In tonight’s segment of, “don’t believe the captions”: one knitting friend in the Zoom meeting was mentioning how her son loved to put peanut butter and a few chocolate chips on his mushroom before putting it in the microwave.

People were going back and forth and chuckling and I finally found that one moment where it was safe to interject and went, because I just had to know, Chocolate chips and–mushrooms? So tasty. What am I missing here.

MARSHmallows! They howled.

Usually I guess such things in time but then how would I amuse my friends?

Knitter friends meeting by Zoom. Here on the other coast, I hadn’t had dinner yet.

Pumpkin pie? We were talking desserts, mostly chocolate, mostly chocolate cream pie, and man did I want to run go start baking.

Finally someone grinned, “My aching hips” and we all cracked up.

(Afghan: finished the ninth repeat. Six more to go.)

To my neighbor’s chagrin, but I said no, no, it was funny.

I had my phone in my hand about to–I totally forget what because just then I saw movement out the window: the large dog from next door was sniffing the mango tree. He really wants to know more about whatever hides under that mango tree; the few times he’s gotten out of his yard he’s gone straight for it. It’s such a shame I planted it where I can see it.

I walked outside and the dog’s expression was a horrified, Busted!

He ran. But only to where he’d be just out of my sight. All! The! Smells! to be explored!

I was coming around the corner.

He ran. He stopped and turned. Nope, I was still coming.

At last he gave it up as a lost cause and ducked through the hole I now saw made by the wooden temporary panel angled just precisely so, and it shook and shimmied a moment after while I stood there wondering how that big dog got through that small a space.

And here’s the funny part. I’ve never had a dog and I could be wrong but so help me he clearly wanted me to get the blame for his shenanigans so he started barking at the intruder.

Which had been him.

But never mind that part, territories must be defended and so he barked some more till he’d convinced himself he’d done his job and kept me out. Or something.

Hours later it still makes me giggle.

We really do need to get those six feet replaced the right way once and for all.

Jen said she was coming to town briefly.

Krys said we had to get together! She’d host!

A bunch of us came. I brought a box of slab apricots from Andy’s Orchard, the healthiest tasty (and fastest!) thing I could think of on the spur of the moment.

So many memories, so much catching up, so good to spend time with friends, especially the one we never get to see.

As I was leaving and we hugged I asked Jen, So: when are you coming again?

She looked like, oh if only, and I grinned, Trick question, right?

She laughed and we got one last hug and I wonder when the next time will ever if it will ever be. But it had better. Because I said so. So there.

(p.s. From Food.com: a recipe that they had way too much fun with. And the comments!)

I’d never heard him speak publicly about it before. For years they didn’t want to, understandably.

But announcements were made about the 35th anniversary of the annual creche exhibit our church puts on the first weekend every December.

And thus of their son’s accident.

John was twelve, and he and his little brother were on their skateboards crossing the busy street that runs just behind their house and on their way home when a drunk driver blew through her red light. The younger brother took a glancing blow; John took the full force.

I was at that creche exhibit when they suddenly interrupted the crowd to explain that they’d just gotten word: would everybody, of their faith or other faith or of no faith but willing to Think Good Thoughts, be willing to kneel together with them and join with them as they offered a prayer for John?

And so we did. The feeling of hundreds of hearts calling out together towards someone else’s child was a powerful experience never to be forgotten.

It did not look good. But he was still hanging in there.

The thing, though, is that what his dad did for a living as a neuroscientist was to try to help people recover from major brain injuries. His biggest fear as a parent had always been that such might happen to one of his children, and now here it had.

John was in a coma, and his dad knew that every day in that coma was a step away from future recovery.

Two weeks later, he did wake up. He had aphasia. Language, both giving and receiving, was scrambled.

And now here’s where part of my story sneaks a word in (though I didn’t interrupt his to say it.) I had a kid in kindergarten (edit: first grade) and two preschoolers and a friend in the ward had a two year old. Lisa thought we should go visit John at Children’s Hospital in Oakland (the one at Stanford not having been built yet.)

So we did. Once a week we piled in a car during school hours and drove an hour each way to go visit him, one at a time per the rules while the other entertained the littles in the lobby. We became very close during all this.

Lisa had been a cop in Hayward in a previous life so one day when a bad accident entirely shut down the freeway, the only day John’s mom was unable to go see her son, Lisa said, Turn off at that ramp I know all the back roads we can do this, and so John was not left alone that day after all. We made it through.

He spent six weeks in brain rehab and all in all it was I think three months before he was able to come home.

His dad said he went through special ed from there on out and it took him six years to graduate from college–but he did it. He’s married to a wonderful woman now and they have two little boys.

I remember the description of the entire middle school turning out to welcome him back, festooning his wheelchair with enough helium balloons to look like the house in the movie Up.

A year later I was diagnosed with lupus. I’m allergic to all NSAIDs and my arthritis was so severe I was eating with plastic utensils because I couldn’t lift the metal ones. I got told the best thing I could do for it was to start going to a warm indoor therapy pool nearby that was only open to those with a doctor’s prescription to get in.

I had two preschoolers. How on earth was I going to pay for a sitter every day?

Lisa took a deep breath and said, Tell you what: I’ll watch yours if you’ll watch mine right after while I work out in a gym.

She gave me the gift of her mornings Monday through Friday for two years. I could never ever have asked anybody that, but she offered and she did it and our boys grew up as brothers for that time. I expected to keep doing that for her as my youngest went off to kindergarten and she had two more children, but it was not to be; they moved to Michigan.

So. John’s dad told his story. His greatest fear had come true. The whole world had turned out in support in such amazing, inspiring, wonderful ways and his son was so happy being a dad and husband.

When he got done telling this, I asked for the mic.

And what I said was not all the stuff about me nor Lisa at all, but this: that about six years later, during the holiday season, I had been stuck in the backup of an Avoid the 13 sobriety checkpoint where they stopped every car on the main drag and made everyone wait to be checked out by the police to make sure they were driving sober.

The kicker is that they were holding it exactly where John and his brother had been hit, and that went deep for me.

Those checkpoints were deeply unpopular (and sued over) and I knew it.

So I found myself sitting down one day and writing a letter to the police department (by hand in those days!) to be a rare voice of support, telling them it was important to me that they did that.

I hadn’t planned on saying it when I sat down to write but it demanded that I add it, so I did: I explained that my friends’ 12-year-old son and his brother had been hit by a drunk, at that very intersection as a matter of fact, and John had not been expected to survive.

But he did, I said, thanking the first responders; I just wanted you to know he’s in college now.

I sent that off and thought, well, that’s that. Didn’t expect to hear anything back.

A heartfelt letter from the chief of police showed up in the mail.

That checkpoint had been set up where those boys had been hit specifically in John’s memory.

And he told me:

I was the cop who had to knock on that family’s door and tell them what had happened to their son. I never knew how it turned out for him. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A few months ago I saw some handwoven blankets on Etsy from the Carpathian mountains and saved a few to my Favorites just so I’d be able to find them again–just to admire.

Knowing none of that, my friend Anne sent me a link yesterday to a video about those same craftspeople, and I loved getting to see who they are as they worked, the gorgeous hills they live in, so many details close up.

There–right there at the six minute mark, what I’d caught a small glimpse of was suddenly plainly visible: the woman was wearing the same vyshyvanka I was wearing right then as I watched her. (This one is very close.)

Mine had come from her part of their country.

I wondered if the needleworkers knew each other. Each region has traditional patterns and colors…

Should I ever buy a blanket of theirs (that would make me toasty-comfortable in winter and my husband way too hot), I’ll send those weavers a picture of me holding their blanket. Wearing our shirt.

Slava Ukraini.

The best of my Anya apricot attempts. This was a kernel in my fridge two years ago. And now I know it’s going to be glorious to have in the Fall as well as at harvest.

Last night I was talking to my knitting zoom group friends and mentioned that the hat I was working on was the overall gist of the various patterns that someone in Ukraine had embroidered onto three blouses for me; that I wondered how, especially given current circumstances, I could get it to her in Kiev. I wanted to be able to thank her beyond words for all the hours she’d put in on my behalf.

But it had to be a small enough package that she wouldn’t get hit with customs duties. So, a hat.

Note that this is the same soft ball of Mecha that my granddaughter knitted herself a finger puppet out of.

We brainstormed ideas, with one person saying what about going through the embassy?

I have no idea. But I like that one, and I can try. That does make me want all the more to make one for every vendor there I’ve done business with; I can’t imagine what they’ve had to go through.

But only one of them embroidered by hand to order and knew who the recipient would be as she did so.

And I want her to have this.

There was a woman’s conference at church. They were holding the first half of it in the room with the worst acoustics in the building by far and I knew I wouldn’t hear a word. Everybody would be part of a shared experience except the woman in the back who doesn’t laugh or gasp or whatever sympathetic thing along with the crowd and how awkward is that for the speaker who doesn’t know. I didn’t want to go.

But when I considered the thing last night, I realized I felt kind of starved for some people time and the very fact that they were finally holding this again was like the Before Times. And that was a privilege. Besides, you can’t do anything for anybody if you don’t show up. I would wear a mask anyway, so my face wouldn’t cause much of a problem, right?

I made very sure I had some knitting with me.

And man, that room was as bad as ever.

And man, did I mess up that pattern and had to just stop about 45 minutes in and put it down; after I got home I tinked back 2/3, but never mind, I fixed it–and messed it up again and ripped it again and fixed it again and that time it actually was fixed and stayed fixed but the whole thing was not one of my more shining moments with a ball of yarn. But at least, in public, it made it look to anyone else like I could do fancy lacy things with yarn–just don’t squint.

So.

When I walked in, I was waved over and invited to a table by some very kind soul I wasn’t sure I’d ever laid eyes on. Who turned out to be a friend of my daughter’s. I started to feel rescued from myself. We found ourselves seated for a breakfast that I’d thought was going to be a lunch at the end so I’d already eaten and I don’t normally like breakfast much in the first place and looking at that lovely fruit plate, I certainly wasn’t going to explain Crohn’s to strangers. But I didn’t dare touch it.

Across from me was a young mom with a small baby, about four months old. Those right around her apparently knew her and chatted with her.

But she was struggling harder than I was to cheer up.  Sleepless nights of early babyhood are hard–or maybe it was postpartum depression, I worried. If I’d thought I was isolated these past few days with no car, remember what it’s like to be at that stage, I told myself.

I ran into a friend after that and we caught up a bit and were late heading into a classroom and tiptoed quietly in at the back.

Right behind that mom.

Her baby fussed a little. I distracted his attention. He smiled. I wiggled a finger puppet on my hand.

She offered silently, Did I want to hold him?

My face lit up. And how!

Oh I tell you. All that pent-up grandmotherhood came pouring out for that sweet little face, and the best thing you can do for the mother of a baby is to adore her child like he’s the most beautiful human being you’ve ever seen. Because he is, every one of them is. Even when they’re fussy. They just are. And so he and I made friends and she–

–she started laughing quietly. At his antics, mine, for sheer joy, and when he finally decided okay, I want my mommy now and started reaching her way I handed him right back and thanked her profusely (quietly) for the great privilege.

She walked out of there happy.

So did I.

Friends forever.

Tell me her name again? I didn’t quite catch it.

We did something way better than going to San Francisco for chocolate: we visited our friend in the hospital and chatted and cheered and swapped hospital-food stories and left her and her husband with smiles on their faces–and ours, too.

I somehow left out of yesterday’s long list (I thought it was in there, but no) that our elderly friend Walt had died that morning. That I got an email from a mutual friend asking if I could help out, that when I answered, Sure, what do you need, expecting it to be about Walt’s wife in a nursing home because of course you’d expect that, the answer I got was a clear phishing expedition. “I’ll pay you back when I get back in town…” As if. He’d been hacked. On that day of all days.

I can’t hear our new widow on the phone and she can’t type to me and I don’t feel mobile enough yet to risk driving. Aargh.

Today a fake-Amazon spammer called every two or three minutes and one can only wonder if I got put on a list of suckers who’ll respond. The same recording. For hours. It makes no sense; I mean, who ever caves and believes their lie after hanging up the first twenty times?

What finally stopped it is when I let it go to the answering machine several times in a row. I should have done that sooner, except that the machine is where Richard’s working.

I just got a note: the friend who’s been in the ICU had canceled the phone number I’d been texting messages to.  That’s why she hadn’t answered. Okay, got the right one now.

And I think I found the right yarn. But it is 600m and it is not wound yet and my back said, listen, buddy, I’m working with you on this and you gotta admit I’m getting there but you have to meet me halfway and that is not it.

So it is still a hank.

I started in on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s autobiography instead.

Our entire bishopric was sick or out of town today, so leaders from the stake filled in.

The one who was to lead the service was sitting in his car beforehand going through a few notes before getting out, when he saw the woman.

She was elderly, she was stooped, she wore a headscarf and walked slowly with a cane, but on crossing the small side street and coming onto the sidewalk in front of the church, she removed her scarf, bowed her head, and clasped her hands together in prayerful reverence.

And then she saw him seeing her in her quiet moment. He was afraid he’d interrupted her reverie and felt like a bit of an intruder.

She waved to him. Hail fellow well met.

He waved back, and felt in that moment like he’d found a friend. Lovely woman, and he wanted to share that moment with the rest of us: there is so much love out there in the world to be blessed by, and for us to remember to offer.

Richard and I had seen her, too, a few minutes later as we drove up, but by then someone younger had joined her and was looking out for her so as not to fall as they headed slowly and carefully in the direction of the house two doors right nearby where our son’s old soccer coach lives.

I took the man aside afterwards. I told him that that coach has taken in several families of Ukrainian refugees and that I thought she might well have been one of them.

The speaker was someone who had helped me get the Ukrainian flag hats to the Consul General and his American friend, and I knew how much that would mean to him. And it did.

Her mother told her lovingly but firmly, No, you don’t put a marble in your mouth. Here, you put it on this and watch it roll down.

It was a child’s assemble-it-yourself marble maze. The host had had it all ready for her.

We were at a friend’s for dinner, and the young mom got distracted by the conversation because the dinner was for her. I got down on the floor and took a turn with her baby, who was old enough to run but too young to talk.

We rolled that marble down those chutes.

The rest of them had gone into a covered tin labeled Marbles.

She shook it at me, her eyes questioning, but I did not open it for her. Her mother had narrowed it to just the one and I wasn’t about to mess with that.

RollrollrollPLUNK!

She picked it up from the bottom piece and looked at me with big eyes and…moved that marble slowly up in front of her mouth. Testing whether the rules applied across multiple grownups and when Mom wasn’t looking.

I shook my head no.

Oh. They do. Okay then.

She put it back on the (oh what’s the name of that toy) and let it take its path and never tried to eat it again.

Anne gets the thanks for this one. A note from her got me looking: Ukraine is of course known for its sunflowers and as a large producer of sunflower oil.

What happens when you grow lots and lots of big bright yellow flowers?

You get lots and lots of honeybees.

I had no idea that Ukraine produces 10% of the world’s honey, although of course they do; it’s just that most of it never makes it over the ocean to here.

In the US, Congress has allowed corporations to adulterate both olive oil and honey and to sell deliberately mislabeled blends as the real thing. If you’re allergic to corn like a nephew of mine, that’s kind of a big deal on both counts. Can we please vote in people who care about people?

Which is why it’s wonderful to find a company that tracks its sources down to the individual farmers and verifies that what they’re passing on to their customers is nothing but true pure honey. (Re the olive oil: California’s law requiring Californian-grown organic extra virgin olive oil to only be that has been grandfathered in. That one you can trust.)

So. Anne found a jar of Ukrainian sunflower honey from a company that not only does that source tracing but is donating 100% of profits for it to World Food Kitchen and to Medical Teams International’s efforts on behalf of Ukrainian refugees in Moldova.

Even with the FedEx shipping, that sixpack of bottles comes to $12.50 per two-pound jar. The local stuff I’ve been buying is a dollar an ounce.

Do you have friends who need Ukrainian sunflowers in a jar for Christmas? Some of mine suddenly do. And it’s already here on our side of the ocean. While the money heads over there where it’s so badly needed.

This is a little bit out on a limb–and yet.

I’ve mentioned how I was instantly smitten with a beaded sunflower necklace designed by Oleksandra in Ukraine. I waited several weeks before ordering it to see if its effect on me would wear off; the lower sunflower in particular is really big and I don’t naturally tend towards the ostentatious.

And yet. Those flower halves lifted as wings to the sky, the inner petals below curled as if caught up in the velocity above: it spoke to strength, resilience, survival. It reminded my eyes of peregrine flight, if you remember my volunteer remote-cam work towards their recovery. Yes, I could wear that. Thinking of strangers’ eyes lighting up on seeing me wearing a vyshyvanka: I would. For them.

It somehow felt a compelling part of the historical moment that I wanted to bear witness to. My father would have loved the art of it as well and I missed him, and that was somehow wrapped up in it, too. My little sister and I were with him on the plaza in Santa Fe when he fell in love with a shadowbox turquoise necklace and spent a long time talking to the artist about how her creation had come to be and about her work; he’d bought it for Mom, just like his dad had once picked out a large turquoise and a setting type and had watched another Navajo artist create a ring to surprise Dad’s mother.

That ring was big. It was almost ostentatious. And I treasure it. I’m the granddaughter who got to inherit it.

And so, wondering which granddaughter’s this would someday be, I bought that gerdan in July, back when there was only one, and I’ve written here of the long international back-and-forth wanderings that thing has been taken along on ever since.

My longtime mailman rang the doorbell Friday and I said quite gladly, You’re back!

He enjoyed that.

He’d been away when the post office had been unable to figure out where to send that gerdan. I knew he wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

Meantime, Oleksandra had been avidly following that tracking every day, even though for me it hasn’t changed since September 17.  She sent me a note a couple of days ago to let me know what the American postal service hadn’t been able to say: it had arrived back in Kiev! She was going to go retrieve it, repackage, and re-send it. She had made another two of those necklaces anyway even though I had told her that if it never showed up to please consider it a donation and not to worry about it.

But she was determined, and luck turned her way, and so, one way or another, there are strung-glass sunflowers coming my way shortly. Maybe it will spend the usual month or two waiting in Kiev to leave the country again; maybe it won’t.

And here’s where part of me can’t say/part of me can’t not say it so I’m just going to put it out there:

I was woken up very early this morning, October 3, by a dream that stayed vivid and still is, which is not a usual thing for me: that, however long it might take this time, I was once again at my front door opening it to our longtime guy and he was handing me a package. It was, it was my long-hoped-for necklace from Oleksandra, my personal connection to a family with a loved one defending their country there.

And as he handed me that package from Ukraine it totally capped off the day for both of us as we found out that we had both heard the news:

The war had ended that day.

Ukraine had won.

I know that all the fiercely wanting it to be so does not make it so. I know a dream does not require reality to bend to it. And yet the wild irrational hope holds on hard and it utterly refuses to let go, and all I can do is pray hard in grief and love and longing.

All I can say is, we shall see.

And that I wish that there could be overnight delivery on that thing.

We have a quite elderly widow in our ward at church, probably the oldest person there. She’s lived in her house with the big back yard and tall trees and winding creek up near the hills for most of her long life.

Someone had an idea that I want to pass along: that her friends who could should bring themselves a sandwich and gather at her house for lunch on Fridays, clean up afterwards to make sure she doesn’t have to do any work to have us come, and give her company and laughter while being sets of eyes looking out for her for the sakes of both her and her children across the country.

We had such a good time today.