; you couldn’t carry it in your hands without having it make the day a bit brighter.

Now picture me ringing Nina’s doorbell, her opening the door, and then her standing there speechless. Nina is not the speechless type. But she was dumbstruck.

Finally, she exclaimed, “How did you know!”

Know what? What was she talking about?

“My grandmother!”

It turned out, her grandmother had given her hyacinths for her birthday every year as she was growing up in New York City. It was a tradition between them. Her grandmother had passed away, and here I was showing up on her doorstep on her birthday with…hyacinths.

And you know that after that day I could never, ever give her anything else, even if I have to do a bit of hunting around to find some. I don’t have a picture up yet, because I always feel better as the day goes on and it’s still a tad early for me to get out and about to go buy some. But I will. I just wanted to jump in first and say–happy birthday, Nina!

Sue’s amaryllis today: yes, the same plant that was blooming the first week of December. It just keeps on lighting up the place.

(Added later): The mail just came, and with it, a copy of the second edition of my book–it’s in reprints already. Woohoo!

My friend Pam gifted me with a surprise: a pair of fingerless gloves with my Rabbit Tracks pattern knitted into the backs of the hands. In a yarn with a colorway named “Red-tailed hawk.”

I was sitting in this very seat, working at the computer one day a few months ago, when a red-tailed hawk flew into the tree outside my window here. I stood and watched it for several minutes; when it spread its wings and tail feathers wide and flew off, it was absolutely breathtaking.

My friend Robert, who lives in the mountains nearby and is the weaver of my medicine blanket, rescued a red-tailed hawk about a year and a half ago, injured by the side of the road. He took it home and nursed it slowly back to health over several months. He sent me an occasional email along the way, telling of the progress she was making, of how he’d won over her trust and she would come to him. He described the thick leather gauntlets he wore to protect him from her claws as she would climb up his arm towards his shoulder to get closer.

Then came the day he decided she seemed ready to return to the wild; he thought her wing was probably strong enough now. He took her outside, on his heavy leather glove, and waited for her to fly off.

This was a new thing. She had to decide to stay with him or go. She did not immediately take off, but when she did, she flew to a tall tree close by (proving to him she could fly that far again)–where she perched and regarded him for half an hour, as he waited to see, as he couldn’t take his eyes off this beautiful bird he’d put heart and soul into caring for.

He described it all to me. Then, at last, she lifted her wings and took off into the sky.

I still have this cough bugging me. I still have a fair amount of nausea, and my weight’s down six pounds from the beginning of last week. It’s a little too easy to feel crummy.

And then I got a package in the mail yesterday, red-tailed hawk fingerless gloves to keep my hands and heart warm. The beautiful and unexpected gift of Pam’s time, thoughts, and yarn lifts my spirits high.

It was out of the blue–and yet I could see it coming a long way off. My friend Karen calling today, with a stunner: she was closing her yarn store. Oh, Karen, I’m so sorry; when?…

After today.

WHAT?

She’s been doing two fulltime jobs for I think six years; I’ve wondered for a long time when something would have to give. And abruptly, yesterday, she looked at the lease and decided it had, and that was that. She was making lots of phone calls, asking people to spread the word. We did.

The end result was an impromptu get-together party of many an old friend: friends of Karen’s, friends of each other’s, friends of the shop’s, after 20 years. Karen is the friend who taught me to spin and dye, working out of her home for a few years after her first location was destroyed in the Loma Prieta quake. This is the friend who gave me one of just the best stories that didn’t make it past the editors into my first book, for lack of space, but I tell you, her cat that dyed itself green will be in the next one. This is the woman who, when I called her after my car accident, saying, my sister wanted a navy afghan for Christmas and no way no how was I able to drive right now, did she do mail order? Responded with, “Yes, but I can do better than that,” packed her minivan with navy yarns, DROVE TO MY HOUSE 25 minutes away, and then insisted on giving me a discount. Gave me a hug, as I stumbled dizzily, and told me to get better.
This is…was…the store of my friend.

And I will miss it. But now she’ll have time to actually knit for the first time in years, and I hope I’ll actually get to enjoy more time with her, not less, because of the change. It’s hard to let go. But it was clear she was ready.

One more mention about Jo: she’s the only person I know with leopard-print hearing aids.  If you’ve got’em, flaunt’em.

I am changing her name here.

The whole way along, Jo hasn’t been entirely sure about this whole aging thing. Californians are supposed to stay young forever.

Picture a woman with white bouffant hair, holding tight to the high style of her youth, and a well-preserved old Mustang muscle car that she’d babied for decades as well as any hobbyist. She used to laugh at young men who would roar up alongside her at red lights and start to offer to drag race when the light turned, till they got a good look at the person in the driver’s seat. A woman! An OLD woman! As the first female to get an MBA from her university in the 40’s, she enjoyed lobbing other peoples’ expectations back at them like that. I think she was into her 80’s before the hair deflated, after she’d had a stroke, and her beloved car was totalled by her ex-husband, whom she had stayed friends with and who had borrowed it.

She goes to my church. Her stroke turned her into an instant little old lady, and she was not happy about that. There was a Sunday morning when I asked her how she was doing, and she, from her wheelchair, declared, “Heavenly Father forgot about me!” She didn’t care much for this dependency thing, not one bit!

From there she seemed less and less often lucid; sometimes she didn’t recognize me anymore, despite our having moved here in ’87. But she still had good days, just, none recently, when I made my decision.

I didn’t know how she would respond to my knitting for her, but I decided to do it anyway. I took some baby alpaca in white, white being about as generic a color as you could ask for, one that wouldn’t freak out the caretaker if her patient played dress-up with too-wild and crazy abandon; I knitted Jo up a bit of a scarf. Not too long, since she’s seated these days, you don’t want it catching in the wheels, and besides, she might not notice if it did. But oh so very soft.

I took it to church. I put that scarf around her neck and kind of patted it in place on her shoulders, telling her I’d made it for her and what the yarn was made out of. (Ever the fiber artist here.)

She’d been feeling down for some weeks, and that day, she was just plain out of it. She reached one hand absent-mindedly upwards towards mine, but she didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. Some of her elderly friends swarmed her as I stepped out of their way, exclaiming over her, exclaiming over her new bit of adornment, telling her what it was and how wonderful it was. Jo’s face went from blank to mildly bewildered.

The next Sunday, there was Jo. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She was with it. She greeted me cheerfully. She totally knew who she was and where she was, she was her old self again, and she was ready to challenge anybody to a drag race in her wheelchair, scarf flying.

It was startling to me how changed she was and how much of a difference a simple gesture had made in reminding her that she really was thought about, honest!

I thought of all that today, about a year later, as she sat parked in her chair waiting for her ride home to pull up near the door. She waved hi and laughed. I didn’t put her on the spot by asking her my name or hers; she recognized my face and was glad, and that was reward enough.

Doctor R, if you see this, yes, this is the same pattern as your afghan. After I gave you yours, I knitted it again a few months later to keep close the memory of your face as you reached into the bag, stunned, thrilled, speechless, feeling the softness of the baby alpaca and cashmere and finally exclaiming, “Did it take you very long?” And I answered, “About an hour an inch.” Never has the acceptance of a knitted gift from me meant so much to me as what you gave me in those moments.

It was 72 inches long. He had given me every one of those hours by saving my life a few weeks previously. I was sharing some of my newly-gifted time back with him to convey the depths of my gratitude at his caring: there was never a knitting project more deserved.

Now, for the day-to-day part of this post: at least one of the dye manufacturers says helpfully in their literature that although the dye is more colorfast if you simmer it, you can easily dye in the washing machine; that way, the machine can do the heavy lifting of the water. I’m sure they thought that if they made it sound easy, more people would buy their dyes.

Yeah well. I tried doing it that way once about five years ago. Don’t. Worse, I tried it with their cotton dyes. Had it been an acid dye for wool, those just wash right out of cotton anything, but no such luck. Picture the machine in the spin cycle: now picture every little crevice a droplet of colored water could get flung to, and trying to obliterate every last bit from the inside and outside surfaces of the tub. Which is why I have a set of pink pillowcases with blue blobs on them and a freckled tencel jumper: I was so sure I’d succeeded (including running the thing with water only in it). Later, while I was in the hospital for ten days, my family brought me my own pillow and we used those pillowcases–if they somehow disappeared into the hospital’s laundry or trash, nobody was going to cry.

Afterwards, I went thankfully back to normal life, and, as part of that ordinariness, to using a dedicated dyepot like a good little girl.

That second afghan I made in this pattern was for my daughter, who later decided that she’d rather have it dyed burgundy than the natural light brown baby alpaca I’d knitted it up in. Okay. Hmm. Dr. R’s, I’d dyed in two batches, one to each fiber, to get a heathered effect when I knitted them up together. I didn’t have a pot big enough for this one.

The one bathtub in this house is old and crackled, and I didn’t want to risk dyeing the cracks, so I set a large plastic tub in there, filled it full of water too hot to touch, put the afghan in, took the afghan out, stirred the dye in, and put the afghan carefully back in. If I’d put the afghan into the dyebath dry, most of the dye would have schlurped up into whatever part hit the surface first, regardless of any amount of stirring; it needed to be wet for the dye to distribute properly. And I wanted the afghan hot so it wouldn’t cool the dyebath down when I put it in.

But that still just wasn’t enough heat to set the dye, I found. It wasn’t taking up. So I poured a goodly amount of the dyebath into my biggest dyepot and put it on the stove to simmer. I figured the dye was already well distributed by first using that big tub, where it had room to be stirred; I just needed the extra heat.

By the time the thing was ready to come off the stove, nobody else was around. It was New Year’s Eve, the kids were off. It was way heavier than any dye pot I have ever dealt with. I went to lift it, and it didn’t lift. I had this moment of, hey! If I say lift, lift! I can do anything if I try hard enough!

Thank goodness for the thick cotton sweater I was wearing when the boiling water hit.

I was going by my usual premise that it’s always better to start with a smaller amount of dye when you’re not sure; you can always add more later. But this time, I’m not going to. It’s beautiful; it’s much closer to the color of Dr. R’s than the deep shade I was aiming for.

Cool.

Nancy’s husband made Grendl a cage, and she sent me a picture. It suddenly occurs to me as I write this, I still don’t know yet where to find the pattern.

Okay, that’s not a post title you see every day, but it fits. We were visiting old friends last night who moved from our town to a beautiful home up against the mountainside in Utah four years ago; we were catching up, and on our way back out, there was a car stopped at a red light in a long stretch of empty road. Mark and Kelly can probably envision just where I’m talking about; there’s only the one light. Except, that other driver had pulled off into what would be, in California, the bike lane, and we wondered why–until we pulled up alongside him.

At the Monterey Aquarium, there’s a freestanding round tank in the walkthrough that is filled with brilliantly silver sardines. They flow along together in a circle, with a few mavericks hemming and hawing along the edges of the school, poking curiously in other directions, lagging behind, dashing to catch up, small children at play, it always seems to me. But if something disturbs the group–if a visitor taps on the window or peers in too close–there is a splash of randomness as some turn to the left, some to the right, and then somehow they all give a leap forward close together, a flip of the tails in perfect focus and a flash of silver as they swim in their new direction. After a calm-again moment, the ones who want to look around a bit more find their ways to the edges again.

Last night I was suddenly understanding why my husband had remarked recently that my camera was inadequate: there was no way it could capture that night picture I so much wished for. A few yards from where we were pulling up to a stop for that red light, there were seven or eight magnificent elk standing in the light snow, the peak of the mountain behind framing them. I have never seen elk in the wild before. It was breathtaking.

The light turned; as our car started up again, I mentally apologized to the fellow in that other car in that bike lane next to us, who had had, it had looked to me there in the dark, a large camera in his hands. At our sound and motion, the elks did exactly what those sardines do: they turned, some to the right, some to the left, and in so turning around they all somehow came closer together, and then they leaped forward as one. Not in a great hurry, and they slowed down as we pulled away, just, this is What They Do. Part of being an elk.

I came away with a sense of awe at the interconnectedness of the patterns, earth and sea. And of what the natural world offers to teach us of the strength of pulling together for each other.

I know, I know, you’ve heard the phrase before: “for those who’ve read my book…” you get to meet someone just a bit more.

I got an email last night from Nathania at Purlescence, saying someone had brought in a gift for me, would I like to come pick it up? So this afternoon John and I went over there, wondering what this was going to be about; walking in their door, I exclaimed to her, “Your amaryllis is gorgeous!” thinking, cool, they’re decorating the store with my favorite flowers! Or maybe someone had brought it in as a pre-baby present–Nathania’s only got a few weeks left before she and Kevin get to hold their Christmas baby.

“That’s your gift. Do you know a Sue B?”

I was boulevers’e. Well YEAH!!! That’s the Sue whose story starts my book off, the waitress we love so much who can tell you what our preschooler used to order for dinner twenty years ago!

There was a thank you for her baby alpaca lace scarf in handwriting that Steve Jobs ought to take note of and preserve as a font. What she didn’t know, was, her gift made it so John got to come into the shop and have all these people he knew there congratulate him on his mission and wish him well, a chance for them all to say goodbye to each other for two years. The timing was absolutely perfect, and they totally made his day there as well as the flowers themselves.

So now I get to take Sue’s gift and share it with everybody here. (Sorry I took them away from you, Nathania, I’ll make it up to you, I promise…) These are gorgeous, Sue, and I love that you did this–thank you!

Last night, our neighbors were celebrating the many accumulated, small, moment-by-moment good decisions and unselfishness that had led up to their marking fifty years of marriage. And we were invited to come share in their joy with their loved ones.

We ran into Penny and her husband there–or rather, Penny grabbed my arm as I walked by through the crowd, oblivious: I found myself suddenly exclaiming, “PENNY!”

The first time I ever attempted Barbara Walker’s Checkerboard Mesh Lace as a newbie–the pattern I used in the body of my Blue Jay shawl–I used it with cobweb 2/48 yarn and size 0 needles for a wisp of a scarf for her. We still had children in elementary school together back then.

When things were winding down, Richard headed towards the foyer and turned back to see if I was following; I was finishing up one last conversation first. And then when I came out:

“Are you all right?” he was asking a woman about the age of our moms, who was sitting on a chair near the front door. I found out later he had already asked her several times. There were other people around, but nobody else seemed to have quite taken notice of her state.

She was not seeing us. She was keeling over to the side in very slow motion, one arm splayed out, her hand tightening up. I hunched down so that I was looking up at her face, and repeated Richard’s question.

She began to come to herself again, and said something I couldn’t quite hear. There are times I rue my deafness more intensely than others, but she said again, faintly, “I feel ill.” Gradually, though, she regained herself as we quietly talked. It was just a touch of indigestion. Maybe it was a hot flash. Yes, she told me while Richard was sent off looking for a friend of hers, there had been pain down her left arm, but only for a moment. I told her, trying to gently counter her denial, that I had had that shortness of breath and classic pain radiating down the left arm–at 31. She was surprised. I was hoping to convey, being clearly no longer 31, that acknowledging what was going on and treating it was important.

She did not have any memory of Richard’s asking her if she was all right.

While he was gone, I mentioned my having lupus and Crohn’s–not to complain, just enough to let her know that he and I both understood and were there for her. When he came back, we asked her if we could call 911. She glanced out the front door, and I knew what she was thinking: the sirens, the paramedics, the loud and disruptive exclamation point to the lovely party and everybody going home with that as what they remembered of it, when maybe it was nothing, nothing at all, no reason for all that–and she shook her head no, while wondering out loud, though, whether she should be turning us down. I told her, “Better to call them and not need it than not call them and need it.” I almost had her talked into it. But no.

The wife of the bridal couple came out and saw us concerned over her and was concerned, too. She came over and spoke with her a moment, to convey, along with us, that it’s okay to be ill if you’re ill.

In the end, the woman allowed Richard to drive her home in her car while I followed behind in ours to get him afterwards. I thought we should sit with her awhile. Women know to come, to sit, to be there with others going through the transitions and upheavals in life. But he was the one who had gone with her, he being able to hear her subdued voice in a moving car when I knew I could not, and she was less open to him than I think she would have been to me. Nothing personal; more a gender thing. But she did at least let us take her home.

And I emailed our neighbors when we got back to our own home, to fill them in and because I knew they knew how to contact her, and that they would want to.

I came away from the whole thing feeling, the signs were subtle. Not sitting up straight, the not seeing, the shaking, and then her not remembering–which we wouldn’t have known had we not asked her questions. We probably should have called 911 on her anyway, but we gave her the autonomy and respect to let her make her own decision. I am hoping that once she was home alone, without a crowd of people around her who might be able to step in, she called for that medical help after all, or at least is getting checked out today.

But still. I woke up this morning with a profound sense of our having been in the right place at the right time. And that she was willing to listen to me, whether she immediately did what we hoped for or not, because I had cleared the path ahead by having already walked down part of it.

Women have always been there in the transitions of life. We all go sometime, but it’s the not knowing, it’s the fear of what lies between and ahead that leaves people feeling alone and afraid. Rachel Remen writes, “Fear is the friction in all changes.” By simply being with her, that woman, whoever she was, gained strength, emotional and perhaps physical. She had not been alone.

And she had given the gift to our mutual friends of keeping the evening a celebration of their lives together.

The CT scan suggested lymph node involvement. There was none. The surgery went very well and was deemed a complete success.

Marguerite will be okay. And my intense thanks to all who wrapped her in thoughts and prayers of healing, alongside mine.

Jasmin knits socks. Saying that is like saying I knit a little bit of lace from time to time: Jasmin. Knits. Socks!

When she made some comment about a month ago about how her sock drawer had run out of space and gee, she was going to have to ditch some pairs, maybe Goodwill, I had no doubt she was joking, and I joked back at her that I could help her find a better use for them than that.

She showed up at Purlescence last night with the cardigan I’d left behind at her house (oops, and thanks) and five pairs of socks. Which she already knew would fit me because she’d already made me a pair.

I was stunned. She loved it. I protested. She threatened Goodwill again, and told me this batch was for me. Now for anyone who has ever thought me a generous person, I tell you, the true me burst right out and said to the group something like “Mine all mine bwaahaahaa” and it was about another hour before I asked a couple of people, individually (and, they will note, quietly–I didn’t say it too loud) that they seemed to have about my size feet too if they’d like some. They just laughed me off.

Some friends, you can do all the nice things you could ever possibly think of for them, and you’ll still never catch up.

(p.s. For the non-knitters reading this: I never understood why someone would bother to knit socks, something that would wear out after all that work to make them, till the day someone handed me her sock as she knit the other one and said, Here. Put this on your foot. You’ll see.

And wow did I.  Instantly.  There is simply no comparison between that and anything machine knit. I still don’t love to knit sock yarn on size 0 needles, but oh, do I love handknit socks.)