By way of introduction: Dave, who’s lived here most of his adult life, was a teenager whom we knew when we lived in New Hampshire 35 years ago. His oldest is in college now. His grandfather was a rabbi who fled the pograms in Russia.

He’s a lawyer.

So he prefaced his remark in Sunday School by saying that when you think of pardons, we generally think of a Presidential pardon. The difference between a pardon and forgiveness?

You don’t deserve a pardon.

You deserve forgiveness.

The person forgiving you deserves that they do so.

To which I would add, and of course forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning, it means I recognize the humanity in you in spite of what you did. If nothing else, to keep from pulling me down to your level.

Dang. I wrote all that out because his words sounded so brilliant at the time and, Sunday School lesson or no, I still can’t find it in me to forgive the murdering little warmonger over there. I am willing to turn that job over to Christ because it’s frankly well beyond me. I just want him stopped.

I am so glad Dave got to be born here.

My friend Sue, recently home after two years abroad, put out a note that today was going to be Pi Day and she’d left her pastry blender behind in South Africa; could she borrow one?

Sure!

And so she was the other person who stopped by yesterday, briefly, but it got me thinking I wanted to celebrate the day, too. I had prefab pie crusts in the freezer and could cut to the chase instead of the butter.

Last year when we had so many tart cherries on our tree, I pitted and bagged them by the quart so that they’d be the right size to pop right into a crust. I grabbed a ziploc out of the freezer this morning.

But it was the season’s remainders and the amount a bit random, about half, which explained why it seemed so small.

Well huh. I’d forgotten about that.

I rolled the crust out very thin and lined four large ceramic bowls with it: two for cherry, two, peach slices, and, just for fun, folded the edges down galette style. They took about 45-50 min at 350.

Each of the four Mel and Kris cereal bowls served two.

Meantime, on the peregrine front, Grace the falcon is trying to get that gravel just so for the eggs that are about to arrive at City Hall. She’s had several tiercels (males) fighting for the territory and her and one was the victor long enough to get a name and possibly future progeny–only to be ousted the next day by a new new tiercel.

Who so far is TT, for, The Tiercel. Much bonding has taken place and he’s definitely the victor of the year.

They’re really going to have to give him his own name before they start naming the eyases (babies) to come.

Friends dropped by for a visit; we hadn’t seen each other in awhile because we’ve been doing church by Zoom so as not to expose my mom when we finally get to go see her, but with Tony’s death they just needed to come make sure everything was okay.

We’re fine, no worries, great to see you.

She’s an avid gardener so I showed her the littlest apricot seedlings: This one’s a week old, this one’s a few days.

They’re so cute!

Aren’t they?!

I offered her one for their condo patio and she’s considering it. But then she made clear what she really wanted: to know when the peaches at Andy’s were coming on, because I’d given her some of those last year and she couldn’t wait to go buy more.

We are looking forward to it together.

Michelle was going to be dropping by and I thought about asking her to pick something up at the store on the way; we’re trying not to drive the Prius any more than we have to before it gets worked on, and given the amount of time the car was going to need, they told us the job would have to wait till Tuesday.

And yet.

Somehow I just felt pushed, is the only way to describe it, to go do a quick dash to Trader Joe’s; they’re within a mile, and we’d gotten reassurances on the car, just go.

Which is how I came to be not only outside but driving past the neighbor’s house when their dog got out while nobody was home.

I was surprised. They’re really careful about that.

I pulled into my driveway. Keeping an eye on him, I texted the mom.

When he saw me watching him he trotted from the far gate to the front door as if patiently waiting for it to be opened for him. I wasn’t his people but he knew my face and maybe I would do?

That nonstop limply hanging tongue on a cool day said I’m thirsty; I asked her, Would it be okay if I got him some water?

Turns out she was mid-flight. The person who’d come by to take care of the dog must have goofed. She was so glad I’d seen him.

I looked for what bowl would work well from a dog’s point of view and got out my late mother-in-law’s oversized white Corelle one, you know, the one that won’t even fit in the microwave. Holds lots. Splash all you want.

Just then a large brindled coat trotted quickly past my kitchen window along my side of the fence.

Oh so that’s how you did it!

I went out there and where there’s a sheet of plywood barring his way where that one section had fallen down and still not been repaired yet, he’d dug and gotten it pulled down somehow and had gone past my kitchen and out my open gate. He was just quickly retracing his steps, now that I wasn’t outside watching him nor letting him in his house.

Busted.

I set the water down on their side of the plywood, figuring that even though that’s not where his water bowl goes, a dog of all animals is going to be able to smell that it’s there if he wants it. Then I set the plywood back up. It would come down again if he wanted it to enough, but for now he was back in his own fenced yard, he didn’t have to be panting anymore, he was safe.

I just hope no skunk vies for that water in the night. My neighbor will be tired enough.

Tony and I couldn’t talk politics at all, but we could definitely talk fruit trees with enthusiasm.

I’m pretty sure he would have loved watching one of my apricot seedlings grow up, knowing he was nourishing something both rare and the best to be found. He loved to cook, and he would have done really great things with those in a few years.

But it was not to be. Last night our Italian friend peacefully passed on at a ripe old age as his beloved garden was starting its new season of blossoms and green and fruit and growth for his wife and daughter to hold him close by.

Having had such huge success with the 46″ tall Anya-offspring apricot seedling that was planted in lobster compost last year, two weeks ago I transplanted two of the ones that had come out so tiny into the stuff. One was 4″ tall, the other 6″. I wasn’t sure they’d even survived, and then I accidentally ripped a few roots despite all I could do as I moved them.

I had more bags on order but I could at least do those two.

From what I’ve been able to read, for an apricot branch that loses its growth tip, that’s it, that branch won’t grow nor even sprout out any side branches from its lower nodes until the next year–and that’s certainly how it was for mine. The severe heat last summer did some serious crisping.

Two weeks into their new digs, a week of daytime warmth, and guess which yearling burst out with the green first? The not-dead-yet 4″ one, and there are hints of green on the other. They’re ahead of the ones that got no lobster. Even though their roots were messed with.

So here’s my one that’s starting its third year: it likewise started off tiny and stunted and then played catch-up last year, making it to 26″ only because I didn’t know you shouldn’t do summer pruning and I was trying to keep the two sides at the same height.

And then I found out why that had been a mistake.

But its success is why I was sure the little ones were worth keeping trying.

There are three more small ones, two of which I expect to do fine and one that…it will be a surprise if it does, it looks pretty black, but we’ll see.

I have a friend who told me he’d love to have one of those apricot trees. I figure first I have to get it tall enough to remotely look like at least a bush.

I have high hopes.

I got a heads-up from a dairy-allergic friend two days ago: Mutari Chocolate‘s building is being torn down and they were being forced to move, without a place to land yet. Go, she said. Valentine’s is their last day.

NO! Oh, man…

And so the three of us headed over the hills to Santa Cruz to support Michelle’s favorite chocolate maker. Their stuff is pricey–but extremely good. And safe for her to just simply go and eat out like a normal person, which has been such a gift for her.

I feel like I’m out of practice after these past two years, but I wanted to thank them and support them and encourage them in whatever may come next. So I grabbed four Malabrigo Mecha hats knit of many a Sunday Zoom session and managed, from the back seat, to thread a yarn needle and run the ends in on the three that needed it, despite the steep twists and curves of Highway 17 through the mountains.

We knew it might well be our last chance. We knew we were going to splurge.

That turned out to be a definite understatement.

The chocolate machinery in that place, the music, and of course the masks are all not conducive to my hearing much at all in there and I’ve always just been the pleasant but deaf mom picking out what I want and letting the others have their conversations. But this time the familiar face of one woman lit up when she saw me–and not only did it mean the world to me, in that moment I felt how much having to let go of this place and our coming at this time meant to her.

And that answered my inner question right there. Yes.

And so the purse was opened and I asked her to pick a color. She exclaimed and chose the one in soft purples and browns that could be cacao pods by the colors. Perfect. I suddenly wished I had more of those to offer.

The woman behind her picked a bright blues and greens mix.

Did I see someone working in the back? I asked.

Yes. And so the first woman picked one out for that woman, too, and walked over to that room to share it.

It was my Don’t Go parting gift. My pleading of Please Make It Back Here. Even though Santa Cruz rent is crazy.

They are going to tour some of the farms around the world that grow their cacao beans and then come back here and start searching for a new spot.

They do, in fact, have a second location: in Watsonville, so their website will remain up and running during what is hopefully just an interim.

I was so glad I had a way to say thank you for all the chocolate and the welcoming and the allergen conscientiousness that’s been so freeing for our daughter.

Who, as she drove us back north, said with both wishing and hesitation, Watsonville. That’s…quite a drive.

Yes, but note that at least your cousin does live near there.

An elderly person dear to me got hacked yesterday.

And today, another elderly friend, chatting like she does and asking after my family, told me happily about the quarter million dollar check that had arrived by FedEx from Publisher’s Clearing House and how nice it was that they look out for the elderly and disabled like that and had I signed up for that, too?

I advised caution.

No, no, she’d taken it to her bank and they’d accepted it.

I reminded her of a mutual widowed friend who, at about 90, was swindled out of the house she’d owned free and clear for decades and had found herself thrown out on the street in utter bewilderment.

There was no unconvincing her.

I linked to Publisher Clearing House’s own website where they warned against frauds being committed in their name and say that even banks have been fooled into thinking the checks are real–until they find out they are not.

I asked if she’d called PCH to make sure it was real. She hesitated, then said she had, and I thought, if you did, did you look it up online or did you call the scammer’s number? Because there is nothing legitimate about this.

So since she was a friend from church I got off Facebook and mentioned it to those in a better position to step in and help; she sure wasn’t listening to me.

To which one of them said, could that have been a fake? Basically, (she didn’t quite say outright) was the person they were trying to scam–you?

It was indeed a duplicate of her profile. Reported now.

I guess I learned a little humility myself on the gullibility index today.

Early on in this whole pandemic thing, when everything had been on lockdown and particularly so in our area, the county north of us decided that a customer could buy something online and the shopkeeper could hand it to them outside now. You could have that close a contact, briefly. Youcouldn’t browse, you couldn’t go in, you couldn’t touch their credit card machine, but you could do that.

This is when they were still trying to figure out the details of how covid-19 is spread.

I talked to one of my local shops, saying that what I wanted was two bags of a particular blue Malabrigo Rios that matched so that I would have enough for an afghan. I knew that officially it’s ten skeins per bag equals one dye lot; rumor, though, is that they’re matched up in groups of ten but that the mill produces more than that in each lot. But that’s a rumor.

So.

I wanted twenty skeins. I’ve found matching bags in the past, but I wasn’t going to be able to go in and eyeball anything.

Turns out the whole supply-chain mess meant the shop didn’t have and couldn’t get them in from Malabrigo for months.

But maybe her yarn rep had them on hand, she wondered.

Turns out she did.

Once those were delivered, I swung by the shop, they handed me the bags out on the sidewalk rather than frisbeeing them from, y’know, six social feet away through the car windows and all that and it was so good to see actual human faces again, not to mention old friends.

(Unspoken: Still here. Still here. And you too! Stay that way. Thank you for wearing those masks. Pray those vaccine researchers get their studies finished fast.)

I waited till I got home to see if my initial quick impression was correct. It was.

She’d been so relieved that the two bags matched like her rep had been sure of.

Now, here I interject a quick story about my folks visiting the dye works for a tapestry weaver in France at a time when they decided they needed just a bit more of this one color for their project, so the dyer was asked to create more.

He asked Mom if this and this matched.

She said no, not quite, and why. But no, sorry.

He hadn’t thought it was discernible but since clearly it was, he added just a touch more to the pot. There you go.

So blame it on the genetics. Here I was, staring at those blues, going, but they’re just not quite the same. This one’s more vibrant. This one’s darker. You can put them in all kinds of different lights and it doesn’t change the fact. It’s certainly not a huge difference, but…

So instead of becoming the next big project they’ve sat there for all this time because I can’t use them together unless I separate them by enough other colors and space that the difference might not matter, in which case I would no longer need twenty skeins of Matisse blue because half of the afghan would be something else altogether. Which has had me wondering if I should ask my friends who do diving and photography if they have a particular reef photo I could use, to riff on last year’s fish theme.

I’ve been musing about trying to match the one or the other, but I don’t know if inventories are back up yet.

Here, let me finish this other project first before I worry about it too much.

I just like to know what’s ahead.

I was in a knitting group meeting by Zoom today where they asked everybody, What is the yarn that you’ve been hoarding and not knitting that you most love?

I told them that Colourmart had some heavy laceweight 150g 98/2 extra fine merino/vicuna yarn that was really nice stuff, but that every now and then–twice that I know of–they’d popped up a few cones of some with 7% vicuna content. It’s cobweb weight but it sells out fast.

So, having knit two 7% cowls, one for me and one for a friend and swooning at every stitch–nice stuff!–I’d been stalking the site to see if any more showed up, y’know, like during an inventory check or something. For months. (This is after I’d plied it on my wheel and sworn I’d never do that part again–I should have paid the five bucks for them to do that on their machinery. Cobweb weight is super fiddly to get right when you can’t see what you’re doing because it’s black and my spinning was wonky, although in the finished cowls, who could tell. Or care. So soft!)

Suddenly one day there was this one single cone of not seven but 10%, and not only 10% but it was blended with extrafine cashmere. No sheep.

I ticked the ply box and picked a number: twelve strands, the maximum, for a thicker yarn to work with. $55 total for 5.29 mill-end ounces, when pure vicuna retails for $300/ounce.

As one of my friends described it later, I bought it so fast I showed speed streaks.

It’s black, of course, which my eyes would rather knit later rather than now, but the thing that’s actually holding me back is that there’s only the one cone. When it’s gone there may never be another. How would I risk letting anyone feel left out of receiving the one best thing, and how on earth would I choose who should get it?

My longtime arborist stopped by today because I wanted a quote on some pruning that was higher up than I’m willing to go. He was surprised when I asked him at the end if he liked dark chocolate–why, yes, he does, very much–and then opened the front door and grabbed him one of those plisse’ things and told him what it was. That was fun.

The somewhat less fun but worthwhile thing was going in for a mammogram yesterday.

It created one of those weird moments where the pandemic makes invisible people real, and necessary, where you never knew they even ever were: there was a little window on the arm into the innards of the machine, just a few inches across and with a light inside so you could see how the thing flexed as they moved it in place next to the squish table thingamagummy.

And it was dusty. Quite. Inside an enclosed space with no opening as far as I could see, with that little light at the back showing just how the tiny, uneven, fuzzy bits cascaded down the little diagonal whatever in there. Dust bunny-foot, mid-hop.

I marveled out loud, the tech being an amiable sort, and she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Oh we’re not allowed to touch those.”

Turns out the manufacturer has people whose job it is to clean those inside parts, which the patients are never exposed to, so, given covid restrictions and workers out sick (or maybe they’d quit) and the fact that it would physically affect nobody to just leave it like that for the moment, there had been no one on hand to do that particular job that I would never even have known existed.

I’m still left with the question hanging of, why? Why did they make it that way?

So that this whole x-ray vision thing can be a two-way street between patients and our non-robot overlords?

Two years from now I’ll be looking to see if it still looks like that. Which is the weirdest way to get a patient to book the next routine appointment ever.

Knowing that we are cautious about exposure, and knowing we might say no, our friends Phyl and Lee invited us for Christmas dinner.

We did church by Zoom last week because it just felt like a time not to go; it turned out that an out-of-state visitor contacted the bishop a few days later to say they were so sorry but they had covid. I don’t know how big the outbreak from that is but I do know three people who’ve gotten breakthrough infections so far. But at least their cases are being ameliorated by their vaccinations and hopefully they won’t have to go through what I did when the virus was new.

Our friends had gone to quite a bit of effort to get the tests and they were okay.

We decided to say yes, and what can we bring.

Bring yourselves, they said, the rest is taken care of. And so we did.

Turns out they had bought a pre-prepared dinner from the grocery store so as to be able to just put it out there and enjoy the company.

But when they opened it up, everything but the ham had gone bad, had been delivered already bad, and I guess my instinct to call to offer again to bring something wasn’t far off but having no idea why I should I respected their request.

They put in the unexpected effort with what all else they had on hand and pulled off a lovely dinner, and after all the isolation of these past two years a Christmas evening spent with friends was a feast indeed.

There’s a new Shaun the Sheep Christmas special they played for us afterward that I would have bought it for my grands if I’d known. Those guys are so creative! And funny.

A definitely good time was had by all, with a strong awareness of how fortunate we were to have that time and each other.

Merry Christmas and G_d bless us, every one.

Happy Birthday to my grandson Parker! And my mom! And my cousin Carol! And my friend Carol! And my friend Sterling! And my friend Jessica! And my friend Lisa! And my friend Julie’s dad!

Okay, who am I missing here because at one point I was counting ten. Clearly, 12/20 was the day to come discover what this life is all about.

(And on a side note, it suddenly occurred to me a few minutes ago that the paint is certainly dry by now and that it was okay to put the wreath back on the front door. Bonus: no pine sap in that one, which is good, because I manage to brush my hair with it every time I walk through the door, and every time I think, And I knew it was there, too. Do other people manage to do this? Or is this just me?)

I’m totally going to quote Afton here, with her permission.

Her husband was…

“…up and drinking his coffee.

As he was standing on the porch, at 6:35, AM, here comes the postal truck.  To drop off a package filled with very lovely yarn from Alison Hyde all the way from California.  As the startled tall one accepted the package he asked the bleary-eyed postal worker

“Are you the early shift or the late shift?”

And the slightly weaving man answered after careful consideration

“I’m not sure.” And

Turned around, slid into his truck, and sped down the street.

As they said on Hill Street Blues

Be careful  out there”

I wrapped presents for eleven people this afternoon, got them into five boxes, addressed, sealed–yes we do have another roll of packing tape (the starting edge shreds mercilessly) whoops that’s a no yay there’s another!

Had it all planned out down to the long-unused walker in the trunk to get all of those into the post office without losing my mind.

Says me.

Somehow the thing shrank markedly when confronted with all those big boxes, and the swinging backbar kept shoving them off by the side of the car.

A young man saw the little old lady with the walker and came to the rescue, thinking I had three boxes, and was determined to carry the big one in for me. Which is cool, but then I reached back into the car for more boxes (oh) and so he helped me reverse-Jenga those with the others on that thing.

Except for the big one still in his hands. Having offered to help carry it in he wasn’t giving it back. Cool, thanks!

At the counter, the one on the bottom had wedged in there by now and didn’t want to come out and the clerk motioned a plea to–the same guy, it turned out, who ran to help again.

If I’d had a hand knit hat in my purse he might have gotten one on the spot. Or a crocheted scrunchy for his man-bun? (Um, probably not.)

That was likely the earliest I’ve ever gotten everything mailed that needed to be mailed, kids, grandkids, grandkids’ Christmas-week birthdays, sibling and spouse, but then this is the year you don’t want to procrastinate on the post office. Right?

Got home. Sat down. Turned around.

And saw the box I was supposed to mail to my friend Afton two weeks ago.