So, picture this (happened a few years ago, but I’m still telling the tale.)  An older couple comes home one day to find, of all things, a mattress blocking their front door.  What on earth?  They hadn’t ordered any mattress!  Oh, wait–must be for that other house again.

It was.

Picture winding roads out a bit from the main suburbia and a street sign that delivery truck drivers sometimes read wrong, with a home to each direction from that intersection with the same house number.

Picture my dad growing up in Carson City, Nevada.

Picture his high school classmate (and there were how many in that class, Dad? Eight?) now living in the one house, on the inadvertent receiving end of that mattress, and in the other…  Our friends V and V.

Don’t you love it when the world shrinks like that?

And just to make it even smaller: when we moved here, the father of someone we knew at church owned a house that was good for entertaining in and would occasionally turn it over to his kids for parties, and we got to go there a few times.  But Mitch’s dad retired and moved away and that was that.

V and V called us a few years ago to invite us over, but mentioned they’d moved. Okay, cool; we got the new address, we’re driving there, and the closer we get, the more we’re saying, Do you think?!… Nah…  *I* think…! And then we pull in the driveway.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Richard knocks on the door, V opens it, and Richard asks if the house still has the such-and-such room down at the end to the left.  V, stunned, goes, How did YOU know?!

Dad’s classmate got a good laugh out of that one.  And we offered to help her with any mattress removals she might need ever after.

What are your small-world stories?

Wow, what a day! Okay, I’m going to let myself be distracted a moment first by saying, Lisa, Tina: if only you could have seen all that colorwork on display! Bright silk saris in cheerful fuschia and orange, fuschia and turquoise, fuschia and gold and coral and black, and did I mention fuschia?  Reds, reds, reds, orangy-reds mixed with purply deep blues and a flash of teal.  Over to the right, blue and purple.  Over to the left, resist-dyed bright red with tiny white stars that at first glance looked like Barbara Walker’s Rose Garden lace pattern, as if all our patterns overlap somewhere in space, as if to pronounce, we are universal in our creativity and our humanity.

Bright pink, lime, you name it; down near the stage, weft of sage green, warp of fuschia, shimmering in vertical changes as the wearer walked.  Such a glorious intensity everywhere that we so seldom see in our Western culture.  Color!

M outshone them all. By far.

We’d been invited to the dance recital of the baby down our street from our New Hampshire days, the adorable little girl whose parents came over and played an evening of Scrabble with us after her family moved out here too; a teen, I think, by the time we ran into them at the Aquarium in Monterey–the time I totally embarrassed her big brother by telling him I remembered him going down their steep (to a three-year-old) old driveway on his Big Wheels. Just what every teenage boy wants so much to be told in public.  Right.

We’d visited with the parents since then but the children had been away at college. Now they were graduated and there, and M, long a dancer, had taken to serious study of the religious dances of her parents’ native land.  She had studied under a master on two continents.

It was far more than a recital; it was a two hour concert with seven musicians in accompaniment.   The auditorium was packed.  As fluid as the river she was portraying here, as determined as the trunk of the elephant there, as graceful as–there simply are no words.  M had studied and practiced long towards perfection and it showed.  Michelle and I kept glancing at each other and going wow, not wanting to miss a second of it by turning away a moment too long.

At the end her master teacher pronounced that M, too, now, was a master and a guru.  She had succeeded.

Her father, taking the podium, wondered out loud at a life’s journey taking such faraway turns: New Hampshire–M totally made my day by looking straight at us, way in the back, immediately as he said that; she had not seen us before the program, but she recognized us–and in their life here in California and visits to way back home.  And here we all were together from all these places in celebration of her accomplishments and hard work.

To life!

(p.s. Yes, I finished her wool/silk scarf in time. It is not bright. The colors are quiet.  But I think it’ll be okay. And V and V, if it’s not, rat your daughter out for me, wouldja? My needles love to dance.)

I kept it short. I wanted enough yarn left to make a matching pair of socks of the merino Jasmin spun up for me: after I started with one pattern, I realized that at the size it was coming out to, I could switch and do it a la Water Turtles, a very open, stretchy lace, and not have to use up lots of yardage. I think my final stitch count was something like 241/row in the main body, only seven Water Turtle repeats long, and it’s plenty big enough for me. (Pardon me while I go run in those loose ends…)

This is the yarn Karin just surprised me with to replace the shawl I surprised her with to replace the yarn she surprised me with.

This is the baby squirrel near a towhee, to give a sense of scale.  It has already learned it is not to climb the awning support pole so temptingly close to the birdfeeder, not from me but from the other squirrels–and it was highly amusing to watch it and a gray squirrel this morning. They were staring at it longingly, twitching towards it and away and towards it and away in fierce repetitive tiny motions, not daring to but oh it’s fall!and you have to squirrel away food!!andandand!!!

All I did was unlatch the door and the two careened into each other while trying to run for the hills.   Guilty!

The baby squirrel tried to climb the fence yesterday and found itself sliiiiiiiiiiding back down the wood. Oops. Made it on the second try, though; it’s getting better at this quickly.  Yesterday the fence, tomorrow that pole, bwahaahaa. (If that big feederfiller isn’t looking…)

We’ve all had days like that–being new at something, trying again, and the sense of satisfaction at getting it right.

And one more thing.  My usual daily dose of hot cocoa?  Mom, this is for you: today I broke just a small piece off the end of a Valrhona 85% bar and grated it into the mug (and got tired of grating and just broke up the rest of it and threw it in).  Add the milk, nuke the milk (you don’t put solid chocolate into hot milk, they have to warm up together to keep the chocolate from seizing), and then I added the cocoa and sugar.  Skipped the usual dollop of cream.

Wow.  Things will never be the same.

The summer that Sam, my oldest, was 12, both she and I were about to hit something we’d never had to face before, me in my mothering and she in the land of classmates: the trauma of middle school. I wanted her to go into it having something to be unique and cool with, for her to be able to do something nobody else she knew could; with her permission, I signed us both up for lessons in handspinning, with a few dyeing lessons too in the six-week summer course taught by Karen Brayton-McFall of the now-gone Rug and Yarn Hut.

There was another mother/12-year-old daughter pair in that class. And that is how we met Gigi and Jasmin, nowadays the Knitmore Girls of podcast fame.  Gigi later helped test-knit a pattern for my book; Jasmin has been exceedingly generous with her sock knitting, and both of them with their friendship.

Gigi’s in the hospital right now and I am waiting for the word.   I don’t dare visit, not with the last of the bug going on. (I had fun yesterday, but I overdid it.)  I am adding in my prayers with her family’s and hoping for her to get back to normal quickly.

By the way, I mentioned my sister-in-law here recently.  When they got the results of her surgery and biopsy, the doctors told her, if you’re going to get breast cancer, you want this kind of breast cancer. If you’re going to find it, you want to find it at this stage.  They told her it was the best news it could have been.

Okay, now, Gigi, your turn.  We’re with you.

p.s. Gigi, this one’s for you.  (Don’t miss it.)  Enjoy.  And if it doesn’t work (hah!), we’ll sneak some ice cream into your room some other way.

Diana designed a bag to fit my new laptop, and I am ecstatic.  It’s gorgeous and it fits it just so. Thank you, Diana! We are planning a trip to Coupa Cafe with it to celebrate, and anybody who wants the pattern, now you know where to find it. (Coupa Cafe’s hot chocolate: there is nothing anywhere quite like it.)

Speaking of chocolate.  Our local dairy specialty place stopped carrying manufacturing cream a few months ago.  But. But.  How was I supposed to make my signature dessert now?  Nineteen years I’ve been making that, and at church potlucks and on the block party list they always make a point of having the H’s be on the dessert assignment. There was a tradition to be upheld, didn’t they know it?

That lack of that cream is why I didn’t make my chocolate torte for the neighbors for Labor Day–it wouldn’t have been the same without that 40% butterfat, and I didn’t want to bring an inferior version, so I brought those mini cupcakes–here, let the raspberries distract them.

So. Michelle and I went to The Milk Pail today, and lo and behold, there was a sign from the owner saying that serious foodies knew about his manufacturing cream, yadda yadda.  As if it had never (shhh!) been gone.

I guess I’m not the only one who pleaded.

They don’t sell it in small bottles anymore.

My dairy-allergic daughter looked at that half gallon and went, So that means you’re going to make a double batch (ie, four tortes) and put them in the freezer?

Yes, at least that many.

Then you have to make a coconut milk one too. You can’t torture me like that.

Sounds good to me.

So we have some serious bittersweet chocolate buying to do.  And why yes, I was feeling better, can you tell?

(An aside to my old friend Kelly: it was wonderful to run into you there and catch up on your family. It’s hard to believe your toddler is in her senior year of college.

And yes, we had an inquisitive, fearless baby black squirrel exploring the patio today who seemed to be on its first campus tour of the outside world as it checked out everything in sight. It had its big-hair tail fluffed up for the big day as it dined out at the Sunflower Cafe al fresco.

I briefly pictured knitting up a matching big for it to haul its leftovers home in.  But no, squirrels being cheeky little things, it can manage doggybagging it itself.)

In his honor, I am going to try to get this to post at 9:09 on 9/9/09.  (Did it!)

At the block party Monday, I was talking to a couple who are exactly at the stage I was a dozen years ago: spending afternoons driving kids to sports, music lessons, you name it, go go go.  I told them, Yeah, I used to put 200 miles a week on my car just driving kids, and the husband nodded, So you get it.

Oh yes.

But one of the things that concerned the mom was, as their first kid headed into high school, how do you stay engaged with the school environment the way you did when they were in elementary?

The short answer, of course, is, you don’t.  You can volunteer here or there, you can be very active on the scene, but you can’t stay involved in everything to the same degree you did when there was just a single teacher in your child’s life.

And yet, I told her. Let me tell you a story.

My oldest had had a friend whom I often dropped off on our way home in the afternoons; no big deal to me, and an easy way to get to know my daughter’s friend a little.  (There are no school buses–Proposition 13 got rid of those in the 70’s.)

One day Sam and Jo were late coming out.   Really late.  There were things to get to, reasons to get uptight.

And yet, somehow that day, I just didn’t.  I told the other kids, who were already in the car since the younger schools let out first, Dunno what the holdup is, but whatever, they’ll show up, they know we’re here.

When they did, I saw Jo a step ahead walking towards our car because Sam had taken a step behind her in order to privately shake her head and wave her arms frantically at me in a silent, fervent plea: Mom! Don’t be mad! (Okay, the fact that she felt she needed to should tell you right there that I was hardly a perfect parent.)

But mad?  Nah.  Totally relaxed.  Good to see you, girls, how ya doin’, isn’t it a beautiful day out today?

They got in, I took Jo home, and then Sam could finally let it out. She told me Jo had had a particularly hard day and that Mr. Hodges, their math teacher, had taken the time after school to let the kid spill her guts and listen to her.  He had made it very clear she mattered to him for those 40 minutes and that she could come talk to him anytime.  And this was a proud new dad who would want to hurry home to his baby, so I knew what it had taken for him to do that.

Okay, for this next part, before you get too impressed, understand that I had wanted to do this for quite some time and had been looking for an excuse.  I made half of these for us.  So.

The next day I made a double batch of cinnamon rolls.  Now, when I make cinnamon rolls, they’re more a pastry than a bread and they are *good*.  I timed them to come out of the oven just so, popped them out of the pan, and drove to the high school and parked. When the kids showed up, I asked where Mr. Hodges’ classroom was, quick, before he goes home!

To say he was blown away does not begin to tell it.  Still-hot cinnamon rolls? Homemade just for him?  For talking to someone else’s kid, even?!

I told him, for my kid too: Sam knows now that if she has a problem and needs an adult to talk to, you’re absolutely someone she can turn to.  That is the greatest gift a parent of a teenager could ask for, and I wanted to make clear how grateful I was for that.  And for Jo’s sake too.

He couldn’t get over it.  He told me  that in his years teaching he had, a few times, had parents send him a fruit basket or some such, but not once–not ever–had a parent actually sought him personally out to thank him in person.

To which I would say, about time!

The big annual Labor Day block party.

Random Hershey’s cookbook cake recipe–using mini muffin pans, it made three dozen.  (Note to self: fancy schmancy Williams Sonoma one?  The pan looks artsy, the results, not so much. Go for plain and round only next time, like the ones shown here.)  Bake 13 minutes.

Ganache: 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 c heavy cream, ~17 oz good dark chocolate (one Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Bittersweet bar.)  Break chocolate by smashing bar (still wrapped!) to the floor repeatedly.  Thwack.  Melt chocolate in cream, stir; will semi-set fairly quickly.

Raspberries: rinsed, then carefully individually dried off.

Three of my neighbors in this square block work at Stanford Hospital. One is about to start a new job in a different department; I told her the names of my favorite nurses she’d be working with and to tell them hello for me.

I didn’t mention that the last time before this month that I finished a pair of socks, it was six years ago, done as a thank you to the highly empathetic B. for being willing to walk in his patients’ shoes. Earlier this year, I found myself saying to someone at the nurses’ station, “I’d know the back of that head anywhere!” and he turned and we had a delighted reunion, IV pole and all.

I spoke in church briefly today about a man from a local ward (congregation in Mormon speak), not ours but the next one over, whose volunteer assignment is to offer the Sacrament on the Sabbath to members of our church who are hospitalized at Stanford.

And thus a month ago he found himself with a list of names and room numbers in hand, walking into my room for the fourth time this year, where, there I was, IV and all all over again.  He exclaimed, It’s YOU! How ARE you!

Much better as of right now, and thanks.

Such a simple act: kneeling by my bedside.  The heartfelt prayer.  A little bread.  The second prayer.  A little water.

Such a powerful act: coming to one who cannot come to you.  Declaring by how he lives that there are no strangers now, only friends.  Being with another in their extremity, completely present for them in the moment, offering a shared faith in the light and love of God that surpasses all such circumstances.  He brought to me, in his own way and fulfilling his own part, a healing.

Looking back at all that I went through this past year, I said today, the pain simply falls away: all that is left is the moments of light.  The love.  God’s.  His. The doctors’. The nurses’. Every person who cared.  It is made so visible by their choices in those circumstances.

I still don’t remember that man’s name.  But I will always know that warm smile.

About an hour ago, I only saw a blur with my glasses off, reading; Michelle saw the falcon swooping by in front of the window in its peregrinations.  She stood there, going, Wow!

I was wishing, More? Please?!

Note that the squirrels have again gone into deep hiding.

Meantime, last night at Purlescence, I said to Jasmin that some of you out there allowed as how you actually *liked* to kitchener.  (She was totally being set up and she knew it.) She said with immediate perkiness and the biggest grin, “*I* like to kitchener!”

And thus my socks took the easy way out, with both of us promising that, next time, I was to do it myself.  But she worked that grafting as easily as casting on a new project. ‘T’ain’t hard.

There will be next times: I started another pair today I’d been planning in Casbah, and DebbieR surprised me by having told the LYSOs from afar to gift me with their Jitterbug (it was a b.o.g.o. on their sale table) to keep me going with this whole sock thing.  Yeah, I know the racket: someone expresses interest knitting-wise, you bombard them with really good yarn, and you know they’re hooked on the spot. It’s insidious, I tell you.

The mail: Michelle’s first reaction to LauraN’s package was, a spider? No–an octopus, ready to get to work on socks: Mrs. Weasley’s airneedles have competition now.

But didn’t I tell them?  Lace shawls, sure.  But socks?  I don’t knit socks. I have quite a few pairs of handknit socks, thanks to Jasmin, Deb and Kate, Niki, Bonnie, Michelle, Chris, and my daughter Sam has a pair from Judy Sumner that turned out to be just her size.  My longtime readers know that I wore mine every day at Stanford this year as a way of declaring, I am loved.

But me?  I do not knit them here or there, I do not knit them anywhere.  Not in a house, not with a mouse, not on a train, not in a tree, my hands don’t like them, Nancy, see?

That package that arrived last week from some Sock Summiteers, had, as I mentioned, a hank of Blue Moon SockGate sock yarn in the colors of the logo of the Summit that was going on while I was holed up in the hospital. A yarn with a good firm twist for holding up well under heel and toe–cushy for a foot, not so much so for, say, a shawl. It was adamant about what it wanted to be when it grew up.

I looked at it and thought, it could make a cool hat for some guy sometime…

Wait. Would I knit a hat on the size needles that stuff would require? For anybody? No matter how much I loved them? When I could make one in a third the time with something else?

No.

I noticed that there not only was no return address on the envelope, the thing had been auto-stamped in such a way that it didn’t even say what town it had been shipped from, fer cryin’ out loud–if I wanted to surprise Nancy back, much less the others, with something finished from that yarn? Dude. Totally out of luck.

She/they wanted me to make myself a pair of Sock Summit socks to match the t-shirt and did a good job of reinforcing the point.

But I don’t knit socks. I can, I have, I don’t, the needles are too small, I drop too many stitches, blahblahblah.

I am wearing the shirt.

And looky here. How did that happen?! I do too knit socks!

I still won’t take them here or there, I’ll still drop stitches everywhere. But I do, I DO like knitting socks!

And quite honestly, I would never have sat down with a porcupine scaffolding of size 1s if it hadn’t been for the happy peer pressure of that package:  I have some designated blue-and-purple yarn of at least two or three years’ standing in my stash to prove it.

I am having the time of my life watching this first one coming to be and I’m really hoping to show off the pair at Purlescence on Thursday.  You guys go give each other a big hug from me, y’hear? You have SO earned it! I can’t wait!

As our family started praying for my sister-in-law, whose breast biopsy came back positive a few days ago, I got another message.

One of the wonders of the Internet is how easy it is to reconnect with people whom you knew back when.

One of the wonders of continuing to be alive on this planet is learning how, when you once care about another human being, however much, wherever they may go forth to in this life, you wish them well in it all. And that that never stops. Ever.  The caring only grows more important, even when it takes you by surprise because you simply hadn’t had occasion to think of the person in years. But they matter, and they always will.

I spend very little time at Facebook: this is where the bandwidth real estate is my own.  And yet, forgotten password or no, somehow one old friend after another showed up and there it was.

And so I got asked today by another Churchill grad, someone I’d known since elementary, how life was now.  It stumped me. How was hers, too?  How on earth does one sum up 18-50? Got married, had kids, and in my case, wrote a book?  If you add up my four kids’ ages, that’s 96 Mom-years; that could get a little wordy. By mentioning having systemic lupus and Crohn’s both? Nah, that’s just the background noise. Tell her to read this entire blog back to front?  (Spare her!)

It may not have been the best answer, but I responded saying I’d always wanted to be a writer; published now and off to a good start. And then it seemed the best way to sum up the whole rest of everything else was simply to link to the story of the man with that Stanford Blood Center t-shirt on.  The everyday trip to the store.  And yet.

The context that had brought us together was the group “Pray for Chuck Heidel,”  a tall kid who’d teased me in junior high math class but a kid who by late high school had transformed into the downright decent, good person he’d been all along, as most kids do. He’d been a member of a champion football team that had included Brian Holloway and Jeff Kemp: I was by no means part of the jock scene, but we had a crop of decent people among ours that defied stereotypes.  One of them, I said to at the 20th reunion, “I don’t remember much about you: but I remember that you were always a friend to anyone.”

Chuck was recently in a bike accident and was airlifted to the U of MD Trauma Center.  Unconscious.  Paralysis. Blood clots. Intubation.  As I read the reports of what he’d been enduring since then, I kept thinking, I had that in January. I went through that in February. I had that three weeks ago.  Part of me wanted to tell his family that his voice will sound normal within two weeks because he didn’t try to talk while he had that tube down his throat–he was unconscious then. Part of me wants to make jokes about hospital food while jumping up and down that he can swallow again. And he lifted a glass to his lips!

There was his daughter’s awe at her father’s example of asking the family to gather round him to pray for the patient next door, in worse shape than he.

And that, I could tell her as a patient, is how one copes. By finding a way to bring forward the best in oneself, the faith if we have faith, our goodwill in all circumstances, looking for any way of serving those around us in order not to have the bodily damage hog all the attention.

Because the love never stops. The caring never ends. It only grows with each new experience.

I was finishing up knitting the purple baby alpaca this afternoon when the doorbell rang.  I wonder?…

There were two absolutely adorable little blond boys, ages 4 and 6, a little shy as they looked up at the stranger in the strange house, a get-well note in their hands and with their smiling grandmother, who had driven them, standing behind.

A moment of confusion on my part and then I got it.

A little before my surgery, the local paper had run a story on their family: the dad with the Silicon Valley job and the small in-town yard but a little bit of the Woodstock “got to get back to the land, and set my soul free” in him, and so, he had set up a small beekeeping operation with his little boys.

Who get to deliver the goods. But they’ll only go as far as a four-year-old’s attention span.  We’re on the far end of town (and there’s only so much honey for their subscribers); we just barely squeaked in.

Delivery times are, as I understand it, whenever there is honey to share; I told the dad in an email when I signed up that I was going to be heading into surgery and if nobody was home, would it be okay to just drop it off at the door? He said he would send a honeybee to buzz my window hello at Stanford for me.  I was charmed.

But I got to see the boys instead.  It took me a moment to register that oh, right, as I opened the door, not seeing their jar of honey quite at first.  Lost in the cuteness.

And I have to tell you, that is the best-tasting honey I have had in years. Note that the jar isn’t quite full–it was earlier… (Yes, Mom.  You used to catch me dipping a spoon in the honey back in the days when I, too, was little.  Haven’t changed a bit.)

I had an appointment today with my cardiologist to ask questions about my blood pressure med; everything’s fine, and no, this wasn’t the Thursday post-op. Routine stuff.

I got there a little early for a doctor who is  always late because he takes the time to listen to his patients, which I like, and pulled out needles and the purple baby alpaca I’d grabbed on my way out the door.  I’d had a project already started to try to get done by Thursday, but somehow it just..wasn’t..it. But purple was. So.

Doodling around, let’s see, cast on 33, take it from there, I was several inches into it, wearing the shawl on the cover of my book, wearing the socks that Michelle knit me, when another woman not much older than me checked in. (Wait, I’m 50, I might look that old too… I tend to forget that…) Now, when you’re sitting in cardiology, it’s fairly striking when someone younger than the average clientele comes in–but it was my knitting she was drawn to as she sat down by me.

On a whim I’d brought mine in a Purlescence bag rather than one of my knitting bags.  She told me she was a knitter too. She hadn’t heard of that store and wanted to know what the place was like.

My mind glanced briefly back towards the owner of another shop who’d once asked me, “How are you?” rather warily as I’d walked in her door.  Someone who has seemed to me fearful of what life might be capable of: who, a few months before that moment, had suddenly come upon me waiting at the elevator at Stitches in a wheelchair and with no preliminary conversation, had simply exclaimed, “It’s not fair!” like a small child and had rushed away while I was going, huh?

“Do you want to know?” I shot back.

“No.”

Well, that’s honest, I thought, and answered, truthfully on the non-health side of things, “I’m fine.”

Purlescence, though…  (Here’s a half skein of the Sea Silk in Glacier I bought there last week. The dark line lower right is just shadowing from the chair behind the scarf.)

Coming back to the moment, I told my fellow patient, “They have a great selection. And also this: I had a shawl on display there, and came in asking to have it back after my daughter-in-law’s uncle had a brain tumor and went into a coma; I wanted to get one to his wife quickly.

Whereupon Kaye, one of the owners, not only gave it to me, she took an expensive, beautiful, handmade shawl pin, put it in my hands, wrapped my fingers around it, and asked me to give it to Barbara too. Someone she had never even heard of before.”

The woman went, wow.

And then I told her, “And last January I was in the hospital. The owners of Purlescence gifted me with two skeins of a buffalo-blend yarn, which cost something like $50 apiece, as a get-well card.”

Her eyes got even bigger.

“They are NICE people,” I told her.  “Just the best.”

That being true, I thought I would repeat here what I told my fellow knitter in that waiting room today. I wish that all yarn stores could be like the one that I get to go to.  I know how lucky I am.

I could have gone on and on about how they attract good people like themselves, (that’s just for a start), but my name was called.

I so hope that woman shows up at Purlescence sometime when I’m there!  She would fit right in.

To Nathania, Sandi, and Kaye: you create much good in this world. I am blessed to know you and have you nearby.  I just wanted to say publicly, thank you.

By, say, wearing a cool Sock Summit t-shirt and a Sock Summit pin and wearing Sock Gate-colorway socks, dyed by Tina (you have to knit them first) when actually, no, you weren’t at Sock Summit.

This drive-by knitting gift landed in my mailbox today, from Nancy, crediting JoAnne, with a little tag in there from Ellen, and saying Stephanie approved.  A group hug, it sounds like.  Thank you doesn’t begin to express the sense of wonder at being included like this.  Wow.  Cool.  Thank you!

I confess to cowardice last month: I did tell my surgeon there was a knitting conference. I waited to see his reaction before I was going to specify that it was actually not just that, but a sock knitting conference–and then somehow as we talked about things related to the kinds of stitches he was going to be doing, it never quite came up.

Heh.  I know how I can make it obvious now. Now that I’ve broken him in on the general idea, with my husband enthusiastically nodding that oh yes, thousands of knitters come to these knitting conferences, I can show that indeed we do.

And now that I have been made well at his and the other surgeons’ hands, next time I won’t have to miss it. Or even worry about missing it.  I can’t tell you what a gift that is.

Meantime, this is what Sea Silk looks like in Glacier when it’s damp, which it won’t be for very long. One more finished!  Silly doctors probably don’t realize the post-op is supposed to be a grand reunion time: my head surgeon will just have to go play a knitterly Santa Claus afterwards, I imagine.  Think he’ll mind?

Phyllis asked me, while on the phone yesterday, and I told her my soapdish dispenser I’d bought from Mel and Kris had broken and that I’d love it if she could pick one out for me from their display and have me pay her back.

This morning, at church, she handed it to me and told me that when they’d found out who it was for, they wouldn’t accept any money. (Insert futile protest of “But you’ve got to earn a living, you know!”)

Note that they didn’t confess later to me when I came by after all; they wanted Phyllis to get the delight of having me be surprised.   Did I mention that they are really nice people?!

One of the reasons for my escape later was this:  I wanted…  Now that I knew they were there, I needed something that was meaningful to me and small enough for me to be able to carry back to my car  (even though I didn’t end up carrying nor walking with it.)  I needed it  small and lightweight for Deb to carry, too, luggage and plane rides being what they are.

So I bought a small ceramic bowl.  Mel and Kris do beautiful work.  It is the handthrown pottery equivalent of cupping your two hands together.  I’ve had one for awhile that I love; the colorwork and sense of their presence gives a certain reverence to the start of my days as I mix cocoa (a lot) and sugar (not much) in mine, then pour the mixture into a mug of hot milk. Perfect.

Today I got to give the new little bowl to my friend Deb, who stopped by after flying into the area from back East.  I had no idea she loved to collect beautiful ceramics; it had simply seemed like the right thing.  It was fun to watch her delighted reaction.

She, on the other hand, had knitted me an exquisite lace bookmark, and it matched the lace socks she and her daughter Kate had knitted me earlier.

She also knitted for both of the get-well afghan projects that were going on unbeknownst to me in January.  She knew it would mean much to me that she knit one of those squares with leftover yarn from my socks at the center, surrounded by yarn from her late son’s socks. As a matter of fact, one of her squares was knit with such an intensity and speed that it was the first to arrive.

I got to show her, finally in person like I wish I could for Anniebee and Elizabeth who did the piecing together and for everybody who worked on them, the finished afghans.  We shared stories. We laughed. We missed Robbie, my son John’s age, sharing hospital stories, and wept.  And hugged.

Some friends you can never get ahead of.  But they are also the kind of people where that doesn’t matter.  It was such a rare treat to get to see Deb as well as Mel and Kris; it has been a weekend all around of holding friends close in much love. (Phyll and Lee, you too.)