You know how, when you have a bad bug, things just kind of slide for awhile there?

Yeah, and it was getting to me. And so tonight the kitchen floor is scrubbed, the sink is scrubbed, the dishes are done, the mail is tossed, the yarn is more organized, the table’s cleared with a fresh tablecloth–oh oops, well, it was, and even some bathroom cleaning got done. And then I finished the cowl that was on the needles.

I think I’m getting better.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee announced the very happiest of news and I guess I just got hit hard with spillover nesting instinct. Works for me.

I can just picture the first time she gets to snuggle that little one. I am so happy for them all and it just makes me head over heels with my own grandchildren all over again. There is nothing in the world like a grandmother’s love for that brand new person. There is nothing like that moment when they’ll first get to see her eyes looking back into theirs.

Except for the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that, and all the years after that. To life!

And now for some pictures.

Richard the younger and Kim threw a Halloween party for their friends’ and her sister’s kids and rented a bouncy house for while the grownups visited. Makes it easy to keep an eye on them all while keeping them happy. The costumes got shown off, with Hudson wriggling in and out of his several times.

We were warned before we left that Maddy has firm ideas and she does not allow her aunt to pick her up and not to be disappointed, that’s just how it was. So it didn’t feel quite so bad when I got in the car next to her at the airport when we arrived, hoping she would recognize us from our Skype chats, that she looked at me like how dare you and cried. When I offered her a flamingo fingerpuppet, she arched hard away and screamed inconsolably. A little bit of soft soothing singing? Okay, not so much. Time to focus elsewhere and let her have her space a moment.

She might not talk much but she understands plenty. So after lots of rounds of peek-a-boo after we got home that got her smiling, I asked her questions. Maddy? Do you want to…?

Do you want to…?

Do you want to…?

It wasn’t long before one of those questions was, Do you want to hold my hand? to go outside and inspect that newly-arisen bouncy house, and there was her arm reaching up towards mine. We walked out hand in hand.

Maddy? Do you want me to pick you up?

And she let me pick her up.

Do you want to go in the bouncy house? (Photo from the umpteenth go-round later.)

She wanted to try to climb in herself, but the entry leaked and sagged a little and made it hard to push off from. I helped her up.

And from there she let me pick her up quite a few times. Several of those times she asked for Ma Ma or Da Da and I took her straight to them.

She decided I was quite alright.

I kicked off my shoes and got in there with the kids for awhile.

After being bounced all over by the bigger kids, suddenly it was just Hudson in there with her (and me, but I was sitting down just then) and it became clear that Maddy had just hatched an idea. A personal challenge.

She stood up and walked careful step by uncertain step down one raised blue row that wobbled a little underneath her. Hudson bounced. She did not fall down this time when he did. I held still for her. On the other side of the wall the bigger kids were leaping onto and down the slide and it was a little like balancing on Jello.

She turned, wavered, almost fell but didn’t, and still staying in that one lane she walked back the other way faster. Then she turned at the end again without a flaw and without touching the walls and this time she ran joyfully back–she could do it! She could stay in the lane and stay upright! I mentioned it to Kim, who was just then coming over, so she could know why Maddy was so proud of herself and share in the moment.

Cousin Hayes (yes that Hayes, and he’s totally fine long since) is in the orange shirt. He and Hudson, three months apart, are best buddies.

What was amazing was how energetic Hudson was: he’d had a 103.5 fever and a trip to the doctor the day before, and the kids had warned us in case we wanted to cancel the trip.

Had it been anyone else, but no. I grinned, I don’t scare off that easy!

We’re both slightly under the weather today. We earned it, and we’d do it again any day any time.

Yesterday was a high-energy day that started two hours early and I’m still a bit wiped, so, just another quick airport story for today.

Waiting for the flight home, there was a tired young family next to us: a mom, a dad, a small infant, and an older brother, I would guess five. Or maybe he just got finished with being five?

The wait was long and the parents tired and that little boy needed a distraction.

I did a quiet dig through the fingerpuppet stash… Let’s see, pink flamingo, I don’t think so, a bright green lizard with white scales, yeah, that one. That’s just right. I leaned over to the mom and asked if it would be okay to give this to her son?

The three of them lit up (the baby, who was nearly asleep, was unimpressed) and as she handed it to him the little boy was as if he had waited his whole life to own this very lizard. Maybe he’ll grow up to study these? He was so taken with it that I wondered what his future self might become. Everybody has to start somewhere.

“Happy Birthday,” I told him, to make sure his folks understood that this was not a loan.

The mom blinked. Turns out it WAS his birthday, and they’d flown to Legoland for the day to celebrate it.  (And I imagine to make a big deal over him to try to make up for the sudden shift in the family dynamics with the arrival of his baby sister.)

“Oh cool! Really Happy Birthday!”

He examined it, he held it up, he wore it on his finger, he made it into a character. His playing was respectful of everybody’s space, from the baby’s to everyone in the crowded airport; he was a delightful little boy, and with just a little prompting from his mom he remembered to tell me, “Thank you!” And he watched my eyes to make sure that it really was his. It was. OH good!

And then I told his parents why our flight was delayed an hour, why the whole day’s worth surely had been after our first pilot had erupted the oxygen masks by accident. They did a startled ohmygoodness! and then the guffaw that that whole thing so deserved, one borne of the same thought I’d had that, hey, we’ve all done something bone-headed in public like that, glad to know we’re not the only one. And maybe a little glad that ours wasn’t quite to that scale.

And then they sat up a little straighter, chatted a little, and best of all didn’t seem so tired after that.

I wish I could tell that pilot that. And that it was okay.

Didn’t knit a stitch, but at least I got one of the butter hanks wound.

And then suddenly I have an unexpected reason to knit it up by tomorrow night–or the next afternoon, if I want to block it with a hair dryer going.

That’ll teach me.

Or rather the second two=one is bigger than the first two=one.

Ten years that white cobweb merino/silk had been waiting for me to wind it up. It had arrived in a hank (never again, not that fine, not that many yards) and I always knew it would take a lot of time to wind it up by hand. It did, snagging on itself much of the way. But it looked better with Diana’s soft-butter-yellow than anything else I put next to it and that got me to finally go do it.

So I wound those two strands together on my wheel. That sets in twist going one way and I need to make more to put them together, the wheel spinning the other way so as to restore balance so the fabric to come from it doesn’t torque. Like twisting your swing on the swingset and then letting go and watching it twirl till it comes out straight again. Only in this case you’re making the thing thicker with each stage.

Now the question becomes, do I three-ply the two-plies I’m making or settle for just two bobbins per for a four-ply?

I’m drastically revising my earlier assessment of her cone’s being a month’s worth of work: there’s nothing that says I have to use up every bit of it right this minute, just that I make something good and pretty and that honors her while she can still get to see that happen.

All I had to do was start working with that yarn and it started telling me how I was going to do that. Now I’m just working out the details.

Bins and bins: Diana was giving away her yarn to all of us.

She had one big cone specifically squirreled away for me, though, since I’m a spinner, and she went in the back room (with me taking the measure of every step as she went, having a good idea of what it took out of her to do that and wishing I could rush over and get it for her) and she brought it back out: 602 grams of a cobweb weight that she knew was natural fibers, and it clearly was, but she wasn’t sure if it had a little silk mixed in or not. The label had fallen off the inside of the cone and she said it had always been quite faded. She still had it–she’d tried various electronic tricks to try to copy it to come out darker but no go.

It was, at the least, a very fine merino wool if not cashmere. Very soft, and certainly not a synthetic. Not baby alpaca. I would guess probably yes on the bit of silk mixed in but I’ll be able to tell a little better once it’s actually running between my fingers; lots of experience there.

I told her I had cones of cobweb cashmere in a natural light brown that I could ply it with and that the two would compliment each other very nicely. But I’ve also thought since then that it would go well with white, too, of course, so I have to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up–and get to it, and quickly.

I’d like her to be able to see something made out of it. That much yardage could easily become a month’s worth of work, I know, and it’s nearing Christmastime knitting-wise. It’s nice stuff, though, and she would so love that.

“I wonder what color it’s going to be when you’re done,” said Richard.

Well yeah, I could dye the coming hanks, yes…

If I do that, he said it first.

Edited to add, I told her I’d gone to Andy Mariani’s farm to buy the figs and she just beamed: “Don’t you just *love* that little store?” She was so delighted that they’d come from there. I was a little blown away that she knew, and loved that she loved the place, too.

A friend who is in hospice care is having a potluck tomorrow for people she dearly wants to see, and bacon-wrapped cheese-stuffed roasted ripe figs sounded divine to her.

I wanted them done right–and so I drove down to Andy’s Orchard for the figs. Besides, I’d been looking forward to going since just before our trip East. Oh wait–I sewed the “Created with pride by…” tag on the outside. Classic. Okay, let’s fix that, alright, now we really are ready. Go.

I got my figs, and I almost/sort of pulled off the equivalent of a doorbell-ditching of a handknit hat.

I forgot to put care instructions with it, so, to Andy: it’s extra fine merino wool, spun a bit tightly so as not to pill. It was a mill-end cone, which meant I pretreated the yarn in hot soapy water to get the mill oils out. Still, it could shrink more, so the thing to do is to hand wash it gently in tepid water as needed. Just a bit of suds in the sink, put it in, let it sit a bit, take it out, put it back in in tepid rinse water and then lay it out to dry, shaping it back in place a bit if needed.

Thank you for feeding my family and loved ones so well with such great fruit!

While we were back home.

Karen and Richard and I went to go see our old friend Scott, whom she and I grew up with. He’s an avid birder, and I often think of him while enjoying my Bewick’s wrens, favorites of mine and a life bird of his, wishing I could share my little flock and somehow help reestablish them on the East Coast: they’re extinct there but plentiful in this area. And only in this area. All those songs those tiny birds sing!

It is safe to say his health issues are more than a match for mine.

It was so good to see him and hard to leave when we had to later that afternoon, but Kathleen would be waiting and this was a time in her life when she particularly needed her friends present when she could see us.

We turned on Waze (which routed us around more than one accident in the rainy days we were in town), pulled the car away, turned a corner towards the left, another left–

–and there was a Cooper’s hawk. Fully in view, close to the street, an actual, perfectly-placed, of-all-the-things-it-could-have-been, a Cooper’s hawk on a large low stand-alone branch of a tree in someone’s yard.

It silently watched us as we continued on our way and away.

And everything was going to be alright.

The beautiful bride and groom and the reason for the trip East. My generous childhood friend Karen put us up and enjoyed our marveling at rain, real rain, real East Coast rain and oh that depth of green everywhere!

Meantime, our mutual close friend Kathleen’s brother, diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer three months ago, rallied and somehow hung on yet a little longer.

We got to spend the time with her she’d needed, when she wasn’t caretaking, and his hanging on helped her feel permission to come unload on us; it’s hard and we knew it and we needed to comfort her as much as she needed that comfort.

It was a rare gift to be able to be there for her. My niece could never have known when she scheduled her wedding that her timing was exactly right for someone she’d never heard of.

And in possibly related news…

Friday, Richard and Karen and I picked up Mom from where she was staying and it having been ten years since the folks had moved away, we drove Mom around old haunts for the afternoon.

My old high school, where she had worked: it was gone and a completely new building was there now, still red brick (another familiar essence of I’m-home re the style–bricks crumble in quakes so there’s very little of it in California) but so very different.

The house I grew up in that Mom and Dad had had built for them: it looks like a single story at the front but opens into light and warmth at the back, built into the hillside dropping behind it with Californian floor-to-ceiling windows upstairs, and downstairs, windows nearly that big, taking in those beautiful woods.

It had been remodeled and looked very different–but I had seen it during that process and she hadn’t and I knew how much she would love what they’d done with it. Outside, those plants covering the side screens alongside the wheelchair ramp to the front door were new to my eyes.

I tried to talk Mom into knocking on the door with me. She just couldn’t quite.

It was to be a six-patient assisted-living facility, which the folks did not know when they sold the place. Turns out it never took off and now is simply rented to a man and his son.

Which we found out from Barbara when…

We pulled the rented navy Camry into a driveway on the side street up the hill. The lace curtains had not changed but Mrs. N. wasn’t home, so Richard backed back out and Mom directed him across the street and up just a bit.

Where Barbara was. She had seen us walking up to that first door and then pulling into her driveway and was wondering who and what on earth was going on.

And then I knocked on her door.

Her daughter Elaine opened it and staggered backward–and I think I did, too. “What are YOU doing here?!!!” she exclaimed in thrilled disbelief.

She lives in Tennessee and she knows I live in California and Mom in Salt Lake now. What I didn’t know was that this was the weekend of her high school reunion. With a December birthday I had just missed being in her class, but still we knew each other most of our growing up. We had reconnected on Facebook but hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in decades and I was absolutely the last person she expected to show up right there at her mom’s door. Or my mom either for that matter but there we were.

We had a great time. Richard and Karen got included in it, and Kathleen’s brother in the conversation; no, Elaine didn’t quite remember that name, but she wished him well in his current journey forward.

And Susan, I have to tell you: I have particularly enjoyed how perfectly placed each pointillist dot is on a cowl I made out of your yarn, Burnside Bridges colorway, evenly balanced everywhere. Elaine admired that cowl, too, and as the conversation and our time there was winding down she mentioned again how very pretty it was.

“I have another one, this is yours,” as I took it off my neck and offered it for hers.

A gasp, “NO!”

Again, “I have another one,” I grinned persistently.

She was grateful, she was disbelieving, she loved it, she was thrilled–and she made me want to go knit for everybody everywhere right now. I had needed that, which she couldn’t have known, and that was her gift back to me. And it was no small thing.

I do have another. In Koi Pond, not quite the same colorway but close. And, because I didn’t find where it had fallen out of the suitcase while I was packing till after the trip, it’s, uh, not quite actually finished yet. Close enough to claim it, though, right?

And I think that’s why Kathleen’s brother was, and as far as I know, is, still with us: it was his reunion, too. There was a chance to see his old friends one last time who might be coming into town, if they came to him. I so hope they did.

In the end, not even the badly coughing woman last Friday at the audiologist’s who came up to ask me about my knitting before I pled being immunocompromised and begged off could stop us: by Tuesday I was well and we hopped on that plane, with the encouragement of everyone at the other end.

Last night, on the second leg of our flight home, the pilot himself stood at the front of the cabin and announced, “Everybody’s on. Let’s leave early. Let’s get there early.” And so we were out of baggage claim and on the freeway before we were even supposed to land.

Meaning we fell into bed at 3 am our time.

A whole lot happened in between. I am so very, very glad we went.

More later.

The sore throat finally caught up with me and Michelle drove me in. The good news/bad news is it’s not strep. If I need a doctor’s note for the airline next week, I’ve been offered one.

My brother’s daughter is getting married back home in Maryland and I badly want to go.

And on a more somber note, a childhood friend’s brother’s funeral is most likely also to be there next week, his prognosis measured more in hours now–and I want to be present for her sake, too.

This is why I work harder at avoiding crowds before traveling. I am not going to be the one who should have stayed home but instead made everybody sick; when knitting just takes a bit more oomph than you’ve got, there’s no way I’d inflict that on others. We’ll just have to see how it all plays out.

I am totally going to plagiarize my friend Dannette’s toddler on this one. (A side note to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee: he was the baby you held in San Francisco.) She needed chopped nuts, and you know there’s nothing a little boy would rather do than be allowed to pound things–and with a grown-up’s tool no less. And to be helping Mommy and Daddy with the baking while doing it!

And thus the gleeful picture she posted, the rubber mallet a blur in his happy hands, with the word: Pismashios!

The annual Labor Day block party happened today because that’s when the people who organize it could be there.

Having forgotten to buy cream, I didn’t bring a chocolate torte this year, but I figured homegrown black cherry tomatoes were a decent trade-off, with some Durkee sauce on the side and a plastic knife to scoop it out with and a note explaining that they go together.

It’s one of the great old traditions of summer. My dad tells me he learned about Durkee’s (there should be an ‘s there. There really should) from Richard’s great uncle (probably before we were even born, right, Dad?)

Three times I saw someone bending over my bowl and wondering out loud, without reaching in, Are those tomatoes?

I did not go on and on about their having been picked in the early morning for peak sweetness, yadda yadda; I just said, Yes, and homegrown, too!

A few got eaten. The Durkee was left untouched. Leaving me wondering, is that combination just an East Coast thing? Don’t these people know how good this is? I couldn’t find it in any stores here and had to order a six-pack online, so hey, I had plenty to share if they’d let me.

Okay, searching for it to offer you all a link, I got this:

“FAMOUS SAUCE
This popular tangy sandwich spread has been around for over 100 years! It was even served in the Lincoln White House!”

With a picture of the bottle.

But when I searched for info on that actual item on the manufacturer’s website, it seems that after hanging in there since the mid-1800s, it… Is on the list of all their products but isn’t under Sauces and it isn’t filed under F. Wait, don’t tell me they’re not making it now!

Looking a little harder, I found this on food.com, along with a recipe for faking it:

“Eugene R. Durkee created the first prepared and packaged salad dressing called Durkee Famous Sauce in 1857. To appreciate his endeavor, it is important to remember this was created prior to refrigeration. His creation was carried west by the pioneers. Historians have found old, discarded Durkee dressing bottles along covered-wagon trails. Durkee Famous Sauce was even purported to be stocked in Mary Todd Lincoln’s pantry and served to Abraham Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War.”

The real stuff, as currently constituted (i.e. with soybean oil) is still on Amazon after all. Phew.

“A friend is getting into knitting,” my son texted. “Got any surplus fluff you wouldn’t mind passing along?”

Fluff being kid code around here for yarn, roving, raw fibers, the works. So I asked what colors they wear.

“Darker colors normally? Never seen him wear anything in a light shade, thinking about it.”

Yeah I was a little surprised and shouldn’t have been, but mostly I was just delighted, knowing just how much fun and even joy that person could be bringing into his life and others’ in the years to come; sure, I’d be glad to enable that a bit, here, just let me stash dive here a moment (don’t think he’d want that laceweight silk…)

Meantime: I read a week or two ago someone’s story of his squash climbing out of his raised bed, the plant within that bed dying, but where it had grown out to it had rooted to the ground and was still merrily producing new squashes. He wrote it to tell people who like to grow on trellises what they might be missing out on, but for me, it was a hey, you, water that new area that the plant had sprawled to, chasing the sun as it edged away from summertime.

So I started to.

And suddenly, after not producing a single new squash since July, there was a new one, and two days after that another new one and maybe they’ll even have time to mature before a frost (especially since they’re near the mango tree.)

And I found this description of parthenocarpy and maybe it explains how that second one has that huge flower still going while the new squash is already that big: as a seedless decoy, which would take less energy out of the plant to produce, to keep feeding the critters it needs to disperse its seeds while luring them away from some of the seeded squash so the plant has some chance of actually being reproduced next year.

We’ll see when we eventually cut into the thing.

Alright. So. Stash. Time to get to it more than that first quick glancing-over. There’s a definite dearth of manly superwash worsted around here, hmm.

There was a photo and a note on Facebook: Did anybody want… Free to a good home…

Someone else asked for the big red crockpot. I asked if the smaller one had been spoken for. (Much more our size anyway.)

It had not. I headed over. The doors at Purlescence are locked now but lots of work was going on on the other side as the place was slowly being emptied of its ten years.

Kaye carried the thing to my car for me and, almost there, threw in the thought of, You wouldn’t be interested in a toaster oven?

YES! I exclaimed a little harder than quite entirely reasonable, surprising myself. I had long wanted to be able to warm up just a bit of the kitchen for some small baked thing, but not enough to justify replacing my elderly cracked-plastic simple two-slicer. We don’t have a lot of countertop space. I had not wanted to want one and it all kind of came out in that one-word blurt.

She apologized that it needed cleaning, but I found when I got home that it needed very little. It’s cute. It’s a two-bagel-slice top with a pull-down door in front and not much more of a footprint than my old toaster, a total win.

But the biggest thing about the both of them is the bit of history she offered with them: all those Thursday nights, all those knit nights, they’d had these tucked away upstairs for a quick bite to eat.

So that’s how they’d made it through all those long days over all those years.

These appliances had sustained my friends so that they could sustain our knitting community and now I get to have them here with me. And someone else got to take home part of that history too, and I like that. I like it a lot.

And I love that I now have a toaster oven that kind of looks like an old jukebox.

I need to go toast me some toast. Anyone got a favorite slow cooker recipe? Chicken tikka masala, maybe?