Doctor: Saturday a week ago? So we’re nine days out. Okay, you need to let your brain heal. No exercising. Be a slug. While the muscle mass diminishes (she shrugged regretfully). Wait on the driving till you feel better. Let’s see, what can you do while you’re lying around when you don’t want to lie around…

Me, helpfully: I could knit!

That got me questions about brainpower vs knitting and I said some knitting requires full attention and some is absolutely brainless (and my current project is in between. I left that detail out.)

Doctor: Definitely brainless. Rest it.

Me: (Crud.)

So yeah, it’s been like that and will continue like that for a little while. The motivation though is that after this, my seventh concussion, not to let how things are right now become the new normal.

Later… The mailman delivered a stack of catalogs and for no real reason I always feel like I have to at least leaf through them. Or in the case of some, a fast flipflipflipflipokaydonetoss.

This one page stopped me. Blink. I looked it up online to see if what was there matched. It did.

That model’s legs and my brain: they are both a little bit inside out. (Or at least till that company figures out what everybody’s looking at.)

I think a hand wound ball of yarn can be a work of art in itself. Hopefully one that gets unravelled quickly and happily.

Last year, after all this went on, you could count every individual beleaguered leaf from afar. (Speaking of which, that’s just a bit of cinnamon to get rid of some ants. No yellowing.)

In a few weeks this tree has grown from having plenty of space under its tent to being right at the bird netting on all sides and at this rate I’ll have to buy a bigger tent to protect the growing cherries.

Some problems are cause for celebration.

Oh and? I got an email from someone saying his twin daughters (they’re nine or ten) had knitted all through Conference and by chance might I have any leftover yarn? Because they were out.

I asked the dad what their favorite colors were. He got right back to me.

You know that if you want knitting to be the lifelong love it could well become for them you’ve got to give them the good stuff. Some soft acrylic, yes (take it all!) but also some cashmere blend and an angora/merino blend (an out-of-stock bright light lime green, a color they’d hoped for), washed and hanked from cones. I told the dad how to wash the natural-fiber stuff and warned the girls gently that a lot of people are allergic to angora and it’s okay if you find out you are, but I think you’ll love it (and boy did they). The fur combed from a shedding rabbit. It is nice stuff.

(It also happens to give one of my kids hives.)

They were so excited. They so much said thank you. And I couldn’t possibly have enjoyed those yarns better any other way. Can you just picture all the people those two are going to make happy over the years to come?

Thirty-one weeks, thirty-two weeks, hang in there, baby…

She made it to thirty-three weeks. When my nephew’s wife first went into labor the doctors told the parents that every day in utero was a week the baby wouldn’t have to spend in the NICU, so getting that far was a huge blessing.

I packed a not-tiny-enough outfit with an adorable pair of baby socks knitted by my friend Susan into a box last Friday (I wish I’d thought to take a picture of them) and sent it off to my sister-in-law; the new parents were supposed to be moving near her about the time labor had first unexpectedly started and I didn’t want it to get lost between the mailman and the new place.

Their daughter/her granddaughter arrived Tuesday. There is an adorable picture that is not mine to share of her looking up at her mother with wide open, soft eyes. She is a beautiful baby.

Our niece was discharged today with the surprise of a newly-arrived box to open.

The baby is doing very well, all things considered. Breathing on her own. Might be able to eat on her own soon, too.

The handknit socks. That’s what got exclaimed over. Susan had made these beautiful socks for their baby, and on the day they had to go home without her yet it helped.

The knitting. Hmm. No, if I say a single word it’ll give it away–so yeah. Later.

Meantime, the first Indian Free flower opened Feb. 23; at March 20 and after all those rains that tree is still blooming, although these last blossoms have no counterparts left on the other peaches for pollination. Such a pretty tree. So very glad I planted it. (Lemons and clamshell-protected peaches in the background.)

And the tart cherry–I counted in the neighborhood of a hundred buds today on that tiny tree.

The Cooper’s hawk swooped overhead while I was outside taking these pictures but I didn’t quite get him in any of them.

Looked out the window to see a black squirrel hanging upside down the trunk of the cherry tree. Wait–there isn’t even any fruit there yet, guys, c’mon! But given that the squirrels gnawed halfway through and destroyed a bunch of peaches the size of a small fingernail I chased him off and did a “And STAY out!” by baptizing the tree by sprinkling. With cinnamon. What I’d put out for the ants had gotten rained off and I hadn’t thought I at all needed to replace it yet but I was wrong.

Not a single critter has come back. That I know of.

We went out and bought birdnetting this evening, though we have not wrestled it on yet.

A few days ago a raven landed on the fence immediately behind that cherry, his mate in the neighbor’s tree just behind him, and with a my-territory-not-your-territory from me they promptly flew off; every time since then that they’ve returned to that tree just beyond the fence they have stayed behind a big limb as if to hide. But they have not come into my back yard.

Today there were a lot more cherry blossoms promising of all the goodness to come–and two side-by-side raven-sized poop jobs on my car. I washed them off fast before they could damage the paint; I’m hoping we’re not going to have to buy a car cover. I mean, hey, I didn’t even do the fake dead crow thing yet, guys!

Tonight while weeding I found a third of those critter holes (possum? Raccoon? Skunk?) dug under the fence, a new one in exactly the shape and size of the other two and immediately below where that raven had landed, i.e. as close to the trunk of that same sweet cherry as it could get.

I think what we have here is a conflict of interest.

(So I got out a long-tangled hank of Malabrigo Rios and got that pretty and exquisitely soft yarn all wound up neatly, needing to exert total control over a frustration, any frustration, and turn it into happy anticipation. It’s beautiful now and ready to dive into. It felt great.)

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee made her daughter a hat like this (thank you for the inspiration!) Alternating sections of knit and purl that make stockinette’s tendency to curl up on itself a feature rather than a bug: five-row sections of it pointing this way and then that make a warmer garment in the process, little almost-tubes of wool against the cold. It also tends to take a lot of knitting to get it to create actual length. This was the new project in my hands when the stake president stopped me.

Yarn: a heavy merino here, knit on size 4.5mm (US 7). I simply knit till the yarn was as close to gone as I dared before casting off. I found it slightly overspun, so not quite so much of the Zegna Baruffa extrafine effect, but that means it will hold up to a whole lot of wear against a coat and it is definitely soft enough.

We had stake conference today, which is when a group (i.e. a stake) of wards (i.e. congregations) all come together for a really big joint meeting. Happens twice a year.

Parking is a bit of a zoo and it lets out at noon: a bad time sun-wise for a lupus patient to have to take a long walk, and so as is our usual we decided to get there about forty minutes early.

And as is our usual I brought something to work on before the meeting started, the cowl I’d begun right before we’d left for Salinas yesterday. I was quietly working away on it when the stake president walked by, shook our hands, pointed to the project in my hands and said, We’re going to be talking about that.

Knitting??

Knitting.

Okay, this I wanted to hear.

He spoke last in the two-hour meeting and in the course of his talk he told the tale, sharing a few more details with me afterwards, knowing I’d be interested. (Not so much so as to give away any hint of who it might have been; he simply chuckled fondly when I eagerly offered to share yarn or at least my sources of the good stuff. I’m sure if she wants to know, he’ll make sure she finds me.)

A woman had come to him for counseling. She had had some experiences that had left her struggling with an unwanted sense of bitterness. She had come to him seeking a blessing.

And after hearing her out, he offered up that prayer with her.

And in that prayer he found himself, quite to his surprise, telling her she needed to knit.

That was it. Just, she needed to knit.

I asked him afterwards, Was she someone who used to and her hands had bothered her and she was hoping for healing? Or…?

No, he smiled at me, she never had. This was new.

Now, as he said to the congregation, My mother doesn’t really knit. My wife and sister don’t really knit, I mean, they have, but they don’t… And my daughter has, a little. (He was struggling to describe a Knitter with a capital K without having really experienced one personally, but he knew there were such people and that those who were would instantly understand, and probably everybody else who knows a real Knitter. Or Crocheter for that matter.)

I asked him, So did she?!

Oh, yes! And he told me how she’d made things for all her friends and had created so much happiness around her by it. As he said it, he knew that I would know exactly what that would be like. Even though he doesn’t really know me.

But he knows that I knit, and he understood.

In answer to last night’s question. (Yarn here, with last night’s picture showing the color best.)

This, this is why knitters need kitchen scales: the grams-per-row ratio.

The dishwasher is fixed, the dishwasher is fixed!

Those tight pink apple buds I photo’d earlier finally opened up when it wasn’t raining and the air was a little warmer.

The fig tree: nine days ago and now. The tether to the fence was to brace it against a serious windstorm we had last fall, while it still had its big leaves, and it came in handy again these past few days.

The early blueberries are halfway along.

And the peaches! I found a dozen actual beginning peaches before it started to rain and I bugged out of there.

That’s the good part. The bad part was that the squirrels had already gnawed off half the outermost part of six of them. They are now clamshelled–although, peaches fruit on new wood and much of it was too tender to hold up one of the bigger clamshells the fruit will need later. I quickly scrounged up some small ones and they worked just fine for now. The rain held its breath till I could finish.

Re the knitting: I’m working on a cowl in dk weight, a gift from Dragonfly Fibers. Yarn is Traveller, color is Peony. It’s been 10 grams worth of yarn per pattern repeat and I have enough yarn to do one last repeat, which I would start with at the next stitch. Except that after 93 grams, it’s already a lot of cowl. But I can’t stand to not use every bit of a favorite Stitches yarn.

So I’m throwing it at the blog for the night and deciding in the morning.

I just can’t get enough of these. The Indian Free has the biggest, pinkest flowers of any of my peaches.

The branch I pruned off it this winter and rooted and planted and pretended to be a real gardener with is up to three leaves today. There was a bud showing a little pink, too, but I carefully nipped it away so it could save its strength: be a tree first before you can be a fruit tree, little one.

But boy will it be a glorious when it grows up.

I had no idea it would work out that the prettiest tree would be the one closest to Adele, but I’m really, really glad.

Oh and yes–there was a bit of knitting done.

This was the very nearly bare branch at the back in yesterday’s picture–we’re up to six baby figs tonight with the tree sprouting everywhere now.

Meantime.

We were in the longest and I mean longest line at Trader Joe’s. Ten minutes it didn’t move, and the others weren’t much better.

I gave a dad with an antsy little girl a finger puppet–and only afterwards realized she had a hospital bracelet on her wrist. She needed it all the more, then.

I had time to exclaim to the woman standing next to me over her purse, which was clearly hand knit and hand felted with inner and outer pockets (that takes skill in the felting process), a flap, a full lining sewn in, she showed me–just a beautiful piece of handiwork. Had she made it?

Oh she wished! But she did knit; her friend had made this.

Did you go to Stitches last weekend? I asked her, sure of my answer–I mean, this local, how could she not have, right? Where we were standing was less than ten miles from the venue.

The look on her face! Like she was almost afraid to ask what she’d missed out on but oh goodness she HAD to know! A hesitant, No… What’s that?

About a hundred fifty to two hundred vendors and ten thousand knitters at the Santa Clara Convention Center. People fly in from all over for it.

Sacramento? she asked. (As in, far enough away she didn’t have to regret missing it?)

Santa Clara. At the Convention Center.

There was both profound regret and a deep excitement in her voice now. She hadn’t seen any advertisements. I wondered in return if you had to know by word of mouth, more or less? Next year, she said. She was going! Next year!

There is no question in my mind she went straight home and looked it up now that she knew to. And I hope her friend who does such beautiful work goes, too.

I came away really glad Richard and I had both felt too tired to tackle Costco so we’d just gone to the much smaller grocery with the short lines. Which thankfully weren’t.

The first flowers on the Indian Free peach opened. The Baby Crawford sprouted five tiny buds today, with a hint of pink at the tips–not bad for a one-month-old.

Clara laid her first egg of the season near the top of San Jose City Hall today.

I saw not the usual redtail hawk in that area but a peregrine falcon in the hills above town today, well outside of Clara’s territory, and wondered if it was one of our old hatchlings.

And I’m going to stop writing and get back to my knitting and man, does it feel good to wrap wool around wood right now.

Stitches West, day one.

Two vendors when I saw them made a point of saying they’d missed me last year. (I had the flu). Blink. They’d noticed? I did not expect that. At all. They quite made my day.

Susan of Abstract Fibers surprised me with this yarn two years ago and it’s a great favorite of mine, so I had to show her the cowl it had turned into: nice and warm (needed that today) and it’s one of those things that when you put it on, you know that whatever else you might have going on, hair, whatever, it doesn’t matter, you look good today, y’know? It does that.

Someone stopped me and asked where the pattern was and how I’d gotten it to be wider at the bottom and she really liked it. I confessed it was a doodle.

Karida of Neighborhood Fiber Company–love her  and her colors, too. And Lisa Souza and her husband Rod. Across from them, Sheila and Michael Ernst with their glasswork. Kate and her team at Dragonfly Fibers. and the surprise of finding out she’s in my husband’s hometown and we could swap a memory or two on the old Inez’s Needlework shop that used to be there. The late Inez had everything going all the way back to the ’60’s. Plastic canvas needlework could be yours, old cross stitch kits, good yarns, too.

Kris Kunihiro was there with her son Ben. These little bowls were shallower than their rice bowls, and with a lip they were perfect for what I wanted. A little bowl for each person’s sour cream, a little bowl for each person’s brown sugar, a bigger bowl with all the strawberries you might possibly want to dip into the one and then the other. You can never have enough of those.

And tomorrow I get to go all over again and see even more old friends all day long. I might even remember to take an actual photo there this time.

I had two projects I wanted to finish before Stitches: one for the pride of showing the thing off, and I really wanted to, and the other for the sake of someone in particular I badly wanted to give it to. I was adamant with myself that I was going to finish that gorgeous silk first.

Which means neither project was getting done…

I kept starting and finishing other things altogether till I gave up on the pride and dealt with the fact that the other was the recipient’s favorite color, not mine, and dove into that gift project at long last. It is now blocking, with all the magic that is lace+water=gorgeous. Looking at it, I marvel that I ever had a problem getting myself to sit down and work on that. The anticipation (with a bit of relief thrown in) is sweet.

One thing to mention from yesterday. I heard the mailman and went out to the mailbox and there, standing shyly on the sidewalk, was the tall young dad from across the street, holding his baby boy, his three-year-old daughter clinging to the side of his leg when she saw me coming. The dad was glad I’d come out–he’d wanted to explain why they were standing there and there I was, making it easy.

Our oxalises were blooming and she’d wanted to come over and look at the pretty flowers.

There was a long-stemmed dandelion flower in her hand.

I remembered the spluttering and outrage of a gardener, years ago, when I stopped him from cutting my yellow patch down–to him, oxalis were weeds and a nuisance and he glanced down the street to see if any of the neighbors were seeing him being derelict in his work. But to me they were what had invited me to walk in to this house the first time I’d seen the place. They don’t seed, they don’t spread, they just bloom in their spot every winter and then quietly vanish at the dryness of the summers to await their rebirth.

I explained to the little girl that the sun was going down so the flowers were closing up for the night, but they would open again in the morning and you could still see their pretty color.

She looked at me with big eyes and tucked herself behind her daddy and peeked out as I smiled.

I leaned over and picked a stem with a nice little cluster and offered it to her. She let me give it to her.

Her daddy thanked me warmly, and we each went back inside to work on our respective dinners, with me plotting of peaches and plums to knock on their door with in a few months.