I’m knitting all these peach and apricot trees and wishing for summer fruit.

So: take a bag of frozen fruit, berry mix, peaches, cherries, whatever grabs you. A typical one here is 12 ounces. Mix about a tablespoon of cornstarch (depending on preference, size of the bag, juiciness of the fruit after thawing–it’s all a guess anyway) with sugar. A quarter cup sugar with 12 ounces of tart berries begged for ice cream, a generous third cup sugar was too sweet for me and he thought it was great. But I interrupt. Sugar+cornstarch, then pour in your bag of frozen fruit and mix it all up really well in that two quart bowl made by Mel and Kris since you want to do visual justice to the goodness to come.

Cover with a plate and microwave. Stop and stir every few minutes, especially at the beginning. Remember that the cornstarch will thicken as it cools, especially if you put enough in but the amount really doesn’t matter all that much, you just want to make sure you get that fruit good and cooked.

Spoon it into pretty bowls. Mentally thank friends Kris and Mel again.

Take the good excuse you have right there for buying those Trader Joe’s cinnamon graham crackers that are so crunchy they shatter: break them up over the top of your bowl of what’s essentially now pie filling. Eat it before they get soggy.

(I’ve never seen an amaryllis quite like this before. I was going to take its picture outside but this is as far as it got.)

So it turns out the rules have been changed re those phytosanitary certificates: credit cards only. Which was the opposite of the previous rule and it surprised me because usually government entities in California don’t want the surcharges from the banks. If I could come back down, I was asked–or, she offered very generously, she could drive to my house for it.

It seemed a very small amount of money to waste that much of her time over and they were busy; I could come, no problem.

So there I was again.

I waited till she was done and then said, I don’t know if you’re allowed to accept it in your job. But I like to spend my Zoom meetings making simple hats that I don’t have to look at my hands for, and then find people to give them to. I’d love to offer you one.

I’d brought four to choose from, and she oohed and aahed over how pretty they were.

It looked like a work-from-home day for everybody else I’d seen the previous time. As we chatted briefly I bragged a little on my afghan project; she considered that a moment and said, It’s like a quilt, only in knitting.

I thought that was a really cool way to look at it.

But she said reluctantly that I was right, she wasn’t allowed to accept one. I tucked the hats away and said that I was going to think of her, then, when I looked at them.

With great fondness, too. I was glad I’d not only gotten to meet her but that life had offered us that little encore. All the best to her. And Ellen had gotten her tree safe and sound!

You’re their best but also worst nightmare, he told me over dinner.

Me: –?

Basically, he said, because I was a nice person to deal with–but could I imagine having to deal with every.single.plant.sent. individually?

Here’s what happened. You know they would have looked at me funny if I’d said she’s an in-person friend, but she is, and she lives in Oregon now. And she and I wanted to get one of those super-rare super-good apricot seedlings to her.

So I looked up what the rules are, because the last thing I would want is its being confiscated at the state line and destroyed after I’d nurtured and grown it this past year, not to mention the disappointment to her.

Oregon has a long, long list of banned plants you cannot bring in. That’s okay, California does, too–like the gorgeous understory-level mountain laurel that I grew up with that is a silent carrier for the Sudden Oak Death disease that began in the last 30 years or so, and they’ve discovered that the redwoods

I seriously had to stop typing a moment

but it’s true, Sudden Oak Death kills the ever-unkillable towering, majestic redwoods, some of which are older than Jesus’s time. We could lose every one. California has been throwing money at research to solve that and experimenting with tossing antibiotics around tree drip lines.

I’m not about to mess with Oregon’s forests nor crops. There are so many variables added when it’s not just a kernel anymore–I wanted to do this right.

Our county agriculture office seemed a bit bemused that I was so enthusiastic about my particular apricots–and maybe at my willingness to follow the rules? How many people do? But for respect for the redwoods if nothing else, was my point of view. Do unto others. Etc. (Maybe I was atoning for those kernels I did mail the last few years?)

They were certainly willing to help. No, apricots did not show up on the banned list. Soil was, though, and inspection for a long list of diseases was required.

They told me the fee for the phytosanitary inspection. No problem.

They walked me through my part of the forms: I was being an exporter because I was sending it out of the state. Yes write one box and one plant in that one box and how I was going to ship it. (Unspoken: because that’s so not what they usually deal with.)

Then just before I went there I had to carefully take the baby tree out of its pot, get rid of every bit of dirt bigger than the equivalent of a hole left by a size US 8 knitting needle without shredding the roots, wrap them in damp paper and then into a 2 gallon ziplock zipped most of the way for the transportation time, and I was off to San Jose. Across the street from the hazardous waste plant.

One of these things is not like the other…

They had told me they would prepare their form and mail it to me afterwards, shouldn’t take too many days.

Visitors were clearly rare. Signage was sparse. I climbed the steep stairs and went oh okay, there’s where I’m supposed to go.

You call via a wall phone with a number posted by the desk opposite, once you find it, and wait for someone to come out of the locked area.

I did and pulled out my knitting.

A few minutes in, someone came out to use the restroom across the hall. On coming back, she stopped a moment and asked, Was I making a cowl?

The secret word!

She told me with a big smile that she was a knitter, too, and you could just hear the capital in that K.

I told her, I miss Stitches, wondering if she got the reference; she instantly responded, Oh, I do, too! We were in strong agreement that someone had to re-start that business. There were so many of us! Clearly enough to make it worth someone’s while, and with that she headed back through the door I was waiting by, having enjoyed the conversation thoroughly.

I don’t know if that made the difference. I don’t know if word was conveyed by the five other people who went through that door in that time that I would not be antsy at the wait, to say the least.

All I know is that a new person came out that door, inspected my plant with its roots dangling nakedly in her hands and healthy as could be, she made me wait awhile again–and then chucked that thought, opened the door again, and invited me back there while she finished the form and double-checked with me on the name and address it was to go to.

I paid. I was done. It was done. I was free to mail it, just make sure that paperwork is inside because it could be opened at any point along the way and checked for that phytosanitary report and certificate.

I had been saving a long narrow box and the cushioning for it since Christmas.

Between yesterday’s full dormancy and this afternoon’s 64F, it had started to show the first tiny signs of spring and it could not safely spend three days in the dark.

They promise me it will be in Portland tomorrow.

Bonne Noel!

The other thing I did yesterday was to go to the Social Security office.

I officially changed to my married name with them years ago but the IRS never got the memo. Social Security always had it right, at least, and I no longer had to worry about the state refusing to cash the check for my driver’s license renewal. (Checks. Boy that *was* awhile ago.)

It finally tripped me up again. The Boomerbenefits.com person told me the only thing for it was to take my documents back to their office and walk it through.

The Social Security people told me to take the taxes under my full name problem to the IRS office, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Given Jean’s funeral, I went in the afternoon, a little afraid they would close promptly at 4 and kick everybody out who was still waiting. My previous experience had been back when W Bush signed the Patriot Act and messed over millions of women over how official their married names were or not: the databases had to match.

It was hours and hours in a building and part of that town I’d never want to be in again among people who really didn’t want to be there nor work there.

This was closer and much nicer–nothing fancier than a good paint job and decent flooring and no dirt, but what a difference that made, and they were much more efficient. And actively helpful.

But since I didn’t have an appointment there was still about a 75 minute wait. I pulled out my purple cowl project.

A woman about my age (I can just see her smiling on reading that) walked in, saw how closely placed the connected chairs were, saw that there were only a few individual seats here and there but it was all definitely going to be too close to strangers, and hesitated and nearly walked out.

I smiled, “I don’t bite,” and she chuckled, looked relieved, and sat down next to me.

We made friends on the spot.

Turns out she’d always wanted to knit or crochet. She had even bought a crochet kit for–I think she said a sweater project?–and she’d tried a few times to teach herself how to do it, but it seemed too much to master all at once and it had sat there for years.

I told her, sometimes you need to simply start with something else, maybe something smaller, and then come back to it.

She looked at me. And the small, make-time-useful portable project in my hands. Yes. Yes, that made a lot of sense, thanks.

Eventually they called my number, they called her number, and that was that.

I walked out of there regretting that I hadn’t offered her my name or email so that she could ask any questions or get help getting started; it was the crocheting that had stopped me from offering, it’s been so long I’d be looking at YouTube videos myself.

On thinking about it later I realized the difference would be that I only need to refresh the memory on what term goes with what and the rest would come right back to me.

I did mention to her that I’d found knitting easier on the hands.

The SS office’s website had warned that there was very little parking but I’d pulled in going, Four spaces?! There are only four spaces?! How does that work!

Turns out the rest of them were on the far side of the building, y’know, where I ended up finding the front door, too. Oh.

And so as I was wishing I could ever see her again, walking along the outside of what I now knew to be Windows 5-12 inside, a small red car about the age of my Prius slowed down.

And there she was, waving hello, glad to see me again, too. My face totally lit up and so did hers.

I really hope she gets her sweater and her new skills she’s long dreamed of. I think the chances just went way up.

People who grew up here. People whom I hadn’t seen in twenty, even thirty years and probably won’t ever again. A guy I dated briefly in college. (“Wally.” He looked behind him and didn’t see anyone he recognized. I pulled my face mask down, said his full name this time, and he exclaimed, Alison!”) My kids’ old middle school art teacher, long retired. My daughter-in-law’s dad and uncle, who grew up here, and her brother–we surprised each other.

Jim flew in, too, and played the organ. Ruth Ann flew in and played her violin: friends of Jean in her later decades. The chapel’s folding doors at the back were opened to make room for the overflow of people celebrating 98 years so lovingly spent.

The friend doing chemo for Stage 4 whom I thought didn’t come out in public anymore sat a few seats down from me: this, she had to be there for. She had grown up here and never left and people she knew came and what a reunion it was.

I mentioned to Wally that her brother had married someone I grew up with in Maryland. He liked that.

And of course, wait for it, there it was: the toddler great-grandchild who started to pitch a fit at the front and his mom reluctantly started hauling him out of there. A vivid orange octopus with eight i-cord-knitted tentacles and suddenly they were seated next to me near the back and happy and the mom got to hear the rest after all.

The final speaker was one of the twelve apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as he told us more about his beloved mother.

The room was full of people who’d known him as a boy and who get how he’d become someone asked to share the love from Christ with the whole world: it was his mom. Pearl Harbor survivor, third grade teacher, surrogate loving mother-figure to all.

And his dad, too, gone these many years now. Much was felt and said of his being able to embrace his sweet Jean again at long last.

I kept thinking of her all day that day, and wondered.

Her husband went blind from diabetes. He was on dialysis for years.

My kids were young and my lupus was new.

After reading Norman Cousin’s book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” I decided the author was right, I needed a new creative outlet. The smocked dresses I’d made my little girls–the arthritis meant I couldn’t do those very fine needles anymore.

But then what?

I was at the library with the kids when Kaffe Fassett’s first book about fell off the shelf into my hands. Glorious Knits. Sweaters and coats in dozens of colors (which I’m convinced were the starting point of the painted-yarns industry: all the color work but not the strands to untangle nor the ends to work in.) I hadn’t knit since college and couldn’t do anything like that in a million years but I was sure going to ogle those pictures. Especially the ones at a Dutch amaryllis farm.

Could I knit? With physical therapy help for my hands and big enough needles, yes.

I made a dozen Kaffe Fassett designs over the next few years.

But when I wanted something simpler or portable, having no idea how to do lace, I was making triangle scarves in plain stockinette. They worked up quickly and they were brainless. You didn’t have to haul fifty skeins everywhere. They always fit.

I splurged and bought a little bit of angora at the late great Straw Into Gold in Berkeley.

At church, Jean admired the scarf it quickly turned into.

It took her a long while, but eventually she made me a request.

It was not for a showy Kaffe Fassett, beautiful though those were.

Walter, she told me, couldn’t see–but he could still feel. Would I be willing to knit her a scarf like that? In angora? For him, for her wearing of it, for the softness to comfort him?

How could I not?

Jean, a Pearl Harbor survivor, had family gathered around celebrating her 98th birthday on Wednesday, a few days early. But it was time to be together now.

She quietly slipped away afterward to the waiting love of her life whom she had missed for so very very long.

They are together again. Their joy is so strong even I can feel it.

I was talking to a friend on Sunday. She was wearing a mask due to her husband’s health, which meant my hearing had to depend on my ears only but we did our best.

But one of the things she said was that, like us, her husband hadn’t signed up for Medicare because he had coverage through his work.

He was hospitalized. He had turned 65. His insurance refused to cover the hospital part of the bill on the grounds that Medicare should be covering it.

But nobody tells you that! I wanted to protest.

She also said that if there is a gap in your healthcare coverage and then you sign up for Medicare, you pay a fine–and she emphasized this–every single month for the rest of your life for that.

Medicare was insisting they had had a gap of two weeks.

They had not. But they had to prove it, and she spent hours each time waiting in line at the Social Security office and then the IRS office and then back to the SS one. She had to show them physical proof.

You know those medical cards you get every year from your insurance company? she asked me. SAVE THOSE. They are your proof that you had continuous coverage. Get an envelope, keep them in there, put it in a safe place, but never throw those away and never lose them.

After she got home she emailed me this link. Boomerbenefits.com. Because nobody knows what they’re doing when they suddenly have to decide on what to choose among the bajillion Medicare plans out there while insurance agencies cold-call and spam you mercilessly.

I started trying last year (not too persistently, because it was so discouraging and because I thought the work coverage was fine) to find out what the difference is between Medicare Advantage and Medigap plans and why one would want one or the other and what the difference in costs would be. That site has the point of the whole thing right there front and center: one makes you use a doctor from their plan, while the other lets you go to any Medicare entity whatsoever. That’s Original Medicare. You then pay a Medigap policy not to have to deal with the 20% co-pay bills nor (assuming you choose a good plan) the paperwork.

There are far more details than that but I’m just getting started.

Basically, for the first time in all these months I feel like I have a good source of information. Medicare’s own site was definitely less helpful as far as I was concerned.

So I thought I’d pass the good word on for those coming up on this soon.

We were visiting our oldest’s for Thanksgiving when she offered me some lupus-protective sunblock for the walk we were about to take with the grandkids: and that is how I found the lump in that upper socket.

I just figured a zit was about to pop in a weird spot. It didn’t. I mentioned it to the optometrist, who immediately referred me to the right eye doctor.

It has grown since then. Not a lot. It is harder. A little. But definitely.

They could not get me in before January.

All this time I’ve been ignoring it, going, it’s no big deal, I can’t do a thing about it yet if it is, things have always turned out okay so far so this one will, too.

The theory on that anti-tumor-necrosis factor that granted me these last 20 and a half years is that it could cause cancer about twenty years out, and since I was trying really hard at the time to still be alive the next day that sure sounded like a bargain to me. It was.

So it’s kind of interesting to find myself trying not to freak out after all this calm nonchalance now that the appointment is only two days away. I don’t know if I’m finally giving myself permission to feel the possibilities?

No! Because I said so. Look at all that yarn and plans (acknowledging that I have let myself down with a bit of a knitting slump of late) and hopes waiting on me. My grandkids. Time. I want all of it.

Just typing that out loud makes it sound pretty overwrought. Good. I’m quite happy to go back to the no-big-deal.

I just want to know–but when I do, maybe I’ll just want to be back to where I didn’t have to know yet, and I know that, too.

You know exactly what I need to do here: get those needles moving. Create some love to put out into the world.

Being told out of the blue today that an old friend has inoperable stage 4 cancer says that sometimes things turn out a very big deal and life is so fragile and you just never know. Love your dear ones.

Me, I’m looking forward to helping my oldest granddaughter in her pursuit of learning to be a lifetime Knitter with a capital K.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on….

I hoped to see a particular someone at church today and gift him with a hat in thanks for a kindness of his, but I found myself wanting to make extra sure he got a color he liked.

Turns out he was off visiting elsewhere–but so were McKay and his bride, only, here.

McKay grew up with my kids, so much so that when he ran into my daughter in college someone asked her later if they were seeing each other and she told them, No! That would be like dating my brother!

His family moved away when he was in high school; I was in the hospital when they left, which makes it easy to remember it was 2003, and I hadn’t seen him since. Although I did get to send him and his bride best wishes via Facebook when they got married.

He wanted her to see where he grew up.

And I had two Mecha hats, no sign of that other guy, and plenty of time to knit more for him. But only one time to be able to hand these two theirs in person.

And with that bit of incentive, the cowl I was working on got finished this afternoon (picture pre-blocking) and the next hat went from an unwound hank of good intentions to 2/3 of the way done.

You never know when you’ve got to be ready for anything.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all.

We had a spur of the moment lunch out with old friends, a great time, and a restless toddler at the next table where two couples were doing the same thing we were.

A panda puppet. Happy faces.

On a side note, if you take my favorite blueberry cake recipe, use Forager cashewmilk yogurt because the dairy-allergic kid is gone and it needs to be used up (but real butter because I can again), swap 2/3 c of the flour out for 2/3 c of almond flour, and sprinkle the tops with half the blueberries and then maple sugar and bake for 23 minutes, it makes eighteen blueberry almond maple muffins and they came out very very good.

(This isn’t the one, it’s just one of the many like it.)

What I wanted to make didn’t seem to matter: the same old same old Malabrigo Mecha in Teal Feather is the skein that jumped into my purse for the outbound flight. Clearly, it was the boss of me.

I was going to make a fancier pattern at least, but on the first row above the ribbing I found I’d goofed the stitch count for that. I didn’t have the patience to risk tinking back the stitches twice: seventy in plain stockinette it was. Again. No openwork for you!

It was a shorter flight than the one to Seattle so this hat wasn’t done when we landed.

We played with grandkids. The five year old challenged me to a game of chess–not that he really knew the rules yet but it was something the big kids did and he wanted to show that he was one, too.

His daddy did a we’ve-got-this, strode on over, and coached him on moving what where when. “Checkmate!” after maybe my fourth move with his youngest grinning at winning.

Back at the airport all too soon. Time to finish that silly hat. The last few stockinette rows, the decreases that always take longer than you’d expect, the bind off, and then–just do it. I wove the ends in, fished in my purse for the folding mini-scissors to snip off the extra length, and stuffed the thing back into my purse and finally, finally started the cowl I’d planned to make this trip.

Thus the hat ended up in the overhead luggage bin, well out of reach. The seatbelt sign never turned off. No one on our row but the two of us this time anyway.

Curbside, Uber gave us a wait time of an hour. Oh joy. Not two minutes later his phone buzzed again: someone had decided to take the fare and he was already doing the turn-around into the terminal. Yay!

A 2007 Prius pulled up to us. The man’s name was Jamal, an older guy. His accent was pretty thick but his command of the language was as good as any native-born’s from what I could hear; he clearly loved a good conversation and meeting new people and he was just a joy all around. From the back seat I watched the brim of his old thin faded baseball cap moving up and down and around giving motion to his words. Had we had a good trip? He asked questions, then listened to hear the answers like we were old friends.

He jumped out of the car to help get our luggage out for us.

I reached into my purse: “Do you like this shade of green?”

Confusion in his face.

“I knitted it for you.” Then to clarify, “I knitted it but I didn’t know who it was for. Now I do. It’s wool, machine washable wool. It’s for you.”

Our loquacious driver was suddenly speechless.

He took it in kind of a slow motion, eyes on it, feeling the thick warmth of the thing against the chilly air in the fading light.

It was as perfect a Christmas Eve scene as that little hat could ever have hoped to be a part of.

We wished the best of the holidays to each other and each other’s families with a wave goodbye, pulled our bags on up the walkway and away.

A crazy-busy nonstop runrunrunrunrun kind of a day like probably a lot of other people had today.

The teacher friend who needed homemade cookies for a party and was even crazier-busier than we were and had absolutely no time for it got handed plates filled with warm ones right out of the oven, courtesy of yonder daughter.

I think we’re ready?

There was a long string of kvetching back and forth on Nextdoor.com today over people parking in front of other people’s houses. It got pretty silly (and I wasn’t about to step into that.) C’mon people.

Back in the day, there was a kid across the street with a jacked-up monster truck. Bright red, huge tires, bumpers at window height (illegal now.) Couldn’t miss it. And for whatever reason he always liked to park it in front of our house and not his.

The fact that they couldn’t make any sense out of that I think is why it bugged my kids. Although I certainly rolled my eyes over it myself. It is safe to say it dominated the view out our front window.

So one day that truck was there and clearly the guy had had a good time because you could hardly tell what the paint color was for the layers of mud. How it got splashed that high I did not know.

One of my kids really felt that particular day that this was an injustice too far.

And then suddenly all the Sunday School lessons about serving rather than finding fault came back to me and I had the answer to that: hey, let’s have a conspiracy! Here, I told them, help me fill the bucket. Soap. Sponges. Do it fast before he comes back out. You with me?

They really got into this. YES!

I helped carry the water; they dashed out there and got right to it and made it their project. They started on the side facing our house where they wouldn’t be seen from his. Was it okay to climb that bumper to wash that window? They decided it was. They were giggling by now and having the time of their lives when Sandy next door, who had really been bugged by the guy’s parking habits herself, opened her door in surprise and asked, What are you doing??

Washing! Truck! was the answer. (With that kid agonizing to me afterwards, I sounded so stupid but I didn’t know what to say fast enough and that’s just what came out!)

Ooookay, and she went back inside.

There were still a few soapy/muddy smears here and there when they decided that that was as much as they were going to be able to get away with without getting caught and came in snort-giggling and smiling and anticipating. There was a lot of hanging around the window by the front door to see. And then, deliciously, the guy (18-20 years old or so) came out to get in his truck just like they’d hoped, and–

–wait.

He walked around it, completely befuddled. Who? How? What?? Huh. Well, okay, and without saying anything to anybody because there was nobody outside to say it to anyway, got in and drove off.

Memory says he parked it in front of his own house after that; I’ll have to ask my kids.

The biggest delay was the crowd of cars at the airport. I’ve never seen anything like. It was nearly 3 a.m. her time when we got home.

And so she ate an early dinner tonight and was ready to crash while we went off to a potluck with a white elephant exchange: each person was to bring one thing.

Pick a folded-up number to find out when your turn is.

A quart of honey made the rounds.

But when it was finally the hostess’s chance, she had seen which ones I’d brought and was the first to pick the small gold wrapping on the table.

She got a Malabrigo hat. Once everybody knew what those were the other got snatched up quick. I had a third tucked in my purse in case someone didn’t like the color they got: which means I quietly handed the host one at the end, too, as a thank you for a fun evening and the couple can decide whose is whose, but the hostess was so pleased with hers that he may have to do some serious cajoling there.

Or not.

I was reminded how much more of this I need to be doing–for my own selfish gratification if nothing else. I like making people that happy!

My mom called yesterday, blown away.

My best friend from high school lost her mom to cancer while Karen was a freshman in college. Her dad remarried, then passed away himself a few years later, and her stepmom was the only grandmother her daughter ever knew. She died in her 90’s a few years ago.

It’s the Christmas season. And there was a wonderful mother figure still out there from Karen’s point of view, one who was widowed just before the pandemic and after a long, good marriage. Reaching out just felt like the thing to do.

My folks had moved at retirement, so she made sure she got the correct address from me.

And now Mom needed Karen’s address for her very delighted thank you on those Lindt dark chocolate balls that she would never in the world have expected.

Man, I picked good friends when I was a kid.