Channon’s comment sparked this one.  She and I wrote back and forth, with me going, eh, who wants to hear more about lupus, and her encouraging me to go ahead even when I said I can’t skip that part, it’s integral to the story. So here goes.

When it was first diagnosed, my kids were 2, 4, 6, and 8, and barely that.  I found myself suddenly being told I was not to go in the sun anymore.  Right. Like how am I supposed to adhere to THAT forevermore!?  Besides, I’m an outdoors type.

My arthritis was severe enough then (it isn’t now) that they tested me for Rheumatoid, and throw in this, that, and the other, and I was just plain having a hard time.  Not to mention, my mom’s cousin had died of lupus a week before her wedding date.  Cheers.

So.  Richard decided he needed to do something about all that. The lupus he couldn’t fix.  (The Crohn’s later was LE cells branching out.)  He wanted to cheer me up.  So he called a number of our friends and they all threw me a surprise half birthday party.

When they all yelled, “SURPRISE!” I was going, What?  What is this? A surprise party? But this is June!  My birthday’s in December!… Huh?  Well, oookay.  Chocolate and friends, who’s complaining.

There was a cake: half a 13×9 sheet cake, baked and artfully decorated by our friend LaRee with the words

Hap

Birt

Ali

on it going down the cake.  Which was dark chocolate.  Yum.  And a very good time was had by all, with much laughter.  My husband’s a genius.

Turns out, LaRee had had the same initial reaction to Richard’s proposal but had been perfectly willing to go along with it, and hey, let’s party!

So, months later, it was going to be LaRee’s birthday.  I found out.  My chocolate torte (recipe in the comments here) was already well on its way to what it is now and I decided to bake her one, dark chocolate ganache on a nearly-flourless cake.  But I’m no good at writing with a tube, so when I surprised her with it, I gave her a card instead, with the inscription:

“Hap Birt Ali,” she said.  Happy birthday to you, too, she re-torted.

(And you know?  Somehow we all muddled through just fine.  And life is very good.)

It seemed a really good idea at the time.

Okay, back up.  Around here, we December babies at church have a December club: anybody who’s ever gotten, say, one earring for their birthday (*note to my little sister: I am SO looking at you) with a note saying wait till Christmas for the other half of their present understands why we old friends get together once a year.  Not to mention that it’s an excuse for a no-stress-all-fun party.  Anybody born in the 12th month who can get there is welcome to come, young or old.  We each unwrap a present we bought ourselves as we explain why we got that thing, sing “Happy birthday to us,” and have a potluck brunch and a grand good time.

In talking about why we got what we got, we get to open up about ourselves in ways the rest might not otherwise come to know.  Although.  Mike, if you ever get something that *isn’t* model-train-related, or Orville, that’s photography-related, we’re all going to keel over in surprise.  And if I get something that isn’t knitting-related, for that matter, the rest of them will.

So many stories out of those parties…  Conway asking a new member of the group, trying to make conversation, how many children she had.  I thought, Oh, Conway, don’t!…while her face clouded over and she stammered, “We got a…late..start…” Poor man, he had no idea.

Turns out she was about three weeks along with her miracle of a baby boy and had no idea yet. That innocent conversation had let us in to see her pain, making the shared joy later all the more intense.

And there was Virginia, the matron of the group, gone now.  She always had something funny.  A pig cookie jar with a sensor that oinked loudly when you opened and reached into it–I ran out and got one right after the party: I had young children, I could hear that thing across several rooms, hey, it made a great Mom alarm!

Somehow my children didn’t love it quite as much as I did.

One year Virginia got herself a mirror.  It wasn’t terribly big, and we were thinking, okay, a bit big for purse sized, but whatever.  She took it out of its wrappings very carefully, not letting us see the box, sliding it out against herself–that was odd.

Then she held it up.

And the canned laughter began. It had a light sensor in the back so that as soon as you lifted it up it set off the ha ha ha hee hee hee ho ho hooo in an endless loop till you put its back down flat.

My dad has a wonderful sense of humor.  I knew he would love it.  There was still time before Christmas, and again, I ran out to copy Virginia.  (I got my husband one too, which is why I could photograph it; it’s got to be ten years old by now and it still works.)

I didn’t want Dad’s mirror to break en route.  So I filled a plastic grocery bag with styrofoam peanuts and put it at the center and put the bag at the center of a box I was shipping to my folks.

Mom and Dad got it and thought, oh what a cool way to package things!  You don’t get obnoxious styrofoam bits all over the place when you try to pull the presents out of the box!  Dad carefully took that bag out and set it aside to re-use to pack his brother’s presents.

Come Christmas Day, I called my folks, dying to hear their reaction to it, and they said nothing. I finally said, Dad–did you like your mirror?

What mirror?

And then, Uh oh…  Um…  Let me call you back!

He went looking and found that bag still there where he’d been packing things up, somehow it hadn’t made it into my uncle’s box after all.  No surprises by then as he unwrapped it, but hey.

They held a dinner party not long after, and Dad quietly placed that mirror on a shelf a bit to the side to see who it would catch and whether they’d warn the next guy.

And boy, did it.  Good thing his friends have a sense of humor.   Yeah, I confess. I put him up to it.  But then, he could have bagged it.

————

*Ed. note: She was 11 at the time; I was turning 13.  I’ve forgiven her. Honest.  But I still get to tweak her–sisters’ rights and all that.

At church.  There was the new daddy proudly holding his tiny child at this season of celebrating the birth of the Babe.  There was the daddy of the twins, surprising me by telling me his boys were already 16 months.  How did that happen so fast?

There was an unexpected announcement that Ann was in a coma in the hospital.  My first thought was, she misses her son. She misses her husband, gone several years now.  And oh, how I will miss her–we all will.

But you never know.  She and I have compared tough-old-bird stories from time to time with a laugh.   You never know.  It might not yet be her time, and hope is a strong and tangible thing at the edges of life.  I wonder if the nurses at Stanford taking care of a tiny and frail old lady know who she is; I believe she was one of the original nurses there when the place was new.

They are rebuilding most of Stanford Hospital to enlarge it and to comply with the stronger earthquake codes, although I think they are keeping the beautiful architecture that faces the patients coming in the doors.

The old gives way, and the pages turn in the Book of Life.

But they stay attached at the binding.

This is Friday as I type. Well, sort of.  By extension.  I’m too wired to sleep (although, the time stamp’s an hour ahead of me.)  Anyway, my husband suddenly said to me tonight, Tomorrow’s your birthday and we have that thing at church going on then; would you like to go to Flea Street Cafe tonight?

Asking someone who eats if they’d like to go to Flea Street for dinner is like asking someone who knits if they’d like some qiviut.

Even when I saw the side door unlocked and thought in puzzlement, when did I do that? and locked it on our way out, it didn’t dawn on me.  Richard said later that he’d unlocked various doors three times and I had locked them all.

He managed to walk out just behind me so he got that last one after all, and quietly texted “going!”  He also got permission from Phyllis and Nina in case he needed it to persuade me–I did want to go to Kepler’s after dinner, but I really wasn’t up to it and he easily talked me out of it.

“SURPRISE!!!” The house was full of people.

Okay, I should have seen that one coming.  And I did wonder if someone would do something Saturday night. I most certainly didn’t expect them to do it Friday night.  I now understand why my husband kept trying to tell me all the way home that I was actually already 50, by any reasonable argument, while I was telling him he was just jealous that he was an old man while I was a youthful 40-something-er.  He even had the audacity to tell me that by Chinese counting I was 51.  Nuh UH!

I had no idea.  And they could tell, given what my kitchen looked like.  Not a clue.

A great time was had by all, and it is now Saturday, so I guess it’s true: I’ve tumbled over the hill and joined my sweetie into fiftytudinousness.  Thank you for the amaryllis bulb, Richard.  (Ed: Oh, wait, that one was from Alyson, I’ve been corrected.  Thank you, Alyson!)  Thank you for the flowers, Nina and Phyl. Thank you everybody for coming and for the cake and the veggies and the mulled cider and the chocolate and the apricot flan and the fruit pastries and the…

And you know? Richard passed on the dessert menu, but Jesse at Flea Street, after coming out to say hi to this pair of longtime customers, sent out four dark chocolate truffles anyway.  (Jesse! Those were the BEST EVER–THANK you!) …yes I ate my two, I couldn’t miss that, that’s part of why I skipped out on Kepler’s just in case, Crohn’s blahblahblah–SO worth it…

But my Richard said no to ordering dessert at Flea Street Cafe. THAT is when I should have been tipped off.  Totally.

Don did look up my blog a day or two after  he got home from Trader Joe’s. He did read my entry about him and his beloved wife, who passed away November 11th.  And then he asked me if I would read the part of that entry about them at her memorial service the coming week.

I said absolutely–that he could hold it at 2 am and I’d be there in her honor and his.

And then my Crohn’s went bonkers.

When it’s like it was last Saturday, a single swallow of even water can create an effect like a bad case of stomach flu; fats make it worse. (An aside–I wouldn’t mention that here, except that I want to explain to the several kind people who offered me the cake that was chocolate in memory of Don and Amalie’s wedding cake back in the day.  I did think it was a wonderful way to celebrate her. It was hard to pass it up.)

But I was going to that celebration of life, and there was no way I was going to let a little thing like Crohn’s stop me.  I did give him a heads-up just in case, but I was going.  It eased up enough, and today, (thank you dear God!) after being extremely careful all week, I got to go hear stories on one of the good influences and good friends of my younger life.

I did have to chuckle at one woman’s asking me, before things got started, if I’d met Amalie at the Senior Center.  I didn’t tell her I was only 49, although part of me was tempted to grab onto that number and dangle it in protest, as if it weren’t 364/366ths of the way towards its expiration date.  I mean, I know the hair’s gray and that there are good plastic surgeons in California, but… Too funny.

I loved the story Don told of when he proposed: “Will you marry m”YES!!!”  He chuckled and said it was exactly like that.  To which I wanted to say, well, of course; Amalie knew a good thing.

Don, am I allowed to share the one about her not coming out at the “Here comes the bride” music being played in your friend’s living room because she was still trying to decide which wedding dress to put on?  The friend popped her head in the door, Amalie asked which one looked better, the friend pointed to the one on her (because, um…) and exclaimed, “THAT one!”

I hadn’t thought they had any children, but then, there weren’t waterproof hearing aids to wear at the pool back in the day; they had a son who is clearly as gentle a soul as his good parents.  He noticed that other people had someone to sit with whom they knew, and I did not, so he sat across a table from me and we shared a bit of the day together.  When I struggled to hear, he was entirely patient with that.

His good parents raised him well.

I dearly wish I could tell his mother that in person.

Although, in a way, I think I just did.

After writing a year and a half ago that we hadn’t had any gopher plants come up in years, this summer a seedling somehow popped up, so now I can show you what they look like.

Next, these cheerfully declare each year that December is for green and yellow in California.  They’re just starting to bloom, and they open up in the light each morning and then pull the blankets over their eyes at night. They totally charm me.  And if there should be a freeze, the plants look for awhile like all is lost–and then they grow right back up and bloom all over again, declaring the season theirs and not to be wasted.

My kind of plant.

I was on my way to the post office today and pulled over to snap what picture I could get, curious that one pond in the marshlands here was full of birds (enbiggen to see them) and the other had none in sight.  For whatever it’s worth, the one big fire we had in town last summer was at the city compost heap, that long low mound in the upper right.

I have a fondness for gophers, and I love how this last picture resembles the fur on one.   On the other side of the street and down a bit from where I pulled over to snap the baylands, there was a gopher mound.  One that made me laugh, albeit a tad ruefully, for its sheer ambitiousness: there was a paved bike path.  Then a grassy strip, then the two-lane access road I was on, then a busy freeway with eight lanes’ worth of pavement, and the mound was between the access road and that freeway.

I wondered how many times, tunneling under the path and then the two lanes, the gopher had tried to come up for air or to see if it could finish its tunnel yet and had hit hard pavement with its paws or head.  Nope, that doesn’t work. Keep going.  It had finally made it all the way to where there was soft dirt on top and green growing things and new flavors of roots to chew on.

Good thing it could go back to where it had come from.

I got a message out of the blue yesterday from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school graduation.  Turns out she’d been looking for how to contact a classmate I’m in touch with who’s been quite ill and who I’m sure was thrilled at being offered pictures of them in first grade together.  Then today, another long-lost classmate sent me a hello too.  I tell you, in great delight: you CAN go back where you came from!

It’s kind of dangerous to post pictures of things friends have made for me because I can’t possibly fit everything in here–but it is all appreciated.

From my friend RobinM, quoted with permission:

“This morning I heard an interview with singer Tom Jones.  Members of the radio audience had submitted questions.  A woman said she had been to lots of Tom Jones concerts; no matter what mood someone was in when she went to the concert, she emerged with a smile.   What made him smile?

He said that he had been bedridden for a couple of years with TB.  He used to look out his window to see kids playing by a lamppost.  He told himself if he could ever get to that lamppost, he wouldn’t complain about a thing.  He’s never forgotten it.  What makes him smile is to sing and see the smiles on the faces of the audience.”

I loved this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html It states that someone had studied the effects of being happy on others: a shared guffaw, a smile, a thoughtful act.  I’d have been curious to follow them around to see exactly what their methodology was, to see for myself whether the presence of the researcher had contributed to the positive expectations: whether people felt they had to show the stranger that the kindnesses of their friends was important.  Curious.  But either way, they found that the ripple-on-the-pond effect goes out to three degrees of separation to people who didn’t even know nor see the originators, and that it can extend up to a year.

I would guess that it actually goes far longer than that, although I’m sure it depends on how you define it.  After all, just think of someone who went out of their way to do something uncommonly nice for you, and doesn’t it lift your spirits years and years after the fact? That teacher who believed in you.  The friend who gave up her time to listen when you needed it.  The stranger who smiled hi in passing on the day you most needed it.  That provides motivation, years after the fact, to go and do the same for someone else.

We knitters have an edge in all that.  What we make and give is a tangible reminder of how we feel about someone, a way to bless them over and over and over, bringing a smile to their face as they put the shawl to their back or socks to their feet, feeling warmed and thought about.

That’s powerful.

And hey, Jasmin, with the Crohn’s and lupus flares going on, I put on that second pair from the right today. I didn’t get to take you up on your hot cocoa offer yesterday, so I carried you around with me all day here instead.

Thank you all of you and to every person who comes to read my blog.  Much appreciated.

Suffering from writer’s blog, and then I was surprised when the doorbell rang just now, rescuing me: Jim,  (written about here, here, here, here, here and here–he’s Nicholas’s dad) holding a sweater out sheepishly.  This was clearly one of his favorites, not to mention it’s pine-green-wearing time of year anyway; it’s the second year he’s brought it to me.  I assured him quickly before he even asked that I’d love to mend it for him and that it would only take me five minutes or so.

But notice I didn’t invite him in for those five minutes, and I’m pretty sure he was on his way to work at the university anyway.

What I didn’t want him to see was, yes, I can do a pretty good job of mending a small hole in his sweater–but often after several passes at it.  Take matching yarn and dissect one ply from the rest to have a thin enough strand.  Thread needle with it (is there any question that I’d have yarn?) and weave up and down, recreating the missing stitch while connecting it to the still-existing ones. Pat self on the back for doing a good job, check it from the right side to be sure, grumble, carefully undo work so as not to make the hole bigger in the process, rethread needle, try again.  Have the single ply shred due to lack of twist from having been freed from its mates–undo, try again.  And so on.

That’s the part I would just as soon skip having an audience for.  So.

The sweater looked in good shape otherwise, and I was surprised when I looked at the inside to find I’d mended not one but five holes the last time he’d brought it by.  I finished mending today’s and held the thing up.  Right side out again, you really couldn’t tell; I was pretty pleased with myself.

And then I saw it.  Oh, *that’s* going to leave a mark!  About half a dozen stitches and rows’ worth of a mothbite, probably a carpet beetle’s at that size.  I tried. I really tried.  Hey, Jim, did you know that you can throw an old sweater in the washer and dryer several times and then cut it up into really useful hotpads? In green, to match your Christmas decorations!

No, I’m not ready to tell him that yet.  Writing this gave me my required five minutes of throwing up my hands at it, and now I’m ready to dive back in. Undo, ditch the baby alpaca–it has too bright a sheen to it for the wool for that big a space, it calls too much attention to itself–go find the cashmere/cotton that I used last time that’s a closer color match, and go try again. I can make this work.

Marguerite‘s mother spoke in church recently, detailing what her daughter had gone through, thanking God and every member of the congregation for their help, their love, and their prayers. For all the encouragement and hope that always seemed to come in at the moments it was most needed.  It was her daughter’s birthday, and her mother wanted to celebrate her good health out loud with us.

As she spoke, Marguerite was everybody’s daughter. She was already everybody’s friend.

Having given him my card with my blog address, I’m not waiting till tomorrow to post this. I want to wave hi now.

After my lupus diagnosis, starting when my youngest was two, for several years I swam Monday through Friday at the CAR pool, CAR being an acronym for the Community Association for Rehabilitation.  It was a very warm pool to help those with arthritis and it was indoors, which was absolutely necessary with my new sun-sensitive disease.  You could only swim there if you had a doctor’s prescription to get in.  So everybody there had something going on and everybody knew it.  We looked out for each other.  Often, if someone didn’t show for awhile, people would go checking on them to make sure they were okay.  This is where I met Jonathan, who was one of the lifeguards and who is now an assistant professor at a university in Singapore (ie, if you follow that link, his story did come out well in the end.)

There was the time I lost a roll of film out of my purse there and didn’t know it; it got found, and the only way to figure out whose it was was to develop the film. Since I took the pictures, I wasn’t in any of them and it didn’t help them any; so then the staff showed them to people coming in until I went, Oh! That’s Steve and Tobie! Those are my photos, sorry about that, how much do I owe you?

It was pictures of their wedding.  Tobie is half Hawaiian. Steve, it turned out, was a dead ringer for the young husband of one of the lifeguards and there had apparently been quite some consternation when those pictures came back from the shop–I think they were hiding them from Michelle-the-lifeguard just to be sure.  There was a huge sigh of relief when the groom in the pictures turned out to be someone completely different.  Too funny.

Then there was the time one of the other swimmers mentioned that he liked to bake, and I told him of a bizarre cheesecake recipe in one of my cookbooks: Oobleck Pie, for the Dr. Seuss story.  Honey lime avocado cheesecake with a wheat germ crust. Did that sound Marin County or what?

The guy asked me for the recipe. And then he actually made it.  Didn’t touch it; just brought it to the staff and presented it to them as a gift.  Heh.

I walked in the door a few hours later, and one of the lifeguards pushed that seasick-green dessert at me and told me, “This is *your* fault. You have to eat the first piece!”

Oh my.  Well.  Once you get past the shock of the first bite, it was actually pretty–okay, at least.  They had too much fun watching my face as I ate.  Yes, I’d say it’s pretty good; here, you have some!

So that gives you a little background on the place.  There were no strangers there.

There was a delightful couple there, Don and Amalie, a generation older than me but younger than a fair number of the regulars–as a young mom, I was definitely the baby in the crowd–and they were gregarious, funny, and the life of the party there.  They were essential to me as I learned how to cope with my very changed life: they had both had strokes at quite a bit younger than most, and they were perfectly cheerful about life and clearly quite in love with each other.

I remember telling Amalie once about wanting to buy some mohair yarn that was in the most perfect-ever color a yarn could ever hope to be.  It had been discontinued, so my chance to get it was a one-time thing and I knew it.  But I was highly reluctant to spend to get it.  She looked at me, and with a wisdom that I knew came of experience she had and I didn’t yet, told me, “It’s only money.  Money can be replaced.”

I bought that mohair, and it became the ribbing, collar, and cuffs as well as in the diamonds of my Kaffe Fassett coat.  Amalie made it happen.

When we decided to remodel our house, they invited me to come over to their place to show me the work they’d had done to help give me ideas, knowing that the only way to know how to do a remodel is to already have done one, and of course nobody goes into it having that.  They’d done a lovely job.  They had pet birds that I got to meet, too.

John, my baby, was I think in first grade when I quit going there: the local Y had opened an indoor pool and offered a family plan for what I’d been paying for just me.   We just couldn’t afford both plans.  CAR lost. It was terribly wrenching.

John is 20 now.  I ran into Amalie a few years ago: she was sitting in a scooter, waiting for a bus.  I didn’t recognize her at first; her hair had gone completely snow white by then, and I didn’t expect her to be in a chair.  If memory serves, I was walking home from the car repair shop, so I happened to be walking along the busy street where she was.  We had an impromptu visit that left me realizing how much I missed my old friends at CAR, wishing there were some way of having a reunion.

I saw a letter to the editor in the paper once, noticed the name, and exclaimed to my husband, Oh cool! It’s my friend Don from CAR!

Fast forward.  Michelle and I ran a few errands today, and as we got in the car after the first one, she apologized for taking so long at it. Not a problem, I quickly assured her.

Later I told her I was so glad she hadn’t been in a hurry.  The timing!  Our next stop was to Trader Joe’s for some goodies for her to take back to college that she can’t get out there.  I saw an elderly man in an electric wheelchair…

…and thought, could that be?  Don?  Nahhh.  If it were Don, Amalie would be here.  (Radiating thoughtbeams at him, Turn. A. Round.  Turn. A. Round.) Okay, that didn’t work, so from the next check-out line over, I said his name loudly, figuring that if it wasn’t him the word would simply vanish into the general hubbub of the store.

A little more volume the second time, “DON?”  Some part of me somehow just refused to be deterred, and I thought, what the heck, I’m in it now, so I said his full name loudly.

That did it.  Don turned around. It WAS him!!!

He couldn’t immediately place me, and that was no surprise; I’ve certainly aged.  My hair is completely different, and instead of being the mother of young children, I’m the mother of four 20-somethings.  But he was as sweet as ever and certainly willing to hold a conversation with someone who clearly knew who he was and was so glad to see him.

I reintroduced him to my tall Michelle, telling him she was four years old when he’d first met her.  We chatted a little, and I think he got who I was.   Then he opened up and told me, “My wife passed away a few weeks ago. It was very sudden.  It was very unexpected.  She…” He stopped.  “She didn’t suffer.”

My heart went out to him.  “Oh, honey.” I told him, “I’m so sorry.”  I told him how very glad I was to see him.

While I thought, I am SO glad that today of all days and this moment of all moments we ended up in this store and that you did too.  And somehow in the lines right next to each other right here.  I am just SO glad.  Dear God, thank you.

And Don, I look forward to the next time I get to run into you.  Take good care of yourself, y’hear?  I need you to.  When my own life was upended, you and Amalie are the ones who showed me how to cope.

I teased Ann at church today: I liked her red necklace.  I told her it looked like she’d brought her own snack to church, just to make sure she didn’t get hungry–it looked like a string of licorice.

Ann, sweet elderly lady that she is, guffawed.

I know her grandson and his wife; they have two little girls, one shy, one I can sometimes get to laugh or smile back at me.

I know Ann’s daughter, although, not so much; she visits often enough that I’ve had the occasional conversation with her.  It would take me awhile to think of her name.  But Phyllis knew it, and we know each other certainly by sight and by friendliness, and as Phyll and her husband were bringing us home from the airport Monday night, they mentioned that the woman’s husband had very suddenly very unexpectedly died.

He did *what*?  Ann, I could see; she’s of the World War Two generation and pretty frail. But her thin healthy son-in-law?

Ann’s daughter was there in church today, and I went up to her and told her I’d heard and I was so sorry.  She hugged me back.  I told her we’d been away–Baltimore, Vermont…  that I’d only just found out.

Where in Vermont?

And it turns out she’d been where we’d been, just a month ahead of us.  Burlington, the Ben and Jerry’s plant, the teddy bear factory and the Lake Champlain Chocolates next door.  And, get this, she got to eat one of those cider doughnuts over at Cider Hollow.

I haven’t been where she’s been in her loss.  But somehow it was gratifying to her that we’d been where she’d been when she was having a good time.

A few more pictures:

This is Jill at Kaleidoscope.  If you ever want to support a really nice LYSO, and you’re shopping online, and you like really nice yarns and soft yarns and quick delivery, I highly recommend her and her shop.

And I had to throw in this Ben and Jerry’s shot just for fun.  Euphoric stuff indeed.

Saturday night two weeks ago after Stitches was over for the evening, Karen and I went to the Boogie Knights concert benefiting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Tommy Fund.  Kate in the middle here sang.

(Okay, I have to do the designer thing here and add, Karen’s wearing the original Water Turtles shawl–we looked for more turtles at the Canal, but it was just the wrong time of year, I guess; Kate’s wearing her Kate shawl, no, the pattern’s not out yet, and Deb is wearing her Michelle shawl. Deb and I wrote to each other and compared notes and supported each other as our kids were going through their teens, and my Michelle is the same age as her Kate, so knitting that pattern for her seemed just the thing.)  Note how the lights above them look like a halo glowing out from their heads, centered particularly on Kate’s. I quite like that. It fits.

Okay, this one’s for my family: this is what the old homestead looks like now that the remodeling and painting is complete.  It’s built into the hillside; from the back, there’s California-like high and long window space all across the back looking out on the woods.  The house has been turned into a small private assisted-living facility in the middle of the neighborhood by the woman who bought it.  If I were elderly and infirm, looking out on those gorgeous woods every day is exactly where I’d want to be.  There’s now a large wooden deck out the living room with sliding glass doors stepping out onto it.  Perfect.  I debated knocking on the door and telling them about the cute chipmunks under the carport who will cautiously take peanuts out of your fingers if you hold still a very long time, and the raccoons, turtles, foxes and deer in the backyard.  But I let it go.  I have quite a few memories of possums landing in the trashcans and unable to get back out: you should see the teeth on those things.  Dad would tip the can over on its side, whack the bottom with a broom to make it unfriendly in there, and go back inside where we would watch till the thing waddled out of there.

A few photos from the trip, with more to come:

Amanda aka NHKnittingMama.

Karin, who gifted me with the black baby alpaca that became my friend Amy’s shawl, holding Lucy, and Kristine, Lucy’s mother, who took Jennie some Ben and Jerry’s emergency room medicine.

Paula, wearing her spindle-spun Blue Jay shawl in an absolute perfect imitation of the original, color-wise, with Sue, and that cute tall guy standing behind her.

Joan, who lives in Vermont and whose blog is called knittingbytheocean.  My daughter, when she moved to Vermont, described it as being like California without the ocean (and with real weather), so Joan’s blog name has always made me chuckle.

My sister Carolyn, who met me at JFK Airport during our layover on the way home.  It took her as long to get there as it took us to fly from Vermont, even though she lives in Manhattan.  She scheduled her son to fly home to coincide with our stop and we had a wonderful, albeit all too short time together.  But at least I got to see her!  And I did not risk missing my flight this time, given our four-hour layover.  I snapped this picture as she was answering a call from him saying his plane had just landed.

This is a shot my childhood friend Karen took near the Potomac, looking up at Swain’s Lock at a point where there’s an overflow release for the C&O Canal.

The spot where I fell through the canoe, several steps away and looking the opposite direction from the above picture. Yes, that’s straight down.  I knew you’d all want to see the spot.

Yesterday was the signing at Kaleidoscope Yarns in Essex Junction; I’ll add pictures in here when I get home.  My fellow bloggers came: Karin drove all the way from Albany, NY; Paula came from Massachusetts; Amanda and her husband and son and then Sue, who sometimes sends me New Hampshire pictures since we used to live there, came from New Hampshire; Joyce was missed; Kristine and Joan came from closer by, and my mind is being terribly ungracious and blanking on someone–I’m sorry!  Jill hosted us with warm smiles and homemade bread and cookies.  Books were signed, stories were swapped, and a great time was had by all.  I would add links if I knew how to open a second window on my daughter’s Mac.

It’s humbling in the extreme to have people–old online friends, to be sure, but still–take that kind of driving time and make that kind of effort to come to let us meet each other in person. I hope I lived up to their expectations, while feeling like, no, I really can’t do anything as wonderful at all as they did by comparison; but I am so, so grateful they did.  Thank you everybody, and thank you, Jill.  

Off to tour the Ben and Jerry’s plant in a few minutes…

 

Greta and I are old college friends who hadn’t seen each other in 17 years, and we arranged to meet at JFK Airport during a layover.  I left my husband guarding all our carry-on stuff–and my Kaffe Fassett coat, to top it off, more than any one person should have to carry–while I went out of the security zone to have a chance to catch up with my old friend. I carefully kept my ID and boarding pass with me, taking only my purse. I promised him I’d be checking back through in time to spend the last full hour with him so he could go buy lunch, take a restroom break if he needed it, etc etc.

All well and good, till… I got a not-quite-frantic-yet IM message from Richard: they’d just changed our departure time to 45 minutes earlier, ie boarding quite shortly, and they’d changed our gate to one further away.  He’d had to move everything, and I needed to hurry NOW.  Oh goodness!  How can they do that!  Gotta run!  Greta waved goodbye as I tried to go back through security.

The boarding pass had been in two pieces barely connected.  Somehow between stuffing it in my purse and then stuffing it in my pocket for handy grabbing, I’d lost the top half.  No good.  Can’t let you through, so sorry, lady, no the flight won’t wait even if your luggage is on it, sorry.  I got sent way over to the luggage check-in to get a new boarding pass (they let me go to the front of the line–thank you JetBlue.)  Then back to security.  Everything was far enough away that I was running.  Which gets too dramatic, with me suddenly in acute need of air and my heart not happy about it.  They grabbed me a wheelchair.

The wheelchair lady was in absolutely no hurry.  She’d seen the original boarding time and couldn’t understand my hurry, and nothing I could do could talk her out of it.  I tried to take a deep breath.  In the end, I got there with just a couple of minutes to spare, but it was just too close.

And then the flight was so turbulent there were no snacks nor bathroom breaks allowed.

Richard forgave me, but it was a near thing for a few minutes there.

But I did get my Greta time.  Yay!  Was it worth it?  You absolutely betcha.

Note which spouse is typing this.