I meant to get a picture. But I blocked it last night, ran the last end in this morning (I had a sudden moment of, aagh! I forgot the end!) while standing at the front door waiting for my husband to come dashing through late, and the camera just didn’t make it into the picture. But I got it done.

I knitted shawls and scarves for a number of friends in my congregation at church. It, um, kind of snowballed, till finally I decided I couldn’t leave anybody out, I was simply going to have to knit a scarf for every woman there who hadn’t gotten something yet. A large lace shawl, no, but a scarf apiece, 3-6 hours worth of knitting, that, I could manage. I’ve been at it for months now.

Back when we lived in New Hampshire as a young couple, 20 years ago, there was a family we knew well; Dora, the mom, was the Relief Society president, ie, the head of the women’s organization there. Two of their three sons were still in high school. Then we moved here, and their middle son eventually met and married Jenni, whose family lives here. Small world. Cool.

Now Dora has started commuting coast to coast, and we get to see her at church when she’s in town. So I asked her what color scarf she would like. Black, she said, emphatically. I don’t love trying to see black stitches on the needles, so I asked her if she was sure, or would she…

Black. She’d really like one in black. Okay, I thought, so, black it would be. Except, I had a harder time than I wanted making myself get around to it. I found a skein of Frog Tree black sportweight alpaca in the stash, and knew Dora would love that it had come from a women’s cooperative in South America. That was just the right yarn. So why did I keep putting it off, fer cryin’ out loud?

This past week, three weeks after I’d asked her, I finally sat myself down, and went, look. Just knit it till it’s done. Don’t go to bed, don’t let it hang over you another day, Just. Get. It. Done. And of course, as soon as I started knitting, the softness of the yarn running through my hands called out to me, making up for any color quibbling; ooh, this is so soft. This is so nice. I love this. Perfect.

It was 10:45 when I looked at the clock, then down at the work in my hands, thinking of Dora. Her son, who had been one of those who had come and visited and been there for me when I was in critical condition in the hospital three and a half years ago. Jenni, due to have a baby any moment. I don’t remember for absolute sure if that was the moment I finished binding off or not, but I do know I felt this intense sense of connection with them right at that moment.

We got an email from the proud new dad the next morning. A baby boy! Born at 10:45 pm, 9 lbs, 3 oz.

Black is not the traditional color for welcoming new life into the world, but it was definitely the right color to welcome the new grandma into knowing she was celebrated and loved. She loved it. Perfect.

When I was in college, we used to tease the kids from California who wore Birkenstocks in the snow; c’mon, guys, get a clue!

Now we live in California ourselves, and right now, we’re having quite the cold snap. The Red Cross called my husband last night: they were discussing opening an emergency shelter, since he’s helped run one before for them.

We got up this morning to find our pipes frozen. Such a Birkenstockian installation up there on our roof–I guess the pipes needed some long handknit tube socks?

If you haven’t seen Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s post at yarnharlot.ca, I recommend you go read the details of what prompted this picture. The big blue sock to the left is of a pair I knit; the rest are each from a pair that someone else knit for me, out of the goodness of their needles: Kathleen, Bonnie, Judy, Kristine. Except for Bonnie’s white ones, they are all from hand-painted yarns. Yes, Bank Whatever Wherever you may be that declared Blue Moon’s “Socks That Rock” club as being clearly a scam, that shut down the credit card processing for it, that refunded customers their money they didn’t want back, that wreaked havoc on a small business that didn’t see this coming, and all because you think nobody is interested in knitting socks, Knitters. DO. Knit. Socks. Especially from handpaint yarns, where you get to finish discovering what they’ll look like only when you’re done.

Honestly, how much effort would it have taken to google Socks That Rock Club and discover it gets you 2.4 million hits.

And kudos to Blue Moon for handling it all with class. They deserve every bit of the good karma pouring in right now.

I’ve gone to lupus support group meetings for nearly 17 years now. At first, it was because I was newly diagnosed with a disease that scared the bejabors out of me; gradually, it became because I wanted to comfort the newly diagnosed who were having the bejabors scared out of them, and to help them find the information they needed that I’d already sought out. You can handle anything if you know what it is, if you know others who have already dealt with it, and if they’re willing to be there for you. If you know you’re not alone.

Over the years, the membership has been fairly fluid, with a few old hands like me that keep coming. A number of others–well, it’s not very supportive to die off on us, you know? Stop it! And then there was the woman who came to one meeting (and thankfully one only) armed with glossy brochures with herbal remedies to sell us that she guaranteed would cure us. Cure us! She had lupus, so she knew what we were going through, she said. But if we placed sprigs of this particular expensively concocted green leafy thing with its pretty picture on this page, right between this particular toe and that toe for so many days, just so…

It was all I could do not to guffaw out loud, “And how many times has it cured *you*, lady!?” When the sales pitch got high pressured–where none of us had expected to be subjected to one at all in the first place–I simply changed the subject on her and told her that I cope with my illness by spinning and knitting for others. I quoted Norman Cousins about needing a creative outlet. There’s nothing like anticipating making someone happy, followed by the absolute high when they’re thrilled at finding out that you thought they were worth that effort of your time and thoughts and skills. And wow, look at this! (Scarf, sweater, hat, etc.) Cool!

Today’s was the first regular meeting I’d gotten to go to since my hospitalization in October. The tales I had to tell, to an audience that would appreciate it! The one young doctor who had decided I didn’t have lupus, that that part was all in my head. What the–Goodness, sir! Here, (I thought but didn’t say), let me teach you how to boot up a computer so you can access my longstanding records on the subject. There is a standard set of 11 criteria, of which having four can land you a positive diagnosis; I’ve had nine, ten depending on how you count it. After all these years, to still have a doctor doubt not only me but every doctor who’s seen me these last 17 years…

So. The meeting was about to start, and someone I didn’t quite recognize walked in and exclaimed, “Hi, Alison!” Pam?!! Her face changed by steroids, I hadn’t recognized my former neighbor.

We listened to a dentist who’d volunteered his time to talk to the group on dental issues. A good man. He finished, he left, and it was time for each of us to tell how we’d been doing. My chance was coming.

Pam had a lot to talk about; her lupus was new and a very raw experience in her life. She reminded us old hands of ourselves, back in the day; I do think we were able to help her a lot. Good. Then an Asian woman talked about her reliance on Chinese medicine and how important her herbs were to her…and yet I felt strongly that she was really asking permission or even for pressure to try Western medicine now, maybe to counteract pressure she was feeling from her family to keep with what they knew. Afterwards, out of her earshot, two of us were shaking our heads, with me going, that sounds like me when I had congestive heart failure! The friend I was talking to said, She sounded like me when I had kidney failure! We worried about her. We hoped she’d felt a good enough sense of connection to feel comfortable calling for support. I do believe we need to learn more about what her culture has to offer; I also believe in the Scientific Method, in studying and tracking results, and that when you need a doctor, go to the doctor!

I never did get my time to kvetch. I’m so glad; what earthly good would it have done? I’d arrived forgetting the whole point of my being there: to listen. To comfort. Not to badmouth overworked residents. To help and hope others get the care they need, without making them feel they’d failed along the way. (So, no, I didn’t criticize those Chinese herbs.)

I cast on this scarf at the beginning of the meeting, and got this far along before it ended. As most knitters will relate to, I kept up the eye contact with the speakers, asked more pertinent questions, stayed more engaged, as my hands kept busy instead of my getting antsy sitting there so long…

As for the glossy-brochure lady: after that one meeting, she learned how to spin and she joined my old spinning guild. Not only that, but she immediately ran for president of the guild, which nobody else wanted to be, so, hey! Be our guest, the members told her. While I was going, she took my advice about taking up a creative hobby? Really?!? MY hobby??!!!

Totally nonpsychodegradeable. Good for her. I still ain’t buyin’ no stinkin’ green sprigs for my toes.

It was impossible to shine the silver rope around the stones, till I thought of using a size 1 dpn to push the silver cloth down in there on my Zuni ring. Anybody got any other weird uses for their needles?

This didn’t get delivered yet; we’ve had a busy householdfull. But I thought I’d snap a quick photo of the finished project before the wonderfully random-chance pink ribbon scarf ends up with its rightful recipient–a breast cancer patient, as I mentioned not long ago. The two sides are fairly perfect mirror images in real life, away from the camera.

I learned so much when I lost my ring. I’d quit wearing my original wedding ring when I’d been in critical condition and on megadoses of steroids and it absolutely didn’t fit, and I never got back in the habit. The blood diamond thing had bothered me ever since I learned about it a few years ago; the idea of wearing something that would contribute to the societal pressure to wear a diamond to declare you’re married… When, to me, the ring my grandfather had watched being made for my grandmother on an Indian reservation, something like 80 years ago, held a stone that was symbol enough to me of their love. So. I wore my simple silver band with the four small turquoise stones, one for each of my children, and that was fine with my husband.

Till it disappeared one cold day when my hands got too thin, the day after Thanksgiving. I always wondered if it went down the sink and clogged the plumbing at my husband’s boss’s house, and if he was just too nice to say so.

I looked around, and Richard got me a new turquoise ring, but meantime, I learned:

That the major American turquoise mines got tapped out in the big Native American jewelry fad of my growing up years. That, and, the way they mine gold these days has changed, so that instead of revealing turquoise veins as a secondary part of the process, the stuff is crushed and lost instead. (What a waste.) The better American stones now are often still produced by the old-fashioned pick and shovel it out method (with maybe a compressor helping). Hard work.

That turquoise rarely has crystals, so it can be fairly fragile.

That turquoise can change and turn greener over time if it’s exposed to a lot of lotions and chemicals and various things which people tend to come in contact with. (I like green, so I kind of shrug at that one.)

That a lot of turquoise these days is stabilized so as not to change color and to be stronger, but those stones, although shinier, are less valuable, being less natural.

I learned about a few individual Navajo and Zuni artists and to see their work online. I actually bought a few more pieces, which is the first time I can think of in all my married life that I’ve gone out and bought jewelry; I’m not a big jewelry person. But I loved their work, I wanted to honor the artists, and, frankly, I was horrified at how little they were getting for it these days. Maybe that’s partly from my experiences as a knitter–like the woman who demanded that I make her a handspun handknit angora shawl for her just like mine, and that she was going to pay me: twenty-five dollars. That’s a lot of money, you know! She said it in a tone to make clear I should be grateful for the opportunity. I offered to teach her to knit, by way of shrugging her off nicely. She, clueless, demanded to know when hers would be done by. (Excuse me?) I just laughed it off, while quite mindful that I live in a time and place where, financially, shrugging her off was an option available to me.

This morning, five minutes before leaving to take my parents to the airport to fly home, I happened to glance at something shiny down at the piano bench’s leg. I had vacuumed there umpteen times. It must have fallen right at the leg, and gotten bumped back out into view when my son Richard moved the bench one of the times he played the piano recently.

The stones a light turquoise and not shiny, although the silver is. Perfect.

Lookee there.

Once upon a time, I bought some cashmere roving from Kate Painter, not long after she’d opened her Paradise Fibers store. About eighteen months later, I called her back on a long shot: I had finally spun it up and started a sweater, but I was running short, something I never do (I highly disbelieve in starting knitting a project you’re not sure you have enough yarn for.) By any wild chance?…

Turns out she knew exactly what batch I’d ordered from, and she did indeed have more; she would check to see how much she had and get back to me.

What I didn’t know then was that she had some because she’d put it aside for her own private stash, and that she spent hours going through her basement looking for that cashmere that she knew, just knew, she had. She so much empathized with that helpless feeling of a beautiful project, almost done, which can’t quite come to be, unless… She found the rest of that roving.

Rather than leave her with too small an amount herself to do much with, we talked, and I ended up buying the pound and a half or so that she had down there, and she reordered however much she wanted from her supplier. I had enough for my project, and then some, so.

…come Stitches West the next February, I gave her a lace scarf out of it as a thank you. The funny thing is, I was the second very happy customer to surprise her with a scarf that day, and she happily put mine on over the other one, knowing people would ask, knowing she’d get to brag on her friends all day long that way. Kate is so cool. She has since sold her store, and I missed seeing her this last year’s Stitches. A lot.

Meantime, I still have plenty, some of it spun up, some of it not yet. Stash yarn is wonderful stuff: you can get an idea and be able to just jump in and run with it. Knit it up fast when you need it.

And in the case of this thing I started last night, beat the plane coming in at ten pm here.

My 22-year-old hamming it up. Handspun, white cashmere plied with a golden baby alpaca/silk mix. It may go down to MY knees, but I should know by now that doesn’t mean it’s long enough (and yes, he is taller than that doorframe). Good thing I spun that third ball!

I was looking for just the right pattern to knit up for my mom for her birthday. I came across this Honeybee pattern by Barbara Walker, started what was supposed to be a swatch, realized how loose the strands were at this thick of a yarn she’d picked out, and just kept going with the single repeat so that by being narrow it would be less likely to snag on things.

But talk about perfect. My parents’ house they’d raised their children in is on the market in Maryland, over on Honeybee Lane (anybody want a 7-Br, 3Ba?) You should have seen Mom laughing when I told her the name of the pattern! Dad said it was too small to be a scarf, thinking of scarves as being, well, you know, for shovelling the driveway and the like with; something big and warm. Mom explained, “It’s a yarn necklace!”

Yeah. Yeah! That’s a good way to describe that bit of silk and merino I’d dyed, shown here on our rocking chair: I think of all the times Mom rocked my babies when they were little… Um, yeah, my older son, shown in that Dec 20 post playing “clarinet” by blowing on a stick using his Muppets book as a musical score, is now 6’9″. My little boy. Amazing thing, watching your kids being grownups now; he’s 22 and home right now, along with his younger sister, for winter break.

Gratitude check here: I apparently forgot to take my asthma med last night, my substitute for the Advair that had caused so much problems earlier. Woke up coughing with a severe can’t-breathe attack–it was a near enough thing that I won’t forget to take it again.

And my oldest daughter, driving with her husband to her in-laws’ yesterday, blew a tire on the freeway. They’re perfectly fine. Turns out they were close to my brother’s house, and spent the night there: extra time with her side of the family that they hadn’t expected. So, hey, it all works out.

But I guess what I’m wanting to say, is, take nothing for granted. Love one another. Freely and without holding back, just, love one another. Make it the very merriest Christmas for all. My best to all.

I was twelve when I found some random yarn and proudly stitched up my Tiger all by myself, without asking for help (and thus not getting the gentle input that a color that matched where you’re stitching the white belly, not the stripes in the coat, might be the right idea?)

I’d long forgotten that I’d used the yarn from my big sister’s sweater to stitch him. Harvest Gold and that trip stitched right into my Tiger. And if I hadn’t written that post about Mom, I probably still would never have thought of it.

Her fourth baby in six years’ time came a week early, and so missed being born on her birthday. That one was always one to jump up and down and run around like a hyperactive house afire, so it’s no surprise she’d started off that way: eager to come see the world. Ten minutes apart and the time is NOW!

She herself grew up the daughter of a man who ran for the US Senate when she was 18. Her dad made an agreement with her: if she would stay home the first two years of college and help keep an eye out for her younger brother, she could then go anywhere she wanted. She took him up on the offer, and later transferred to Wellesley. (Ed. note: her mother went to Radcliffe, not Wellesley, too, as I wrote earlier. Oops.)

And where she was courted by a friend of her brother’s from the days the two men had gotten to know each other in France. The friend was a grad student now, finishing up his master’s after having spent three years as a missionary for the Mormon church once the war was over. There was no language training center in those days; you simply went where you were assigned, studied very hard, and learned to become fluent on your own during your first year. Which the two men had done. And now he was nearby, finishing up his schooling on the GI bill at Boston University.

They married, raised six kids, and when the children began hitting their teens she began working in the English department where they went to high school–a good excuse for a goody-two-shoes-anyway kid to behave: Mom’ll catch me if I try to pull anything! She was someone who told her kids that any time they needed to blame her as being an unreasonable parent who wouldn’t allow something, go ahead and blame her. You need a curfew? Go ahead and claim it in all honesty, because she hereby declared whatever curfew her kids might need, any time. Any rule you need? Make it her fault. Done.

As the kids were growing up, she drove her first and third daughters to piano lessons way over by the DC line in Somerset, twice a week each, though the two actually only overlapped by a few months before the older daughter became too ill for a year to go, and then never picked it up again. Still–that was 25 minutes each way every Tuesday and Friday, if the traffic wasn’t bad, but it was always rush hour down River Road coming home. At the same time, she was driving her second daughter across the Potomac into northern Virginia for flute lessons. Soccer moms had nothing on this one. We’re talking major taxi-mom hours–music lessons with the best teachers were that important to her. Piano didn’t take quite so well with the fourth daughter; that one got art lessons at the Corcoran Gallery in downtown DC. The boys? The older one played violin for awhile, the other made up for lost time later by learning guitar in college, playing up and down the East Coast in a band, and eventually marrying the best of the best, settling down, and building custom guitars. Electric ones, with gorgeous mother-of-pearl inlay, carrying on the tradition of associating art with the family’s name: jeppsonguitars.com.

She and her husband one fine summer bought a pop-up camping trailer, packed up the kids, tried to figure out how to squeeze eight people’s worth of luggage into the scarce space–when, standing right there in the driveway about to hop in and go, the fourth child declared her tiger was going with her! Or she was staying home! Her husband said, There’s no room, and you are ten years old and a big girl and you are too old to have to take that tiger still everywhere you go. She gently talked her husband into relenting, and the child, who knew she really was quite too old to need her tiger, who was embarrassed at needing that tiger, but was afraid to face all those strange places to come without him, was thrilled and relieved that he got to come too. He would stay right there in her lap, she promised, where he wouldn’t take up any extra room. (Now that she’d won her battle, she was secretly so happy about it that she suddenly realized she no longer actually needed him, but he’d wangled his invite by then and she shut up about it and he came.) Most of that summer was spent driving in a wide circle around the entire US, coast to coast, top to bottom, with a day trip into Mexico and two weeks or so in Canada thrown in. It wasn’t really meant to be that long at Moose Mountain; the camping trailer broke a part that had to be shipped over from the factory. The nomadic life went on temporary hold, and boredom threatened. The tiger was a comfort. But the volleyball landed in the campfire. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the woman’s wallet when she lost it, and returned it to her–weeks later, with all the cash still in it. Go Canada. The little girl thought it was so cool that someone who got to ride a horse to be a policeman also got to be the hero for her mom.

Who knitted and knitted and knitted the long hours away while her husband drove, state after state, art museum after art museum. Business for him, minding the kids for her, show the children the country for all of them. And the child with the tiger watched, and wanted a sweater like that one her big sister was about to get, wanted to be able to knit like that…

And later grew up and knitted one for her own husband, as best as she could reconstruct it all those years later. Only, not in a ’60’s shade of Harvest Gold, thanks, though.

The woman’s baby brother, long grown up, eventually became a senator too. The little girl with the tiger, whose own kids were beginning to outgrow their stuffed animals, managed not to argue politics with him. Although: she did thank him for sponsoring a bill giving patients the right to see their medical records, which in some states they could not at the time. He was surprised, and exclaimed, “Nobody *thanks* me for anything!” that he did in the Senate. Argues, yes. Thanks? Blink.

Later, when the woman was visiting her 95-year-old mother, her mom asked her, “Frances. How many grandchildren do you have now?” And Frances answered, “Twenty-one.”

“Beatcha!” her mom grinned impishly. Who had twenty-nine. Frances later got up to twenty-five, and loved each and every one and bragged on their accomplishments like a good grammy should.

Cue the guitar, piano, organ, tenor sax, clarinet, flute, oboe, cello, violin, trumpet, harp, let’s see, sibs, what else we got here, okay, everybody, open up and sing:

Happy Birthday, Dear Mom/Grammy, Happy Birthday TO YOU!!!

And Many More…

Judy Sumner, I am so telling on you!!! Thank you!!!

My idea of heaven is getting a chance to see the unknowable long-distance good outcomes and celebrating them with the people who caused and who experienced them. For instance: I can just picture a small woman, with hair thicker than mine in a long black braid down her back, complexion darker than mine, laughing with me and with another woman over what a few of her stitches had done.

I’ve mentioned before the fingerpuppets I order by the dozens from Peru. I didn’t have many left from the latest batch, but somehow I still had just the most right one.

A week before Thanksgiving, I was in seeing one of my specialists, a peach of a man; it was a routine appointment, and I asked after his family. He mentioned his wife had recently had back surgery.

Every woman who has ever put on a Thanksgiving meal (or man, for that matter, but I tend to relate to the women most, personally) knows what a big to-do that whole scene is. I blinked at the thought of trying to pull it off while recovering from something like that, and I was thinking of that as I walked into my closet, and…

…There were my fingerpuppets. There was one, and I don’t have a picture of it to show you amongst the menagerie, sorry, but it was brown. A large bird. It had bright colors cheerfully decorating the edges of the feathers on its big tail. Which is why my doctor’s wife opened up a card in the mail to read me half-apologizing for having lifted their address from a thank you card they’d sent me a few years earlier, and saying I was sending her my best wishes and a “turkey with all the trimmings.”

I had a question for that doctor yesterday, and sent his nurse a message; he called back this morning and answered it: and, thank you for the turkey!

I asked him, “Did she laugh?” Because what could help heal a person better than a good belly laugh?

The sound of his voice in response was such a gift: I got to hear his love for his wife in capital letters as he exclaimed, “OH yes!!” He told me it would be part of their holiday decorations from now on.

She liked it! Hey Mikey! Cool. Very cool. Now, can you just see the two of us telling the woman who’d knitted that turkey and sent it off with a bunch of other little puppets to the USA, wondering what would ever come of it or any of them, that it had been about so much more than putting bread on her table? And thanking her?

(P.S. And you see that one I got to stand there, watching over the animals? The woman with gray-streaked hair, wearing a shawl, a cane, even glasses. That one’s mine; the only way it could be a more perfect portrait is if she had knitting needles and yarn in the other hand. She watches over my knitting perch.)

My friend Lisa Souza at lisaknit.com has been hand dyeing yarn for years; when Stephanie Pearl-McPhee said she may have fallen at Artfibers in San Francisco and swiped her credit card on the way down, well, Lisa used to be the color mastermind behind their one-of-a-kind yarns. She has an art degree and does gorgeous work.

So. Lisa likes to listen to podcasts by Lime N Violet as she works (uh, if they ever do closed captions, count me in?) Come to find out Miss Violet recently found a lump, and was unable to afford the $1000 deductible to get it properly looked at. Lisa to the rescue. Lisa came up with Miss Violet’s Pink Ribbon colorway sock yarn, and within a few days sold enough to donate half that deductible’s worth so far.

Mine arrived yesterday. I sat down with it and figured out how many stitches across it would take to have the pink part come out in exact stripes if you’re not doing a sock. Because, much though I love handknit socks, I do not love knitting them. This was a very soft pure merino–and I say that as a picky and overly-spoiled knitter–good for lots of other things besides socks.

I cast on, ripped, cast on, ripped, six times. Finally seemed to get it just at the right point in the color sequence for the number of stitches I wanted… And then it went off by a stitch or two’s worth by the second row. Oh forget it. I frogged it, and then deliberately cast on at a completely random point and just went with it to see what it would become.

It surprised me by coming to look like a pink ribbon winding like a fire escape down the scarf. Now, as a kid growing up in the suburbs, fire escapes on the old brick buildings downtown fascinated me as a kid: why have staircases outside that end a floor above the ground? My mom explained them to me. I noticed some had folded-up parts at the ends, so that if there really was a fire, that part could be lowered close to the ground. But a lot of them, well, hope there’s a rope attached or a trampoline (or whatever the firemen call them) underneath. Yikes.

The one on my scarf reaches comfortably all the way down to the bottom, thank you, safe and sound. It’s a pink ribbon scarf without screaming BREAST CANCER PINK RIBBON SCARF LOOK AT ME!!! It just quietly is what it is.

So. As I knitted, I wondered whom it would turn out to be for. I hoped it would go to the right person; I hoped it would be meaningful; at the same time, I hoped nobody I knew would be diagnosed with breast cancer any time soon, and that Miss Violet herself would find that all was benign. (I did the false-positive mammogram once myself.) I actually got that thing half done by the time I called it a night.

The phone rang this morning. Nancy, a friend, very hesitant, saying first what she would do and offer to try to make it up to me, and then–she doesn’t do lace, really, she said. She doesn’t knit fast. But she had a neighbor’s 11-year-old daughter over at her house most afternoons after school these days while the kid’s single mom was fighting breast cancer. Nancy was the support and safely-non-family sounding board for the daughter, who was also the granddaughter of an old friend of both of ours.

…Would I, she asked hesitantly, be willing at all–she knew it was the Christmas knitting season, but–to make something for the girl’s mother? She would…

Nancy. I told her, You don’t have to do anything at all. (I was thinking, you already are, for Gracie’s granddaughter, and that’s enough.) You don’t have to apologize. I’ve even got it already half made, and I hope to finish by the end of the day today. There you go. No skin off my nose, and it’ll only take half the skein so I’ll still be able to make another one on top of that. Consider it done.

Timing. The timing of things. Mixed with the generosity of others: Lisa’s giving of her profits to help heal somebody, pass it on. Sometimes, all you can do is look upwards and say, Thank You for making it all come together.

(Edited to add: to Lisa and Rod Souza, celebrating 37 years of marriage today. A very happy anniversary and much gratitude to you both.)