It was 3:30 when I headed out the door to get my husband so I could get to my carpool so we could get to hear Stephanie on time. So we all grabbed a bite before heading home after the 7:00 talk in San Francisco.

But before I crash, I had to share a picture. Baby Jack (whose mother drove Mary and me) is not quite three months old and is just starting to nail this idea of smiling back at people–and his smile lights up the entire room.

Stephanie’s does, too. It was so very good to get to see her finally–been too long. The bookseller was putting names on post-it notes in book copies as the line inched forward and Stephanie grinned at me for the woman’s sake, “Oh, I know how to spell HER name!”

Made my day, I tell you.

Midnight. Saw DebbieR. Saw the neighbor a block away sitting behind me, who did not know that I knit (and vice versa, obviously).

More later.

Two miles from home, so its territory was close enough that it could have been one of our fledglings of several years ago recognizing me: I was stopped at a light and an adult Cooper’s hawk zoomed out of the trees lining the street and straight towards me. Wow. About six feet over the center of my car while I sat there not blinking, really grateful for that red light–and wondering if the other drivers had even seen or had had any idea what they were seeing. I wondered if it was the baby I’d seen hopping around my amaryllis pots back in the day, close to the window with me on the other side like his papa likes to do.

I was across the street from the high school, and I wished I could tell all those teens that when I was in high school the bigger birds had all vanished from the skies. And look!

I saw five more raptors just on the way up 280, and on the way back a first-year redtailed hawk was standing in the grass just off the side of the freeway, presumably having just taken down lunch. It was near the reservoir where bald eagles recently built a nest for the first time in a hundred years. But no, not a juvie eagle. Someday…

Where it was, it looked like it had stopped to smell the daffodils someone had decorated the little hill with. Random acts of gardenership.

And against all the odds after having bought the original skein in December, I was able to match my dyelot with the help of Kathryn at Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco. Yay!

The shawl must go on.

California’s idea of winter snow… Those are strawberry fields, the white a plastic mulch lining the rows of plants.

Richard’s cousins were blessing their baby in church this morning and so we set the alarm and drove from cities to countryside, on past Monterey to Salinas, flatness giving way to steeply winding road then to towering eucalyptus forest swallowing all but the road immediately ahead then eventually to strawberry field after strawberry field in the clouds, the occasional, blessed rain opening up on us three times and three times we left it behind as we continued on, discovering places we had not gone before.

One cauliflower field was playing ball and looking ready to harvest, then quick! Back to the strawberries, for the most part. (My table pleads guilty to agreeing with that.)

It was Sunday and the fields were still, the machinery unmanned, not a farmhand in sight. A day of rest. And of thanking for and asking for more rain.

I got about 2/3 of a cowl knitted during the long drives. I had a shawl project going at home, but I have learned to stick to larger needles in a car so that the tips are less likely to get bounced out of an ongoing stitch.

The baby was beautiful (all that hair!), his two big sisters were happily distracted by young cousins to play with in the enclosed back yard, and it was a reunion of the families of his mother and father: like a wedding, only more relaxed and with time to really get to know each other better over lunch. People brought great food.

And–earlier at the church I saw–couldn’t be. Had to be. I called David? after him as he started to disappear down a hallway without having seen us, then I thought, no, of course, wrong brother. Roger!

He turned and was suddenly startled and we did a mutual What are YOU doing here?!

He lives there. He grew up in our neighborhood (ed. to clarify, here in California, after fielding emails Monday from my siblings of I don’t remember them…) We know his mom well, attended his dad’s funeral, he’s seen us during many a visit home over the years for his kids to see Grandma. We bought his classmate’s old house over on….

Small world.

Not too far at all. We can definitely do that again.

One last note on the Birkenstocks: they were my half of a Christmas gift certificate to the two of us, and the more I try them on the more I love them. I love being able to say I got that much out of my relative’s generosity, and mine was only the half of it!

Nina and Rod, meantime, came by to pick up their Mel and Kris mugs–an excuse to hang out. And this was after a pot-luck get-together to see our mutual friend Johnna visiting from Vermont.

It is amazing how the few minutes we spend together in person can have such an outsize effect forever after.

I said to one friend of Johnna’s I met tonight that when we moved here, my best friend in New Hampshire had been Nina’s old college friend, and so when we moved here Nina and Rod had invited us over for dinner on moving-in day, not knowing us from Adam but just because we were Virginia’s friends and because they knew what it was like to deal with movers and the upheaval of being in a strange place.

When I added, And that dinner was Nina’s first attempt at putting on a Seder, the woman I was talking to looked at me with big eyes and exclaimed, Wow.

She knew what that meant–and from that moment Nina was someone she knew would be a friend to her in an instant, too, whom she felt like one to in return already.

That invitation and that incredible dinner twenty-seven years ago continue to keep on being a blessing. I could run into this new friend again ten years from now and what she will remember about me is that I have an incredibly good person in my life and that she wanted on the spot to be like that too.

Me too.

It rained today! And is supposed to continue the next few days. Cold and wet and so desperately needed.

It’s been bugging me that I didn’t give due credit Saturday night. When we were taking the scooter apart at the convention center, I stood up from it and grabbed its seat to put it in the back seat of the car, but my balance being what it is I was immediately staggering hard against the back of the car instead. The woman who’d been admiring my shawl raced to go help as best she could: by opening the passenger door for me.

I needed to wrangle the seat into the back passenger door first and there was a moment of wait oh that one, but I was exceedingly grateful that she was trying to make a difficult task easier for us as best she saw to do.

I so empathized with her sense of loss that her chance at getting that pattern was going away, but the generosity of her stepping forward was a big part of why I swooped that book out of the scooter’s basket and signed it for her. One stranger doing a good deed to another and in return.

But she deserved more credit than what she got that night as I was trying to write up the day’s Stitches events quickly and collapse in bed. This post is overdue.

The plum tree mid-bloom. Such a flimsy looking little thing and yet it will soon offer so much fruit. I got a note from a friend that she was saving plastic produce clamshells for me: ready to thwart the raccoons and squirrels again?

Oh yes please thank you!

And to help keep the smaller critters at bay… Yesterday Coopernicus perched on the fence, watched me for several minutes, then spread his wings wide and swooped right on over right next to the window.

Got any snacks under that picnic table?

Afraid not. They all fled awhile ago, hon.

Today I saw him on the wooden box–how did he get there without my seeing him coming!? Oh wait. That’s a hawk’s specialty.  Then he fluttered on over to the back of the chair there, looked at me and said something tongue in beak: I can only guess it was along the lines of look, lady, some of my best hunting is in that alcove and if you don’t fill the little feeder there as well as the big one I’m going to have a harder time keeping my lady fed in style.  Can you help me out here?

Sure, right on it.

And on a side note: my father the art dealer has a really cool column up that I thought I’d mention. Cecil B. DeMille, when remaking his Ten Commandments movie in color, commissioned a painter to envision fourteen scenes for him to work from, and all these years later Dad immediately recognized and confirmed for the owners who that painter was, the scenes having been left unsigned. The same who painted George Washington in the famous “Prayer at Valley Forge.”

Here, I’ll let Dad tell it.

DebbieR and her husband stopped by! She surprised me with an oven mitt she’d made me–no more burned hands and no more flipping blueberries at Richard and we all had a good laugh together over that. It was very kind of her. We had a too-short but sweet visit.

The best part of Stitches, with Kris my potter friend helping me figure out what was being said in that loud echoey room, was when the announcer came on to say that the lost engagement ring belonging to this person in that booth had been found–and the whole convention center burst into cheers and clapping, thousands of people wishing the couple every happiness forever. I added the echo this time.

And there was one other thing yesterday that I’ve been mulling over how to say without invading their privacy. And–I could be wrong. And yet….

They’ve been vendors at Stitches for a number of years now. I have bought a little from them but not a lot, much though I might want to; I’m certainly not their most frequent customer. But yesterday when the crowds were down there was room for my chair in there and I wanted to see what they were up to these days. So I ventured in.

His face seemed–distracted, inwardly so, as if a bit lost from the crowd. In pain, is how it felt to me.

She, not the more gregarious one in the past, struck up the conversation, feeling the edge of my soft Lisa Souza-yarn shawl and telling me what a pretty color it was on me.

I kind of laughed, held up a foot with a deep rose Birkenstock Fayette on it and said, “And it even matches my shoes.”

“Ah. Women and their shoes.” Something in her voice–it was by no means disdainful, it was a knowing of humanity and loving it in all its foibles.

It was not the voice of the saleswoman I would have recognized from the past.

But I said, “No, actually, I have the feet of a man.” (I didn’t add, and then some. EE-wide.) “This is the first time I have ever been able to buy a shoe just because it was pretty, that was purely frivolous.” And I silently marveled at it and she did too for my sake.

I admired some of their newest yarn but when I tried to imagine justifying it to Richard, I could not; it was a quite good price for what it was but it was still well beyond me this year, and I put it back down as she engaged me in conversation some more, both of us enjoying each other’s company in the moment, knitter and longtime familiar face to same.

Something was…different.

At one point I saw the two reaching out for each other’s hand for just a moment’s touch and it seemed so pure and so private and so intense that I felt I was an interloper and, happy for them, wheeled on.

Richard had come early the day before when he was picking me up and had waited while I was oblivious and I wasn’t going to do that to him the second day; right at 6:00 I was at the doors, not knowing the freeway was a parking lot and I could have had more of my once-a-year time talking to friends.

She brushed gently past on her way and turned to get my attention and wish me all the best, holding me in her eyes a moment, connecting one last time before I left, that most beautiful handknit hat on her head.

With, I finally noticed as she continued on her way, no hair showing at all from underneath it. Suddenly I knew. I would have given anything to race after her to go befriend her anew and beyond the pleasantries of the day, to tell her husband that my husband would understand, that I had come to Stitches five years ago needing to put myself squarely back into humanity and friends and creativity and life! two weeks after being so very ill that none of the medical personnel had thought I would survive–but I had, and she would, she had to, if I could she could, please be well.

And please know that my prayers now go with you both. I am so glad I got to see you. I’m sorry I didn’t see sooner.

And I’m also not. Because for those wonderful moments you created for me you didn’t have to relive all that but just be.

I got off to a later start than I’d intended. Because I was walking down the hallway towards the front door when I looked up.

It’s been at least two years since I last got to see a pair of Cooper’s: the female picked herself up forty-five minutes after hitting the neighbor’s window, by his account, but she was never seen by any of us again.

Today, looking up through the skylight, to my very great surprise, there they were, two gorgeous raptors at the tipsy-top of the silk oak next door towering over that yard and ours, swaying in the flimsy uppermost branches, one flicking its tail for stability from time to time, the sun shining directly on their orange chests. King and Queen of the Mountain.

They were courting. Wow! I called to Richard to come see, too, and he came immediately, but before he could get there the two hawks dove thataway in perfect synchrony.

At Stitches: the brother-in-law of the Antonio I know introduced himself at the Malabrigo booth. He was thrilled with his new scarf and insisted I take some of a new test yarn they had.

He had no way to know that his apricot matched the color of the chests on those beautiful hawks just earlier. So perfect.

Allison at Imagiknit was wonderful as always. If you ever want to know what Malabrigo’s up to next, her store is their American flagship.

Susan at Abstract Fibers and I connected again today; I adore her and oh my, such beautiful dyework. She sent me off with some Valentine.

Kris and Mel and Ben and I chatted some more.

I went back to the Cephalopod booth, where I had almost…almost…and then stepped across into Karida’s space yesterday and away from her temptation, but I told the woman, “That skein haunted me all night. I had to come back and get it.”

She was amused and surprised and gratified. “It haunted you?”

“It haunted me,” this time picking it up with no intention of letting it go back on that wall. The Rainbow Gum Forest photo I’m seeing on her page doesn’t begin to do it justice (it’s the skein at the bottom of my picture), but I can only hope I will.

I bought some baby alpaca from Lisa Souza. I always do. I always will. With silk this time. I wanted so many of her yarns that it stumped me and I just bought the one in Joseph’s Coat.

Teresa Ruch had some tencel in the most intense, shiny shades of deep rose that was probably *the* most elegant skein I saw at all of Stitches. But laceweight tencel is not my thing. I had thought it was silk, and I put it back, quietly disappointed.

We talked a little, and I told her of a bamboo blend I had made into a shawl where the bamboo had been slippery–and it had quite easily snagged way out to                                                    here. And then some. (Like, a foot.) I can fix such things, but yow it was a bear and it had made me highly reluctant to try bamboo again. Granted, the openness of the lace had probably contributed to that, but…

She took that as a challenge: she showed me how hers was spun and why it thus wouldn’t be likely at all to do that. When I told her that I knew bamboo could be from the inner or outer part of the plant, that that affected softness greatly–and it’s never labeled as such and you have no way to know, she joined in with me on the last part of the sentence and affirmed as I ended with, unless you feel it in person.

Yes.

And with that she decided she wanted me to be convinced enough that she pressed some of her 4 oz/227 yard hand-dyed turquoise in my hands, a lighter color than many of hers are, a bit of purple added in, a beautiful yarn, and asked me to try it out.

I so wasn’t expecting that. I certainly will.

Stitchsisterz had round balls of 100 g/400 yards of cashmere for $25 that was perfect as the carry-along strand to a likewise-fine baby alpaca/silk I’d wanted something to go with–and as I paid for it, the second woman in the booth scooped a copy of my book out of my basket and without even asking the price looked at the one printed on the cover and handed me $25 right back and would I sign it? Um, twist my arm? Thank you!

Jimmy Beans Wool was across from Lisa, and I wasn’t even going to dare look–but that one colorway of Madeline Tosh yarn required I go over there to see closer up. They told me that MadTosh had custom-created Technicolor Dreamcoat for them.

Twenty years ago I knitted a Kaffe Fassett coat in 68 colors that my husband called his Technicolor Dreamcoat. Or sometimes his Joseph’s Coat. Are we sensing a theme here?

I just got the one–really trying to be good this year, honest–and it was showing at the top of my bag as I sat in that chair as I wheeled around and I had random people asking me repeatedly, WHERE did you get that?! (Which also happened when the Valentine’s was at the top, and when the… It’s all good, all of it.)

I later said to Kris, “You can go to your local yarn shop and maybe find a yarn that almost, almost is exactly what you want. Then you come here once a year and you can find”–and we said it in unison in both word and arm-sweeping gesture, “EVERYTHING!”

Then as Richard and I were taking the scooter apart at the curb cut, some random woman in the deepening dusk saw by the last of the light and from the convention center the Wanda’s Flowers shawl I was wearing and exclaimed over it. Really exclaimed over it. Like, this was the thing she had been looking for all day type of exclaiming over it. Richard said, “Yeah, it’s one of her designs,” as he hoisted the scooter up and in, as I said, “Yeah, it’s Lisa Souza’s yarn” (thinking in the moment that that’s what was so pretty. I was wearing it in her Foxglove color, baby alpaca.)

The woman looked just speechless that we were leaving, and that shawl was going away, and she would never find it again, and and and, and I said, “It’s my last day, I’m not coming back,” (as I told Mel and Kris earlier, I’m too Mormon to shop on Sunday–they laughed) and I whipped out a copy of the book, read her nametag, confirmed the who to, signed it, and handed it over to her as she stood there stunned and speechless and happy and trying not to lose which page that shawl was on. I was pretty sure she’d be able to find it again.

And we rode off into the very last of the sunset.

Stitches is coming, Stitches is coming!

Meantime, 58 rows x  110 stitches today and a cowl in Lisa Souza‘s handdyed Earth Birth colorway is almost ready to come off the needles.

The timing.

I utterly forgot to pick up a prescription yesterday, but it was okay, it could wait till today but it couldn’t wait till tomorrow when I have an appointment and would be at the clinic anyway. An extra trip, but that’s life.

I bought birdseed in Los Gatos closer to noon than I usually go out in the sun in and was going to stop back at the house in between but somehow I found myself instead changing freeways and heading straight to the clinic from there. Not what I’d planned.

“Have you ever used our pharmacy before?” the new employee asked.

“Twenty-seven years,” I grinned back at him.

The med had not yet been filled, and so I sat down and pulled out my knitting. It was a two-stranded project and it took a moment to untangle the balls  from where they’d rolled around and through.

And as I did so I was facing, slightly offset and from about eight feet away, a man who looked like–nah, it’s not, I decided. But maybe. I tried not to be too intrusive as I glanced his way.

He finally looked up from his phone and glanced in mine–and held my eyes in a suspended moment of, wait–are you…!?

Okay, yes, confirmed, it seemed, so I asked, “Are you Walt?”

“Yes!” He smiled and sat up a little straighter.

Delighted, I swept up my stuff and moved to a couple seats over from him. The place was not crowded.

He tried to reach out a hand to shake mine but the brief shadow across his face as he tried to move pleaded with me not to no matter how much he wanted to, so I smiled and leaned forward a moment instead in what I hoped conveyed it’s okay not to have to.

It had been so long. “How ARE you?!” he asked, and asked again, so I answered a bit more than I might have by simply saying, “There have been bumps along the way and, eh, threw out a colon that wasn’t doing anyone any good but I’m doing well, thanks. And how are *you*?”

“I don’t walk easily,” he half apologized, and I wondered whether it was a car accident or what, but clearly something major had happened. Let him say as much as he wanted to (or not), I felt; he was just reveling in the unexpected moment together and it was enough.

I asked after his kids; they were a toddler and baby last I’d seen them.  We had been seated at a restaurant and by random chance he and his family had come in–it occurred to me thinking back on that that he’d never seen me walking with a cane before, wouldn’t have known about the speeder that hit me in ’00.

Twelve and fourteen now? “Cool!” I exclaimed, remembering how interesting kids are to talk to at those ages. He glowed in pride and I glowed for his pride. They’d been a long time coming for him.

I mentioned Parker and Hudson, and he laughed that it would be awhile before he had grandchildren. (But then, he’d started about twenty years later than we had and that was fine.)

They called his name, and he got up slowly, carefully, cautiously, not the fit ever-young man I remembered, but hey, he still has most of the color in his hair and look at mine.

He turned back from the counter when he was done and I called him back to me for one last thing I wanted to say: “When DEC imploded and Richard was job hunting, after he interviewed with you you called at the house to talk to him and he wasn’t home and you got me instead. I got off that phone thinking, I don’t know who. you. are. but I HOPE my husband goes to work for *you*.”

A warm, wide smile broke across his face and his whole body relaxed. “Thank you. You just made my whole day. Thank you! That was…a long time ago.”

Best. Boss. Ever. It was a great loss when he moved on to another job fifteen years ago. Walt is the best.

Here’s a new one in the category of things heard for the first time with the new (now one-year-old) super duper Oticon hearing aids that never happened with the previous sets.

I ran into an old friend yesterday; we were delighted to see each other, and she was talking to me as she reached in for a hug.

Then she pulled back, startled and laughing: she had heard her own voice in stereo effect as she got close and it threw her a moment. Oh! Right! You wear hearing aids. But–they *do* that?

Well I guess they do.

Can’t wait to see everybody at Stitches…!

Remember that day my doorbell rang to my great surprise after I’d blogged about my 20-year-old leaky springform pans that had smoked up the oven when I’d made a batch of chocolate tortes? There was Don’s red minivan in front of my house, Don on the passenger side waving hi, and there at the door was Cliff, holding out two new pans for me to bake from. “Well, I gotta have my chocolate tortes!” grinned his dad when I ran out and gave him a hug.

When Don first became ill, I offered to bring him one so that he could have a slice any time he felt like it; he was appreciative but said he wasn’t allowed to eat it now. I would have offered Cliff directly, but I didn’t want to make it any harder on his dad just then, having a favorite but denied food right under his nose. Not the time.

I got a beautiful letter in the mail today from Cliff. Telling me of his father’s last days. It was pancreatic cancer he had had–I had misheard on the phone, turns out.

Don had reached a hand out to Cliff; Cliff had held it gently in his own for a long time, and finally told his dad he was going to go eat breakfast and then come back to take care of him.

And in the short time Cliff was in the other room, Don, having offered and been given comfort and a last moment of shared presence, slipped peacefully away.

Cliff was grateful for his dad’s long and good life, and promised to let Richard and me know when the memorial service would be. We are honored.

If it would be welcome, and I expect it will be, I will bring chocolate torte. I have good pans for that.

Yesterday was such a sudden and steep dive downwards healthwise that it threw me; there’s always this fear of the Next Big Flare, which might not be treatable the next time, and I was living it. Michelle texted me every 15 minutes: drink! Two sips! She got me through the day.

And then I woke up this morning and I did not barf. My belly ached, but it wasn’t childbirthy now.  I managed eventually to eat something. It helped, and hope breathed a grateful relief. Thank you all for your prayers and for Thinking Good Thoughts.

And then I got up, I could actually get up! and I read my emails.

Don is gone. Home to be with his beloved Amalie again, five years after losing her. But–Don is gone from us.

Our elderly friend ran into me at the grocery store shortly after she passed, fifteen years after I’d last seen him. Their son Cliff had not yet moved back in to take care of him and Don was alone. I gave him my blog address, he became a regular here, and I encouraged him to start his own blog and some of you kept him in good company with your comments and caring, and I will forever be grateful for that.

He passed two days after coming home from the hospital, and the day in between, I called to see how he was doing. Cliff told him who was on the phone and asked if he was up to speaking with me, and Don didn’t hear; “Who?”

I heard that one word and I heard the effort that went into saying it and knew in my bones it was the last thing I would hear from him. It was. Cliff apologized, but I have been at that edge where simply breathing is all you can do–but I had Crohn’s, not cancer.

Goodbye, dear friend, and the rest of you? We’re all going to have to step up on the bad puns to wish him well on his way forward. I’m, I’m, just not coming up with any quite yet. I’m sure I’ll make up for it later.

Nina’s birthday party. She loved her new silk cowl. We met new and old friends, had a great time…

And coming up our front walkway, Richard heard the beeping of the freezer alarm I made from a Heathkit kit for a college class my senior year at BYU.

Actually, he reminds me, ours was the second one I made, the class assignment one I gave to my folks. Oh right. It had seemed like a good thing to have, and all these years later ours is still working and I imagine theirs is too. He dashed into the garage from the house. (Hey, nobody uses garages to put cars in in California.)

Six hours bounced wide open.

But it actually didn’t appear too terrible. The chicken is now thawing the rest of the way in the fridge and the other things towards the front were berries and the like that could refreeze safely.

But Nina loved her cowl. Which balanced things nicely.

Build your dream house in Morro Bay, overlooking the huge Morro Rock out in the water, where you can watch the peregrine falcons fishing in the ocean every day, where there’s an incredible weaver’s guild in town pooling resources and knowledge to create college-level coursework towards bettering one’s craft together and you’re an avid weaver (and friend!), enjoying the perfect retirement…

That’s what my friend Nancy and her husband did.  She was in town for a visit and stopped by for a little while this morning, bringing zucchini bread made from zucchinis from her garden. So help me, she looks younger every year. The sea air (couldn’t resist the Sheldon reference) is doing her good. It was great to see her.