Today was Fast Sunday. And so, after church was over, food eaten, the fast broken, Michelle went off with cocoa and various dark chocolates and almond paste in hand to go play with an old friend also in town on break.  (I’ll link to her blog and pictures (scroll down) when she posts them.) Celebrate with dessert!

And so they had fun making chocolate cupcakes with a chocolate-coated marzipan mouse and cheese on top of each; Michelle came home with a container with two layers’ worth in a rubbermaid. On the top layer, there was one mouse that had a triangle to nibble, the one I got handed was facing a whole wheel of almondy Brie with a tiny bite’s worth taken out, and there was one with a red slice. Totally charming.

She mentioned that they couldn’t use white chocolate to draw with because she hadn’t ever found any that didn’t have dairy in it. I told her that’s okay; if they hadn’t been done in dark chocolate (and dark chocolate is always a good thing), they would have been three blond mice.

A great party chez Johnna.

And a Happy New Year to all!

Take one baby blanket today. Edging? Yes.  Decide to add edging all around.

Take one baby blanket, start edging.

Take one baby blanket. Frog edging.

Take one baby blanket. Start edging.

Take one baby blanket to the couch, put it down, and go play three board games (two of them totally new to me) with the kids and one of their new-to-me friends and have a wonderful time.

It’s all good.

The Malabrigo hat for Michelle. Done.

The first of the old amaryllis bulbs  started sending up a bud right on Christmas day, Nature itself in celebration; it suddenly occurs to me I could hunt through old blog posts to find out what color it’s going to be.

Kim’s mom, with love, supplied us with new pictures of the baby.

We went to a party tonight where old friends were celebrating their daughter’s engagement to a really nice guy.

The piano is tuned.

Getting to see, through photos and videoconferencing so far, the grandson who quacks like a duck. (Heh.)

It’s all good.

December 2010: it was worth going through 2009 to get to it.

A little water, a little waiting. And now you can see the slight shimmer to the woolly Malabrigo Sock-y goodness, the depth of the pattern, and oh by the way you can pull it through my wedding ring–and it’s a blanket.

Or will be, in about a bajillion more knitting hours.  Carrying it to Nina’s annual Christmas party and showing it off to her was fun but doesn’t seem to have added any length to it by just admiring its lacy looks. (The chocolate torte that came too was nowhere to be found when it was time to come home again. I think it entered the nibs-less protection program. Or ran off with the ChocolateNess Monster.)

Right then. Back to work.

Michelle’s home, Michelle’s home!

We were both saying to the other, I was going to pick up some soy milk for her before this, I don’t know why I didn’t get around to it earlier. We hated to keep her from getting to go straight home after her long day.

And yet.  The outcome was that after talking yesterday about superb teachers–the traffic to the airport was terrible, we were late getting there to pick her up, which means that when we stopped at the grocery store on the way home, we just happened to be there right at the same time as Ginny. Who is the best kindergarten teacher ever and who taught all our kids. (I asked for her specifically all four times.)

That was as perfect a way as I can think of to welcome our daughter home. Talk about old times! And new, and we did.

Ginny is someone who, last I saw, had a small enclosure set up in a corner in her classroom: streamers hanging down to create what she called the butterfly room. The children raised Monarchs in there, and when a child needed some time to calm down, they could go in there for a moment to be still and have the butterflies they’d fed and watched and cared for land on their arms, their shoulders, their heads, alive and peaceful and colorful, eye right to eye.

And then when the proper time in the year came, the children released them to fly free.

Every Monarch they might ever see for the rest of their lives, they could wonder if it was descended from one of their own and feel a kinship to it.

And we claim Ginny as ours forever.

I mentioned earlier the passing of Smokey, and after quoting his love Jan’s words, this happened the next day. Cool.

What I didn’t mention on the blog, I did yesterday to Jan and to Smokey’s oldest daughter.

The 13th would have been his birthday as well as mine, and thus was the day of his memorial service. We got to see old friends from back in the day, it had been way too long… PAM!!! Pam, who had had no children yet when we moved here, who had latched onto my babies and adored them as we adored her. SO good to see you! And you, and you, and…

But what I said to those two members of Smokey’s family, with more detail here, was this:

My husband’s first job out of grad school was in a town near New Hampshire’s southern border where a couple of high-tech companies had started expanding into to escape Massachusetts’ taxes in the Route 128 corridor.  The town was growing fast and was a mixture of old small-town New England and young professionals from all over.

The old folks voted down things they didn’t want to pay for: kindergarten being one of them. Instead, the schools there tested a small child coming in for the first time to see if he could do the things you’re supposed to learn in kindergarten–and if not, or if he froze up in front of the stranger doing the testing, he got put in Readiness, which was kindergarten by another name. There were eight-year-olds in first grade there!  How does a child recover from that?  They don’t.  And that was a third of the children. Shyness could tank your path forever.

There was a memorable School Board meeting where some guy proclaimed all public schooling as being (slamming his fist on the table and shouting) COMMUNISM!

We invited the folks next door over once for an evening of Scrabble, and were stunned at being turned down with, “We don’t play that kind of game like you educated folks.” The woman went on to tell me that they were discouraging their kids from going to college.

And this was where my children were going to grow up? Nice people around us, make no mistake, it’s just, we grew up in the part of the country with the highest number of PhD’s per capita and high expectations on the children. Lifelong pursuit of learning is just something you do.

We moved here near Stanford University just before our oldest turned five.  I told the two women yesterday that now, she’s finishing her PhD, a researcher with a dream to cure malaria. The others are  in their own graduate paths, the last in his undergrad, inspired to pursue his own area of science by a gifted middle school teacher.

Smokey had not only offered my husband a job in Silicon Valley; he had changed… everything. (They were nodding; they knew what the schools here are like: the pressure, for good and bad, for everybody to be the next brilliant scientist or engineer to change the world. The co-author of the high school biology textbook was my oldest’s actual teacher, passing on her love of the subject and inspiring her to follow her footsteps. )

“Everything!”

Jan was thrilled.  His daughter was nodding, going, “All these stories I’m hearing! All these people he influenced! I never knew…!”

First: there’s a local couple, Tuck and Patti–our family sat under the trees listening to them giving a free concert in front of City Hall once back when our kids were younger, their way, they said, of giving thanks to the community that had believed in them before they were successful.

There is nobody who plays guitar like Tuck. And Patti’s voice!

Being a dedicated Birkenstock wearer, I always got a kick out of her High Heeled Shoes blues song. And this, courtesy of my husband, is what made me think of it. Comfy looking, huh? Something to heel all that ails a body.

The other thing today:

I went to Purlescence to knit among friends, having missed them last night and being in terrible withdrawal. Not to mention, I couldn’t wait to make a delivery. Richard had helped put me up to it. (“I think they’re down that aisle, dear.” –Thanks!)

I walked in the door and handed a certain someone a wrapped present (oh good, she IS here).

She did this furtive quick glance to the sides, because clearly I was just handing one present only and only to her. She whispered, “Should I open it?”

“Yes, sure, go ahead.” (Thinking, don’t you dare not, I’ve been in too giddy an anticipation for you not to.)

The tag read: Because sometimes, that’s just the way the cooking crumbles.

Huh?  She held it down out of sight of the others, carefully working at the paper,  trying to peer through the growing crack at the seam as she gently tugged, the wrapping finally coming off for her to see–and she screamed! Threw her chair back, leaping up, just screaming with laughter, holding it up and showing it to the others and exclaiming, “This is the. BEST. EVER!!!”

Last week, she’d told us all of going out to dinner with her husband and being given a dish with so much more food than she could eat and that was just totally inundated with bacon. Ooh, bacon! And there was so much!  She took the leftovers home.

She woke up in the morning looking forward to that bacon (you know? I never did hear what the rest of the dish was. I don’t think it mattered.) She got up in just so much anticipation of walking into that kitchen downstairs for the rest of it, but her husband, who had had to leave for work earlier than her, had eaten it.

All of it.  Gone.

She told us this last week with an I-know-this-is-silly look and tone of, this was almost grounds… (for pouting, yeah, that’s it. Pouting!)

The wrapping paper fell away.  And she saw: a giant Costco package of cooked crumbled bacon.

I told her as I was walking out the shop door later and she reached to give me another hug before I left, “Best. Response. EVER!!”

Thank you, everybody. I was doing better today but was afraid to push it, so I waited: I had Knit Night coming up and I really wanted to be able to knit there but I also knew there would be a lot of knit/stop/laugh/knit/stop/swap stories going on at Purlescence to keep me from overdoing it–and it was so. It was the best way to ease into it. (Pass the icepacks.)

It was so good to be among knitters. Including one I haven’t seen in far too long–I didn’t even recognize Ava at first, visiting from out of state.  She, bless her, recognized me.

I am so glad I didn’t let a little lupus get in the way of my going!

According to the post office, it was supposed to get there today. I have the tracking receipt around somewhere.

And here’s the other part of the story.  Last Christmas, I dragged my daughter into Purlescence and asked her advice on helping me pick out a yarn for an old friend whose wife I have yet to meet. Sam picked out a particular one that met the specs and that she thought would look good on anybody.

I knitted it up: after some thought, I used the Water Turtles pattern that I’d designed for my lifelong friend Karen. It just felt like the right one, even though it might have been cool to do one of the new ones? But, somehow, nah…

I finished it. It was time to tell the couple I’d made it for. And yet… Something felt not quite…  I didn’t know what.

And so it sat there. This quite honestly frustrated me at times because I really did want to get going on what I thought I’d started, giving-wise. But it was stubborn and it just wouldn’t go. Huh.

Okay, then, whatever. And I started keeping my eyes open for just the right shade of green to somehow fix that one, since it had been green and so green it was going to be if that green somehow wasn’t it. Must be the green’s fault.

I did not find anything that felt like *it*.  Stumped. Totally. For months now.

I finally pulled that Water Turtles shawl out recently to look it over, wondering why I’d made it, then, and it hit me like a boat straying under the falls at Niagara: duh! Karen’s widowed sister-in-law! Karen’s pattern! It’s soft, it’s half silk, the color matches the Alaskan pines, and if ever someone needed a warm hug and best wishes–what took me so long! I checked with Karen first to make sure Sally would like that shade; she gave me an enthusiastic go-ahead.

Today it should have arrived.

And today, despite the fact that we don’t do Black Friday crowds in our family–well, but Purlescence is okay, right? The owners had been there since 6 am in their jammies.  I got there in the late afternoon.  Old friends were there in abundance, I got to play with someone’s baby–

–And I found the exact, the most perfect, the most wonderful shade of green that somehow felt like the one I’d been waiting for all this time. I’d never seen it before.  Bingo. There you go.

I ignored it. I avoided it. I went all over the store, Kaye helping, looking for that color in something else, knowing if it wasn’t soft enough I wouldn’t buy it, but looking.

There was no other.  It had me and it knew it. I bought one ball, 230 yards, one lacy scarf in Cashmere Superior (brushed cashmere blended with silk) coming up.

It’s the right project. It’s the right yarn.  I got the shawl to whom it was absolutely meant for all along–and I hadn’t even ever heard Sally’s name yet while I was buying her her yarn.

To everything turn, turn, turn.  Now the sense that I’d been waiting for all this time is finally here: I have the exact right yarn for the person I started it all out for and it will be in their hands on its own right day, whyever that may be that I cannot know.  Their turn is coming up.

They don’t even know they’ve been waiting. Yet.

I was at the bird center this afternoon stocking up on seed for the month.

Freddie, the owner, asked me, glancing at her computer, if I wanted a suet cake this time with that?

No, I was set, thanks–and then I told her my Nuttall’s, my woodpecker, had not been seen for a few weeks and I’d been missing it.

Yesterday, trying to entice it to come back, I’d replaced the broken bits of the old cake that were in the holder with a big solid new one that had been waiting for it, wondering, if I made it look prettier, set it a nice table up there, would that do it? Had the hawk gotten her? Had she migrated?

I checked it this morning and even though the chickadees like it and the finches will occasionally give it a peck when the feeders are both crowded, it was simply untouched.

No point in buying more yet, then, so, thanks, Freddie, hopefully next time.

And so it was that I was sitting here not long after I returned home, having run gobs of errands after that first one, finding that the grocery store was in total crazy mode, (well…yeah…) having company coming tonight rather than Thursday for dinner, getting home, getting the groceries put away, how to get it all in there and everything done, needing a moment to just finally sit down and crash for a moment, suddenly–

–who should fly in.  My goodness, that brilliant black and white outfit looks formal and perfect for celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday: there she was!

I simply watched, all else fallen away, not glancing away for a second, knowing how fast she can fly out of sight, all the more keenly aware for her absence of how blessed I am to have such moments.  Wow that’s a gorgeous bird.

She ate and ate and ate some more, diving into her food, more than I’ve ever seen her do in one visit. ‘Tis the season.

The Bewick’s wrens, meantime–I actually saw two at once–who never, never fly up to the cake but who come for the crumbs that fall from the woodpecker’s table, have been celebrating the extra crumbles I put out from yesterday’s taking-down; one showed up underneath the Nuttall’s for more, the perfect exclamation point in the flick of its tail.

Dinner to cook, still.  But those wild birds made the weight of it light as a feather.

Having one of the guests later exclaim, “OH! This is my FAVORITE!” topped it all off.

And a good meal was had by all.

Stepping away for a moment from the intensity of a new knitting project…

So. I have this cane. It’s made from sassafras wood, it’s spotted and hand carved and very cool, and my childhood friend Karen found it at a shop in Williamsburg, Virginia. (Yes–that is her on the left in the original Water Turtles shawl; new book copies available at the cover price+shipping at Purlescence.) I’ve used it as my main cane for five years now; I have to admit, the upper curve in the handle is looking rather well used by now.

Shown in the picture above, I have another one from Karen, who finds just the coolest ones, this one from Africa with painted animals on it and an ankh symbol for a handle: zebras, the perfectly-colored and -spaced spots of a giraffe, it’s got it.

Some small child got entranced with it at church recently and a zebra lost an ear.  It’s not very noticeable, except to me, but, so that one got put away for special occasions for its own good. Hearing aids for wooden horses are in short supply.

I went looking today out of idle curiosity, my local shop seeming to have gone to ugly aluminum only last time I checked, and where’s the artistry in that? I say, if it’s a permanent part of your life it needs to earn it a little bit.

And so I found someone who took an old cane and had fun with it. He steampunked it!  There’s a gear here, another few there, leather added to the handle, and, of all things, a lace-up black leather corset going up the shaft. It’s really, really cool! (But I can’t buy it without seeing if it’s comfortable with my hand leaning on that metal there, and I need  35″ and have no idea how long his is.)

I tell you. With apologies to my fellow knitters, this way beats the candy-cane stocking cover that every year about this time I start to daydream about knitting it for the season. Or maybe it’s just that that idea has lost its novelty for me by now.

Hmmm… How would you decorate one?

“So,” Phyllis, our Sunday School teacher today, said to my husband re his response to her question about humility, “you’re saying we should say” (quoting the Lord’s prayer)  “‘Thy will be done’?”

“By us,” I added.

She stopped and appraised that thought a moment.  “Thy will be done by us?”

Oh, if only.  If only always.  Is there anything that requires greater humility and love than that?

We can’t know, only God knows from moment to moment, how we could use our time and talents for the best, right here right now and in working towards some moment in the future we cannot really know.  We try to do the right thing; we try to see ourselves honestly, our faults and our warps, pray that our intentions might be as pure as we want to see them as, and offer our hearts to Him and our fellow man:

Here I am. There’s only one of me, but I can do some things, at least.  Point me in the right direction–and please, loudly enough that I might stand a chance of hearing it above the noise.

Backstory here and then here.

I finally got it blocked and the ends run in.  (Not the project I’ve been working on all week, which has the cast-off left to do.) Maybe it should have been sent off sooner. Maybe it is the right time for her right now for reasons I cannot know; maybe it was simply easier for it to arrive after she finished moving (which is what I was aiming for) or maybe that’s all just rationalizing my lateness. I don’ t know.

But it’s finished and it’s finally into God’s hands from mine: a silk and merino shawl in her sister-in-law’s pattern, the yarn coming from my favorite shop, which is, of course, Purlescence.

Karen plotted with me and it will show up on Sally’s doorstep next week.

As I ice my hands…

If you remember this story. (Seriously–don’t miss it.)

The one thing to add to it is that Gigi herself had started that first shawl, test knitting for me early on in the process of Wrapped in Comfort, and I should have given her credit for it publicly in that post. She’d returned it to me with the yoke finished and enough of the body done to prove the pattern was written correctly, but, feeling she was just never going to get it done, she let it go. Wistfully.  So of course I finished it and gave it to her; she’d thoroughly earned it, by her friendship as well as her work–and it was such an easy way to make her so happy!  Then I finished the second one for the publisher.

It came in handy in the end, too, definitely.

Now, I’ve known Gigi’s son-in-law since he was dating her daughter Jasmin. He’s a peach; that expression on his face when he opened that door that night said it all (but I already knew that).

And so when Gigi commented that she was “Off to show my love and affection to the son-in-law by heckling him,” after reading my post on teasing, I found myself breaking into random giggles all day today–I know how much those two love each other!

I got a note from her this evening: “I think I almost killed him tonight, he was laughing so hard.”

Dying laughing is what it’s all about in the first place. Together, and happily so.

(Meantime, the knitter mumbles, 445 stitches per row on the laceweight, got 12 rows done today. Halfway finished.)