A three-birthday day around here.

My friend Sterling’s wife gave out his cell number when he wasn’t looking and we all threw him a virtual surprise party with text messages. He thanked me and added as he wrote back, who is this?

Oh, Alison! Oh, okay, cool!

My mom went to her airport to pick up my older sister, who with her husband is taking care of their one-year-old grandson Geoffrey, his parents being deployed; so we got to sing Happy Birthday to Mom and talk to my dad and sister, too.

One year ago, and now… We got a quick Skype chat with Parker and Richard and Kim and we all sang him Happy Birthday, but since my husband was off at work, they’ll try later. Cool–all the more celebration for us!

And I got an answer from the doctor who had ordered the Reclast. The site that had said a low creatinine count was a sign of lupus nephritis had it exactly backwards. Low is good. It’s the high that’s a problem. Given that Reclast can affect kidneys of itself, and, yeah, there will be another test tomorrow, but it does seem to be clearing away.

It’s been probably twenty years since I had to know the details of lupus kidney disease, and I’ve never wanted to go back.

Looks like I won’t have to. Yes!

A certain young man is now officially one, his great-grandmother, that plus 80. It’s a holiday kind of a day all around.  Celebrate!

Today was the true spirit of holiday rush.

Remember that four-year 29% bone loss? (Yeah, steroid meds are fun.) I was scheduled to have my first yearly IV infusion of an osteoporosis drug this afternoon. They needed a morning sample from the lab beforehand, preferably same-day.

At the lab, I asked, wasn’t there supposed to be a blood draw too?

With the place packed and signs pleading for patience saying that they had a new computer system in place and it would likely take a few weeks for everyone to get up to speed with it, they looked me up and assured me no.

Well okay then. I stopped by the house afterwards and then I was going to the annual lupus group luncheon. I look forward to it all year. There are old friends who turn out for it that I never get to see otherwise, and I’ve missed it too many times from having germs–you do not bring contagion to an immuno-compromised group. I had RSVP’d, I was germ-free, and I was good to go.

The phone rang as I was walking for the door. The doctor’s office: I was indeed supposed to have had blood drawn, and it had to be at least an hour, preferably two before that IV, the sooner the better.

I. Am. Going. To. My. Luncheon. And I did: and our group got seated at the door, which kept being left open and I kept getting up and shutting it. Lupus. Sun.  Come on, folks, you know what group is here.

The manager, bless her, said to me that the whole restaurant was reserved and everybody was here and then she locked the door! And put a chair in front of it to try to get people from the other group to go out the far one or at least notice that a message was being conveyed. Go her!

I probably shouldn’t have ordered at all. My soup arrived, a little too hot to eat yet, less than five minutes before I really really had to bag it up and leave (but it was so good). We were supposed to be rung up as a group; they let me pay and go, glad to be able to help. Good folks there at Allied Arts.

But I was stressed out enough to trigger my cardiac cough. Back to the lab. Back home.

This IV was all something new and they told me I would feel like the flu for several days afterwards, maybe even a week. I had no idea how I would react. Richard wanted to come with me to be a support and just in case I wasn’t up to driving home, bless him. I offered him half my soup, still warm.

We arrived at the oncology clinic. The nurse clearly was used to people who weren’t used to IVs, and apologized at blowing a vein on the first try: my blood pressure was so low, it was hard to find a good enough one.

Eh. I knew there’s a world of difference between that and a vein that collapses after a couple days’ use in the hospital and screams at the saline they have to push through it; this was nothing, absolutely nothing. I assured her it was okay, and it took a few tries before she believed me that it really didn’t bother me, none of this stuff did.

Dem bones dem bones dem dry bones. An hour of sitting and quietly reading with no pressures to get anything else done in the moment. Enjoying the quiet.

I’m just glad there’s something they can do!

(It’s still the 13th here, my blog timestamp is off an hour.)

As Richard hung up my coat at Flea Street Cafe for the birthday dinner, the maitre d’ exclaimed to me, Ooh! I love your necklace!

Yesterday’s silver beaded chain? Today I got to wear an alpaca beaded version. Picture a Saint Bernard with the proverbial cask: I now come equipped with emergency yarn around my neck. Not that I would ever think of taking these soft jewels apart, but still. It is so me. So perfect.

My doorbell rang this afternoon during the few moments I was actually home between errands: Andrea, bearing gifts and totally surprising me. Inside her two bags were thistle seed and a hanger for them for my finches, and this hand-crocheted Fair Trade alpaca necklace from Bolivia.

Wow. Coooooool! Thank you! And like I say, the lady at Flea exclaimed the moment she saw it, just like I did.

Moments after we walked in the door home again from there, the phone rang: our son Richard and his wife Kim, wanting to set up a Skype chat.

And so we got to wave hi and play almost-patty-cake via the cams with our little grandson. Parker, I am here to assure you, is as cute as ever.

We adjusted our camera a moment to be in a more direct eye-to-eye line with him rather than offsides, and then I seem to have waved hi just the right way: Parker got the biggest smile waving back, got all excited about it and turned and RAN TO HIS MOMMY. Three steps.

Wait. Did we just see what it looked like we just saw?!

While my son was going, Wow! He’s never done that before! We’ve never seen him do that before!

First steps. For delight at his Grammy on her birthday, to the safe reassurance of his Mommy. Does it get more perfect than that?

Part One.

I had no idea what the place was going to be like or even quite where it was going to be. Which was okay, I was going to be the passenger.

My friend Nina was taking part in a small–very small, as it turned out–holiday craft fair in Sky Londa today, immediately down the hill from Alice’s Restaurant.

Phyl was sure it was going to be held indoors and safe for my lupus, and it’s always good to see Nina, so up twisty Highway 84 we went.

Well, there were doors, that much turned out to be true: a stand-alone room of a building with the doors wide open and most of the crafty goings-on out in the fresh air, with Christmas trees over to the side being picked out and bundled onto cars, attracting people driving by to or from the coast. Come.  You see all these trees all around? Bring one home with you, pine-sized. Buy a handknit woolly scarf while you choose in the chill.

The sky was a dense fog, the ear-popping elevation not limited to the tops of the redwoods. I had on two layers of sweaters, wool knee socks, and a good wool hat. Nina was cold in a down jacket and thick hat and I realized that my heating-impaired house had gotten me more used to colder weather than I’d realized. (One site says it was 46F there today, one, a bit more.)

Checking the blog, it was Wednesday that that skein of Malabrigo Rios jumped onto my needles for no reason I knew of and just absolutely demanded that I knit it into a hat, and fast. NOW. And there seemed to be only one stitch pattern for it. That was that.

It wasn’t for my Christmas knitting queue, either. Don’t ask me how I knew that, but it just felt obvious all of its own. Well, huh.

So it got made. I knit it into the pattern that surrounds this blog, except done with yarnovers to make fern lace. I ran the ends in to finish it this morning right before Phyllis came to pick me up; whoever it was going to be for wouldn’t mind if I wore it just this one day, would they?

Ferns grow freely among the redwoods, the fronds echoing the green needles above; the Azules colorway echoed the California coastal sky, bright blue and foggy mixed together. With a touch of green. The ferns.

There was a seat just behind the window next to the door. After admiring Nina’s knitting for sale and visiting with a few friends, (side note for them: my brother Bryan’s Jeppson Guitars is here) I sat down there, figuring the glass would give me a little bit of UV protection on one side at least, pulled some yarn out from my purse, and started another hat while listening to a singer with his guitar who was seated in that room too and whose sound had drawn me in there in the first place.

I tell you, he was good. I looked around for signs of CDs I could write a check for but saw none.

Another man had told me there would be four musicians together later, and I’m quite sorry to have missed that but I can only be outside so much. But while I could be there, the one playing then, I could have listened to forever.

Yarn winding in time around wood as he played helped keep me warm.

I (in my sun worries) thought we were there about an hour and a half; Phyllis later guessed about 45 minutes. Judging by rows finished, she’s probably right. She came to me to say she was done just as I was finishing up a needle; okay, cool–and just as the musician finished his song and said what he was going to be playing next.

He had a blue canister with the word TIPS painted prominently in bright yellow.

I was standing up to go but turned to him instead, glad that I could say something without interrupting–the timing had come out perfect. I said very briefly I had no cash with me (much though I wished) and major home repairs waiting. But this I could do: Malabrigo. Some of the finest wool in the world. I had just knitted this (and I took off my hat). I had made it up as I’d gone along, and it is a woman’s, but I was sure he could find someone to give it to; “I want to throw my hat in the ring” to thank him for his music, and with that I put it in his tip jar.

The new warmth in his smile was like no one else’s.

Part two.

We were pulling out when I went, “The honey!”

“Oh, right,” answered Phyl, offering to let silly me pay her back later (I did) and she pulled off to the left to where someone was selling local honey across the side street.

He had blackberry! My favorite! I told the man I couldn’t go to the Kings Mountain Art Fair anymore where I used to buy it; too much sun time.

He asked if I were sensitive to the sun?

Turns out he and his doctor have discussed whether he had lupus on his arm. He seemed grateful to be able to say that to someone who knew what the word meant.

I explained there were two types, skin only and systemic. If he has it there, don’t let the word scare you.

He told me as we left, “You take care of yourself.”

“You too.” And I assured him that systemic notwithstanding, I’d had it twenty+ years; I’m doing fine.  He was visibly comforted.

Part three.

Costco run. I grabbed my piano hat on our way out the door. If I was able to stay warm enough on that mountain I didn’t need more than a hat thrown on down here too, right?

There was a woman in the store’s motorized wheelchair wearing a set-up that I recognized from when my son had knee surgery: her leg looked tinker-toyed. She was offered a sample of smoked salmon and wanted to buy some, but it turned out to be set on a shelf high above her head and the person giving the stuff out was too swamped with customers to notice.

But I did. “Do you want me to reach that for you?”

“Oh, yes, please! If you would.”

Now, I have spent my time needing that chair before. I know that people in wheelchairs like to browse too: like not just having help getting something down, but also like not being forced to buy it or stash it in the wrong place after looking it over simply because there is no physical way to get it back up high again, the helpful person by then long gone.

So I hung around the salmon a moment, just in case, thinking, browse away, hon.

She asked me if I were a pianist?

(I didn’t say, not like my concert-pianist grandmother nor my organ-performance-minor son, but) “Yes.”

She was too! She LOVED my hat! Wait–I’d *made* it?!

Hey (bring on the brag). I’d designed it.

I showed her the inside: how I’d wrapped the yarn across the backs of every single stitch so it wouldn’t have long lengths to snag on things. But that had made it so the black shows through the white keys a bit across the front, and for later hats, I’d gone with the long lengths. (The floats, to a knitter.)

I did offer to put the salmon back up if by chance she needed that. She loved that someone understood how it was to be seated.

However long later, Richard turned back to get one last thing for me and then we headed to the checkout. With him at the cart, he picked a line.

Which turned out to be next to that woman. Her young sons had joined her by then, one quite small, one maybe six or seven. I knew it couldn’t be easy to have Mom having a hard time getting around for awhile, especially if that’s a change.

I said a quick inner prayer, wondering. In response I felt this: could I re-create the hat? Sure, in a day, two, tops. Could I re-create this moment? Not on your life. And so while she was turned the other way I whipped my hat off my head, stepped over and tucked it into her cart just as she turned back.

She was stunned. “NO!” in disbelief. A delighted butbutbut.

May I?

She shook her head in how can I let you and joy and are you sure. Yes I’m sure.

She exclaimed some more and her older boy admired it and put it on his head. She told me he played violin.

“I don’t know how to knit a violin yet,” I laughed. (Thinking, but just wait…)

Her husband joined them right about then and the next thing I saw, all of them were laughing and happy, and then the older couple behind them in line were happy for them and admiring their hat and loving being at Costco right there right then.

I had been exposed to enough UV earlier to burn my cheeks and wonder what my T- (ed. to add, and B-) cells would do next. But as I once told my friend Scott, “Sometimes you just have to LIVE!”  I was hoping the Decembery conditions would be enough in my favor, but it was a risk and I knew it and I weighed it and I took it. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll be fine. Some things are worth what you pay for them. It was a day well spent.

But that very awareness pushed me to choose not to be selfish but to grab the moment given me to make that family happy.

As that musician had made me happy by the depth of that smile that had lit up his whole countenance. He, too, had played his part to help make it happen for them.

We all arrived of our own choices where we were supposed to be.

Parker ready to read to his younger cousin: hey look, he saved her bookmark.

When Holly was here in town several months ago, I showed her a project I was working on.

She admired the yarn, but as she did so, simply having another set of eyes looking at what I was making it into made me face that yes it was a doodle but no I didn’t like how the second half was coming out.

Finally today I sat down and risked it catching on itself all over the place and carefully ripped half of that little shawl back and reknit the now-squiggly length back up and past that point. It feels so much better.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you, starting with Stephanie, who have ever said you’ve never regretted frogging something that needed it:  at last I have a beautiful mink/cashmere project that I love and that lives up to what it should have been all along.

As it knit back up I gradually went from appeased pride, to, I can’t wait till the recipient gets it!

Meantime, Parker and his cousin, as usual, steal the show.  Birthday and Christmas season. Celebration times!

Got another hat finished today, out of yarn that bossed me around and flew onto my needles whether I’d planned to use it next or not. And only just now writing this do I realize that that colorway and the pattern I chose for it looked rather like–wait for it–a bluejay’s feathers. I had one in the hands today and three in the bush yesterday.

Got a package: some raspberryish Sock Dream yarn I’d ordered. (Richard had looked at it online with me and had declared it nice and you know, your birthday’s coming up…) It was from Karin, my friend who drove from Albany NY to Vermont for us to finally get to meet in person while I was there three years ago. Tucked in the envelope was the total surprise of sparkly soft laceweight Wink in what else but Periwinkle from her Periwinkle Sheep shop with a Happy Birthday card. She remembered? She did that?!

Wow. Thank you, Karin! They are both so soft, and you know I’m a softness fanatic. And here she is, forced to deal with an injured back whether she has time to or not and yet thinking of how to make someone else’s day.

Totally made mine. So generous. Wow. I keep going and petting those yarns.  I hope to do her gift justice.

The third thing. I went back to the dermatologist today to check my scalp post-skin cancer; I’d had lupus lesions in reaction to the surgery and a reaction to the stitches themselves and she’d wanted a five-month follow-up.

She’s a young mom, and she was looking at the scar, which is indented into my skull in just exactly the spot that when I called it my fontanelle she had to stop a moment, she was laughing too hard.

And I have this weird piece of hanging skin at the very back of my head where the worst autoimmune grumbling had been; she declared it inflammatory tissue that, although it’s quite attached to me, won’t be forever; it just looks weird hanging there by a thin little bit.

I think I’ll name it Chad.  Poor little Chad has lesion-air’s disease. And now I could knit it a soft sparkly sweater in two stitches flat.

Lori Stotko, the hands specialist, had wanted me to test the new shaping for awhile.

“So how are you doing with the new splints?”

“Edward Shovelhands.”

She laughed. She tweaked them a bit more–curl that edge a tad, add velcro across this part of the fingers, there you go, good for happy knitting for another three or four years.

And on the wildlife front: I’ve been throwing  a few nuts out mornings and afternoons, far from the feeder, just a few but it seems to be enough to keep the squirrels docile around the birdfeeders. Not enough to hoard but enough for a few of them not to be hungry; seems to work.

The bluejays clearly have caught on. One saw me opening the door today and was just waiting for it. I closed the door and, swoop! Got it! Jab, jab, jab, jackhammering it steadily apart on the ground.

What happened next I did not expect. There was a sudden three-way birdfight: swoops and jousting and chasing right through the smallest twigs through the trees, mine mine mine, continuing on out across the neighbor’s yard and then the next, swoop, swoop, (run!) go away, MINE, and just when I thought it was over there they were back again, swooping and flinching, chasing and fleeing. I definitely got my entertainment out of that walnut.

The squirrels, meantime, kept well out of sight till those big beaks were too.

I woke up with tingly hands after all I said about that pearl yarn, which, I found out, does indeed get a bit splitty at k3tog. It is on hold for today; the larger and more comfortable size 5s came out, a little Malabrigo Rios, and a new project is whizzing by woolly well now.

And I got to go to the annual December Birthday Club potluck breakfast. A new baby was admired, his first-time mom consoled on his not-sleeping, he was cuddled and cheered and she melted at his tiny fussy face, as did we all. He tried to smile back at us, he really did, but it was such hard work when you’re so new.

On a whimsical note: I’ve read that if you ask Siri, the voice in the Iphone 4S, the meaning of life, she will answer with a question: Why are you asking this of an inanimate object?

I mentioned that to my husband, and his so-innocent-puzzled response was, Well, why didn’t they have her answer “42“?

(Okay, so I just googled, and apparently sometimes Siri does indeed say 42. Great engineers think alike.)

Oh, and Lene? If you haven’t seen it yet, I found a chair for you. And yes, I want one too.

A year ago September, my in-laws moved out of their house of over 50 years to be near one of their children. Shortly thereafter, the doctors told them: it was back.

And so we are taking turns visiting the folks, who both feel a lot better than that medical chart suggests. Our daughter Michelle arrived there today to help cook Thursday’s dinner. We got home last night after six days’ visit.

And thus my mother-in-law’s mention that she hadn’t seen me knitting. I’d brought plenty to do, but found I wanted to spend all the time I could without even that interruption. I didn’t need to do; I needed most of all simply to be present.

Thus the chance to meet Lynn, who lives near them all.

And thus, just because the Universe wanted to leaven things up a little… That happened to be one of the two weekends a year that they hold Stake Conference in that part of Texas, ie when a group of wards (congregations) all get together for a big joint meeting.

Which is a good thing because he’s not in their ward and we would never have seen him otherwise.

We sat near the front so I could hear better. And sitting back behind quite a few heads, Keith thought that that tall guy looked a lot like his friends’ dad from back home in California.

The meeting ended. We stood up and when it was our turn, started down the aisle to go.

At the other end of that aisle, a young man suddenly caught my eye and he gasped, his jaw hit the floor, and he stood there wide-eyed mid-stride and speechless.

I remember Sue, his mom, plunking her toddler boy down on the kitchen counter while we worked and talked, I a young mom who had just moved into the area from New Hampshire, she, a young mom who had moved from Boston several years before that. We watched her little boy, her youngest, grow up. Off to college, then on a mission for the Mormon Church, and back to school, then recently graduated.

And now Richard and I got to see him in his own element, his new friends there, his own place being just down the street from where we were standing there in total mutual disbelief and then laughing and hugging and what are YOU doing here! and and and.

In his first job.  He’d come visit at Christmas though, he promised me. It felt different when he said that: he wouldn’t be a student returning home on break but a good man deciding to go visit his folks. Always a good thing.

Sue–it was a privilege. You’ve done a great job.

And somewhere, God chuckled.

Finally got to meet the newly-engaged Lynn today; she was just bursting with joy, her happiness radiant. Lynn and your beloved, I wish you all the best forever.

For a moment there I thought they were going to revoke my knitting license.

I’m going to a baby shower Tuesday for two friends; one is having a boy, the other a girl. I looked up baby hat sizes and measurements tonight and launched into some leftover Malabrigo Rios in Solis blue/green, sure I had enough for the boy one.

Garter stitch, seven across, till the brim is about the right length. Pretty stretchy: do we measure as knitted or as stretched. Hmm. Go for in between (but mostly unstretched). Three-needle-bindoff to seam it, pick up two out of three across the upper side of the circle, standard stuff, although that got me 66 stitches–close to the amount I would use for a worsted-weight hat for me. Hmm. But these needles were smaller than for that. I’m fine.

Richard walked in the room when I was well into it and pronounced, “That looks big enough for you.”

Nooo… That stopped me. I pulled it over my head: a bit tight, but could be done. He was right.

Take it off. Measure. Unstretched? 15″ brim, right on cue for 3-6 months. Height? 6″ and getting low on yarn. I looked for more, but this was the yarn from Parker’s dragonskins baby blanket–there are no other skein ends kicking around but the one.

Baby size it will be after all, then. Knitting license saved! Tadaaah!

Y’know… that would match his blankie…

Okay, I have two hats I need to knit. Starting tomorrow.

(Great Blue Heron, Coronado Island, and Parker, rocking the kelly green, courtesy of my son Richard.)

My friend Kelli is the prime culprit in a particularly nice anonymous favor once done me via Purlescence.

Kelli of late has had to give up knitting: she’s a handcycle racer, with a custom-fitted set of wheels–but autoimmuned hands sometimes have limits and I haven’t seen much of her for awhile. It’s hard to not be able to do the other thing you love to do.

And yet. When Penny in our knit night group had to go on chemo, Kelli is the one who pulled the hand-dyed merino out of her stash and started knitting Penny a super-soft hat.

She couldn’t finish it. She had to ask for help (I knew nothing at the time.) And so Penny showed up one night wearing it, needing to avoid germ exposure but needing to be around friends after months of isolation and needing to show off what those two, a friend helping a friend helping a friend, had created for her to be comforted by.

So. Much. Joy. For all of us.

I recently got some (more) yarn from China, 95/5 cashmere/mink this time; when it came, the green was not quite what I’d expected. I like blueish greens.

This was a kelly green.

Guess how long it took me to figure out who that would be perfect for?

So that’s what I was working on this past week in between baking and packing to help move Richard’s office. That’s what I finally cast off and blocked last night.

And that’s what came out, despite my expectations and all my inspections as I doodled with my needles, to be quite…ruffly.

I was stumped. I said to Richard, But…but…Kelly’s a biker! And then quickly had to explain that that was a joke, son, a joke, biker chick as in that kind of bike, as in trying out for the paralympics. How someone with Crohn’s disease does what she does I have absolutely no idea whatsoever, and I have been in awe of her for a very long time.

But I just don’t see her as the girly-girl type. And this is ruffly!

He considered a moment. Got the biggest impish grin spreading across his face.

“Camo!”

I totally lost it. Laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. Richard saves the day! It was suddenly okay to give her what had been for her all along, silly me, and I instantly quit second-guessing both of us.

Kelli, hon, your girly-girl biker camo awaits you at Purlescence. Love from us.

How you chop 500g chocolate bars: you hold them up high and smash them down on the floor. Carefully, straight down, so the seam doesn’t rip in the paper wrapper (although that can be very entertaining to children for the pinata effect). Concrete-slab floors a la California ranch houses a plus.

Maybe repeat. Open bag. Pour.

My friend Nanci’s youngest is having a wedding reception soon–my stars, I remember when he was a newborn–and Nanci approached me, very tentatively, wondering if I might make a chocolate torte for it.

I always make two. I’d love to. I promised her a pair, if she wouldn’t mind freezing them till the day so I could get them done and out of the way.

She surprised me yesterday by saying she was going to Milk Pail, which is a half-outdoor market, to buy the manufacturing cream so I wouldn’t have to go out in the sun, and was there anything else I needed? Butter? Chocolate?

I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to have someone who doesn’t live with lupus remember what it’s like to have it.  No sun exposure! I told her I had plenty of chocolate and butter; she brought me some butter too anyway, because that was an ingredient that was easy to get just the right one of. I told her there was more than enough cream there for four tortes, and if she wanted, I would try to pull that off in my time constraints.

Her eyes voted immediately yes! If it’s not too much…

And so I started. I made the first pair of cakes yesterday, hurrying to get it done before Richard called for help.

They were a tad overdone; these new darker pans are still a learning curve. Well crumb. I put them aside.

Today I turned the oven down by 25 and the timer by 7, tried again and got it perfect. But when I went to glaze them…

…I’d accidentally picked up the Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bittersweet with almonds rather than plain. Nuts! So I went off in hopes they’d gotten the plain in stock by now–had they had them earlier, the color contrast on the wrappers would have tipped me off: they’re close but not the same.

The parking lot was a zoo and the employees there looked like they were putting a good face on things, but with the holiday (an aside: Happy Veteran’s Day. A solemn time and a necessary remembrance) it almost looked more like the Thanksgiving rush in there. Where were all these people coming from!

I walked in and a clerk I’ve often seen immediately asked me with concern how I was; she hadn’t seen me in awhile. Clearly that had worried her. I was surprised, and touched; I assured her I was fine and thanked her.

I explained to her and the manager the situation: baking for a wedding, I’d bought two almond ones and discovered it when I’d opened the first, too late for that one but I traded them the second, adding in a bunch more bars just to make sure I had plenty of the right ones on hand for next time too. Oh! Wait! I’m out of eggs–and I left the checkout. The woman I’d first talked to had by now taken over a line to let someone else go on break, and I waited the second time in hers.

I’ve still not recovered from our late nights of office packing. I was tired. She rang me up, handed me the bag–and I turned and promptly lost my balance. The eggs went smashing out the top (better them than me.) Chocolate down!

She was indignant: “Those bags are supposed to be good up to 20 pounds!”

It wasn’t the bag, I assured her, it was me, I lost my balance, here, that’s my fault, let me pay for them, as she called someone to get me another box.

No no that’s okay.

Let me clean it up? Please? This is my fault.

No, no, and by now I had several employees assuring me, that’s okay.

And so I went home to my already-chopped (see above) bag of almond bittersweet and those two slightly overbaked cakes, definitely good enough to eat but not quite fancy enough for a wedding.

Which is how my local Trader Joe’s employees got that already-smashed bar returned after all (or half of it, anyway.) I forgot to take into account that the volume of almonds displaced that much chocolate, so the texture of the ganache came out a tad thinner than my normal. Like they would know to compare?

The manager laughed in delight at my semi-sweetly ugly cake with the random almonds. For you all. Trading you for those eggs. Oh yes. Twist their arms.

And as I left, ducking out into the rain, every employee who’d seen it was just bursting with anticipation, fatigue disappeared.

(p.s. Hey Nanci. The first two for you are finished now, the next two are cooling and will be ready to glaze in an hour.)

Who knew that a doctor’s shoes could connect me with my grandmother?

He was wearing a pair of Wallabys today, new-looking ones; I knew exactly how comfortable those were. Back when they were a huge fad in the ’70’s, my father was on a business trip to Spain and knowing my odd-size feet and how much I’d wanted a pair, and finding some at a good price, took a chance–and they were perfect. It was my first-ever experience at being so thrilled at the most perfect shoe purchase (with the love of my Dad to top it off.) I had never owned a shoe that fit well and was comfortable and was perfectly, totally in style. 6.5EE is never in style, but look at these! Authentic Wallabys!

I wore those through high school, I wore those in college, where I was walking in snow at I forget how many thousand feet up high in the Rockies. The salted soaking sidewalks ate at the suede. I wore them till they looked like Harry Potter’s sorting hat in the middle of a sentence.

My grandparents had recently retired and were living an hour north of BYU campus.

My grandmother was a very gracious woman who would never say a disparaging word to or about anybody. She once said that she’d listened to enough of her friends whine about old age that she’d decided that she, for one, was going to be a sweet old lady. And so she was.

So there I was at Gram’s, cousins gathered around for a Sunday evening get-together, when she notices my feet.

I knew I had this coming. I waited to hear what she would say.

She searched for the right words of–well, encouragement or something somehow, and finally just chuckled: “Alison. Your shoes!”

“I know, Gram. But they’re so comfortable!”

She laughed warmly. There wasn’t much left to constrict my feet anymore anyway–nor my heart. I felt so loved.

I gave up and let them be after that school year; there wasn’t enough left of them anymore.

My grandmother had been a concert pianist.

I said to the doctor today, “How did your concerts go?”

“You remembered! You have a sharp memory!” (Oh goodness if only that were true.)

But how could one forget–and then there were his shoes…

Not to mention the waiting piano hat I pulled out of my knitting bag at the end of the visit, to his astonished delight: I’d knitted this? For him? I’d designed this? “I think that’s maybe one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever received!” and he went out into the hall grinning hugely to model it at the nurses’ station.

I offered, and I’m writing it here just so they know I meant it, to knit something for his wife too. I asked what her favorite colors were?

How many men do you know that can answer that question right off the bat? He’ll get back to me on that.

The yarn is at the ready.

(Oh, yeah, and, my 20% hip bone loss in two years is now 29% in (correction–four), despite chugging the milk and trudging the treadmill. My grandmother went from 5’9″, very tall  for a woman born in 1899, to a tiny little thing. I want to walk in her footsteps and be gentle to all to the best of my ability, but I’m trying to keep my own shoes on along the way.)

I want to celebrate Parker’s first Halloween and the best daughter-in-law ever. We are so blessed.

On the knitting front, I was going to write about the yarn that arrived from China with a label saying plane unfold arid and 95% 5% 15%–of what, exactly, it seems I don’t know, but still: bistro mathematics?

And then.

All linguistic silliness got scooped up and put down gently over there for a moment. I got a thank you note when the mail finally arrived at five that needed its own thank you back.

For the picture of a certain hat being worn and loved and appreciated, and for the words that–I found myself wiping a tear. You know who you are. People like you make it all worthwhile, and many more to come who can’t find the words will be knitted for too: because yours make me never want to miss out. Thank you.