There was one summer evening at Purlescence probably two years ago where Sandi and Kaye had a big bowl of huge strawberries set out for the nibbling. They belonged to an organic farmshare and it was the peak of the season.

Those strawberries tasted like the ones my family drove an hour to a pick-your-own place near Camp David to get when I was growing up–and nothing like the grocery store’s. Wow. I went home and looked their supplier up and the demand was greater than the supply; new customers were not being accepted.

Saw something today and finally went looking again.

I’d wanted for a long time to know what a heritage-variety Spitzenberg apple tastes like; I’m not going to plant a tree that’s a question mark.

Our first Full Circle box comes next week. Spitzenbergs will be in it. I can’t wait.

p.s. Hat, finished, scarf, finished, baby dress, finished, baby blanket, finished. Happy Aftober!

Knitting and all the happy anticipation of a beautiful blanket for a coming granddaughter is fun. Sitting icing your hands afterwards for twenty minutes, no stitches, no turning pages, no clicks, not as much. So as I iced I was doing the math in my head.

Sixty-six rows in the last three days. Two hundred eighty-eight needed altogether, unless I decide to add another 16-row repeat or two past where I’m currently aiming for.  But as planned that means I have 75 rows to go.

My friend Afton recently threw out her annual challenge to all the knitters she knew to finish a project or projects, something you’d been wishing were done, before the end of this month. It looks like I’ll make it. Aftober here I come!

(Edited to add, I was thinking it’s been taking about eight and a half minutes a purl row, about nine a right-side row, but–scribble scribble–that’s a guess and it would come to 87.3 hours for the project. Yow! I really don’t think so, 45-50 sounds far more likely, but I do feel better about how long it’s been taking me.)

(Edited later to add some more, that original timing was when I had the flu. Healthy, it was five minutes a purl row. That’s more like it.)

A gentle touch on my shoulder from behind to get my attention as she came in the room. I turned and gasped, “Francie?!”

Francie! Twenty years and we still recognized each other. Okay, the context of being at church helps, but still! Our children had been little together, mine about five years ahead of hers and Ken’s. Ken had grown up here, they had lived here with their first baby, then second, and then had moved to where she grew up.

New Zealand is a little bit far for a quick drop in and visit.

Turns out they had since moved back to the States, just not this one.  But for whatever reason, they were here just for today and were hoping to see old friends and we were very happy to oblige.

Turns out also that a woman he’d grown up with was in town just this weekend too to celebrate her mom’s 84th birthday–and there she was. Good times.

I said to Francie, Do you remember Conway and Elaine? (I knew Ken would.)

Yes!

I told her briefly how our son met and married their granddaughter.

NO! she grinned. How cool!

Yes! It’s very cool. I get to see how much my grandsons resemble Conway and I just love it.

I told her how my grandmother wrote her autobiography in 1970, the year I turned twelve, and about the colonel she said she and Grampa had recently met who showed up in Korea and said, “Soldier, I don’t know what your name is but it ought to be…”

“Why yes, sir, that’s exactly what it is, sir.” (My uncle, named after his dad, thinking, Who is this guy?!)

And that colonel was the great-uncle of the man I would later marry.

Give us another few generations and maybe we’ll marry off one of ours to one of Ken’s and Francie’s. If we’re lucky. (Writing it down now like my grandmother did so the two families can all laugh over it come the day, right?) You just never know.

(Updated to a daytime picture that does justice to the socks.)

Debbie was coming all the way from Fairfield for a quilt show and sent me a message: Purlescence was having an eighth birthday party tonight and that would be afterwards, so could we meet up there?

And so we did, and we found ourselves a quiet corner a bit apart from the crowd and talked for over two hours, swapping stories, catching up, belonging in the best way that friends do, a too-rare moment together. I adore her to pieces.

She reminded me of something I had utterly forgotten: she had asked me awhile back what color socks I wished I had.

Oh blue, definitely blue, any blue, wait wait wait you don’t have to…! (She wanted to.) Well then no time pressure ever and if it ever happens I would love it and if it doesn’t don’t ever feel guilty.

She had me try the first one on and it fit as if I’d been next to her through every stitch. We both cheered! She finished the very last bit of the second one right there on the spot (I loved it, that would so have been me, too) and ran the ends in, then made me take the first back off my feet–it’ll be stinky, I warned her with a grin, you sure, it’s been on that foot now, y’know–and she ran the end in on that one, too. And I sat there with the prettiest socks on in the whole entire yarn store, prouder than anything and just amazed and happy and grateful and wow. Thank you Debbie! There’s a lace pattern curving around it and I’ll try to show it off better later.

I have very happy feet.

I got asked about a month ago if I would teach a how-to-knit class at church tonight. Sure!

Come the time to go, I was tired, I was grouchy, mostly over worrying about someone I know who had a brain tumor taken out today (wistfully cheering on Karen’s brother Paul from too many thousands of miles away), and I wasn’t at all sure I was even up to going.

But I went. Boy am I glad I did.

Sue to one side, me to the other, five newbies willing to give it a go and we were off.

I had just said something about different knitting styles but they all make the same thing when Sue happened to walk out of the room and so the woman she’d been sitting next to brought her work over to me: let’s see, is this the right way to hold the yarn?

I laughed. “Sue taught you so I can’t help there at all.”  Then, “Wait, wait, come back here” as we all cracked up.

One person who came in later took immediately to this casting-on stuff, just got it. A natural. But then when I said okay, now here’s how you knit the first row she was astonished: “You mean I wasn’t knitting?!”

“Yes you were knitting, that’s the first part of it.”

She gave it a try but gave it up. I was like, blink. What? But you’re intuitively good at this, I saw! Maybe later, says she…

Meantime, another who had struggled stitch after stitch after stitch trying to remember which way the yarn goes which way the tip goes no not that way oh right–persevered. Kept at it for an hour till she was sure she had it and was making good progress.

I told them that the last time I’d taught a class like this at church, one woman two weeks later came back to me to say she’d made a baby blanket and two hats already.

They looked at me wide-eyed. No no I wasn’t saying they had to do that–but rather, you can get good fast if you keep at it.

Someone else had picked up yarn and needles so I wouldn’t have to run that errand. Which was very kind of her–but after our little group had been working their scratchy-acrylic Red Heart for awhile (really? They still make it like that? I had no idea. I didn’t say that though), I had them fondle my Malabrigo. OOOOooooooohhhhh.

I explained, This is what keeps knitters knitting.

They totally got that.

Wanting to be sure they really did have it and not to lose any progress, three of them proposed on the spot to start a knit night–on, thankfully, Tuesdays, meaning I can go too. The plan is scarves for foster children.

I had a blast. And this is only going to get more fun. I’m so glad I didn’t just throw in the towel and leave it all for Sue to teach alone.

Little boys are wonderful. This just totally cracks me up.

A note was sent to the ward chat list this afternoon in hopes of reaching the right cellphone before everybody was gone from the church.  A five-year-old was very sad about having lost his new purple clip-on tie.

And then about five minutes later, Tie found!

Eight feet high in a tree.

I sent off a, Is it okay that I laughed? Do you need to borrow a ladder?

It’s okay and it’s all good, she wrote back, John jumped up and grabbed it.

Their little boy was still saying he had no idea how it got up there.

After several false starts and a whole lot of stitches the hat is begun.

Okay, that’s my obligatory bit for the day. What you really want to read, if you haven’t yet, is Stephanie’s post.

If you already did you know that her sister-in-law lives in Madagascar and that once a year she flies home to Canada and buys all the yarn for the next year. (I. Cannot. Imagine. A woollessly-enforced cyclically-stashfree life? All planning no sudden hey-I-could? Yow.) Likewise, once a year she gets to give out all those things she has knit in happy anticipation of sharing her love in ways that will stay when she has to leave, waiting, waiting to be able to give  out that wealth of knitted happiness.  A sweater’s sleeves that were made for toddler Lou with memory of his arms around her neck in a hug, as Stephanie writes. The new baby in the family who needed warmth against the Canadian cold…

And that was the suitcase that went missing July 31st.

After her trying every possible method of extracting it from the airline and then giving the okay to her sister-in-law, Stephanie finally put the word out to the knitter world at large last week.

I know I’m not the only one who said prayers. I also believe in a God who answers anonymously through the actual doings of people to encourage them to look out for each other, and sometimes there’s simply someone out there who needs to know enough to act on a hunch or enough to know to do some looking. They just have to get the word.

Whatever, however.

That suitcase came home to Canada today.

A year’s worth of near-daily work. Safely home.

Y E S !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I snoozed through most of the first session. I tried.

I was feeling much better during the afternoon one and knitted through most of it–except for a few minutes there when the phone rang, checking first, and then the doorbell did. Glenn!

He was here for a business conference. He moved to New York City a few years ago and he wanted to stop by and say hi while he could. I waved through the window while Richard went outside to chat and to meet Glenn’s girlfriend; there was no way I was going to expose them to my germs. Sometimes it’s just not the day.

But at the end we did open the door between us, and standing well away from each other exchanged at least some actual greetings before they left.

And I…have run out of purple Malabrigo that’s wound up. I need to get up the oomph to wind the next ball tomorrow; today there was just no way.

Tomorrow I need to make the call to my GI doctor like the ER doctor had wanted me to do. This morning was worse, not better, and she made it clear that, even if I didn’t want to hear it, she thought the Crohn’s symptoms were actually caused by, y’know, my having Crohn’s. Flu does that.

Or maybe it will all clear up together. I’m hoping.

So, today.

My oldest got hit by a taxi. She assures us no serious injuries, but yow. I’m grateful it wasn’t worse–while fighting my mama bear instinct to want to scream at the guy, What did you think you were DOING!!!

Ahem. And. At noon, Michelle showed up bearing hot chocolate from the shop where we’ve been meeting up with her and her cousin many a Saturday morning, wanting to make sure that, flu or no, we didn’t miss out. I couldn’t drink much but what I did was great and the rest is in the fridge in happy anticipation.

And. The doorbell rang, 5ish. A friend from church bearing dinner, and she had absolutely no way to know I’d been craving pasta and cheese and Italian sausage and a good substantial sauce all day. No way. I hadn’t even said it to Richard. And yet–there it was in her hands: a very good ravioli, lots of sauce that appeared to be homemade (I very much want the recipe) and with a lot of Italian sausage in it, and I could not have imagined up better than what we were offered. Susan! We both had seconds, and for me this week that’s really saying something. Happy us, there were leftovers.

Carrot cupcakes, cut-up watermelon, multi-seed-and-grain bread (that last would have to be for Richard.) She took the time to make that and bring that while arranging her 98-year-old mother’s funeral and affairs and I’m just kind of blown away.

And.

I knitted. Not a lot, two 45-minute segments where I was going v e r y slowly but making noticeable progress on the interminable purple cousin scarf. (Yes it’s still going on.)

Because today was the first of two days of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, two two-hour sessions two hours apart and tomorrow likewise at 9 and 1 our time, and knitting during Conference has always just been a given, and Conference projects always have their own bit of meaning (even if that meaning more than once has been, while I was doing it, finally something that sat me down in my seat long enough to finish this!)

I listen and get my priorities back in gear and feel spiritually charged up while at the same time, and peripherally to it all, create things to make someone out there happy. ‘Oh, I made this one during Conference’ makes it a happy thing indeed.

I think Sunday afternoon we shall have a purple scarf at last and the beginnings of the hat to match. See? That’s the other thing Conference offers: an abiding sense of hope again.

I even started to forgive the taxi driver. I still hope he got caught, if only so he won’t repeat the errors of his ways.

Uh, yeah, so, I’m still working on that one. Good thing there will be more knitting time  spent listening to wise and loving older people telling their stories and of their trusting God’s love come Sunday.

Today is my sister’s birthday, and what she wanted was a photo of the house we grew up in.

Took me a long time to find the file and then I just spent an hour emailing her the roll. (Does anyone still call a photo sequence a roll?)

Hey Marian, there’s one here I missed, of looking down the street from the house, and further down in that post, one of the back yard.

And just for fun here’s a memory of the DMV in Maryland.

The photo here is of the C&O Canal, early November ’08. I used to walk there with my friends all the time, growing up; when Richard wanted to take me there for a walk and a picnic on our second date I knew he was a keeper.

A side note. Alaska went through a 9.1 earthquake in 1964, the second highest magnitude ever recorded and that lasted about a minute. So did today’s 6.2 near Anchorage, and I’m guessing that’s a good part of why my daughter’s building at work was on rollers. She gave me a quick heads-up that everybody there was fine, even if being on the seventh floor was…entertaining?

My thanks to people who build’em right.

“It’s a little wispy here. Do you mind if I cut this?”

It looked fabulous when Gwyn was done, and, having caught up a bit–I’ve known her since she was born–we gave each other a hug and I asked her to please never ever move away.

She laughed. No immediate plans to, thanks.

No longer does my hair pin me for that nanosecond while I quickly (oh right, here you go) lean forward in the driver’s seat to release it so that I can look in my side view mirror. That’s where I tend to say okay, we’re done here: cut!

Saw yesterday’s cowl recipient at church and stopped her a moment, just to make sure: would she prefer some other color? Because if so I had a ton of yarn and I…

She stopped me right there: No no she LOVED the bluegreen in the one she got, it was perfect! It could *never* be better than that one.

And the enthusiasm in her voice said this: it wasn’t just about the color. It was about the moment in which she’d received the thing from my hands. Never take it away or diminish it, it was the only one with that memory and so it was the best there could possibly be. (And she truly did love that color.)

She has no idea how much she gave me. Again.

An impromptu get-together of cousins at Richard’s aunt’s this afternoon up in the redwoods in the mountains. I think that’s her cherry tree in front on the right, for perspective on size.

And then back downhill for a brief stop and then back up into the mountains going in the opposite direction to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday.

Where we ran into friends we hadn’t seen in years, properly celebrated the birthday boy, and a grand time was had by all.

One of those, wow, we squeezed a whole lot of living into one single day and wow is it late.

Oh and: I tucked a cowl I’d knitted into my purse, having felt that I should be ready to give–someone, no idea who–something from my needles tonight. Okay, then; I was ready for whoever it should turn out to be, since I was definitely going to see a lot of people. Madeline Tosh blue/green handdyed softness, my Ft. Worth yarn bought from the MadTosh owner herself.

It just didn’t… I wondered at first and then I simply forgot about it.  Didn’t even think of it. It stayed tucked away. Which is fine, but, huh.

We had to stop at the grocery store on the way home, one last thing to do today because we’re having company over for dinner tomorrow, and there we ran into a friend. She and her family are new in the area, here on Sabbatical from one university to another; we had hit it off with them right away and they’ve borrowed a few items they didn’t have in their temporary place. You need to know what the temperature of something is, here, use our laser thermometer, glad we could help. Your son needs to weigh things by the gram for a school project, so do I because of my knitting–here, use my scale, c’mon over.

Guess who loves that shade of bluegreen?

Well then.

She was so absolutely thrilled, the kind of reaction that makes it so many many more projects will get made in happy anticipation of the next moment like that.

And a new and strange town got a little more like home.

I sent off a card to Cliff, Don’s son, several weeks ago. He took such good care of his dad; we should all be so well loved in our old age. I knew that Don had lived in a senior community and I wondered how that works when a not-yet-55-year-0ld inherits the place.

I also know that sometimes when you’re grieving a loss, often people tend to assume a few months later that life has gone back to normal and that they shouldn’t remind you of your missing loved one and reignite any pain.

As if you could forget. As if you didn’t remember every day.

And so, me, I try to send out an ‘I’m thinking of you’ later on as well.

Today it came back to me weeks after I’d sent it, stamped unforwardable.

He had snailmailed me letters in his dad’s final illness, giving me updates, letting me know. Very much appreciated.

And now, who else would remember that day my doorbell rang and Cliff was standing there with Don grinning like crazy from the passenger side of the car out front as his son held out new pans for me to make them chocolate tortes in? Surprise! After I had complained in this space that my old pans had leaked and smoked up my oven.

Or how they saved up produce clamshells to keep my fruit trees from the squirrels. It is halfway through September and I still have a few last Fuji apples ripening, safe.

Cliff, if you read this, I baked tortes tonight because I was thinking of you both–grinning, remembering that day, thinking how much fun Don would have had with Sunday’s post.

Thank you, and may all be well with you, wherever you are now.

Today had its fair share of concerns. It’s hard when someone we love is going through a tough time.

And yet there was more than that to the day.

Hangpans, or, handpans, if you haven’t heard of them: they look like inverted abelskivver pans or conjoined-twin woks that got hit by meteors. Or something. But the music they make! The article says if you want one you have to write a letter by hand explaining why they should consider making one for you and then you must pick it up in person. In Europe. I can just see them wanting to meet their recipients in person after all their work.

The inventors refuse to mass produce because the quality could never be matched by a machine and they refuse to charge what the market would bear–they simply want those who love music to be able to afford to make music.

Knitters understand.

And.

I went to the dentist and there on the wall was a large new-to-me photo of him and his grown son surrounded by a lot of very young faces in an environment that was definitely not typically American. So I asked.

He glowed with pride: his son’s work was to create schools in Africa. The picture was taken at an orphanage there.

The children all looked well loved and cared for, and I do not doubt that they got dental work done if they needed it, although the man was not one to pat himself on the back.

But the Ebola epidemic has kept them out since. They look forward to when they can go back, and as he told me that, there was no fear in his face.

The love simply mattered more.