After writing a year and a half ago that we hadn’t had any gopher plants come up in years, this summer a seedling somehow popped up, so now I can show you what they look like.

Next, these cheerfully declare each year that December is for green and yellow in California.  They’re just starting to bloom, and they open up in the light each morning and then pull the blankets over their eyes at night. They totally charm me.  And if there should be a freeze, the plants look for awhile like all is lost–and then they grow right back up and bloom all over again, declaring the season theirs and not to be wasted.

My kind of plant.

I was on my way to the post office today and pulled over to snap what picture I could get, curious that one pond in the marshlands here was full of birds (enbiggen to see them) and the other had none in sight.  For whatever it’s worth, the one big fire we had in town last summer was at the city compost heap, that long low mound in the upper right.

I have a fondness for gophers, and I love how this last picture resembles the fur on one.   On the other side of the street and down a bit from where I pulled over to snap the baylands, there was a gopher mound.  One that made me laugh, albeit a tad ruefully, for its sheer ambitiousness: there was a paved bike path.  Then a grassy strip, then the two-lane access road I was on, then a busy freeway with eight lanes’ worth of pavement, and the mound was between the access road and that freeway.

I wondered how many times, tunneling under the path and then the two lanes, the gopher had tried to come up for air or to see if it could finish its tunnel yet and had hit hard pavement with its paws or head.  Nope, that doesn’t work. Keep going.  It had finally made it all the way to where there was soft dirt on top and green growing things and new flavors of roots to chew on.

Good thing it could go back to where it had come from.

I got a message out of the blue yesterday from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school graduation.  Turns out she’d been looking for how to contact a classmate I’m in touch with who’s been quite ill and who I’m sure was thrilled at being offered pictures of them in first grade together.  Then today, another long-lost classmate sent me a hello too.  I tell you, in great delight: you CAN go back where you came from!

It’s kind of dangerous to post pictures of things friends have made for me because I can’t possibly fit everything in here–but it is all appreciated.

From my friend RobinM, quoted with permission:

“This morning I heard an interview with singer Tom Jones.  Members of the radio audience had submitted questions.  A woman said she had been to lots of Tom Jones concerts; no matter what mood someone was in when she went to the concert, she emerged with a smile.   What made him smile?

He said that he had been bedridden for a couple of years with TB.  He used to look out his window to see kids playing by a lamppost.  He told himself if he could ever get to that lamppost, he wouldn’t complain about a thing.  He’s never forgotten it.  What makes him smile is to sing and see the smiles on the faces of the audience.”

I loved this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html It states that someone had studied the effects of being happy on others: a shared guffaw, a smile, a thoughtful act.  I’d have been curious to follow them around to see exactly what their methodology was, to see for myself whether the presence of the researcher had contributed to the positive expectations: whether people felt they had to show the stranger that the kindnesses of their friends was important.  Curious.  But either way, they found that the ripple-on-the-pond effect goes out to three degrees of separation to people who didn’t even know nor see the originators, and that it can extend up to a year.

I would guess that it actually goes far longer than that, although I’m sure it depends on how you define it.  After all, just think of someone who went out of their way to do something uncommonly nice for you, and doesn’t it lift your spirits years and years after the fact? That teacher who believed in you.  The friend who gave up her time to listen when you needed it.  The stranger who smiled hi in passing on the day you most needed it.  That provides motivation, years after the fact, to go and do the same for someone else.

We knitters have an edge in all that.  What we make and give is a tangible reminder of how we feel about someone, a way to bless them over and over and over, bringing a smile to their face as they put the shawl to their back or socks to their feet, feeling warmed and thought about.

That’s powerful.

And hey, Jasmin, with the Crohn’s and lupus flares going on, I put on that second pair from the right today. I didn’t get to take you up on your hot cocoa offer yesterday, so I carried you around with me all day here instead.

Thank you all of you and to every person who comes to read my blog.  Much appreciated.

Suffering from writer’s blog, and then I was surprised when the doorbell rang just now, rescuing me: Jim,  (written about here, here, here, here, here and here–he’s Nicholas’s dad) holding a sweater out sheepishly.  This was clearly one of his favorites, not to mention it’s pine-green-wearing time of year anyway; it’s the second year he’s brought it to me.  I assured him quickly before he even asked that I’d love to mend it for him and that it would only take me five minutes or so.

But notice I didn’t invite him in for those five minutes, and I’m pretty sure he was on his way to work at the university anyway.

What I didn’t want him to see was, yes, I can do a pretty good job of mending a small hole in his sweater–but often after several passes at it.  Take matching yarn and dissect one ply from the rest to have a thin enough strand.  Thread needle with it (is there any question that I’d have yarn?) and weave up and down, recreating the missing stitch while connecting it to the still-existing ones. Pat self on the back for doing a good job, check it from the right side to be sure, grumble, carefully undo work so as not to make the hole bigger in the process, rethread needle, try again.  Have the single ply shred due to lack of twist from having been freed from its mates–undo, try again.  And so on.

That’s the part I would just as soon skip having an audience for.  So.

The sweater looked in good shape otherwise, and I was surprised when I looked at the inside to find I’d mended not one but five holes the last time he’d brought it by.  I finished mending today’s and held the thing up.  Right side out again, you really couldn’t tell; I was pretty pleased with myself.

And then I saw it.  Oh, *that’s* going to leave a mark!  About half a dozen stitches and rows’ worth of a mothbite, probably a carpet beetle’s at that size.  I tried. I really tried.  Hey, Jim, did you know that you can throw an old sweater in the washer and dryer several times and then cut it up into really useful hotpads? In green, to match your Christmas decorations!

No, I’m not ready to tell him that yet.  Writing this gave me my required five minutes of throwing up my hands at it, and now I’m ready to dive back in. Undo, ditch the baby alpaca–it has too bright a sheen to it for the wool for that big a space, it calls too much attention to itself–go find the cashmere/cotton that I used last time that’s a closer color match, and go try again. I can make this work.

Marguerite‘s mother spoke in church recently, detailing what her daughter had gone through, thanking God and every member of the congregation for their help, their love, and their prayers. For all the encouragement and hope that always seemed to come in at the moments it was most needed.  It was her daughter’s birthday, and her mother wanted to celebrate her good health out loud with us.

As she spoke, Marguerite was everybody’s daughter. She was already everybody’s friend.

Having given him my card with my blog address, I’m not waiting till tomorrow to post this. I want to wave hi now.

After my lupus diagnosis, starting when my youngest was two, for several years I swam Monday through Friday at the CAR pool, CAR being an acronym for the Community Association for Rehabilitation.  It was a very warm pool to help those with arthritis and it was indoors, which was absolutely necessary with my new sun-sensitive disease.  You could only swim there if you had a doctor’s prescription to get in.  So everybody there had something going on and everybody knew it.  We looked out for each other.  Often, if someone didn’t show for awhile, people would go checking on them to make sure they were okay.  This is where I met Jonathan, who was one of the lifeguards and who is now an assistant professor at a university in Singapore (ie, if you follow that link, his story did come out well in the end.)

There was the time I lost a roll of film out of my purse there and didn’t know it; it got found, and the only way to figure out whose it was was to develop the film. Since I took the pictures, I wasn’t in any of them and it didn’t help them any; so then the staff showed them to people coming in until I went, Oh! That’s Steve and Tobie! Those are my photos, sorry about that, how much do I owe you?

It was pictures of their wedding.  Tobie is half Hawaiian. Steve, it turned out, was a dead ringer for the young husband of one of the lifeguards and there had apparently been quite some consternation when those pictures came back from the shop–I think they were hiding them from Michelle-the-lifeguard just to be sure.  There was a huge sigh of relief when the groom in the pictures turned out to be someone completely different.  Too funny.

Then there was the time one of the other swimmers mentioned that he liked to bake, and I told him of a bizarre cheesecake recipe in one of my cookbooks: Oobleck Pie, for the Dr. Seuss story.  Honey lime avocado cheesecake with a wheat germ crust. Did that sound Marin County or what?

The guy asked me for the recipe. And then he actually made it.  Didn’t touch it; just brought it to the staff and presented it to them as a gift.  Heh.

I walked in the door a few hours later, and one of the lifeguards pushed that seasick-green dessert at me and told me, “This is *your* fault. You have to eat the first piece!”

Oh my.  Well.  Once you get past the shock of the first bite, it was actually pretty–okay, at least.  They had too much fun watching my face as I ate.  Yes, I’d say it’s pretty good; here, you have some!

So that gives you a little background on the place.  There were no strangers there.

There was a delightful couple there, Don and Amalie, a generation older than me but younger than a fair number of the regulars–as a young mom, I was definitely the baby in the crowd–and they were gregarious, funny, and the life of the party there.  They were essential to me as I learned how to cope with my very changed life: they had both had strokes at quite a bit younger than most, and they were perfectly cheerful about life and clearly quite in love with each other.

I remember telling Amalie once about wanting to buy some mohair yarn that was in the most perfect-ever color a yarn could ever hope to be.  It had been discontinued, so my chance to get it was a one-time thing and I knew it.  But I was highly reluctant to spend to get it.  She looked at me, and with a wisdom that I knew came of experience she had and I didn’t yet, told me, “It’s only money.  Money can be replaced.”

I bought that mohair, and it became the ribbing, collar, and cuffs as well as in the diamonds of my Kaffe Fassett coat.  Amalie made it happen.

When we decided to remodel our house, they invited me to come over to their place to show me the work they’d had done to help give me ideas, knowing that the only way to know how to do a remodel is to already have done one, and of course nobody goes into it having that.  They’d done a lovely job.  They had pet birds that I got to meet, too.

John, my baby, was I think in first grade when I quit going there: the local Y had opened an indoor pool and offered a family plan for what I’d been paying for just me.   We just couldn’t afford both plans.  CAR lost. It was terribly wrenching.

John is 20 now.  I ran into Amalie a few years ago: she was sitting in a scooter, waiting for a bus.  I didn’t recognize her at first; her hair had gone completely snow white by then, and I didn’t expect her to be in a chair.  If memory serves, I was walking home from the car repair shop, so I happened to be walking along the busy street where she was.  We had an impromptu visit that left me realizing how much I missed my old friends at CAR, wishing there were some way of having a reunion.

I saw a letter to the editor in the paper once, noticed the name, and exclaimed to my husband, Oh cool! It’s my friend Don from CAR!

Fast forward.  Michelle and I ran a few errands today, and as we got in the car after the first one, she apologized for taking so long at it. Not a problem, I quickly assured her.

Later I told her I was so glad she hadn’t been in a hurry.  The timing!  Our next stop was to Trader Joe’s for some goodies for her to take back to college that she can’t get out there.  I saw an elderly man in an electric wheelchair…

…and thought, could that be?  Don?  Nahhh.  If it were Don, Amalie would be here.  (Radiating thoughtbeams at him, Turn. A. Round.  Turn. A. Round.) Okay, that didn’t work, so from the next check-out line over, I said his name loudly, figuring that if it wasn’t him the word would simply vanish into the general hubbub of the store.

A little more volume the second time, “DON?”  Some part of me somehow just refused to be deterred, and I thought, what the heck, I’m in it now, so I said his full name loudly.

That did it.  Don turned around. It WAS him!!!

He couldn’t immediately place me, and that was no surprise; I’ve certainly aged.  My hair is completely different, and instead of being the mother of young children, I’m the mother of four 20-somethings.  But he was as sweet as ever and certainly willing to hold a conversation with someone who clearly knew who he was and was so glad to see him.

I reintroduced him to my tall Michelle, telling him she was four years old when he’d first met her.  We chatted a little, and I think he got who I was.   Then he opened up and told me, “My wife passed away a few weeks ago. It was very sudden.  It was very unexpected.  She…” He stopped.  “She didn’t suffer.”

My heart went out to him.  “Oh, honey.” I told him, “I’m so sorry.”  I told him how very glad I was to see him.

While I thought, I am SO glad that today of all days and this moment of all moments we ended up in this store and that you did too.  And somehow in the lines right next to each other right here.  I am just SO glad.  Dear God, thank you.

And Don, I look forward to the next time I get to run into you.  Take good care of yourself, y’hear?  I need you to.  When my own life was upended, you and Amalie are the ones who showed me how to cope.

I teased Ann at church today: I liked her red necklace.  I told her it looked like she’d brought her own snack to church, just to make sure she didn’t get hungry–it looked like a string of licorice.

Ann, sweet elderly lady that she is, guffawed.

I know her grandson and his wife; they have two little girls, one shy, one I can sometimes get to laugh or smile back at me.

I know Ann’s daughter, although, not so much; she visits often enough that I’ve had the occasional conversation with her.  It would take me awhile to think of her name.  But Phyllis knew it, and we know each other certainly by sight and by friendliness, and as Phyll and her husband were bringing us home from the airport Monday night, they mentioned that the woman’s husband had very suddenly very unexpectedly died.

He did *what*?  Ann, I could see; she’s of the World War Two generation and pretty frail. But her thin healthy son-in-law?

Ann’s daughter was there in church today, and I went up to her and told her I’d heard and I was so sorry.  She hugged me back.  I told her we’d been away–Baltimore, Vermont…  that I’d only just found out.

Where in Vermont?

And it turns out she’d been where we’d been, just a month ahead of us.  Burlington, the Ben and Jerry’s plant, the teddy bear factory and the Lake Champlain Chocolates next door.  And, get this, she got to eat one of those cider doughnuts over at Cider Hollow.

I haven’t been where she’s been in her loss.  But somehow it was gratifying to her that we’d been where she’d been when she was having a good time.

A few more pictures:

This is Jill at Kaleidoscope.  If you ever want to support a really nice LYSO, and you’re shopping online, and you like really nice yarns and soft yarns and quick delivery, I highly recommend her and her shop.

And I had to throw in this Ben and Jerry’s shot just for fun.  Euphoric stuff indeed.

Saturday night two weeks ago after Stitches was over for the evening, Karen and I went to the Boogie Knights concert benefiting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Tommy Fund.  Kate in the middle here sang.

(Okay, I have to do the designer thing here and add, Karen’s wearing the original Water Turtles shawl–we looked for more turtles at the Canal, but it was just the wrong time of year, I guess; Kate’s wearing her Kate shawl, no, the pattern’s not out yet, and Deb is wearing her Michelle shawl. Deb and I wrote to each other and compared notes and supported each other as our kids were going through their teens, and my Michelle is the same age as her Kate, so knitting that pattern for her seemed just the thing.)  Note how the lights above them look like a halo glowing out from their heads, centered particularly on Kate’s. I quite like that. It fits.

Okay, this one’s for my family: this is what the old homestead looks like now that the remodeling and painting is complete.  It’s built into the hillside; from the back, there’s California-like high and long window space all across the back looking out on the woods.  The house has been turned into a small private assisted-living facility in the middle of the neighborhood by the woman who bought it.  If I were elderly and infirm, looking out on those gorgeous woods every day is exactly where I’d want to be.  There’s now a large wooden deck out the living room with sliding glass doors stepping out onto it.  Perfect.  I debated knocking on the door and telling them about the cute chipmunks under the carport who will cautiously take peanuts out of your fingers if you hold still a very long time, and the raccoons, turtles, foxes and deer in the backyard.  But I let it go.  I have quite a few memories of possums landing in the trashcans and unable to get back out: you should see the teeth on those things.  Dad would tip the can over on its side, whack the bottom with a broom to make it unfriendly in there, and go back inside where we would watch till the thing waddled out of there.

A few photos from the trip, with more to come:

Amanda aka NHKnittingMama.

Karin, who gifted me with the black baby alpaca that became my friend Amy’s shawl, holding Lucy, and Kristine, Lucy’s mother, who took Jennie some Ben and Jerry’s emergency room medicine.

Paula, wearing her spindle-spun Blue Jay shawl in an absolute perfect imitation of the original, color-wise, with Sue, and that cute tall guy standing behind her.

Joan, who lives in Vermont and whose blog is called knittingbytheocean.  My daughter, when she moved to Vermont, described it as being like California without the ocean (and with real weather), so Joan’s blog name has always made me chuckle.

My sister Carolyn, who met me at JFK Airport during our layover on the way home.  It took her as long to get there as it took us to fly from Vermont, even though she lives in Manhattan.  She scheduled her son to fly home to coincide with our stop and we had a wonderful, albeit all too short time together.  But at least I got to see her!  And I did not risk missing my flight this time, given our four-hour layover.  I snapped this picture as she was answering a call from him saying his plane had just landed.

This is a shot my childhood friend Karen took near the Potomac, looking up at Swain’s Lock at a point where there’s an overflow release for the C&O Canal.

The spot where I fell through the canoe, several steps away and looking the opposite direction from the above picture. Yes, that’s straight down.  I knew you’d all want to see the spot.

Yesterday was the signing at Kaleidoscope Yarns in Essex Junction; I’ll add pictures in here when I get home.  My fellow bloggers came: Karin drove all the way from Albany, NY; Paula came from Massachusetts; Amanda and her husband and son and then Sue, who sometimes sends me New Hampshire pictures since we used to live there, came from New Hampshire; Joyce was missed; Kristine and Joan came from closer by, and my mind is being terribly ungracious and blanking on someone–I’m sorry!  Jill hosted us with warm smiles and homemade bread and cookies.  Books were signed, stories were swapped, and a great time was had by all.  I would add links if I knew how to open a second window on my daughter’s Mac.

It’s humbling in the extreme to have people–old online friends, to be sure, but still–take that kind of driving time and make that kind of effort to come to let us meet each other in person. I hope I lived up to their expectations, while feeling like, no, I really can’t do anything as wonderful at all as they did by comparison; but I am so, so grateful they did.  Thank you everybody, and thank you, Jill.  

Off to tour the Ben and Jerry’s plant in a few minutes…

 

Greta and I are old college friends who hadn’t seen each other in 17 years, and we arranged to meet at JFK Airport during a layover.  I left my husband guarding all our carry-on stuff–and my Kaffe Fassett coat, to top it off, more than any one person should have to carry–while I went out of the security zone to have a chance to catch up with my old friend. I carefully kept my ID and boarding pass with me, taking only my purse. I promised him I’d be checking back through in time to spend the last full hour with him so he could go buy lunch, take a restroom break if he needed it, etc etc.

All well and good, till… I got a not-quite-frantic-yet IM message from Richard: they’d just changed our departure time to 45 minutes earlier, ie boarding quite shortly, and they’d changed our gate to one further away.  He’d had to move everything, and I needed to hurry NOW.  Oh goodness!  How can they do that!  Gotta run!  Greta waved goodbye as I tried to go back through security.

The boarding pass had been in two pieces barely connected.  Somehow between stuffing it in my purse and then stuffing it in my pocket for handy grabbing, I’d lost the top half.  No good.  Can’t let you through, so sorry, lady, no the flight won’t wait even if your luggage is on it, sorry.  I got sent way over to the luggage check-in to get a new boarding pass (they let me go to the front of the line–thank you JetBlue.)  Then back to security.  Everything was far enough away that I was running.  Which gets too dramatic, with me suddenly in acute need of air and my heart not happy about it.  They grabbed me a wheelchair.

The wheelchair lady was in absolutely no hurry.  She’d seen the original boarding time and couldn’t understand my hurry, and nothing I could do could talk her out of it.  I tried to take a deep breath.  In the end, I got there with just a couple of minutes to spare, but it was just too close.

And then the flight was so turbulent there were no snacks nor bathroom breaks allowed.

Richard forgave me, but it was a near thing for a few minutes there.

But I did get my Greta time.  Yay!  Was it worth it?  You absolutely betcha.

Note which spouse is typing this.

My old Knitlist friend Soozie works at Inez’s Stitchery in Kensington, maybe a half mile from my in-laws’ house and yet I had never been; you have to go up a long flight of stairs, and I hadn’t really been up to that the last few times home.

This time I went.  And of course Soozie wasn’t there, but the woman I met (forgive me for blanking on your name) was a sweetheart.  Then around the corner to the post office: a shawl needing mailing that was ready to go.  Done.

Then I called Karen, she came by, grabbed me, and we went to Swain’s Lock, our usual haunt at the Canal; we got there about 4:30 and walked a ways down the towpath and back.  It was hard to remember not to go too far; I do love that place.  There was not another soul in sight on that path.

Coming back, there were white swans glowing in the fading daylight in the quieter waters between the near bank of the Potomac and an island; I wondered at first if they were snowy egrets like mine near the San Francisco Bay, so we walked to the river’s edge to see more clearly.  Karen had called it from the start.  Swans.  One languidly reached down into the waters for a little dinner.  Glorious.

The flash announced that my camera had an ego that was just sure it could capture the scene.  Me, I’m not so sure.  Like my email at my main address, it will just have to wait till I get home next Monday before I’ll be able to see it.  (That’s in case anybody’s wondering why I’m not answering something you sent; sorry about that.)

We went to where I’d fallen through a canoe.  The last shards had long since floated out to sea.  I looked at that embankment and went, I stepped off THAT?  *THAT*?! (Oh, yes, it was definitely the place.)  My stars.  No wonder you were shaking your head, Karen!

I think she quite enjoyed my disbelief.

Occasional-commenter Laura came by this morning, and the three of us had a grand reunion.

Laura was a college friend of ours; she was the roommate of my husband’s cousin, and then her cousin married my sister.  Small world.  She grew up on the opposite bank of the Potomac from us, quite nearby as the Baltimore Oriole flies.  We ran into her randomly in Oakland one day about fifteen years ago and have stayed in touch ever since.  She and her family moved back home to Virginia a few years ago.

She surprised me with a copy–which she signed for me–of her delightful new children’s book, “Mrs. Muddle’s Holidays.”  Cool!  Thank you!

Later in the afternoon, my knitting friend Robin, who lives in my hometown and whose brother lives a mile from me in California, came by.  She took me over to Woolwinders, a LYS in Rockville where they had a Michelle shawl up on display. Cool!

A woman came in, Tina, who was gobsmacked by my Kaffe Fassett coat and asked and tried it on and twirled around in it.  She ran to the mirror, telling me how much she’d been wanting to make a Kaffe Fassett, scrunching it up to her face in sheer joy that such a thing of so much color existed.  I have to say, that coat looked much better on her than me–but not enough to get me to let her keep it, much though she would have loved that.  Then she found out who I was, and her excitement over that–she’d been checking my book out of the library over and over and had decided she simply had to buy it, and wow, here I was!  On a day she never ever comes in to the store, she said, but today she did, and she was just so ecstatic over the whole thing.

Let me tell you, I would happily spend the hundreds and hundreds of hours it took and write another book just for moments like the ones she gifted me with.  Many thanks, Tina!  And to Robin for letting it happen.

And to Laura for her own book and for staying friends through the years and the distances.

Tina twirled and hugged the coat one more time–and another and another–before she let us go.

Yeah, I’d say definitely yes, new friends are really cool too.

Karen picked me up this afternoon and we meandered: first, we drove past the house I grew up in.  It’s been sold and remodeled.  It’s lovely, but it was an odd feeling–after 44 years of my folks being there, it’s definitely not home anymore. We drove past the driveway going down to the Frank Lloyd Wright house around the corner, too, where you could just see the outline of the ship-shaped roof through the winter-bare tree trunks.  Wright’s grandson lives there still, an elderly man who a few years ago welcomed his neighbors by special invitation, including my parents, to a tour of the insides, right at the edge of a nature preserve and overlooking Cabin John Creek.  Like all Wright buildings, it blends right into its landscape.

Then Karen took me past her daughter Amy’s office, where Amy did a really cool braiding job on my hair.  In my Kaffe Fassett coat, my Begay turquoise necklace, Birkenstocks and handknit socks, and my ready-for-a-wedding braids, I felt like I looked like a Californian somehow in the air that was finally beginning to chill.

Karen announced to my surprise that we were going to Cunningham Falls so I could see the falls this time when it was no longer a drought. Oh GOOD! I’d really wanted to do that, but I wasn’t going to ask; it’s way out there in the Maryland mountains, on the opposite side of the road from Camp David.  COOL!

The woods near the falls were surprisingly open to the sky, with tree trunks on the ground, many of them sawed into chunks.  What happened to my park?! Turns out a tornado had ripped through there right below the falls.  More water in the falls now, but fewer trees in the forest.  I look forward to going back to see what changes and rebirthing comes there next, to see what tree varieties grow up in place of the old.

Catoctin? I asked Karen?  Absolutely! And so the two of us turned north a mile or two and went to Catoctin Mountain Orchards, where my family had picked fruit every summer growing up, weighing our boxes before and after we went through the strawberries, the cherries, the you name its, stooping low for hours or, better yet, climbing ladders up into trees with our parents’ actual permission to be up there.  They have a large roadside farmstand now.  I bought one of my daughter Michelle’s favorite foods, their homemade apple butter, and talked to the woman about shipping it home for me.  I’d once hauled an extra suitcase back to California filled with their jars, very heavy, wheels or no wheels, worrying about breaking glass and sticky jam; I had no desire to do that again.

She had no idea about any of that.  She showed me the chart with the shipping charges and warned me that that was besides the cost of the bottles themselves.  Yes, I understood that.  Karen and I hemmed and hawed over a few other purchases–I got a gorgeous matted 8×10 photograph of the falls in the Fall for $25 to take home–and the elderly woman felt the need to tell me twice more just to make sure I understood what costs I was about to be in for.

Yes, thanks.  I got it.  Twenty for the shipping: “Well, yes, those jars are heavy!” I explained to her that I didn’t want to haul them through not one but two airports.  I didn’t feel the need to explain about me doing airports in wheelchairs, about how happy I was to let the UPS guy do the work.

But more to the point, I wanted those jars home safely. My daughter had just had a major health scare last month, she was coming home at Thanksgiving for some doctor time, and I needed to do something to make it all better.  Catoctin Mountain Orchards apple butter was exactly the right thing, and I couldn’t wait to see her face light up.

Sometimes, it’s knitting that I do to try to get that effect.  But I can be flexible.

(ps And then Richard, Karen, Amy and I went out to dinner afterwards and got The. Best. Waitress. in the entire state of Maryland.  I made a point of telling her manager how much we’d enjoyed her as we left.  And if she reads this–THANK YOU!)

Kyle spoke with me at church and gave me permission to share his story:

His mom was a pilot.  Loved to fly, love love loved it.  Planes, helicopters.

Then she got married, decided to start a family, got pregnant with him… And during the pregnancy had seizures that cost her her pilot’s license.  And that was that.

But she still loved planes and she would sometimes take her little boy to the small local airport from time to time to show him around.

When he was 25, he decided he owed his mom and he decided to do something about it.

He called her up one day and invited her to meet him over at the municipal airport.  You know, look around, give her a chance to rag on him about who he was dating or not, quality time with her kid (I think he said it was her birthday).  Sure.

As they walked around the small planes, he asked her about the difference between the controls on, say, this Cessna here vs… and he opened the door.

Kyle! You can’t just…!

He climbed in.

KYLE! You can’t just… Kyle?!

Hop in, Mom, c’mon, show me!

She knew her kid enough to know he certainly wasn’t going to do something wrong, but this was someone else’s plane and this was going too far and what did he THINK he was…

C’mon in, Mom, here, show me!

She climbed in, started to ask what on *earth* is this about, what are you DOING, Kyle.

Then she looked in his eyes.  And suddenly got it.  “Did you…!”

Yup. He’d gotten his license, and he’d rented this plane to take her up. Pilot, co-pilot.  “Go for it, Mom!”

YEEHAW!!!

Wow. What an afternoon!

Before Stitches East last year, I started looking for a website for my old high school; it was our 30th anniversary, and I was curious to see if there might be a reunion, since I was going to be flying East anyway.   Which is part of how, months later, my old classmate and friend Elizabeth and I happened to stumble across each other.

Who would have thought… She’s now an alpaca farmer in Colorado.  And when I told her how much I have a thing for baby alpaca yarn, she gifted me with these two hanks from one of her babies, complete with a picture of it. Oro’s Cocoa Puff. Cool!

And then!  I got to show the yarn off to Kris and Mel, who fondled it and oohed and aahed: they were in the area for a show at Half Moon Bay, and had phoned and asked if they could drop by.  COULD they??!  Ohmygoodnessyes!

And then they surprised me with this beautiful serving tray they’d made me.  I was already in I-don’t-deserve-this mode.  At least I was able to do something back this time; Kris had forgotten her cane, and I had a spare that worked.  I showed her how the crooked shape of the top of it was good for leaning your chin on from a sitting position to embarrass your teenagers into hurrying up when they’re taking too long shopping.  They guffawed.

My husband came home early from work to get to see them; I served chocolate and mangoes and we all swapped stories and told tales and laughed for several hours till they really had to go. Time to set up their booth over by the ocean.  If you’re going, tell them hi again from me.  And thank you.