For the record: yesterday was the day that for the first time ever, a Red-tailed hawk swooped around our patio coming right close to the window with me on the other side, wings spread wide and deep orange tail outstretched, to the pomegranate tree and then to complete the circle away to the bay laurel, to look around and check out the digs here. In my yard.

I have seen them up in the hills many times but never here much less right! Here! Glorious!

And for the record, yesterday was the day my friend Heather L utterly blew me away. She was half-afraid they wouldn’t fit or that their stitches might be too uneven or or or.

Oh honey. Wow. Wow. Wow. They could not possibly have been a more perfect gift of love and skill and talent. Wow. And the colors! And trees to welcome that new hawk to perch and observe from: may it forever feel at home here. Wow.

A night of very little sleep (too much dark chocolate pie last night but it was good), a morning that started earlier than it had any right to even though it was our usual time, so so tired but it was time to get up.

A few minutes later I saw it before he did.

He had stepped on who knows what, but since he couldn’t feel it he didn’t notice it. It was even a whole new toe to worry about, not the old one. I followed the blood across the hall, across the carpeting, so much on the carpeting, and then where it had obviously started. It was bad.

I’m tired of collecting Southwest future travel do-overs.

He cleaned up his foot while I tried my best to clean the carpet. It was too early to be having to work that hard and that much. I did not succeed in getting it all. It was time to go, and we made it to church on time. Breathe. The meeting hadn’t started yet so I pulled out wool and needle and started casting on a hat because boy did I need my hands to switch to the language of happy anticipation.

He tried to tell me I should be setting up my phone for the Zoom caption. I told him I was doing this (waving the needle) for me. Which was nicespeak for (and we did talk it out over lunch later), I am just barely holding it together right now worrying about you and being frustrated with you and this is how I am not bursting into tears out of sheer fatigue and worry and yes you are right and I don’t want to hear it while I have these thirty more seconds to do this so zip it buddy.

Just then someone dropped a little notecard in his lap and smiled and continued walking on past.

I put my yarn away the moment it looked like the meeting was about to start and, for the sake of the both of us,  just immersed myself in the good spirit that others had brought to the moment. It was there, waiting for me to find myself in it again. And what a story one woman told of the power of Love and the redemption wrought in her life!

After the meeting, we finally opened that envelope.

It was a handwritten note. From a single dad.

Saying how much he enjoyed and admired Richard for this, me for that, and that he had just felt moved to say so out loud.

I sought him out afterwards and thanked him. I told him, You could not have known. You had no way to know. But that was the day we most needed what you took the time to give us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A pie potluck, 4-5 pm, dinner was not being served, just pie. Anyone who wanted to could grab the mic and say something they were grateful for.

Which is how one woman who’d invited her friend found out that her friend was my neighbor across the street. We all had a great time catching each other up.

I wonder how many others walked in the door at home afterwards and said, Do you still want dinner?

Not really, I’m good. You?

Nah. It was all I needed.

I got to meet Bethany and Nick!

My big sister said her friend was moving to the area and we both told the friend that I’d love to meet her.

Today was the day.

I had no idea what to expect but still, I was kind of picturing someone about Marian’s age.

They looked younger than our kids, and came here for the same reason we did years ago: the tech jobs. They arrived with a gift of ripe lemons from the tree next to their ADU.

The four of us swapped stories for a bit, older Silicon Valley meeting new.

Looking out our window, Bethany was exclaiming over the trees and I offered a tour.

Yes please!

Blueberries, mandarin, pomegranate, sour cherry, apricot, orange, mango, sweet cherry, peach peach peach later-ripening lemon peach peach plum apple apple fig and tucked way over in the far corner over there, a pear.

Did you plant all these? they asked,

All but the lemon and that apple that died and the rootstock is starting to come back up. (For the second time. The Yellow Transparent is my zombie that refuses to stay dead.)

We had completely lucked out in getting a big (.2 acre) yard with a southwestern exposure for all this; it was a for sale by owner, a bit of a fixer-upper and well under market. If only I could replicate that affordability-plus-yard for them!

There was clearly some serious desire to dig in the dirt, and they offered to come help in the garden any time.

I’m looking at my sweet cherry and thinking, biennial crop because I didn’t thin two years ago? Is that why there was so little fruit this year? How about you do a big burst again next spring? One needing some thinning, and then help harvesting? I want an excuse to see them again and to let them come have all they’d like.

Meantime, I sent them off with some pomegranates, and they were as delighted at that as I was at being surprised with their lemons.

I could see why Marian spoke so highly of them. I liked them from the moment we opened that door.

Many many moons ago, there was the annual December Birthday Club party (we unwrap a present we got ourselves and sing Happy Birthday To Us) where Virginia, who always got something funny, gave herself a hand mirror.

Only, when you picked it up it activated two things: a light sensor and a laugh track. (This is the closest I could find to it.)

Put it down flat, it’s silent. Pick it up to check out that wisp of hair out of place and it guffaws at your vanity. Loudly. Busted.

It was hilarious and I had to know where she’d gotten it. Alright then. So I ran down there and bought one for my dad for Christmas, because there was no one who could laugh like my dad.

How to ship it across the country, though, between the glass and the electronics.

An arriving package solved that problem: it was full of those (hated) styrofoam peanuts.

I took a plastic grocery store bag and filled it full of those peanuts and slipped the box inside and tied the top, then put that inside a larger box with other stuff for the folks with the bag safe at the center of it all.

I got comments from my folks Christmas day about how that was such a good use of those peanuts: they didn’t go flying all over the room when they opened the box, they cushioned everything while at the same time they were contained. Nice. They talked about the other stuff we’d gotten them.

But what about…? I had to know and finally asked, That bag. Did you look inside it?!

No, why would we?

Dad…

It had been tossed. It got retrieved.

And that is how I later got told that Mom and Dad threw a party and Dad snuck that mirror onto the long low (mid-century modern and all that) side cabinet to see who it would catch. Which of course it did. Thankfully the victim had a great sense of humor, and the friends of my parents I knew growing up all found out where that had come from. Busted right back.

Virginia loved that story.

And I mention all this because I got my Aftober Prize of No Particular Worth ™ from Afton today: the ever-changing annual item in celebration of having finished a project in October that everybody in our online knitting group looks forward to every year.

I opened the envelope and went oh that’s cool, I like that. Put it down and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later I walked back–and spotted what was now half-hidden in the rug. Oh wow, look at that!

I’m not going to describe it because others haven’t gotten theirs yet, but, it had been well packaged and hiding inside that envelope and then flipped out without my seeing. I almost never knew it was there.

And I laughed and laughed and missed my dad and thought of my mom (I can just picture her going Oh you didn’t at Dad when she heard that laugh track going) and of Virginia too, gone about 25 years now. Look what she started.

Thank you, Afton!

Eighty stitches, 1×1 ribbing throughout, Malabrigo Rios, US size 5 needles.

Last week, I was sitting in the waiting room at my cardiologist’s working on this when who should come out but my rheumatologist.

He wasn’t expecting me and didn’t see me with my mask on so I called out his name as he went by.

He spun around in delight. I introduced him to my daughter. He looked at the knitting in my hands and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s pretty! Who’s it for?”

“The doctor who operated on my retina two weeks ago,” I told him, realizing as I said it that, wait, in all these years, I’d never knit anything for *him* and I’d known him a whole lot longer.

If it occurred to him he never let on. He cheerfully said to Michelle, “If you live long enough you’re going to need two things: a cardiologist and a rheumatologist.” And then he laughed at his own joke.

But it WAS funny, because the last time I’d seen him, a year ago, he’d sent a message afterwards marveling that “After all these years, for the first time, the ANA is negative.”

ANA being antibodies to the nuclei of one’s own cells, ie the single most definitive marker for lupus.

So I’d lived long enough to, in fact, not need him–assuming that holds.

“The system is fluid,” he told me years ago when I asked if an allergic reaction now meant one forever because I had seemed to have had less of a one on an exposure, and I’d thought it always went the other way, ie getting worse each time. Curious. I’ll take it!

Anyway. So today I finished all but weaving in the ends for this other guy.

Maybe there’ll have to be an appointment made, remission or not.

Or maybe I can just drop one off at the desk in his department with a thank you for looking out for me all these years.

I’ll have to actually, y’know, decide on yarn and colors and knit one before I can start debating delivery methods.

After several renditions of Are you sure, given that I wouldn’t hear it and he would and he’d be having to wake up just to wake me up when it went off, I set the alarm last night for 4:45 a.m.

My plan, discussed ahead of time, was that I would get up to say goodbye and to make sure her ride was coming and if there was any problem with it, I would wake her father up all the way and we would take her to the airport: him, to drive, me, to make sure he was safe coming back and not falling asleep.

At 4:42 a.m. I dreamed a bullhorn going off right in both ears and jump-startled awake. Oh. Right. Turned off the real noise before it could start.

Hugged my kid, who just glowed, and all was well. The 36-year impromptu wool stole for Rebecca is in Boston now.

I hope all who wanted to got to go to the No Kings day today. I so badly wanted to and we were going to, but I never did fall back asleep and by the time ours started at 1:00 p.m., I just couldn’t pull it off. I was with you all in spirit and onscreen (BBC video here) since I couldn’t pull off being on scene. I was so wiped.

So how was it in your town??

Doorbell.

First, the plumber, who looked at the installation below the wretched refuse of the teeming tides of the kitchen sink and shook his head at whoever had set it up like that.

Yeah, I told him, we spent $40k on repairing the mistakes the remodeler left behind (like the rain that had come into overhead light fixtures here and poured out an electric socket there, for starters. That was fun) but that we didn’t know about that one.

He shopvac’ed our attempt at Drano-ing the darn thing, poured it out at the toilet, and got to work on the rest. Those pipes had to go.

While he was under there making noise…

Doorbell.

Hi! I said brightly, Are you Dotty?

She looked at me like what the ??? No, I’m Sue, as she walked in, while I was like, ??? I moved the bin of yarn over to her. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to please get it out of her way.

Ohhhh. The home nurse who comes every two weeks to inspect the wound on his foot? (It wasn’t the nurse I remembered and they always came on Friday and this is Wednesday) so okay then sorry about that.

Because she had come sixteen minutes after Dotty had texted that she would be here in fifteen to twenty.

Right on cue:

Doorbell.

This time it WAS Dotty, and we introduced ourselves to each other. I’d been sure she couldn’t possibly want all those pounds of 2/28 merino (ie 1400 yards per meter) on cones, but she very much did and was thrilled with all of it. Alright then!

She’s a weaver but this was to be a gift for her cousin, who had looked at my photo and said, Yes please!

We got a good laugh out of each other when I tried to offer her the bin to take it home in and she groaned, I have..so..MANY, and I laughed that I did, too, that’s why I was trying to get rid of it. Fellow fiber enthusiasts: we were friends on the spot. We compromised on a trash bag and dumped it all in. She was walking down the street to her car (it was a little crowded around our driveway) and I started to run after her with one more lace weight left behind, she didn’t see me and it hadn’t been in the photo nor the list I’d sent her; I went, nah, she’s good, and went back inside.

The nurse needed cheering up.

I went out back and clipped two pomegranates off the tree. They do not give them up willingly–you have to show them who’s boss. I put a bright pink-red fruit by her, saying, That’s for you; she looked up in surprise and smiled for the first time.

The other one went to the plumber.

He finished up after several hours’ work and I asked, having waited for two days for when I could finally do this, if I could turn the dishwasher on now.

I already did, he smiled.

Good man.

Oooh. I replaced a hearing aid battery. They give a loud little tune at death but his machinery must have been louder.

The nurse stopped to say thank you for the pomegranate on her way out. I mentioned the face blindness and you could see her going, Ahh, now I get it. (It was her second time here.)

Meantime, while she and the plumber had been working, I finished the scarf rescue of the UFO. No side ribbing; my fashion consultant liked it with just the top and bottom done. Stop now.

Twist my arm.

I’ve been quietly thinking how glad I am that I dumped a large number of cinnamon sticks out by the pomegranate tree when the squirrels started showing up. It actually did keep them from stripping the fruit this year, or at least, so far. The plumber was happy for his but the nurse was the one it really made a difference to. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before Dotty left.

It feels so good to be able to run water in the kitchen again.

A potluck tonight, and the speaker afterwards was an old college classmate of mine in town for his high school reunion.

He’d built a house near his folks and his kids had grown up with ours until they’d moved away for his job. It was great to see him.

So.

Tom did a trip around the world in 72 days, ending in September, joined at different times and places by adult members of his family and extended family.

I knew I’d heard of Svalbard somehow but I had to look it up afterwards: it’s between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole, and he described a warning sign saying Do Not Go Past This Point Unarmed.

Very few people live in that large area, it’s mostly tourism, mining, and research.

One resident told him, the polar bears ate a guy two years ago. And four years ago.

(So by that, we’re about due, right…) So he asked the guy, Have you ever seen a polar bear?

No! And I don’t want to!

It was noted that they do outnumber the human population there and that they, along with tigers and crocodiles, are the only apex predators who actively hunt humans, and that if you see a low-lying rock there might be one behind it hoping you walk by. They’re willing to wait. Take your time.

He and his nephews climbed an icy mountain there in a storm. Tom’s advice afterwards was, Don’t.

Turns out Svalbard is where the famous Norwegian Seed Vault is. Ah, that’s why I knew the name.

That green and blue that slipped onto the other side of the back of the bag.

Mo-hair, Michelle remembered with a laugh from one teenage recipient asking me quizzically thirty years ago. MO-hair! Tell me, he demanded, What kinda animal is a MO!?

He was in foster care and admired Richard’s and my Kaffe Fassette coats of dozens of colors and in his enthusiasm ended up with a vest of his own from the leftovers.

I saw him recently and thanked him for changing my life: his reaction to what I’d made was what got me started on seeing how important it is to knit for others.

There might still be a few other skeins in there all these years later, here, let me see.

Backing up a bit: I was thinking some of the bins in the family closet had some empty space by now that could surely be put to use, but it’s really hard to wrangle them out of there and heavy lifting was out of the question.

A certain someone was happy to dive in there for me if I would go through them. It would make it easier to get at the puzzles and games, too.

Consolidation has begun.

Five games (how did we end up with three Balderdashes? Answer: because people kept gifting it to us) and a stack of puzzles that still had the original shrink wrap on them (no missing pieces on those!) all got claimed by friends today.

Some of the yarn… Showed its age. Not by its condition–I store wool well–but by the archeological dig of my knitting history as I went through stuff.

Thirty-five years ago really soft wool yarns were hard to find.

I remember the first time I found baby alpaca. The late Robin and Russ sold it in–I think it was 25 gram skeins. (Edit: 40g.) Today I re-found some of that, all dyed by me because at that time you could have it in brown or you could have light brown but I didn’t find white anywhere till later.

Back then, too many of the really fine-fibered alpacas were being turned into shearling rugs rather than sheared, while the farmers were paid by the pound for the wool, and spikier thicker fibers weighed more for less work.

But as the hand knitting market for the good stuff grew, the quality improved. I thought my discovery was so great then, and compared to the rest of the market it was. But (picking up skein after skein today) I’d hesitate to even grade it as baby alpaca now. It’s okay, it’s just not swoon-able.

So I’m stuck with the same problem I had the last time I did a major overhaul of that space: what do I do with these? I have them because I liked them but to actually sit down and knit I’m always going to reach for something that my hands love as much as my eyes do. The really good stuff is stored in the other room.

In particular (eyeing one bag of white loopy boucle and measuring it at 1.23 lb including its ziplock) what do you do with this (it came out of the alpaca bin but I’m sure it’s wool) that just isn’t getting any more enticing over time? How does one in good conscience keep the good stuff for oneself and fob the lesser off on someone else?

And yet, at the time I bought it, I was that someone else who was delighted to find a natural fiber yarn I could afford.

Oh, and, the seven ounces of aran weight purple-blue wool/angora. Who put meh wool with angora in 2002? Or: given that the words angora and mohair were at the time used interchangeably to describe mohair goats till the trade association came down on it to stop the confusion, is there actually any rabbit in there at all? And yet, it does have that softness mixed in. Hmm.

I’m not driving yet, re the post office, and Michelle’s flying home soon. Hmm.

Michelle looked around at all those bins and exclaimed, clearly trying to undercount it to be nice, You need to not buy any more yarn! And the stuff in the other room–you have enough for, for, like, two years!

We both heard Richard guffawing quietly in the other room. Oh honey.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

Curious. This Supreme Court just in effect nullified its own Citizens United ruling.

Because it ruled in a shadow docket case, meaning one for which there were no hearings, was not aired publicly, with a decision that does not even have their names signed to it to hold themselves accountable to the public–that the president can decide to withhold funds that Congress had decided on a bipartisan basis to spend.

In this case, on foreign aid.

One of my high school friends was laid off from her USAID job months ago and she could tell you many a story about just how effective a peacemaker we were in the world in helping people learn to farm and feed each other better and in establishing public schools where there had been none. She saw it. She lived it. We were perceived as Good Samaritans. The Anya apricots that I go on and on about how intensely flavored and juicy they are? That’s how that original seed ended up here: a farmer from California working on behalf of the State Department befriended people along the Silk Road, who offered him their best to show the world what they had and that not everything there was about war. The good that’s done when individuals help individuals across cultures and backgrounds goes both ways and USAID, with little publicity or public knowledge, is how it happens.

And every year for decades, Congress has voted from both sides to sustain those efforts.

Power of the purse? Separation of powers? Constitution? Voting as a representative of one’s constituents on the matter? Pffft, who needs that. Wiped away with the swipe of an anonymous pen.The president controls all. And you know the only thing this one cares about money is how much of it goes to him.

So, since they can pay for nothing and do nothing now no matter how they vote, why would anyone donate to the campaign of any member of Congress again? (Or at least, of those who are going along with this.)

Besides, there are so many of them. Why bother when there are only six to have to deal with on the Court who have shown that they can be bought off.

Turns out I didn’t squint well enough at the fine print and got the name of the sock knitter wrong (there are only so many of us avid knitters there.) All straightened out now.

One more week till I get to start the months of recovery from retina surgery and I am ready for it.

We don’t have collection plates nor fundraisers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he reminded us.

With the exception that the youth are allowed to have one activity every year to raise money for camp: locally, that’s at the church-owned campground up in the mountains that the kids put many volunteer hours into cleaning up after the CZU Complex fire burned the facilities down a few years ago. Most of those redwoods have begun to green out again, thank goodness.

They have really earned getting to go and to see the forest renew year by year after the devastation.

Last year there was a carwash.

Today was a party. Balloon animals for the little ones and showing them how to make them, cotton candy, come have fun.

We had baked goods by volunteers. Those, you paid for, one of two prices: Original, and Generous, trying to meet everybody’s budgets. First claim first served.

And a silent auction: a picture of the thing offered and a sign-up sheet to put your bid on. Dog walking by one of the teens, water your plants while you’re away. Lessons in various languages. A tour of Filoli Gardens.

Sue likes to knit socks and offered to knit a pair to fit.

I offered a Malabrigo Mecha hat.

The dad of the now-grown Eli, who used to take care of my mango tree when we were away and who loves the teal hat I knit his son, took one look at the blue twin to it and made sure that that was going to be his and made my day.

Someone wrote down $10 for Sue’s socks and probably thought they were being generous for a pair of socks.

She was going to have to bid a whole lot higher than that if she wanted those. After the huge expenses of this past week I hadn’t been going to spend a dime but I knew she wasn’t offering even the price of the yarn (unless it was a really good sale and/or old stash.) But how would she know that.

How about a different number to look at. After that it’s up to her (and hey, I would dearly love a pair from Sue’s hands.)

I got pulled away to family errands before I found out if I’d won but I was assured I would be emailed and could take care of it then if I did.

To quote the good doctor (as in Suess), Who sees who sew whose new socks, sir? You see Sue sew Sue’s new socks, sir!

Sue’s note said pick your size and color. I think forest green sounds good.