The slant of the lowering sun, just in that moment of the day, makes the shadow look so much bigger than the real thing.

And yet sometimes you just need to grab whatever pushes you to get the thing done and we wanted it done. We’d had it years before, till college tuitions and the like got in the way. Now was the time. Chris-the-agent and I exchanged emails and details Friday till well after five till I told him, hey, go have a weekend.

There was a 4.2 (oh wait, they’ve downgraded it to 4) forty miles from our kids Sunday night. The earth was antsy and so were we. Several little ones on the Hayward fault–that’s the East Bay-side faultline that all their hospitals are built within yards of and I think their water mains, too. Tell the people of the 1950’s: science. It keeps you from doing stupid things. You don’t just bulldoze the cracks and call it the cheap land.

One of our outside five gallon water storage containers got chewed through by a critter; drought, I guess, I need to recycle that one. The ironic thing is, the Napa quake seems to have upended underground water into the creeks there that so need it.

I went through the pages of forms again, writing in details like the diagonal bracing we found in the framework of the house when we remodeled years ago–cool, that was better than current code and this is a sixty-year-old house–and we both signed the papers.

Then I called ahead and drove over.

Chris was one of the first people I met in California 27 years ago but he wasn’t in today. But they all work together and the receptionist motioned me to Sandy’s office; I remembered her well.

Except that’s not the name she said.

Me, hesitating a moment: Does Sandy still work here?

She, with a look of oh, you don’t know, then…  “Sandy died. She had cancer and passed in November.”

But…but…! I just stopped there a moment, stunned. I told her I was so sorry. I told her it was taking me a moment to process, and she nodded, understanding, and added a few details so I would know.

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t done anything. And she’s… Well crum. I mean, what else can you say. Crum. I’m sorry.

Finally, into Sandy’s office, where the new-to-me guy’s young children’s pictures were on the shelf and we got down to business. Tell me, what is this about not covering masonry. That means my chimney, right? Not just stonework? (Which I don’t have.) Chimneys are what break most, aren’t they?

They do. Which is why almost nobody covers them in quake insurance anymore.

(Oh lovely.) What if it shatters my solar panels as it falls apart? (Said while suddenly glad they were at a distance from each other.)

“That’s a gray area.”

(Color me concerned.)

And yet. An aunt whose house was a half mile from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta got the full value on her $350k earthquake policy, and she needed it all. A tiny 2.9 strong enough to wake me up because it was so close? Three in a few days in that spot. What would a 6 there be like? Or a 7? I don’t want to know.

The policy didn’t quite take instant affect at signing; the guy gave me the minute of the hour of the day. Three more hours now. Wait, now that I’ve been typing this long, make that two. Less than.

I am remembering when I flew to Maryland a few months after our 7.1 and, getting off the plane, I felt like I could suddenly breathe and it surprised me. I had not realized how much I had been aware of the earth not moving, how I’d watched for light poles swinging on overpasses–and there were a lot of drivers that even then simply wouldn’t stop for a light underneath a bridge, even if it meant someone else could zip around and ahead of them. And no one ever did. Silent amity and unanimity.

But in Maryland it was just plain ordinary oblivious life again, and eventually in California it was, too.

Almost.

But if you ask someone where they were in the Loma Prieta everyone who was here has a story.

I think that I’m going to feel that sense of exhaling again after the stroke of midnight plus one.

It hasn’t been just me; it’s been him, too, and to me the fact that my unflappable husband sensed the need, to him the fact that I sensed the need, between us that made it a done deal.

Our budget just changed a lot with that first payment, but someday it will look like a bargain indeed. Right now I keep reminding myself that, compared to what could be, the premiums? They’re nothing earthshattering.

There is a gap (still) in the six foot tall fence where the neighbors have been rebuilding it after taking out the last of the damaged old part there after our tree guys got done.

The framework is in place, a few beams have gone in, but the husband wanted to do the job himself, not hire some young’un, and he’s taking his sweet time.

They were married in 1956, she told me tonight.

Her longterm memory is still sharp for the most part.

I was watering my plants and saw them at the gap and stepped over their way. Very soon it was her and me chatting away, just the two of us, swapping stories as I moved the hose from time to time and marveling at how trees, like kids, grow up and blossom and bring forth after all this time. Well, some of them; I had her step over to my side to continue the conversation as I watered the pear tree over thataway–that one was still just a baby.

I showed her where it had been pruned to when we’d bought it in February vs where it is now–it’s more than doubled its height already. And when her husband had found out that their bush was shading it part of the day, he got that bush cut back to the fencetop just because. When I thanked him tonight he shrugged off all credit with a grin and a disclaimer of, “The gardener did that.”

(Yes, the gardener had trimmed a little last week, I’d thanked them for the extra sunlight, and he’d clearly sent the guy back to do more.)

This time she was able to process my stories as well as tell her own, and the thing not forgotten yet, she could ask a question or two of me at the end. That’s not always been quite so true of late but tonight it was and we were laughing and swapping and telling the punch line to the next tale and laughing some more and if any other neighbors were outside hearing us they were wishing they were having as good a time as we were.

It’s brought out the best in her.

Half a dozen times, as she always does, never remembering that she’d already said the very same words, she told me, “You know. This is so lovely. You know what we could do? We should put a gate between our yards so we could just step across and visit anytime,” motioning with her hands from existing pole to imaginary one the width it would have to be. It wouldn’t have to be big; we could squeeze through sideways–and she laughed at that mental image every time. “Our own little Narnia door,” I said. (She drew a blank and then forgot it before she could ask, that time.)

At last she said, “Have you eaten?”

It was nearly eight and I had an hour before. She had not yet, she said, and it was getting dark and a bit chilly; time for her to go in. Said with cheerful reluctance.

I stepped back to my side of the fence. We swapped one last story each. I reiterated that she was always welcome to walk around the block via the street come the day to just knock on my door anytime.

And then she went back inside to her patient husband, whose sociable and endearing wife had been entertained for awhile while he had gotten a break.

There is no rush to finish off that fence, the last part to be repaired between our yards, none at all–not on my side, and I don’t think on theirs.

If you get to Kings Mountain Art Fair a half hour before they close, there’s not much sun getting past those redwoods to worry about and you can park close in. (And you’d better, because you won’t have any time at all to sit around and wait for their shuttle bus.)

And yet people were still arriving, not just me.

All weekend, Mel and Kris had wondered where I was and if I were coming.

There’s a short video on that link of Mel creating a bowl like mine. I love it and I love what they create and best of all I love them to–oh wait. To pieces is exactly not the phrase to use here, never mind.

I had long wanted a serving tray in their pottery; they had two left. I bought a few more mugs, since we had found ourselves running low or out while the kids were visiting. A bowl, a gift for a friend.

Ohmygoodness. They had toddler mugs. Almost all gone.  Oh if only. I had just seen Parker handling one of the regular mugs in person just fine. Mel and Kris had previously told me this could be so, that their boys hadn’t broken things, and I’d answered, But they were raised by potters.

Parker raised my faith in the possibilities after all.

At the last, I decided I would wait till I see Mel and Kris again at a show in November so I can pick out one set all together. I think I’d still get doubles of each because, y’know, toddlers. That means I’d need six. Let the budget breathe a moment first and besides, they didn’t have that many that late in the show.

I intend to see them at the next one early rather than late. It’ll be indoors.

One young mom at church was telling me her two-month-old woke her up at 4 am. She happened to look at her phone while she was nursing him and had this shocked moment of Wait WHAT? Half an hour ago?!

She’d lived in California five years now and had never gotten to experience an earthquake.  (You want a Goldilocks one: not too hard, not too soft to feel, just right for being able to say you’d gone through one but with nobody getting hurt.) Even with an infant to wake up and to wake her up, nope; they’d slept right through it.

Seems the ones around here who did wake up all had bedrooms on an upper floor. At ground level like us, nope.

Still, a lot of friends and relatives sent us messages today asking if we were okay. I found a business card fallen on the floor and that seems to be the extent of it at our house.

This time around.

I was planning on writing about figs. Friends shared the bounty of their tree and my tall Richard helped pick a few higher-up ones for the others with his feet still on the ground. I always enjoy it when he does good simply by being tall–something he didn’t choose, it just is. Like the color of his skin.

I can no longer remain silent.

I haven’t mentioned the news of late because I felt nothing I could say could be enough and at the same time I simply wanted there to be one place on the Internet where people could rest from all that for a moment to read about, oh I dunno, mandarin trees and Costco shoppers playing falling piano to my roadrunner.  Or whatever.

And yet some things require they be addressed. I feel John Oliver has done the best summing-up so far of Ferguson, Missouri. Daily Kos, meantime, reports that Tibetan monks arrived there to represent for peacemaking, knowing that sometimes simply observing people often improves their behavior in ways that transcend the barriers of language.

The whole issue of the over-militarization of our police is being shown and borne on the shoulders of those who have the least but whose power is that they may yet change our nation for the better for what they are having to endure–the huge betrayal by those who swore to protect them, the betrayal too by those who give in to their anger late in the nights and allow the rogue forces to justify themselves.

There is the utterly innocent black man beaten by them before Michael Brown, who was charged with destruction of city property for bloodying the cops’ uniforms with four officers later lying during the deposition against their own signed statements. Enraged at finding they had jailed the wrong black man, they’d been determined to make him pay for it. There were video cameras everywhere there, as there must be in such places, and yet somehow no recording of it could be found.

One of those cops is now on the city council.

All those images, all that grieving for the human spirits on both sides of that huge divide and for how much better it could have been, should have been, needs to be, must become for all our sakes….

I wrote this on Facebook at Robin Williams’ death:

Every person matters. You matter. Whether I know you or not, you matter to me.

…….

And that, in the end, is all that matters among us. May we so live.

It came it came!

And I wasn’t even home. I was at a carpet store way down in San Jose and Richard was working from home so he’s the one who got to answer the doorbell; he told me he called out, “Thank you!” to the UPS driver heading back to his truck, as one does.

I got the text while comparing berber vs plush and how it would feel on a crawling baby’s knees or little boys tumbling down. I tried not to be jealous as I drove home.

I took pictures of the box. Dusk never felt so far off. Hurry, hurry! I finally had to at least see and slid it out and found it looked like a NASA experiment.

A little while later, not wanting to risk drying it out or anything…I peeked some more. Cute little kitten’s-paw leaves sneaking upwards.

At last it was 7:00, Wunderground said UV was 1 out of 12, I declared it good enough, lupus-wise–but before I went outside, I asked Richard once again if he thought I should widen the back of the hole away from that pipe.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. He offered to help but since this was my baby he let me do it myself like I wanted.

Got the spade, put the tip exactly right there and gave it one good heave ho pushing down hard with my foot.

I actually don’t quite know how the next thing that came to be was that I was suddenly facing the other way, rear end to one side of the hole and the backs of my legs–well, mostly one–fully scraped and muddy down the calf, but my feet were way over up on the other side and how did they get there and all in one nice smooth motion and I have no idea how that happened. At all.

Okay, maybe not so much on the widening thing. It’s trying to tell me something there and me, I try to be a good listener. Really, I do.

I looked at the hole. I looked at the dug-up dirt to the side, which was full of now-dry clumps and gravel and it would all need to be figured out which was which: the former owners did love their (now deeply embedded, 50-60 years later) gravel path. The obvious hit me at long last–I definitely needed better soil than what I had there and I should have thought of that sooner. Dad and his rhododendrons and all that.

So I was glad I’d gotten an earlyish start and headed over to the hardware store less than a mile away. Bought two bags, organic, pasteurized chicken poop, the works. The fellow they asked to help me to my car with them looked bored and like he couldn’t wait for that work day to be over so I thought I’d lighten it up a little by sharing in brief my sense of anticipation: the commissioned truck. The Page mandarins you couldn’t get any other way. The thirty-seven years since I’d had one, and finally, “My tree came today.”

Suddenly he had this big surprised grin all over his face and he teased me that I was going to have to bring some of those mandarins back to that store for him to test out, y’know! To make sure they were good enough!

Richard got those heavy bags out of the car for me and over to the spot and I got back to it.

And…I didn’t have enough soil, clearly, from trying too hard not to spend too much money on my hobbies….  But you only get one chance to start that tree off right. I checked with him. Orchard Supply Hardware was still open. Back I go.

The guy did a doubletake as he spotted me going past his aisle again: “Back already?!”

“Yeah, needed more soil,” I said to him. “Just, don’t fall in the hole,” and I did a quick below-the-knee skirt hoist  to show him the row’d rash. He started to gasp but then since I was laughing a good one he about fell over in relieved guffaws. It WAS funny.

“You’re REALLY going to love those oranges now!” he told me.

Y’know? He was right.

I have a gardener and his helper twice a month to do the outside stuff I can’t, and today happened to be the day.  They came after the stump grinders were gone and marveled at the changes in the place and loved it when I asked for opinions and advice on what I should do next here and here and here.

I told them about the tanangelo (the computer still doesn’t like that spelling but it’s correct) tree and where I was going to want it to go in–they thought it a good spot–and would it be okay to ask for help digging the hole?

Sure!

I had no idea…. I glanced out the window and thought oh, they don’t have to prepare the hole that much, the tree’s not here yet, although maybe adding water makes it easier to dig? Not aiming it very well, you don’t want it spraying the fence like that. ! Wait, where’s the hose?! How are they doing that?

Just then one of them started coming my way.

A whole lot of years ago Richard, with help from the kids, dug up and put in a watering line with a master control switch in the garage. Which got damaged and was never replaced and a gopher had bitten through the line over on the left anyway and the whole thing had essentially been forgotten about.

That water line on the right side was still live–who knew? There’d been no sign of it. So we had a few minutes there where we were trying to cut it off as it sprayed out of the hole and against the fence. The line to the house? Didn’t do it, it just meant I had no water inside. Huh.

In the no-coincidences department, my husband wasn’t feeling great yesterday and told his boss he would probably work from home today. And did.

He knew there were two water lines whereas I had no idea. He knew where the plumbing supplies were in the garage to cap that thing off, too, and soon all was well.

Wasting water is a $500 fine in California these days and that fence got doused nicely while that thing was going wild, which thanks to his being there, wasn’t more than ten minutes.  On the other hand, one of the tests for whether you’ve picked a good site to plant a fruit tree is to fill the hole with water and see how long it takes it to drain out–if the water just sits there, forget it.

We seem to have just the right spot. Um, except for that pipe crossing the edge. Clearly, it won’t be hard to get water to that one. I think I’ll just spade out a bit at that far edge there….

My next-door neighbor was walking past my house as I was coming out and we both stopped and chatted a moment.

They always plant quite the garden, but it had not been very productive this year; maybe, he said, it was that they watered it less in the drought. He marveled though at how much brighter and sunnier it is there now that my tree folk have done their work.

“Maybe it was my trees that were the problem,” said I, with a new reason to be glad the problem ones are gone now.

“But they were there before.” He was ever the diplomat.

“But they were taller this year than ever before.”

He conceded the possibility.

Then I told him the story of the Page oranges and that a three-year-old Page tree was on its way here and it was fun to watch his face break out in a huge grin like that. I knew they’d planted their own orange and nurtured it and watched it come to fruiting and he knew how much I was going to enjoy that process.

I forgot to tell him, though, that this was going to be one tree that wouldn’t shade his garden like the ones that are gone: there will be no twenty towering feet high and twenty across but rather half that at most. But then, he probably already figured that part out. And that our trees will help each other be more productive, self-fertile or no.

And here I am writing about Pages again because I can’t do anything else to make that new tanangelo come any faster–hurry, tree! I’m waiting!

We have a houseguest for the next few days, an old friend who moved away near the beginning of the year who’s back in town on business. She’ll be working long hours while she’s here and we won’t see a lot of her, but we’ll get some time, at least.

Right now she’s off catching up with someone else for a little bit so I have a moment to just go do whatever.

I think I’ll go get a little knitting done.

Chomp. “Looks like they got that one.”

Understatement alert, hon, but yeah.

And yet. I haven’t stopped planting more fruit.

When I was a teenager they were building a Mormon chapel closer to home and the locals were asked to pitch in and do fundraisers to help speed things along. (These days, it’s all handled from Salt Lake City to even out the resources between communities.)

Dad had heard of a friend of a friend who really knew his citrus and who was driving truckloads of a type of mandarin none of us had ever heard of from Florida to the DC area for fundraisers for various groups–they get their fundraiser, lots of people discover what was/still is said to be the best-tasting citrus there is, he gets paid for driving his truck, everybody wins. So Dad asked for the guy’s phone number.

And that is how he and Joe Ney became good friends with a shared enthusiasm and purpose. After that building in Potomac, Maryland was finished, Dad continued to commission a truckload every Christmas.

Because everybody who’d bought a case of those juicy Page oranges (technically, tanangelos, a Minneola cross crossed with a mandarin) came back for more whenever they could; there was nothing like them and they were too small to go big commercially and I don’t think they kept particularly well so you couldn’t get them unless you had some kind of a connection to them down South. Dad wasn’t about to let go of enjoying and sharing the best of the best every December, so, if it was a truckload he had to order, a truckload it would be–sign the sheet and state your number and give everyone on your gift list a box and know that they’ll never forget it and they’ll forever be grateful.

Then a major freeze hit Florida. For all the misting and wind-machining and whatever all else they could do, most of the Pages didn’t survive, and since it was such a niche market to begin with and young trees were the most susceptible to the next frost, most growers simply didn’t replant them.

Then Joe Ney dropped dead of a heart attack. (And I hope his family somehow sees this post and knows what a great gift he shared with so very many people and how grateful we all are.)

And I have not had one of these beautiful, deeply colored, juicy, paper-thin, easily peelable almost always seedless little balls of exquisiteness since. The Cuties they sell every Christmas? That’s like an old Hersheys vs. Scharffenberger, or even more now that those two have the same owner, vs. the fantastic upstart Tcho’s.

I wrote here Tuesday about whether anyone had any fruit varieties to recommend for my newly-cleared fenceline. I got a private note asking me if tangerines could grow where I am?

Ding ding ding. That was it!! THAT was what some corner of my brain had been struggling to dredge out of the depths! Richard! We could grow our own PAGES!!!

Oh I cannot tell you how excited I was.

Which quickly got tempered by not being able to find a single source outside of Florida that night, much less one anywhere that would ship to me. There’s a quarantine on citrus trees around southern California, no help there either.

I tried again the next day. Help me out here, Google.

Google came through. Google is my friend.

And so it was that there is a grower in northern California who sells three-year-old Page tanangelo trees for $40 and says that they’re large enough that they should be producing the next year after planting. Wow!

Monday Chris’s stump grinder guy comes to give me a bid on how many stumps I want taken out and where. Monday Four Winds Growers mails out my tree by third-day UPS. Not wasting a moment here, and I had to call my mom, and when Dad wasn’t home I had to call back later to talk to him directly: after all those years after those last boxes, we are going to have Page oranges again!

The one glitch? That no-freezing thing. But if the next-door neighbors can tent their young and vulnerable orange tree with a giant lightbulb inside last January, and they did, and they celebrated their 50th anniversary something like ten years ago, seems to me I should be able to manage doing that just fine myself. Or ourselves. (And let’s see, if I get a Gold Nugget variety too we can have mandarins in winter and spring and early summer…)

Just one tree for now. Pages are also rare in that they’re a citrus that is nearly thornless–and I have grandchildren to keep from getting scratched up. I’ll keep it short enough to stay inside one of my new walk-in-size fruit cages; that should thwart the raccoons at least for a little while. (My brain is suddenly singing Little Boxes.)

Some part of me knew when I wrote that throwaway line ending that blog post that I really really did want…something….

Imagine looking forward to your first bite of chocolate in 37 years. It’s like that.

I started a new hat but there was no need: the twins’ mom is thrilled with the two handknit hats made for her babies. Who are just the cutest.

That’s okay, I know who the new one will be for. Right on it.

There is nothing like that moment of blinking in utter disbelief at randomly running into someone you last saw at high school graduation many states away. I guess the Diablo salmon at that place really is that good (it was).

More later.

Our children were little together. And then Pam moved away.

She and her husband and teenage daughter, born since they’d moved away, were here visiting from out of state and we old-timers at church did not know they were coming.

So when Marguerite came into the last meeting a moment late, I quietly motioned with a thumb across my shoulder to make sure she wouldn’t miss Pam-of-all-people sitting next to me.

Look of confusion back at me: Huh?

I leaned back in my seat so she could see. I tell you, that moment of surprised joy in her face, the same one that had been on mine just a few minutes earlier–it was one of those universal moments where the love that is behind it all is suddenly brightly clear.

Pam later was explaining to her daughter that I was the one who’d made her shawl.

And then I was explaining to the daughter that this morning I had felt like I was going to see someone I was going to want to give something to that I’d knit. I’d gone through a few projects and picked out a scarf I liked and hoped whoever it was going to be, if I really was supposed to, would, too. (And I’d told myself to be open to whatever was going to happen; after all, this is precisely why I knit. For joy.)

And so at that she went from grateful but shy and unsure to letting me give her the soft Malabrigo wool scarf. But I had to say to Rich, her dad, that no, sorry, I hadn’t spun and dyed that one. It was hand-dyed, though.

Store-bought yarn. What’s the world coming to. Heh.

Rich told me he’s looking forward to this year’s Christmas card.

I’d better start remembering right now to do them this year.

Too tired (almost) to type. Had a great time. Happy Birthday to Phyllis! *confetti* *noisemakers* *candles* *friends* Huzzah!

The other six in our group took a walking San Francisco chocolatiers tour and then the two of us met up with them afterwards at Borobudur, an Indonesian restaurant. Richard and I (who managed to score a parking spot directly across the street in a perfect no-sun-for-you! moment) were the only ones there who hadn’t been to Bali; for the divers in the group the flavors held many memories. For us it was just very good.

We regrouped for key lime pie chez Phyl and Lee and to watch some sea life videos.

A superb day.  (Do I mention here that that double-decker part of the freeway, the one that’s still standing, still creeps me out every time we drive over it twenty-five years and many inspections after the Loma Prieta earthquake and the collapse of the Cypress Structure? No I don’t. Okay then.)

And a good time was had by all.

Someone among the empty-nesters and retirees at church decided we all ought to get together and throw ourselves a mid-week pot-luck lunch just because. I didn’t know it was in the works till the invite arrived in the mail.

Hey, any reason to have a good time together is fine by me–I was looking forward to it. Hazelnut torte, anyone?

And then it turned out that one person whom I don’t know well very kindly offered to host it in her gloriously gardened back yard and to cook it all, too. She not only loves to cook, she’s actually a caterer and everything she does is exquisite. No protests about sharing the burden allowed, she was doing this was for fun. And no one would get stuck with vacuuming duty afterwards.

But when I found out the change in venue it meant I had to quietly say to the person who started all this that I wouldn’t be able to make it after all. I’m an indoor cat, shut the door. She was horrified at the exclusion but I said hey, if you don’t live with it you don’t think of it and that’s perfectly okay–it’s actually a compliment, it means they think of me as simply me, not as That Lupus Patient.

Now, I have no idea if anyone else in that group found out anything of that one-on-one conversation or if my situation (which I didn’t mention to anyone else) had anything to do with it. They didn’t say. But Sunday the husband of a third woman in that group tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a beautifully wrapped small gift. As I exclaimed in wonder and looked back at him questioningly–why?!–he simply told me it was from his wife and beat a hasty retreat.

It was a set of note cards that looked like beautiful quilts, so much so that I had to touch the one on top to make sure that it wasn’t actually a tiny one that maybe she had made?  (She’s a quilter.) There was no note, no explanation. I was completely blown away.

And of course I used the first one to write her a thank you note. (And had to put off mailing it a day because I had to ask Richard when he got home from work if he had their address in his phone–“The white house on the corner of X and Y” probably wouldn’t have done it for the post office.)

It’ll get there.

And I strongly feel we should have everyone sign another for our catering friend.

Tonight I set the treadmill faster and went longer than usual, thinking a thank you towards all of you who prayed or Thought Good Thoughts my way after yesterday’s post.

Yesterday I’d set it to super-slow and still stopped it at two minutes when my blood pressure kept relentlessly dropping rather than picking up along with the pace. Air was feeling like a rare thing. Not comforting. I knew the drill from my tilt table test: down NOW and feet up. Breathe deep.

To explain: a dozen years ago, my lupus was attacking my autonomic nervous system the first and worst time with that test confirming it in the hospital, an alarm sounding, people running. My blood pressure was at 63/21, heart rate 44. They stopped it and pulled my feet in the air.

Today was so very much better. And I got to be super-grateful all over again.

And.

My friend Karen at church had her sons and their wives in town for a family reunion and the cousins were all toddlers having a great time being cute together.

At one point at the end I saw a woman I didn’t know minding two little ones that I instantly pegged as Karen’s, clearly; the younger one in her lap wasn’t having a meltdown but he was definitely edging towards it: traveling, strange places, strange people, three hours of church, waiting for Daddy to stop talking to his old friends over there. Enough for one day! He threw his paper airplane down with all the energy he could crash-land it with.

The mom looked ready for a good dinner, too; I think it was more for her sake that I pulled out a finger puppet and asked her if he might like to have it.

It changed everything. Suddenly she had a friend to talk to. Someone who thought her kids were adorable. Seeing her. With no expectations nor requirements on her.

It was like the balloon had been increasingly under pressure and suddenly it popped and she could breathe. Her delight at that little bit of handknitting and the appreciation in her face made my day and we chatted like old friends catching up while her little boy explored that puppet with her.

And if she’d put her feet up on that couch right there in that hallway I would have cheered her on.