That green hat? Now I can say it.

We had a tree come up near the house, oh, about ten years ago, a nice little tree. I’m an East Coast person who grew up in the woods (just enough grass at the front there to be, you know, proper, although we loved the wild violets that popped up all over and let them be in all their delightful little purpley glory).

I like all the green I can get around here.

But it became not so nice. Our patio started to buckle and we sure didn’t want it to do that to the house, too. I read up on it and it was apparently an ailanthus, an alien species that doesn’t support the local wildlife and a fast grower because it hogs all the water–and its roots reaching under the shed to the other side looked like they were tangling with the neighbor’s tall and much-loved redwood that overlaps onto our property.

I pointed that out to the neighbors and promised them.  The young tree had to go.

I waited for nesting season to be over, just in case, although I’d never seen the birds or squirrels stay in it for long.  Too open. Too vulnerable.  They clearly preferred other types.  Curious.

The guy I called for a quote came last week with his little boy in tow, an absolutely adorable preschooler who shyly shook my hand too like his daddy, who was beaming proudly, as well he should.

After they left, I went through my stash: years of knitting lace and fingering weights for book material (did you SEE last week when the cheapest new copy of Wrapped was listed at $96.07?!) meant there was nothing really there in the way of little boys and hat material. Purlescence was having a big sale Saturday, though, and surely I could find something good.

Right. Finding good yarn at Purlescence. Difficult, I know.

And so that Jo Sharp merino/silk/cashmere went home with me and a very soft hat got made for an unbelievably small amount of money. Two balls five bucks. It took me just one.

Guess who came along with his daddy for a few moments this morning on his way to preschool? Did I mention he’d already melted my heart? And how much he looks like David, my sort-of-other-son from way back when?  (The oldest child of the Tara’s Redwood Burl Shawl story.)  But then the little boy’s face lit up and he waved hi at me with a smile when he saw me, not quite so shy this time–and I went right back inside and got his hat.

Chris, if he should ever lose that and be heartbroken, you let me know and on a day’s notice for the knitting, I’ll sneak you a spare. (I know, it doesn’t work with baby blankets either, the kids can always tell. But if he’ll let me, I’ve got the yarn, I can knit him another.)

And if you live in the Bay Area of northern California and you want a good tree service, I thoroughly recommend Chris’s.

Oh, and? The barbecue grill got moved over a bit during all the goings-on. Later, I got to see a gray squirrel give it a quick glance from a planter, take a flying leap, and… miss! It landed on its feet but I think it stubbed its nose, poor thing.  Then it got up on the lower bar and posed a moment in triumph, as if to declare, Tadaah!  I *meant* to do that.

And here I’d been just waiting for one of them to leap for the missing tree.

Michelle picked Natalie up from the hospital today. She’s out.  Yay!

Meantime, replacement to fix this broken dishwasher doorhandle: $23 plus shipping (they sent us the full assembly beyond this part; we were pleased).

Time to take the door apart, remove the broken piece,  replace it and put it all back together: under fifteen minutes. The new handle is better designed.

Time for the $133 electronic panel to arrive next: I’ll know after I place the order. So much for that. But it’ll be even faster to swap out, he says, and it’s quite satisfying to be doing it ourselves.  (We’ll reserve true elation for when the darn thing works.)

Meantime, it’s funny how having something you can’t fix right now makes it feel imperative to work on something you can make do absolutely whatsoever you say–or you will frog its little loops into oblivion, so there.  I am master of the yarniverse. I doodled with some silk/cashmere in a whole new tangent and really really like what it’s turning into, even if it doesn’t look like much yet.

Now, pardon me, our local parts place closed down. PartSelect here I come again. (And if you need a new silverware tray? You want Mending Shed for that.

Update Monday evening: appendicitis ruled out. Tests ongoing in the hospital. Thank you all on Natalie’s behalf–I well know how important the prayers and the Thinking Good Thoughts are (which to me are the same in God’s eyes–the point of this life is to learn to care for one another the best we know how in whatever way we know.)

Meantime, in the silly-stuff department, as it’s been growing I’ve been doodling a bit with my double-stemmed avocado treelet, the one with the darker leaves.  Any good spinner knows the point of plying a yarn is to add strength and balance, and I wanted to keep those stems growing together rather than splitting apart.  They intrigue me. I’ve never had a plant come up twins before.

When I first started bending them gently around each other, they would untwist themselves and come back apart by the end of the day, but now, a little more height, a little more dancing to the Twist.

The larger-leaved sprout is a few weeks older but is still sitting in water and the color difference is actually more pronounced in real life–I’m assuming it’s because the young’uns are happily digging in the dirt.

Both pits came from the same bag of Hass fruit. The Hass itself, the most widely grown avocado in the world now, was from a sprouted seed allowed to grow into a tree that was nearly cut down because it wasn’t taking grafts from the Fuerte variety (good thing!) The children of the man who sprouted it got him to relent, Rudolph Hass’s tree was left standing, and the rest became history.

As we anxiously wait to hear more.

Let me start off with this link from two years ago to tell Natalie’s mom she’s not alone. My daughter was in school at BYU at the time; her daughter’s on an internship here, the same distance away from home.

Michelle is very protective of me re germ exposure and my impulse to jump in the car with her wasn’t worth the time the argument was going to take if I pursued it.  But I thanked her as she walked out the door.

She stopped in her tracks and shot back in her worry, Mom! To do anything else would be unthinkable and immoral!

Well, yes, of course, and she saw that clearly and dropped everything during a heavy day at her job; that’s why I was so proud of her.

She had met Natalie at a church young adults party. Natalie asked if she might have a ride home to where she was staying for the summer, and it turned out to be right in our immediate neighborhood anyway, so it went from sure, glad to help, to, oh cool! They were friends on the spot.

That made it so Natalie had someone in a town she didn’t know that she knew she could turn to.

Good thing.  Last night there was a call; she had a fever. The older woman whose house she was staying at was out of town.  We knew Natalie had no car, and a bike gets you nowhere when you’re at 102.  So when she said she had no aspirin or anything, did we, would we mind terribly? It was an of course and oh honey and I heard Michelle on the phone insisting that she call her any time in the night or day if she needed any help as she rummaged through our medicine cabinet before dashing over.  We found the meds. We sent along a new pillow for her, too, trying to make her comfortable.

We all had a feeling that wasn’t the end of it. I told Michelle last night not to worry about the car today, just assume it was hers if Natalie needed her.  We all said she was welcome to spend the night here, as a matter of fact we’d rather that than having her be sick and alone… But she did not.

The call came this afternoon and the very sound in her voice got Michelle’s instant attention. I know from an experience of mine at about that age how hard it is to go off to see some doctor you’ve never heard of in a town you don’t know, but it had gotten to the point that she knew she had to. Michelle was out the door in a flash, stopping only long enough to make that protest of but of COURSE!

Urgent Care took one look at her and said, Stanford ER. Go. We think it’s appendicitis.

Shirley, meantime, the woman she’d been staying with, came home from visiting her grandchildren and is now off at the hospital to be there for her–where I dearly wish I were, too.

I owe that.  But I am so grateful to her and Michelle, too, who took up the cause on all three mothers’ behalf as well as Natalie’s from the start.

There was a meeting at church last night, and it being a perfect summer evening, the nearest door was propped open for the cooling ocean air to breeze in.

“Oh! It’s a little bird!” Fluttering suddenly above our heads.

“It’s a finch, here, let me, that’s what canes are for.”  A house finch. Female, and by the looks of it a juvenile–a young one out exploring a bit and now lost from its flock and it didn’t know its way back to where it belonged.

That’s what houses of worship are for, right? Finding God’s place in our world. A little bit of God had been brought to us.

I stood up and walked to the other side of the room. I knew I didn’t need to be threatening from its point of view, I didn’t need to get any too close; just hold my piece of wood up a bit (it would make a great perch if it didn’t come with a human attached) and the movement near it would get it to change its direction.

It did. But the room had a raised ceiling at the interior, not too high, with a lower edge all around and wall sconces along that ledge up there; it needed to come down and go around before it could go out.

It grabbed onto the popcorn-ceiling-type stuff above a sconce.  There was an “Oooh!” around the room marveling at its ability to hold onto the seemingly impossible.

C’mon little one, I thought, you’ve lost your flock, you don’t want flocked walls, you want blue sky and the berries on that bush over there to eat. That’s how the males get such red heads in your family.

We danced a little dance: Alice over there stood and raised her arms and it flew back towards me, I raised my cane (my folks can tell you that’s nothing new) and it zigzagged back and away–out the door of the room just so, straight across the hall and outside to the great blue sky waiting for it. So perfectly and so fast that it took me a moment to take it in that no, it hadn’t gone down the hall and lost to who knows where, it was home.  Free.

Thank you, everybody. Your taking the time to offer all those kind words means much.  Karen got down there and reported that Dale looked peaceful, joyful, in a way that took her back to their childhoods. I can just picture their mother smiling and waving hi at them from the kitchen in that brick house in the woods that she designed.

And it makes perfect sense to me. He had loved. He had been loved in return and at long last in his life even married–no small thing to a man nearly blind who knew what it would take for someone to take him on in her life.

I imagine his pension meant that his new wife would be taken care of as any good husband would wish for if he couldn’t be there. His small family of sister, brother, niece and stepmom meant that Sally would have a loving family wrapped around her in her grief, just as they’d rallied around their stepmother, who had married their widowed father shortly before his own passing.  Dale leaves his wife with their love as well as his.

And when her own time comes, he will finally get to introduce her to his parents.

I’m so glad they had each other and the time they did!

I keep sitting here staring at the screen, wondering, but what on earth do I say?

My childhood and lifelong friend Karen, proud owner of the original Water Turtles shawl that I knitted for the turtle that swam alongside us at the C&O Canal as we walked the towpath there like old times: her brother Dale was ten years older than her and a thoroughly-confirmed bachelor.

Who stunned the heck out of everyone by announcing about a month ago that he was getting married and then, three weeks ago, going right ahead and doing just that.

*Dale*? Is getting *MARRIED*?

Their wedding pictures looked so happy, and I wondered whether Karen did the classic sibling thing of are we talking about MY brother? when her new sister-in-law said that Dale was so sweet. I mean, teasing is what siblings are for, right?

I wondered how the newlyweds were doing when I got a message from Karen Saturday night: Dale had pneumonia. ICU. Didn’t look good.

Butbutbut he was just fine just last wait I don’t get it!

She was visiting her daughter a thousand miles away but threw herself in her car first thing in the morning for the long, long drive, picking up her oldest brother along the way and stopping at her home for the night before continuing on for the rest of the drive south to see Dale.

Or not.

Her phone rang at 1:35 this morning.

I am unfathomably grateful to a woman who took a chance on a long-distance relationship and showed Dale, for the first time in his life, that not only was he so lovable that someone would actually take a chance and marry him in order to spend the rest of their days together, she DID.  It was such a great gift she gave him.

Karen, Sally, Paul, Amy, Helen–I am so sorry for your loss.

A woman I didn’t know, about my age, was sitting in the back by herself before the start of the women’s meeting at church today, so I picked myself up and moved over there.  There’s enough aloneness in this world; this moment, I could do something about.

You’re Katie’s mom, aren’t you? I asked her.

Yes! She brightened.  We chatted a little.  This was her third grandchild, eleven days old now, she’d come to help out.

(Someday I will get into the baby knitting thing and I know if I do I will never stop, but we’re not there yet.)  I asked where she was visiting from, and when she said Cincinnati, I asked if she knew Gary M…?

(Right.  What are the chances.)

“Well YEAH!” She looked at me in delight and explained how she and her husband knew him.

I told her, very pleased, “My husband’s cousin” –not adding in all the details like how Gary and his siblings and my husband and I had gotten to know each other better going to college together, etc etc.

And yet again the world shrinks down to people size.

Johnna and her husband just bought a house. In this city of single-stories, they bought one someone had added onto going upwards and that second story is designed for entertaining.

And entertain they did tonight, with musician friends of theirs performing in the space up there that, looking out the windows at the trees, made me realize how very much of my life in California is spent at ground level; it’s just one of the idiosyncracies of the place.

Wow. You get a new appreciation for seeing a flock of finches zooming by and poplar leaves waving at eye level. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed having height in my life.

The first fellow was a Stanford professor whose specialty is computer music.  The second, a pianist, the third, a trumpeter–New Age, jazz, traditional, they were having fun, playing by turns and then the pianist and trumpeter a few duets together.

It turns out the professor had studied under someone whose research my husband’s then- work group had sponsored in Boston. A mutual friend, definitely.  Small world.

But then the best part was at the end:  they all decided to jam.  The professor said, “I’ll start with something, like this…” and riffed. The pianist took it on, the young guy joined in with the brass, and listening, you would never know they hadn’t been practicing that piece for years.  It all just naturally fell into place, till the thought struck me–how would they ever know when it’s over?

And then immediately, but why would anyone ever want it to be?

Background shawl with thanks to Mary, who so earned it.

Every time I think I never have to take the squirrel-on-crack-effect prednisone steroid again in my life, they think up some new excuse. Short term but massive, they want now.

I argued with the nurse. *I’d had a doctor give me a bedside lecture last year that despite my reaction to topical iodine, iodine is an inert mineral that, he said, it is impossible to be allergic to. A medical myth.  The stuff they mix it with? Sure. Iodine? No.

And so (just like last year just the same) they want me to take Pred and Benedryl for a CT scan so I won’t react to this iodine I can’t be allergic to.

I got nowhere. The nurse who called me to tell me had no idea. This is just how we do it, sorry.

Yes, and walking around with 80/40 bp and the like is how I do it, do you know how I react to Benedryl? Is it in my records?  Do you really want to depress that?

You know?  I think I’ve been more stressed about this than I thought I was.

Just before my first Stanford stay last year, when I was too sick to sit up, much less knit, the community at Purlescence filled a large basket for me of newly-picked oranges from Jasmin‘s trees and yarn and handknits to cheer me on and to give me something to keep me looking forward.

One of those things was two skeins of Mooi from Nathania, Sandi, and Kaye–a blend with buffalo and cashmere that was probably one of if not the most expensive yarn in their shop. I was alive enough to realize and hang onto the idea of what a treasure they were offering me: in my intense pain and weakness, being able to anticipate specific moments of joy in an as-yet uncertain future.

How do you live up to that intensity when you’re puttering around happily back in normal life? It has been bothering me that I haven’t done that great gift justice. It kept waving other skeins ahead of it, going, no, no, you go on, wool, you’re fine, no problem.

It’s time.  I guess I can’t say I refuse to let this ongoing post-ops stuff buffalo me now.  This is lovely stuff, with a brightness to it that I didn’t see in the ball and didn’t expect as it weaves around my needles, and it didn’t even hit me till I started playing with it that those women had picked the color in their stock that matched my favorite teal-blue skirt they’d seen me in a million times.  Man am I slow on the uptake.

And now I can begin to really tell them thank you for that Mooi. At last.  It’s gorgeous stuff and it is a great comfort. Again. A CT scan? I was worried about a stinking *CT* scan, fer cryin’ out loud?! What was I *thinking*!

(Edited to add five weeks later: I talked to my radiologist brother-in-law, and he said that while one might not technically be allergic to iodine, it is very common for iodine to bind with various cells that one then makes antibodies against–causing a potentially dangerous and yes, allergic reaction.)

Fireworks again tonight, same place. Curious.  Only, this time I went outside and watched most of the show–after noticing the falcon behavior on the cam: both juveniles had already taken up their posts for the night, and it used to be, when they were new at this flying thing, that they roosted together on the louver. Of late, they haven’t always been there and when they’ve both been on the louver, they now stay at opposite ends of it.

They’re not ready to go totally off on their own quite yet.  A little independence at a time.

But when those big Fourth of July booms started, Maya scuttled halfway down it towards the reassurance of her brother’s presence. After the booms stopped, she went back to standing  sentry duty at the far end from him, facing him, watching over him as their mother had watched over her young by night.

Meantime.  I knew my friend Marguerite’s mother grew up ethnic Chinese in Hawaii, and Marguerite’s father, whose family emigrated from China when he was two, taught their daughter that the only description that mattered was “American.”

Her mom got talking a little about that today.

She was a young woman coming out of church one day, wondering at what all that sound going on out there was about.  So did everyone else. It became immediately obvious as they stepped out the church door: Pearl Harbor was under attack! They watched and cheered on the American side of the fight.  Bearing witness. Remembering forever.

Today, as I listened and realized Hawaii hadn’t even been given statehood yet at that point, she bore fervent thanks for the privilege of being an American.

To which, with equally fervent thanks to my ancestors (here and here are two, others came later) who braved their trips across a different ocean, seeking freedom, I say, amen.

A constant reminder to myself: it doesn’t get finished if you don’t finish it. That half a cast-off row isn’t going to cut it.

Right, right. So there you go.

And while we’re talking about glorious deep rosy reds like that–a return doorbelling, plum jam, a surprised plum-tree-owning neighbor, a protest of “But you didn’t have to do that!”, a response of “But may I?” (And I explained that Michelle had wanted to learn how to make jam, so it was from both of us.)

And then I got invited out to their garden.  Squashes were picked and I was gifted right back again.

My kind of neighbor wars.

Oh, and–they showed me a large leaf, quite shredded; insects, I thought, and a bad case at that. Birds, they corrected me: they’d liked it for their nests. (They clearly thought that was pretty cool, actually.)

So THAT’S where they…! So we talked birds a moment, and when I described my Nuttall’s, they smiled, oh yes, they knew that one. It has really taken to my suet feeder–that’s today’s picture, and I’m hoping it’ll let me get closer and closer.

Meantime, my black squirrel climbed a tree and stared at my being somehow on the wrong side of the fence.  What are you doing over there?!

Speaking of squirrels–my tomato container got dug into, bad, and trying to figure out how to keep the bushy-taileds out, I hit upon this: I took the lid of a plastic spinach box, cut out to the center and wider there for the stem and pushed it down into the pot. Voila! Mulched, sort of, and squirrel free. (Picture taken after the digging and before the sweeping up the mess.)

One of the things about the pot is I can haul it inside when I’m not around to give those squirrels The Look. It is the funniest thing to see one of them stop dead in their tracks and even sometimes turn tail.  You don’t mess with the momma here. You can have sunflower gleanings, but the tomatoes, those are mine.

I’d share them with the neighbors when they ripen but they’ve got their own ahead of me.

Every now and then Facebook helps bring about a moment where you think okay, this site has a lot of faults but this is why I put up with them.

Someone I knew from back in the day casually mentioned a first name of her friend and a moment of their shared history in the context of I don’t even remember what, because I was just sitting there stunned–wait–do you mean..?!  Where do I find…?!  I have wanted for SO long…!

And there she was.  I sent her a note.

Twenty-four years after our younger daughter’s birth I finally got a chance to tell this person my husband and I both so much admired growing up the news that we had named our child after her because we wanted our daughter to be as kind a person as she is.

About time.

There was a knock on our door again today.

Michelle looked in the bag and grinned. Her jam jars are ready to go.  We’ve got serious work ahead!

Someone new was in church today, and there was a Sunday School lesson on the Biblical story of Jonathan and David and comments made on the essence of friendship.

I told them of how one small decision to be of service, of my friend Lisa and me going together to visit a mutual friend’s child in the hospital in Oakland once a week, had grown our friendship and had led, a year later, to Lisa’s offer to watch my preschoolers while I did swim therapy for my newly-hit lupus to treat my sudden and severe arthritis, if I would watch her little boy in return.  We did that morning trade-off for three years four and then five days a week, an immense amount of her time that I could never, ever possibly have asked for. And what a difference it made in my life!

The new woman came up to introduce herself afterwards:  saying, she had heard the other side of that story.

Say what? What other side?

She told me she had just moved from Lisa’s ward and that Lisa had told the story of how she was profusely grateful for my help with her two-year-old back in the day.

I was going, wait, wait, there’s nothing I did that remotely compares to what she did!

Wow.  Huh.  It got me thinking how, with true acts of service, both do come away feeling like they were blessed the most of all.  But you know what, Lisa? You still did way more.

Meantime, thank you all for all the anniversary wishes!  Today is the actual day.  And after thirty years, I still think we have the best honeymoon story ever.