Sam saved the day and picked me up again this morning. Go Sam!

Usually, when I go to Stitches, I zip around the whole place, chat, see who’s got what, avoid temptation for the first day and figure there’s less around to buy the second day so I’m safer that way, right?

I’m torn between guilt, minor innocence, and being really glad I bought the yarns I did my first day this time, which were not a lot but which I really love and can’t wait to knit–because I didn’t know and the car transmission was bad enough, but today…!

We woke up to no hot water. None.

Richard was wondering whether the pilot (is there a pilot on that thing?) had gone out and was about to get to it to check at the time Sam came.

I had a grand day at Stitches all over again. It was Saturday, lots of people were there, friends I’d been looking forward to seeing. Got a few texts from Richard–we’re working hard here. Hot water heater blew. Plumber wants $1400–and I bought not one single ball of yarn.

And all the while I was reassuring myself that the last time this happened, it flooded out the master closet and the laundry room that it sits between, so the whoever-he-was plumber had charged us extra to set it up so that should it go out again, it would drain to outside. Far easier to deal with.

Towards closing time, I was chatting with Rod and Lisa Souza again and a friend of theirs they introduced me to, Heatherly Walker. Heatherly got to asking me about my pattern writing; did I use any software?

No, I just hash it out on my own.

Was I interested?

Did she know of any good ones?

Sure! and she told me about how she and her husband had come up with what she’d wished were out there so that now it was, and she told me a bit about it as she reached for a copy in her backpack.

I had visions of transmission and plumber estimates dancing in my head as I asked her how much I owed her.

A direct quote: “Nothing! I LOVE your book!”

(Jaw. On. Ground.) Wow. Thank you!!!

I talked to Melinda and Tess at Tess’ Designer Yarns, and I apologized for my lack of buying this year; I so love their yarns. Next year, as I explained why.

They offered me to just have a skein of yarn, whatever yarn. Everybody at some point has a week like mine had been; they wanted to make it easier. I thanked them but told them hey, they have to make a living. (And there will be more customers who might want it tomorrow, so.) But I very much appreciated their generosity, and I love the softness and the colors in their yarns and I wanted to give them a shout-out here. Good folks.

Time to go. Richard was stuck with the plumber. Sam had something else going on but still offered to come get me, good man that he is. I told some of my Purlescence friends and they conferred: when Dannette’s husband arrived, Kevin and other-Richard lifted the scooter into her minivan. Dannette had been about to go out to dinner with the others but they all decided to work around taking care of me (they invited me too but I was just too tired and too broke) and Dannette, her husband, and adorable baby drove me the ten miles home.

The plumber who had set the water heater in a pan with tall sides and an overflow pipe to outside? Balderdash. That pipe was spraying all over the inside of the heater enclosure nonstop as more water pumped in, which is why Richard sloshed through standing water going past the closet after I left. Michelle helped him try to rescue our things.

At some moment of stupidity in my life I had put some of our older family photos back in there. He thinks they’re dryable.

There was a zipped cotton bag on the floor full of handknit sweaters: the infamous 86″ wingspan Aran I made him when I was newly back into knitting 23 years ago, the cabled Kaffe Fassett in llama where every half of every cable is a different color against a background of navy (wet, and next to that white aran, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to inspect the aran quite closely quite yet), the handspun handknit baby alpaca/silk cardigan with the wooden buttons, five other handknit ones…

A pound of 90/10 cashmere/nylon cobweb weight that I’d bought at $15/lb years ago, pounds and pounds, and had plied a lot of it up into thicker yarns; nope, still had a cone back there. The bag was wet but the yarn seems okay.

And on and on. We are running the washer nonstop. If it was near the floor, it’s wet.

I wonder if homeowners will replace that wall?

(Edited to add in the morning: the white aran seems to be okay. Phew.)

Correction, Monday morning: I got the details wrong. It was the *top* of the water heater, somehow, that rusted out and was spewing at the wall. The plumber’s setup was good for your much more typical failure, and the new guy made good use of it.

I edited last night’s post to say I thought I’d found the problem.

Partly, it turns out; the battery still just doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to and I had to stop and plug it in awhile and wait three times, but hey. Thanks to Sam, I got to go!

Disneyland for knitters: we get to see friends we only get ever to see there and to catch up on each other’s lives while surrounded by all the best yarns any of us could ever hope for.

Four and a half years ago I was at Stitches East and met Karida Collins, the dyer who runs Neighborhood Fiber Company, her color inspiration being various neighborhoods around Washington, DC–back home for me–and Baltimore, where my daughter now lives. Karida decided to do the Stitches West show for the first time. And so there she was! Cool! And she recognized me!

She had exactly THE fiber with the perfect amount of yardage and twist, the exquisite softness, and the perfect color (Charles Village) all wrapped up in one sublime skein of silk yarn. She had come all this way to make it possible; there you go.

The owner of Wild Orchid Knits was there with her daughter: camel/silk, cashmere, mink; she uses only natural dyes. I had met the mom two years ago, been unable to find her work online since, didn’t see her there last year and wished for two years I’d bought a particular yarn from her to cheer her on in her good work. Well now.

A note from Jan helped me pay more attention than I might have to the softness and inherent baby-friendliness in some  James C. Brett Marble Chunky acrylic from Yarn Barn for Parker’s little brother to drag around the backyard and playground someday, and so now I can get to work on his first afghan.

Years ago, when Signature was just starting to make needles and they came in straights only, they brought their new product to Stitches West and I wasn’t interested. Now they have circulars but they weren’t coming–but my friend Anne just happened to email me to say she would be working at Southern Yarns’ booth and there would be Signature needles there, just in case I wanted her to reserve me a pair.

I read that just dumbfounded. How did she know?! I have a particularly well-loved pair of rosewoods 3.75mm that had somehow gotten a divot clipped out of the tip. I needed a new pair, and I’d wanted to try out the Signatures. They are green.

And then. There was my dear friend Lisa Souza and her husband Rod, reason alone to come. I was wearing the Julia shawl in her Pacific colorway from the book and I had people stop me constantly, all day, wanting to touch it, telling me how gorgeous it was, to ask where I’d gotten that yarn. Lisa!

A friend kept me company while Sam and I waited for each other in different places at the end of the day till we finally texted–oh there you are! Just because she wanted to, and when I apologized over the cold outside there by the drive-around, she laughed it off, telling me about the snow she’d traveled in from and that this was warm. Ah. Okay. So you know Real Weather, that’s right. We watched a flock of geese fly overhead against the darkening sky.

And a fabulous day was had by all.

I can’t believe I had the energy to type all that out.

Oh and: a bar of good Valrhona chocolate, other than the length of it, feels just like an Iphone when you’re groping blindly through your purse. Reception is ec static.

It’s not even Stitches yet and I’m exhausted. Got up early, drove everybody to work, ran the errands, did the dentist thing, had my fob fall off my keyring and had some stressed minutes retracing my steps with help from the good folks at Trader Joe’s till I found the rest–and at dinnertime got a surprise of a note from a friend saying he’d hesitated to say anything because you don’t want to jinx a friendship if something goes wrong, but he knew we needed a car and as far as *he* knew, his was in great shape, just old…

And he’d just bought a new one to celebrate a new job.

He was asking less than our van’s estimate. If only we’d known sooner.

It was gorgeous. And a tight fit for my 6’8″ husband, who didn’t want to test drive it with a migraine but was willing to sit in it and let me drive it and fall in love with it. Volvo makes nice vehicles. It’s got a ton of miles, I wouldn’t use it for a major commuter car like our friend did but then I only putter around a bit–and Michelle will be doing her own car shopping Saturday.

Quite reasonably, Richard didn’t want to pay for a car till he had actually driven it. And I have Stitches the next few days and another couple is (as one should) taking it to a mechanic tomorrow to have it checked out: the only way to be sure we could claim it was to hand over a check on the spot. With regrets on the unintended, unwanted pressure.

I think that quite reasonably means we won’t get it, but it was a nice dream. At least now we know there are possibilities out there.

And did I mention the battery on my scooter for Stitches, after lo these many months of my testing the scooter and not keeping it plugged in because the batteries need to be run down and of running it deliberately downwards, doublechecking the charging, and of the scooter being fine, is being iffy only starting today? Not last week, not Monday, not all those times in the whole year when I tried to keep it babied so it would behave when I needed it, just and only today? That needle dips into the yellow warning when I go halfway across the house. It’s supposed to stay firmly, solidly green. It did it did it did it did and now it doesn’t.

What could I do? Tomorrow’s the day, so, I plugged it back in and could only hope it would recharge all the way just because, please oh please, oh pretty please, I need it to.

——

(Edited in the morning to add, after the first few comments were already in: as we were going go bed, Richard said, Try unplugging and replugging.

I did, twice.

Try again; couldn’t hurt.

I did, and that time found out that the cable between the chair and the power box plugs in to both of those, it’s not built into the power box side like I thought. Guess what had come loose? Saved! That seems to have done it.

“The oil light flickered on in your car, Mom, just as it was stalling out.”

And so Richard drove an extra almost two hour commute time today to take her to work and then to his own office and later back while I took my car in. I haven’t driven it in a long time, and it felt very sluggish going those few blocks to the mechanic. I walked home and waited to hear.

The engine is fine.

The transmission is toast, and so is one axle. The car is an ’00 with 116k miles.

Stitches West is this weekend, the one time a year I need a minivan and the only reason we still have it: so that I can set up the ramp for the electric scooter.

You put a hundred fifty vendors of balls of yarn and thousands of people in one convention center with someone who had the connections between the balance and visual centers of the brain severed by a speeder, and you have the neurologist who looked at that five-day brain EEG and warned me, “You’re not epileptic yet–but you’re real. close.”

My balance is tactile and visual and when the visuals are on extreme overload and I’m trying to walk through it my brain feels like water droplets skittering across a smoking pan. Scooter. Period. Not worth the risk.

You can take the machine apart and put the pieces in the trunk of a car but the heaviest part still weighs 60 pounds; I wrote on Facebook, I can’t ask anyone to do that.

Jasmin says that Sam offered. I wrote back that I already had the manufacturing cream bought to make a chocolate torte in thanks.

And I’m quietly marveling over that: with no plans in mind, and certainly not with any idea of what was about to happen with the car, I had splurged and bought some at Milk Pail on Saturday. Because it just felt like I needed to be able to make chocolate tortes right now. It wouldn’t be anywhere near what I owe in thanks, given how much going to Stitches means to me and what his generosity does, too, but it’s a start.

Maybe you’ve already seen the video of the two-year-old who can sink a basketball so well. The kid is as good as a mom tossing a piece of mango peel across the kitchen into the trash: never misses. Baby giggles time!

Meantime. Don has a friend with lupus he wanted to give a copy of my book to, and so I drove over this evening to drop it off and we had a great visit. I just really hope I don’t end up passing on the germs of the guy who was sitting next to me on the plane on Monday.

And while I’m doing that hoping, blogs and emails are wonderful but in-person time beats all. Thank you for the excuse and the invite, Don. And for the knitters, two words: Stitches West!

(Oh and. I checked my peach trees today. The Tropic Snow has buds definitely swelling up and starting out, the August Pride, barely but it’s starting, and the Babcock is being a little more patient. It is the most amazing thing to plunk something so inert in the dirt and watch it coming to life!)

I like the fact that when you knit from a cone, you only have to weave the beginning and the end ends into the fabric. No joining of skeins in the middle.

It’s not that the skein lengths are the problem: it’s my memory of the baby quilt a friend lovingly made my youngest. It was a great quilt, bright and cheerful and colorful and with little shiny slippery ribbon ties all over. (With, thank goodness, a cotton batting inside that could never bunch up.)

John at a year old discovered that he could undo those red ribbon ties. I would put him to bed and he’d work his fingers carefully into those little knots and tug here and there and pull. Great dexterity very young, interested in fibers, clearly a future knitter. (I’m still waiting.) Once he was asleep I would take it away from him, retie all the ties (0r at least the ones he hadn’t pulled all the way out) so that it wouldn’t become a game with Mommy to him because then we’d lose them all, and then cover him back up again with his favorite blankie.

I know what little fingers can do to ends.

My daughter-in-law would like a baby blanket made out of a soft synthetic such that it can be dragged around and abused and used without her wincing or gasping over what her little boy or the laundry might do to it. But I just wish I knew how to find a baby-soft worsted synthetic/blend on, you know, a cone… Any suggestions?

And yes that is an announcement. We are starting into the third trimester now. Parker is going to be a big brother, and the new baby boy is due on my husband’s birthday.

And we are home.

Which seems both so very ordinary and so strange.

Had a great visit with my parents while we were in Salt Lake: my mother-in-law had wanted her ashes  buried next to her daughter’s grave there.

Her brothers and some of their families would be able to attend that way (not to mention my folks).  There were people who’d retired there after careers in Washington, DC, and I had people re-introducing themselves to me who’d known me since I was born.  Who knew. Edna Lou, who said she’d worked for my dad (wow, that would have been, what, 1953?! ’54?) Wow.

And there was the doctor who–I asked Richard later, that was him, right? Yes–was a close family friend of my in-laws and my parents and to whom my in-laws took their daughter when she was a teenager for some diagnostic tests. She was given a contrast dye to scan her kidneys, in the hospital as I remember the story, and promptly went into anaphylactic shock. It took a team working hard to bring her back, and in that moment of relief as she came to, she looked up at this good man she knew from church and declared, “My dad’s a lawyer and” (with extra emphasis) “my brother’s 6’8″. You better watch it.”

Everybody in the room cracked up.

And here my Ft Worth sister-in-law was, with her three grown or nearly-grown kids.

Cousin Michelle, younger than me, is fighting breast cancer and it was not caught early. “This last year’s been real rough,” she told me.  Her husband looked around at the happy crowd at the luncheon, laughed at the toddler who played games with the cane with me and declared, “We need to all do this again. For a happy reason.”

This morning as we packed up the rental car to go, somehow it caught my attention and I found myself bending low for a closer look. I knew I would want a picture, but even with the fingerless gloves on knitted by (you know who you are, and thank you), it was too cold to pry everything open to get to my Iphone in the this inside the that. We needed to go.

There was tiny frozen rice everywhere: as if the wall of fog had shattered into perfect little frozen grains of it on the ground. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it before and I’ve certainly lived in snow in my life. It was like the weather was trying to throw a wedding. Or perhaps wishing Michelle and her love a long and happy life together.

We were coming in for landing when my seatmate opened her window at last and I had a sudden moment of, wait, it looks like snow on the ground here, too?! But of course it was the late sun coming blindingly white off the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

We are home.

I filled the birdfeeder.

Things are so much the same and so different.

Got to the post office: boots returned, striped hat mailed to old friend. Check.

Drove north. Silk scarf delivered to Piano Guy for his wife.

“I didn’t think they *made* this anymore,” he wondered out loud. “It really is…?”

“Silk,” I nodded, Yes. (It’s all Colourmart‘s fault.)

When I knit a hat for him awhile ago, he gave me a handshake in thanks, but in his excitement today at looking forward to the look to come in his wife’s face and in a color I knew she would love, I got a gentle hug this time on my way out.

I drove to the pharmacy. BD brand alcohol wipes in stock? (Needed when changing the dressing every three days.) Some of the other brands have perfumes, so, that one.

“I can’t keep them in stock,” Pharmacy Guy apologized.

Okay, no problem, meantime… I reached into my purse and pulled out a washable wool hat (thank you DebbieR! I just didn’t have a yarn that felt right, but she did.) “Is this set of colors okay?”

“Okay for what?” confused.

“For you, handknit by me,” and as he grabbed it, exclaiming in delight, I reminded him of that day and thanked him for looking out for us. He pulled it down to his eyebrows and created a Cheshire Cat moment: that big, big grin was all there seemed to be. He about danced.

I drove home remembering my occasional grouse over the slipperiness of silk and the few rows I had had to tink back carefully and redo because the stitches had jumped off the needle when I’d put it down, or the length of my queue or any other silly thing that ever got in my way even for a moment and remembered, this is what it’s all about. This is why I do this. To put more love into the world, to give back for all the people who’ve looked out for me, who prayed/hoped me back to good health and before and after. I owe those guys for how much more knitting will happen for more people because they knew it and they treasured it when they saw it and felt it.

(p.s. and a note to the knitters–today’s scarf was pure silk, but those on the site with a bit of lycra to them? In my very limited experience via one swatch, they seem to be able to grip another yarn in a way plain silk does not, so if you wanted to blend colors and increase weights by knitting two strands of whatever other yarn together with it, the thinner 95/5 silk/lycras are the way to go. And all of them, being cones from the mill, need to be scoured in hot water when you’re done knitting to get the mill oils out: softens the yarn and removes the dulling, graying effect of the stuff. And then look what you have! Glorious!)

The doorbell rang: a friend of Michelle’s I didn’t recognize and whose name I tried really really hard to get her to say loud enough for me to hear, since I was the only one home just then, offering up a blooming pot of narcissus in condolences. It was very sweet of her. Darned if I know who she was.

I remember the last time I had to be in real weather in winter, I felt very Californian because the only shoes I owned that had a closed heel were sneakers. (Other than the Wookie horsehair shearling-inside mukluks someone once gave me, but never mind.) So there I was in Birkenstock clogs, flipping snow at the backs of my quickly-freezing-wet legs as I walked.

Wookies are great for Halloween night as I hand out candy, funerals, not so much.

Young professional daughter to the rescue, Chan to the rescue by having given me a heads-up about a site to check out, and though they weren’t perfect, a new pair of size 6.5 EE-width leather boots in a price I could fathom right now was actually found. (A good time of year to be looking, too.)  Not flats, which I need, but at an inch and a quarter, close; we’ll see in express-shipping time if they fit, and if they don’t I will actually have to be dragged out shoe shopping, trying to find that one physical store among the millions of people in the Bay Area that has what I want in a size I can wear. Just a plain, classic, comfortable, no-frills pair of black leather boots. Hopefully they’re already coming.

That backup pair in that picture is motivation if nothing else. Family photographs will be taken. Um.

(Sorry for the sideways.) Richard did a doubletake when he got home as he went to put his stuff down–where did those come from?

My friend Kathy came by, I told him, and she’d read the post about the spilt pea soup. Says you can put hot soup in these, the lids lock down on the top, you can transport it safely–she has–and they wash in the dishwasher, and she’d wanted to help keep our car clean the next time.

Very cool. Thank you, Kathy! I had no idea these even existed. Got room to make a triple batch with these guys.

Meantime, I particularly like this picture from the Inauguration. A husband, a wife, a mother-in-law.

(Ed. to add after reading Don’s question: it’s a package of three, each holding more than a gallon.)

Awhile ago, maybe two months or so, Mary, who I know has knitted some beautiful things in her day, asked me something about a book. I didn’t quite hear which she was talking about but I was glad to help. Ah, she wanted me to have one–oh, thank you for thinking of me!

And then I didn’t hear from her and forgot all about it.

Yesterday morning Michelle showed up at work and blubbered the news and her boss sent her straight home to be with Richard and me. He was Skyping with his siblings; plans were being made, dates and places decided, and after all the phone calls and messages, it seemed so very quiet around here.

The phone rang in the afternoon. Somehow on that day of all days, Mary had felt moved to remember that she had had this book she had wanted me to have, and she asked if she might come over. We don’t live particularly close, especially for a woman of her age, and on any other day I might have had the presence of mind to have offered to come pick it up instead to save her the trip.

I was surprised at how stooped she looked as I opened my door, much more so than I remembered. “I’ll never get through all these now,” she chuckled, waving it away.

Turns out it was a first-edition 1970 Barbara Walker, her Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. Wow. I was delighted, but in case someone else might need it told her I did have the complete set of the more recent reprints–as a matter of fact, the day before, I had mailed my mom’s old set to my daughter and her roommate to have fun with. (My mom had let me have them when she’d downsized.)

She hesitated a moment. I thought, And you came all this way, and my bad hearing, and…

I told her about my friend Gracie Larsen, who knew Barbara Walker and quite a few other big names in knitting, who had pushed me to get my own book out there and who had given me Ms. Walker’s phone number and Meg Swansen’s (her publisher’s) email and had told me to get to it. I’d needed permission to use some of Ms. Walker’s lace patterns within my shawls, and she graciously gave it to me but asked for attribution. Which I gave to the fullest extent of my editors’ cooperation–but it meant that Richard had come home from work that day and I was still fairly speechless at just who I’d talked to that day–wow!

Mary was flipping through her Walker book, and I loved out loud that unlike mine, hers had color.

She grinned, decision made, holding it out. Yours. She knew I would find someone who would appreciate it and love it as she had, starting right now with me for the moment.

I grabbed a waiting copy of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls” and asked her if she would like? Oh, yes! I flipped through, going, and that one is Julia J–, and that one is Nina P–, names she knew and whom I’d designed those shawls for.

Cool!

She left and I prayed her a safe journey home, marveling that on that day of sorrow, she had brought generosity, love, light, and thinking of something I might like in order to make me happy and to further my skills and had gone so far out of her way to make sure it happened. Because it had felt like the right day to come.

Lynn, here, the post where I got to meet her in person in Texas the day after she got engaged, her happiness lighting up the whole church. I got to see her again last month when we came back to see my in-laws, and Lynn and I spent an evening at her old knitting group in the Madeline Tosh ship in Ft Worth where she’d been a regular before she’d married and moved a few towns away.

I twirl a small forkful of Lynn’s late mother-in-law’s orange honey that she gifted me with about every other day, savoring it, trying not to run out too fast, thinking of her and how grateful I am for her friendship every time I look at that jar. How glad I am that she and her Beloved found each other in their lives.

Yesterday was their first anniversary.

Today her beloved, one of the very best, slipped away before hospice could even finish setting up at their house.

I’ve wanted to grab the next flight. I can’t afford it. What I did do was go searching in my house, for–something, I didn’t know what, and found a shawl project that I’d long ago stalled out on: it had been put aside while I’d debated how to finish it and while I had had people needing the love from something hand knit Right Now, and so the shawl had become abandoned altogether and at last pretty much forgotten other than the occasional guilt twinge in its direction.

I didn’t even remember which pattern it was; I was surprised when I pulled it out to see it was Y not Z. Huh. I always did like that yarn.

I sat down with it. I decided, seventeen months after I’d started, at long last what to do: a few rows there, that’s all it had needed all this time, that and a decision, and I cast it off, blocked it, and with that I tied up one loose end in my own life. It is done. And after its submersion in the water, it feels like one of the most beautiful things I have ever knit.

And it’s not at all Lynn’s color, darnit.

I got a note from an old friend from junior high, who knows I knit: might I be interested in a commission?

Not sure what she was asking and worrying it might be aran sweaters or who knows, I replied, I knit for love, not money; money just takes all the fun out of it. (Trying not to inwardly protest that I just got this perfect yarn from DebbieR that she instantly knew was for the pharmacy clerk I wrote about and sent it to me, and when I opened it I had the same reaction–this is it! So I have that hat to make. And I have someone else whose wife’s scarf is coming along, and the purple for Purlescence. The queue…!) But I said none of that.

Betsy thought on it awhile and got back to me today with: would you knit a hat for love, for me?

I laughed. Of course I would. Any allergies, what colors do you like.

It just so happens that Michelle had dumped a whole bunch of my yarn stash in the family room and I’d been sorting through projects and skeins all day, so it was easy to find what I was looking for. And: the missing size 5 that was driving me nuts and keeping me from getting that guy’s hat started? I’d been short circ-ited. Turned up two rows after I braved through the start of Betsy’s on ragged old bamboos, gold-plated Addis no less, boom, there you go. I’ll do hers and then his. I found them!

What she had no idea of, and neither did I… As I sat down and got started, her yarn next to me started plotting, rubbing its woolly little paws together in glee. I had had this half-baked idea for some time, and a hat is a great way to test a pattern on a small scale, and I’d needed a woman’s hat to do that with, and wouldn’t it be cool if Betsy’s request got me to finally work that idea out?

And I’m off. And if I push I can still finish all of those projects by the end of next week. Betsy, hon–I owe you, bigtime. Thank you!

Sam’s roommate surprised her with the scarf she’d made while waiting with her at the hospital. She’s just the best.

Sam ended up in the ICU last night.

And Sam was at long last discharged from the hospital tonight after she was able to keep the beginnings of food down and her platelets had gone slightly up–with a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Y’know, it works a whole lot better when the hospital isn’t serving you broth with gluten in it and then wondering why the patient who can’t eat wheat is suddenly a lot worse.

A huge thank you to everybody for your much-needed prayers and good thoughts her way. (Long, long exhale.) Phew.

Note DebbieR’s comment two days ago about the 80-mile drive to Purlescence.

She came with her mom, a kind and gentle soul, and now I know where Debbie gets it from: the kind of people where you walk into their presence and you know you’re among friends. The kind of person who knits fingerless gloves for someone else’s daughter they’ve never met just because they really, really came in handy for Sam, who loves them and all that they convey.

We swapped stories and laughed all afternoon. There was a middle-aged man I didn’t recognize who came in and was quietly knitting away behind their backs, not looking our way, not butting in, but breaking out into a big grin at all the punchlines.  (It’s a big room like that.) I loved it. I did apologize to Nathania at one point for monopolizing the soundwaves and she grinned and waved me away, You’re fine.

Pamela was there, and bless her, came over at one point and told me, You’re not drinking enough.  She grabbed the cute little 7 oz thermos that Michelle had given me as a souvenir from Japan and went and refilled it, taking good care of me when I wasn’t bothering to myself: without a colon I have to drink 8 oz every two hours. Debbie and her mom approved. Go Pamela.

Near the end, Debbie had a thought and asked, And by the way, how are you?

I hesitated but confessed: I had woken up this morning with BAM, instant Crohn’s flare, totally unexpected and out of the blue. It did get a little better as the day went on–and then all this laughing and loving and I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s not gone, I added, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.

Crossing my fingers.

To be more specific: this morning’s angry belly had had me thinking, if I barf I’m in the ER. Do. Not. Barf. I hesitated, but there was just no way I was going to miss out on this afternoon, and certainly not after they’d driven all this way for it.

And then afterwards I found myself feeling like, and look at me now! This works! (If only it were always so easy.)

I ran a quick grocery run, got home, hadn’t quite finished putting things away when the phone rang.

It was our daughter Sam. She *did* barf, and she *did* end up in the ER. Turns out someone had offered her a quinoa salad at a New Year’s Eve party, not realizing that couscous mixed in there means wheat–and Sam’s a celiac. Throw in a lupus flare and an ITP platelet crash and her roommate ended up picking her up and putting her in a wheelchair and getting her to the ER faster, she told us, than the paramedics could have done it.

The roommate brought her knitting and started and finished an entire scarf in the 24 hours it took the doctors to decide to admit my daughter.

Taking deep breaths and saying lots of prayers. And wishing I could send DebbieR and her mom to make Sam laugh like they did me, while grateful to Sam’s roommate who sounds like she’s pretty good at that herself.