I needed to immerse myself in work.  The house is cleaner now and guests were fed tonight, with Michelle and John preparing as much as I did. It did us all good.

I had two unfinished lace scarves, and considering the pair for several moments, I picked up the one that didn’t require much out of me; just a little more of my time. The one I’d thought I was going to finish Saturday night after Nina‘s birthday party, before we heard the news.

A little water and wire, now, to bring out the best in it so it can be ready to go forward wherever it may need to go.  Created with love, to be sent forward for peace.

When I was diagnosed with lupus, my immediate reaction was, “What’s that?”

I joined the local support group to try to gain perspective from those who had already lived with this and who had experience dealing with it.  One of the things I heard there was story after story of the crazy things various members had done while whacked out on high-dose steroids: one woman described how she cringed at the thought of going back to her doctor’s office where she had shown up at an early hour in her bathrobe and slippers, pounding on the man’s door, screaming, completely paranoid and out of it.

Her doctor had shown up to work, come onto this scene, and told her worriedly, I think we need to decrease your dose. (Uh, yeah.)

And then she had had to live with that etched into the minds of all the onlookers who did not know that she was not, of herself, in any way like that and with her own vivid memory that she had, nevertheless, on those drugs, done that.

And so I utterly refused to take steroids.

Ten years later, I now had Crohn’s too.  I told my new gastroenterologist that I had always said I would never take prednisone unless it were a matter of life or death.  (I didn’t say out loud the feeling, and maybe even then… What if I did something totally crazy from the med and then died of the disease anyway? What memories would I leave my family then?)

But he knew.  Dr. R. held me steadily in his eyes and told me gently, “I think it’s time to give it a try.” And added, “I think you’ll be okay.”

In the moment he said that I felt that he was right. He was.

And that is how after all that anxiety and all that time, I at long last came to learn that my mental health stayed stable on those drugs.

But also that, as it turned out, I was the one-in-a-million autoimmune patient for whom they utterly did not work.

I know what the depth of pain is in being handed an incurable medical diagnosis that takes away every plan you ever had for your life.  (Give me sunlight! Give me the great outdoors!) But I was an adult, with enough experience to know I could adjust to the new situation and cope, and with four small children dependent on me to help keep me going.

And my brain was intact.

For me it was a choice and it was also pure good luck.

The homecoming prince. The good-looking guy. The nice kid. The big brother everybody looked up to and wanted to be around, who liked to laugh and who was so good with little kids.  Suddenly trying not only to cope with a major new diagnosis and with finding out that his entire future as he’d pictured it no longer existed, but now having no functioning mind with which to learn and adjust. He was out of it. He simply did not and physically could not comprehend.

At church today, people were searching for ways to rally around the family. I, for whom writing is like breathing, offered this: write down memories of our Brian.  The Eagle Scout. The ready helper.  That beautiful smile.  Remember out loud for his family the best of who he was and what he did. There would be so many stories; give them to his parents, his grandparents, his little brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles and his cousins.

Tell the good.

Because that is who he truly was.

I’ve known him since he was a preschooler. He was a good kid.  He was a kind person.  I got to see his delight, in one memorable incident a year and a half ago, at his succeeding in totally making my day.

My two younger children heard the sirens last night.  It is so hard.

God understands.

(Ed. to add: Please do not say anything in the comments that might add to his mother’s pain. She is my friend.)

I did not know how this was going to go.  I guess I was a little nervous about it.

Yesterday I met a fellow knitting blogger and, it turns out, an absolutely delightful person, Holly, visiting from Germany; as I walked into Coupa Cafe, a short distance from her hotel room, a woman stopped me and admired my Peace shawl, reaching out and fondling the bottom of it a little and asking if I’d made it.

“I designed it,” I smiled, searching her face, thinking, No, you don’t look the least like that tiny thumbnail photo I saw.

She didn’t seem to want to go further, so I thought, well, that answers that question, and excused myself and continued on past the patio and inside and ordered my hot chocolate. And saw my old friend Glenn.  Glenn!

Alison! How ya doin’! Let me introduce you to my colleague!

The red Peace shawl shown here? I made it for his wife Johnna. (Her computer was down that week.)

When there was a break in the conversation, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder: “Are you Alison?”

A different woman.  Called that one right. But I bet the three of us could have sat down together on the spot like old friends.

Which is just what Holly and I did.  There was such a warmth in her face as she asked me if I were me that I felt instantly, Oh, good!, and she probably did, too.

And it just got better from there.  We swapped stories for hours, and she’d brought me sock yarns from Germany in a bag from the conference she and her husband were here for; I, having had no idea what she might like, came unprepared, a thought she completely waved away with a smile.

They will be moving back to the Bay Area in a few years. I, for one, can’t wait.

(The new bag in the background: tomorrow’s post.)

At Purlescence last night, people were swooning–moaning, quite honestly–over this skein.   One person shopping the store whom I didn’t know, oblivious to the conversation in the group, stepped close enough to get pounced on: Here, I told her, feel this!

Her expression went from, yeah, okay, I’ll humor you, whoever you are, lady, to *big eyes* and “WOWWW!!!” and her glance sweeping the room, her expression exclaiming, where do I FIND this?!

Maybe six or seven years ago, I was at Stitches West, talking to a woman who was selling qiviut fiber combed from her herd of Alaskan musk oxen.  She and her husband had devised a holding chute to keep each animal still (and, I imagine, from goring them) while they combed out the undercoat it was ready to shed across the tundra.  They would then pick out the guard hairs by hand to avoid damaging that precious fiber.

Small wonder, then, that her little one-ounce ziploc bags cost $30.

But then she had me touch it.

Qiviut was then the softest, finest legally available and humanely collected animal fiber on the planet.   And given where the animals live, very, very warm.  The musk ox had only recently been taken off the endangered list, and hers was, if memory serves, the first non-Inuit-owned private herd on the continent.

There was a moment of surprised delight last year when my first surgeon mentioned she’d bought a qiviut smoke ring in Alaska on a trip and I asked her, At the Oomingmak cooperative?

How did you know?!

My surgeon owned and treasured Eskimo-handknit lace qiviut, of all things.  I knew I was in good hands.

Back to the scene at Stitches.  The woman had a big black plastic garbage bag full of the stuff, ready to weigh out to order, and I laughed and asked her, just out of curiosity, how much the whole thing would cost.  She eyed me with a grin and shot back, “With or without the divorce lawyer?” (Ouch!) “About six thousand dollars.”

So.  I bought one ounce–a year later, at the next Stitches, after having thought about it long enough. I was going to spin it, I was going to ply it with mere cashmere to get twice the yardage, oh, I had plans.

And then I actually tried to spin it.  It was almost like dryer lint.  It needed to be spun very fine, which one would want to do anyway, but I have almost no feeling in my fingertips and the job would be purely visual.  Pass the microscope.  And that gets old and very difficult very fast.

It sat in the closet. I know, I know.

I finally, talking to my friend Rachel one day, told her that it was criminal to have qiviut, of all things, going to waste and that since she liked to spin finely anyway, I was giving it to her. She was under firm orders not to give it back. This was for her.

Yeah well. Do your friends like to be ordered around? Neither do mine.

And so it was that I got a text message yesterday incoming: “Will you be at knitting?”

I still have yet to manually enter most of my contacts into my new phone; I had no idea who was asking. So I typed back, simply, “Yes.”  Kind of a no-brainer: it’s Knit Night? I go!

I walked in, sat down, and Sandi casually tossed a bag on my lap as she walked by.  ?!??!!  Yes.  And the message sent with it was, You’ll know whom to knit this for.

I instantly did. Oh, I did. I told them, I’ll have to think more about it and pray about it, but–

–And you know, I did all that, too, but, I knew immediately and that was that.  I can’t tell Rachel how grateful I am for her gift of those 186 yards.  It’s for someone whom I’ve needed to knit something for for several months, someone going through worse than ever I did all of last year, someone I would give anything to make her family’s sudden severe burden easier, if only somehow I could.

Someone for whom I’ve gone through my stash again and again and again, looking for just THE right thing, and somehow nothing felt good enough. I couldn’t figure out why.  Now I know.

Maybe, the fact that a total stranger did all that work spinning it for the sake of goodwill towards whomever the right person might be, added in with my own goodwill knowing whom it cries out to be knitted for, maybe, it might ease her burden. Maybe just a little.

A little basic human warmth and kindness.

A little bit of fluff.  But it can go a long way.

Can Nut Lady come out and play? Pretty please?

It’s just the one, the red-bellied medium-black squirrel of the three siblings, that has decided my purpose in life is to open the door and toss it a walnut.  It has now learned that if the walnut goes past it, it’s still there, and will now turn and go find it.

It has surprised me the last few days (I apparently learn slower than it does) by perching there in the morning, watching me at the computer, waiting patiently for me to get with the program.

I am utterly charmed.  It’s training me well.

Okay, question for everybody: I succumbed to Margo Lynn’s mention of the Cherry Tree January sale and ordered some suri lace.  They threw in a grab bag with random additional skeins, a pair of SWTC needles (size 8, 32″–perfect!) and these two… black plastic hearts?

Anybody?

Is there some cosmic knitting significance to these that I’m just not grasping?  I am at a loss. Huh.

Meantime, Phyl, the purple flowers you gave me for my birthday are still blooming the winter away, as are the first of the amaryllises, a gift from Richard.

Happy January!

She totally made my day.  I would not even have expected her to at all remember me.

We were sitting in Sunday School today in a room where the rows of seats were curved a bit, giving the ends a clear view of each other. We were to one side; her parents came in and sat down at the other end, a young mom and dad with a fussy fifteen-month-old in their arms, a good-natured kid, but, naptime is naptime.

They got her quieted down but not especially happy; a cracker and a little milk from her sippy cup helped somewhat. The mom looked tired.

And then–that little girl saw me.  She got the biggest grin on her face, spread her whole hand as wide open as she could, leaned her whole body towards me from far across the room while making the grandest wave hi a wannabe grandma could ever hope to see, in a burst of new energy. Me! It’s me, lady! Remember that fingerpuppet you gave me a month or two ago? Remember smiling at me? You’re my FRIEND!

There was no resisting waving back in kind. I think if her mom hadn’t had a firm grip on her she might have gone flying across the room to leap into my arms.

The back row was soon looking both ways, quietly chuckling, catching the wave too; baby smiles are so marvelously contagious.

Hey, almost out in there…  I replenished my supply in my purse when we got home.  And now you see why I give out those Peruvian fingerpuppets to fussy little ones: it’s for me.  I tell you, it is totally, selfishly, for me.

January 2.  New Year’s will probably always now remind me of January 2.

There’s a whole lot I didn’t write in that post a year ago today.  I didn’t say it was an emergency colonoscopy.  I didn’t say how the doctor wanted me to get some blood tests run, too, but after he saw what he saw he made a point of telling Richard to take me straight home afterwards and not put me through going to the lab that day. He was hoping all that bleeding he’d wanted so much not to see would quiet down enough to make it easier to go in the next day.

It was all downhill from there.

We got a letter in the mail, that, fittingly, arrived today of all days: announcing the new company that would be handling our by-mail meds, which, were I still on it, would have applied to supplying my Humira–you cannot just walk into a pharmacy and buy a biological Rx off the shelf.

So now we know.  Caremark has been kicked out.  YES!! (I tell myself I’m not bitter.  And yet.  It is still true that had they done their job I might still have a colon. Had Blue Cross honored their commitments on time I might still have a colon, not to mention points south requiring that second operation.  They did not.)

But a year later, looking back… All of that is honestly a very small part of the whole.

There is this sense that I can handle anything now.

There is this sense that I can be there for anyone else now.

There is the knowledge that there were people who were there for me through anything and everything, including, to the best of your abilities, so many of you from wherever you were.  You let me know I was not alone and not bereft in that hospital room all those weeks with needles in my arms and itchy plastic anti-blood-clot machines working on my legs day and night, that my mom and my husband keeping watch there and my children who were away weren’t facing this alone either.  I cannot tell you how important your presence in the comments and by your prayers were during those days, the squares that were knit, the afghans that were assembled, the cards that were sent, the Thinking Good Thoughts that got thought. Thank you.

There were doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, even that housekeeper, who made me feel it was important to them that I had passed through their lives and thereby gave meaning to what I was having to go through.  In the process, they, too, strengthened my then-tenuous hold on my own.  How close I came–not that there was any doubt–was brought home to me when I got word two months ago that someone my little brother had grown up with had just had the same liver-inflammation complication of his own Crohn’s; he had not made it.  My heart goes out to his family.

I am intensely grateful to be here with my own family still.  Amazed at the things I can do now.  Intensely grateful at having had our kids home for the holidays.  Celebrate? Oh, honey, there are no words to say how much.  And it’s a whole new year!

Even if the kids could only bake enough cookies for a few, really, today. (They covered the table with paper plates full of fresh cookies ready to go, including my husband’s family’s specialty of Grinch-colored spritz Christmas trees with a red hot on top.  A batch of chocolate ones got baked and added at my request, but the kids did it all.)

Trying to get five adults to agree where to be at one time, with two cars involved, while preparing for Christmas and the two more adults to arrive, is…entertaining.  Visions of caroling were met with “But do we have to SING?!”

To which I answered, as I told Cliff when he opened the door at his dad Don‘s house, “Just two words’ worth: ‘Silent Night.’  I mean, c’mon, think about it.”

Merry Christmas to all, and to Santa, and everybody else traveling, a good flight.

I may not be getting to explore the cathedrals of Europe anytime soon.  But tonight, listening to Michelle singing with the choir in the glorious acoustics at Stanford Memorial Church, I felt, it doesn’t get better than this. It just doesn’t.

And when the flute played–a flute! (My family will understand that exclamation point.) From a seat halfway back, I heard every note as clearly as if I’d played it myself.

Wow.

And Jim, who was my kids’ organ teacher, totally hot-dogged it on that massive, ornate old pipe organ way above our heads; he was having a great time. Remember the story about his son Nicholas?  Nicholas played a duet with him tonight.

Hark, the angels indeed sing, shining brilliantly in the cool night.

You know why it’s so hard to keep those holiday pounds off?

It’s those see stars. One arm breaks off, they just grow another one, appearing time after time.  Whaddyagonnado.

(Michelle volunteers one-on-one as a tutor and the middle schooler brought her holiday cookies as a thank you.  Michelle wasn’t about to tell her she didn’t dare risk eating them; it was a sweet thing for her to have done.  I was glad to help out a little, and besides, I could use nudging the scale up a tad.)

Meantime, this morning, our piano doctor who makes house calls, an old friend after all these years, came by.  The house was, shall we say, unfinished–and I was discouraged at how fast my energy had given out on me.

He smiled a warm smile; “Doesn’t look messy to me.”

And at that suddenly everything was much better.

He glanced out at the birds on the feeder, taking them in for a moment; he has done recordings of the wildlife in his own area.  I’ve heard his frogs.  (If you ever need some theme music while ripping out your knitting…)  I wondered if he could hear my finches through the window.

I’ve heard them I think twice now. Yesterday the feeder swung around so one couldn’t see me coming as I opened the slider as quietly as I could and slipped outside.  The feeder swung back around, and I was close enough to stroke the little bird’s stripey-brown feathers had I moved.  I didn’t dare move.  Or breathe.  It chirped and dove into the seed, again and again, keeping an eye on me–and when I did finally breathe, it was a Mr. Tumnus moment: Oh my goodness! You’re a human, and I’m–I’m a bird!  Fright and flight!

I picked up my needles while Neil tuned my piano.

I don’t usually knit in the mornings; I’m not sure how to describe the weirdness that is the body responding in slow motion before about noon–you tell it to move and it dithers like a 13-year-old told to do the dishes and arguing about it. Knitting at that hour, and particularly on tiny needles?  Slow as doing taxes.

And yet. He played a few snatches of song here and there as he tuned, reminding me why my concert-pianist grandmother had chosen that Kimball in the first place ages ago.  Such a gorgeous depth of sound to it.   Some notes had slipped, but he was pulling them back into where they belonged.

The needles picked up a bit.

He got to the highest notes on the piano.  So many times in the last twenty years I’ve heard only the slight thud thud of the hammers hitting against the strings up there, but with my ears turned up now–thank you John Miles–I caught a few of those actual notes, thin and high and as unstable as a hummingbird’s flight, but briefly actually mystically somehow there.  So that’s what those sound like.  I had long forgotten.  Wow.

That stopped my hands altogether across the room as I felt, Do it again!  Make it play like that again! And he did. I didn’t hear each note every time, but just enough to feel like I was in the presence of a small, rare gift from Life itself.

Don’t forget to breathe! And don’t stop in the middle of a row of laceweight silk or you’ll drop a thousand stitches and he was almost done there. Hurry!

I didn’t finish the row. I didn’t drop the stitches. I did, however, find myself hugely cheered on a morning when I had been needing cheering.

So many grace notes appear when we are in the presence of good people who are our friends.

The kids are coming home soon.  Let the music begin.

And then there are the days that make up for the other ones.

When I was designing and knitting a shawl for my friend Lisa originally, I realized it wasn’t quite her color–and that became part of the story in my book. My friend Gigi loved that pattern best of all and, as a thank you to her for helping with the test knitting and simply for being a friend, I gave it to her and made Lisa something else. Besides, the original was a bit dark for the photography.

So I reknit that pattern in a slightly redder, lighter shade, still a bit dark but that still matched the story, and that was the shawl I sent off to my publisher.

I met Gigi and her daughter Jasmin when they took spinning lessons with my daughter Sam and me the summer our girls were 12.  Fast forward to… This past summer, Gigi and I were both facing surgery.  Hers wasn’t scheduled yet; mine had to be.

And so I was in the hospital during Sock Summit.

She just got out of the hospital last week after five weeks in: heart surgery with  complications that just seemed to drag on and on and had us all on the edge of our seats.  But she’s finally home now and recovering.

She called Thursday, to my surprise, to ask, was I going to Purlescence that night?

You’re coming?!  Oh honey you bet I am! Nothing on earth could keep me away now!

It was SO good to see her! She was exhausted but had needed to get out–boy, tell me about it, I so get that.

I sat down on the floor next to her so I could be close enough to hear over the room without her having to exert herself.  She took a deep breath and decided to tell me something she hadn’t been going to.  But she had settled it out rationally in her mind and was proud of herself, and rightly so, for her attitude over it.

She had taken that burgundy baby alpaca shawl to Sock Summit.

And someone, apparently on the housekeeping staff, had stolen it.

Many inquiries were made, a great deal was made over it, but it was not returned. And here her friend who had made it for her was in the hospital.

She was devastated, as you can imagine. She told me how her boss had liked to tease her when she flung the end over her shoulder; that one has a nice wide neckline to it and she liked to wear it as a long curving wrap. But it was gone.

She had had, I’m sure, much time to think it over during her own hospital stay.  It had helped solidify for her how she wanted to feel about it: that someone somewhere out there must have really needed that shawl. Someone out there must have needed that feeling of warmth and love, too.

I heard her, but it was still true, I told her, that nobody could have that good feeling for having taken it. But, we agreed together, maybe they could give good feelings with it to someone who didn’t know it was stolen. We can hope.

I was quietly dancing inside. I knew, I knew…

I got home. I checked. Of course it was in there. The one that had been at the publisher’s. In baby alpaca. In that pattern she’d liked so much.  And, just to remove any doubt in my mind, although she had had no idea that’s what she was doing, she had worn a pair of handknit fingerless gloves to the shop that night that were redder and pinker than her shawl had been. The shade change would work. Now I just had to get there.

Richard and I went on a date this evening, and the first thing we did was to drive down to San Jose.  Jasmin’s husband Andrew opened the door and smiled in recognition when he saw me standing there.  I immediately started caroling, to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” for his mother-in-law’s sake, “We wish you a happy Ramadan, we wish you a happy Ramadan, we wish you a happy Ramadan, when it comes ’round next year.”

He cracked up.

And I handed him the bag and asked him to give all of them my best and told him what it was. And I knew, seeing the warmth in his face, that he meant that thank you with all his heart.

And to all a good night, as I climbed back in our car and thanked my husband for driving me down there. He’s a good one too.

Borrowing another photo from last year to brighten things up a bit while impatiently waiting for my amaryllises to start budding for the season.

Someone spoke at church today about her family’s reunion held in Thailand a few years back; they’d originally booked four days on the beach, but after they’d been there a day or two, decided, you know, we’d really like to go to church; where’s the nearest?…

And so they’d left that hotel in Phuket. After they got safely further north, they felt a bump that was the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.

The hotel they’d just been in was gone.

I told the speaker afterwards of my encounter with my neighbor who had just spent a month driving relief trucks for the Red Cross after what was, for her, too, supposed to be a family vacation in an exotic spot.  How my neighbor, in the aftermath, was going from being intensely needed and involved and actively participating in the helping and in the grieving, to being home, where–nobody knew.

And somehow just in that moment as she stepped out of that car from the airport, I went outside to check my mailbox and saw her and went over to welcome her, having no idea where she’d been on her trip or why she’d been gone so long.  She threw her arms around me and sobbed the whole story.

It was easier to bear now: someone here knew.

And now that woman at church knows my neighbor knows what it was like to be there in Thailand on that day, someone in this city knew that beach too, someone right here loved those people and wonders and cares about them still.

Someone else knows.

And that is an inherently comforting thing.

Okay, that last one was an in-joke among hearing aid users.  Those orange tabs are what you pull off the air-activated batteries before putting them in the aids. They made for longer fingernails than I’ll ever have; all my growing up, my piano teacher told me that if I showed up at her house with nails long enough to click on the keyboard, she would cut them or I would. Period.

To this day, long lovely fingernails are a spectator sport.

Meantime, (this is a picture from last summer, sorry I don’t have a newer one, Kris is wearing her Water Turtles shawl) yesterday I got to see Mel and Kris at a show in San Jose–I only went because they were there. You know, pottering around a little bit here and there but mostly spending my time catching up with them; I went in the afternoon when the crowds had died down quite a bit so we could visit and not have me be in the way.

And there’s a great story to it all.  But I can’t tell it yet. I know, I’m so mean…

I knew I should have taken a photo, but I just never got around to it. Okay, squint a little and picture this but with  the colors more intense.

I had a lace scarf–more a stole–that I’d knit out of some of Lisa Souza’s Mardi Gras colorway, as bright and lively and cheerful as the name.  All finished, but tucked away, waiting for its moment. I thought I had plans for it–but it just wouldn’t go.  As usual, my yarn was the boss of me.  I finished it probably a year ago.

Today for the first time, I put it on and wore it to church.

F. was one of the speakers.  F.  was quite new to this whole speaking in front of a large crowd thing, and when he stood up and looked at his audience, he was nervous and a bit overwhelmed at first and soon turned to the bishop, who is bilingual, asking for help.  Though F. speaks English, it doesn’t come as fluently nor as easily as he’d like.

Sure, glad to help, and the bishop stood up next to him–and then grinned, no no, come back up to the mic, you first.

F. spoke from the heart, and we watched the nervousness simply melt away as he did so.  There were a few times where the bishop started to translate and F. went, wait, say (strings of Spanish followed). They laughed and continued.  There was one time F. spoke, the bishop started, F. went wait, this too, and they kind of tripped all over each other verbally, laughing some more.

And in the process, the whole language difficulty thing became simply a means for the Spirit of love to enter in and bless the whole congregation listening and watching them.  An arm went around a shoulder. And again, in delight.  Love speaks in all languages and it speaks without mistranslation.  It simply Is. And it was there.

At the end of the services, I saw F.’s wife and there was no longer any question: I knew.  I went up to her and told her, my friend Lisa dyed this yarn for me, I knitted this, but I just spent the whole time thinking it needs to go where it most belongs…

…As I took it off me and wrapped it around her.  Just her colors, I saw, pleased, just perfect on her–as she gasped in surprise and delight.

I’m half deaf, I don’t speak Spanish, I’ve never really had a conversation with her, or at least not one that I was very successful at participating in, just many a smile and quiet nod shared between us since I met them–but when words are not enough, Love enters in just the same.

Translating perfectly.