I was in the lab waiting for a routine blood test this afternoon, and so were a lot of other people. They had a sign up: “Projected wait: 20 minutes.” I pulled out my knitting, a lace scarf I’d begun. People came, people went, lots of people. Knit on. The sign got changed: “30 minutes.” I knew I wasn’t a stat, so I’d be pretty much last in line. I didn’t *think* I would run out of yarn…

An elegant elderly woman in a wheelchair came in, being pushed by her granddaughter. They came over next to me, the granddaughter sat down, and we all struck up a conversation; it is amazing how welcoming yarn and needles seem to universally be. The grandmother said, almost as if it were an admission and a failure on her part, a shirking of her grandmotherly role, that she’d never learned; the granddaughter told me she’d made a stab at it herself, and that a lot of young women like her seemed to be learning these days.

I picked up my ball of blue baby alpaca/silk and had them each hold it a moment, as I said that there are so many really nice yarns out there these days, and they don’t have to cost a lot. They oohed and aahed over the sheen and the softness, stroking it a bit; I went on, saying, to fall in love with knitting, you really need a nice yarn. Not, say, a cheap acrylic.

The granddaughter nodded and said that cheap acrylic is indeed what she’d used, that one time when someone had been teaching her. But touching this, she could see how the knitting bug could really reach out and grab you.

You betcha. (Now. Why did you think I held it out to you, eh?)

This is a slightly breathless-sounding post, but if you’ve ever been, you understand the overload. Stitches West was wonderful and overwhelming and totally a Disneyland for knitters–over 200 vendors. I love it. I love running into people I only ever get to see there, some local, some from all over the world. That delightful fellow from Wagtail Yarns in New Zealand, with my hearing loss in that noisy place and his accent, we somehow need to put closed captions on him when he talks, but we laughed at ourselves and managed just fine. (His kid mohair in Dark Teal. The intense color!) I finally got to see Blue Moon Fiber Art’s yarns, and understand why they’re so popular. Gorgeous. (Backstabber: was that deep rose-red colorway named after that bank that yanked their credit card operations for their Socks That Rock Club, claiming selling sock yarns had to be a terrorist front, that no one knits socks? If it is, they made something beautiful out of that whole mess, I love this stuff.) I got to see, of course, Sheila Ernst and Lisa and Rod Souza, my favorites. (Mardi Gras, Saint Valentine, Berry Poppins, with Jellybeanz on order, and Lime and Violet glass needles to play with them on.) I got to go to Half Pint Farm’s booth and exclaim on behalf of my friend Cris (it’s a tradition), “Ellen: you ROCK!” She laughed and laughed; I hadn’t forgotten! (Emerald, silk/merino.) Karen at Royale Hare, who wanted to read my whole book on the spot (Cazadero Mist, Fitch Mountain Frost.) I got to see Melinda at Tess Designer Yarns, who’d been pretty stressed last year; I didn’t help at all at the time, given that I caught and tore an expensive yarn with my wheel, and she waved me away when I tried to pay for it: so as a thank you for her kindness, I took some of her hand dyed silk I had, knitted it up into a scarf, and surprised her in the mail with it not long after. This year, she seemed much more relaxed, enjoying people, really enjoying the show and how much people loved what she’d dyed. I patted myself on the head and chose to believe I’d played a small but good part. If nothing else, knitting for her had made it all the more important to me that she have a good time, and she was clearly having a good time. Yay!

I had people coming up and introducing themselves over and over, and thank you to each of you if you’re reading this, you totally made my day. At one point, I exclaimed, “SUE!” I hadn’t seen her since I’d gone to…well, let’s see, my younger daughter was in fourth grade at the time and is a college junior now. Been awhile. I got to see Robert, who wove my much-loved medicine blanket. Very, very cool.

Pictured above are two of my favorites, Pam Bell and Darrin Kaufman of Pacific Meadows Alpacas (garnet for a shawl, and red for a scarf). Darrin found me before I found them, and dropped everything to come over and chat awhile. They sell the baby alpaca yarn that I used in a lot of the shawls in my book–wonderful, soft stuff, and they are two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. So don’t mind me; I’m bragging on my friends for a minute here.

So, meantime, if anybody bought the silk/stainless steel blend yarn from Habu, tell me, what on earth do you DO with it?! Their website says it was originally developed for oil filters. It reminds me of the old joke that if you give an avid knitter steel wool, he or she might knit you a Volkswagon.

A little bit of each of these vendors, most of them people who are already good friends, will be there with me as I knit up their yarns. Good times ahead.

Before I say the rest of this, I want to publicly thank Shelly, who has emailed with me any number of times but whom I had never met. Today was her first-ever Stitches, she was only going for the one day, and she spent three hours of it pushing me around. Knitters are such nice people… Many, many thanks, Shelly.

When I was knitting my Barnswallows scarf for my book, I picked out a yarn that reminded me of the color of well-weathered wood, Jaggerspun Zephyr in Mushroom; it went with the story and it felt right. But as I knit it, I wondered whom it would eventually go to. It was pretty, but it wasn’t a color you’d be seeing me wearing any too often.

Ann Rubin is the person behind Afghans For Afghans, as I noted on my Weapons of Mass Construction entry, and for the last several years she has run a booth cum collecting point at Stitches for people wanting to donate handmade warm woolen things for the people of Afghanistan. To wage peace and goodwill. I’ve stopped before and chatted a bit, but never felt virtuous enough to make the effort to knit a whole blanket.

Well, Ann recently put out a call asking for hats, mittens, small things; someone was flying over there, but luggage space would be a problem. The one time I finally have an afghan I want to offer, a donegal tweed wool knitted with a camelhair/lambswool, big and warm and practical. So I emailed Ann; could she still use this? Sure, she said; there will be another shipment going not too far off, bring it, and thanks.

I went to the KnitU meetup last night, held after the opening-day stuff was otherwise over. I didn’t expect Ann to recognize me; other than the fact that I’ve been in a wheelchair at Stitches past, there was nothing ever to make me particularly stand out when we’ve met before. She and I were sitting across the large room from each other at this meeting, and she was dead tired, could hardly keep her eyes open–but they had us go around the room and say our names; she registered mine when I said it, her face lit up, and she smiled a silent hello.

Getting ready for bed last night, it suddenly hit me in total clarity: if I knitted something for Ann, anything warm she would feel morally obligated to share with those in far greater need of that warmth. She is someone who cannot sit still when there are humans in need. But the story of that Barnswallows scarf was about creating a place of peace in a background of ongoing war–and it is a wispy little thing, a bit of Jaggerspun Zephyr, a symbol and an airy lightness.

There is nobody else it could possibly have been for.

(Ann hesitated to accept it; she didn’t want to leave the other volunteers out, and she didn’t want the focus to be on her. I told her it would be wonderful publicity for the Afghans For Afghans project, and with that she relented. And she absolutely loved her scarf.)

The doorbell rang this afternoon. It was the tall UPS guy, with two boxes: a smaller one full of yarn I’d hand dyed–that picture will be on page 10–and the second one full of the projects in the book. Plus a few that didn’t fit in, including the green one Amazon currently shows as being on the cover. That cover got ditched when I pointed out that the pattern wasn’t in the book. Oh, oops.

So here, with a Kaffe Fassett coffee-table-style knitting book at the back for scale, is all the knitting projects of the last two years that I haven’t given away. Most of them, however, I’ve given away.

Why, yes, I do buy more yarn when I go to Stitches. Fancy that. (…My husband and the wheelchair repairman set my top speed at 8 mph. I could wipe out a whole aisle if I forget to turn the thing off while writing out a check. But it also means that baby alpaca/silk at Lisa Souza’s is going to be mine, because I can get there faster than anyone else.)

See you there!

(Edited to add: dead chair battery again. What, does it not like freezing garages? This is going to be interesting…)

This is Karen. She owns the Rug and Yarn Hut.

This is the friend who taught me how to spin and not to be afraid of dyeing my own yarns. It’s just playing with watercolors, have a good time!

This is the friend whom I called after my car accident in ’00, and told her my sister wanted a navy afghan for Christmas, I needed yarn, but the world was spinning around and I couldn’t drive.

This is the LYSO (local yarn store owner) whose response was to pack up her minivan, drive the 25 minutes each way to my house, present me with all the navy yarns she had for me to choose from, and who then GAVE ME A DISCOUNT at her great insistence, along with a hug, and told me to get better.

I’d tell you about her white and gray cat climbing into her dyepot and snuggling down into that nice warm wool and dyeing itself green semi-permanently, totally freaking out the neighbors, except that I’m saving that for the next book.

If you’ve got a good LYSO, give them your best. Because there just aren’t enough Karens in the world.

Last week, I was waiting for an elevator up to my doctor’s appointment, and an elderly man in a motorized wheelchair and his bored-looking attendant came around the corner to wait for the doors to open with me. He looked just like an age-progressioned version of the dad in the neighborhood, growing up, whose storm door I had careened through as a little kid (see Kathleen’s afghan story on my main website), and I instantly liked the guy for that. So. His chair looked a lot like the one I use occasionally, and I told him that as I unzipped my purse and pulled out whichever random fingerpuppet came to hand. I explained that I keep one over the joystick on my scooter and find that it makes me instantly friends with all the little kids around me (very true), especially bored ones in waiting rooms. He needed one for his joystick, too!

The attendant still looked bored. The man was absolutely delighted, so she put it over his joystick. He asked if I’d made it, and I admitted that no, I do knit, but these I buy by the dozens from Peru–but they are handknit. He declared, Well, then, I have to pay you! I laughed, as we were boarding the elevator together, telling him, Hey: it cost me eighty cents. Enjoy!

I’d had a twinge while unzipping that purse, not knowing what kind of condition the old man’s mind might be in, given that his body had clearly seen better days. But his mind, heart, and sense of humor were utterly delightful; I’m so glad I didn’t hesitate.

(My Rabbit Tracks pattern with the recommended extra edging at the sides. Yarn: Lisa Souza’s Seafoam colorway; sorry I don’t have any more of the requisite cashmere knitted up on hand for the illustration.)

I am so stealing this line from Carol H., a commenter over at Yarnharlot’s blog. Stephanie aka Yarnharlot wrote a superb post Friday that every knitter who has ever been condescended to, but who wants to handle it well, can relate to. For me, the biggest such moment was when a medical resident last October, seeing me knitting as I sat in my hospital bed, having just met me and knowing nothing whatsoever about me except the fact that I knit, when I mentioned something about my blog and website, gasped loudly, “YOU!!! have a WEBSITE?!!?”

Like wielding two sticks and some wool means you’re not capable of using a computer? Sir?

Stephanie is a woman who, single-handedly, raised $320,000 for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres from her fellow knitters simply by asking for people to open their hearts. This is a woman with great power to do good, by how she writes and who she is. Her picture is on the very first day that this blog was launched, if I may so brag, from when she was in Los Altos, CA for a booksigning–one that involved a city permit to take over a large parking lot to accommodate the over 300 knitters who showed up for it.

And yet at another venue, she had someone hesitate to set up that tenth chair in their hands, no matter her protests, sure there couldn’t possibly be ten knitters in the area to want to come to a signing for a knitting book. Knitting?

Thus Carol H.’s line: we hold “weapons of mass construction” in our hands. We use them to show people we love them. And there are a lot of us. Ann Rubin’s Afghans for Afghans project, putting warm clothes and blankets made by hand–not just physical warmth from things bought, but a real and human warmth, stranger reaching out to stranger–I think goes a huge but quiet way to launch peace between the peoples of our countries. Our hours spent doing so cannot be bought: they can only be given. And when they are given, when we measure our lives in a manifestation of real caring, we have great power to do good.

Weapons of mass construction. Let’s knit!

Oh, and, that resident? The last day I was there, he looked at the lace scarf I was working on, in cashmere that I had dyed in shades of a royal blue, (absolutely gorgeous if I do say so, and I do say so), and said, wistfully, “I have a wife…”

I thought long and hard about it after I finished it, and finally went back to Stanford and left it with my favorite nurse, whom I’d already gifted with baby alpaca/silk lace, to give that man for his wife, the resident being unavailable just then (she paged him; he was there somewhere; we tried.) A physical reminder, soft, lovely, and skilled in the craftsmanship, that he needs to truly see his patients, not write them instantly off on the basis of his prejudices. It gently holds fast to the truth that I did not write HIM off despite that and other mistakes I believe he won’t repeat. I figure, if I’m to be part of his medical education, then it’s essential I play the part well.

We can construct a massive amount of good by holding fast to our good will. When we express it in stitches, all the better.

Drive-by knitting.

They had no idea. None. The timing! That the last few nights I’d considered packing a hospital bag, didn’t pack one, but I did go hunting through my stash till I found the second ball of that yarn I needed to finish the project on my needles–knowing that Richard wouldn’t have a chance of finding it. (Yeah, like if he were to tell me to go grab the particular ham radio that… Not a chance.) Just in case. My Crohn’s and my dysautonomia both had started to flare recently, and I can manage as long as I don’t start barfing, which my low blood pressure can’t handle, and I don’t know what meds are left to try now if my permanent chemo stops holding off the Crohn’s, and I’m trying not to get overly worried about it, yeah, I’ll be fine, and and and…

And feeling not as fine as I’d like.

So. Last night I went to my monthly knitting group, which had been moved forward a week because of Stitches being next week. My friend Nancy had called to make sure I’d be going, and had picked me up so that a ride wouldn’t be an issue; Los Gatos is a bit of a hike, and last month my husband was answering a Red Cross call and I had had to miss half of it.

We did the usual go-around-the-room and show off, and when it got to Nancy’s turn, she stood up and said, ‘Scuse me a minute.

She disappeared into the back room. She reappeared with a box, gorgeously wrapped.

I have been a party to some of Nancy’s shenanigans in the past, but I never ever thought I’d… My stars!!

Finally someone said, Well, OPEN it! I looked up at last at that, my jaw still on the ground, and said plaintively, My hands forgot how!

Open it. I opened it. And out came this: a congratulations from my local knitting friends on the June 11 publication of my book. Nancy had put all the squares together and had attached a tag naming the creator to each block. Nancy’s is wool she’d handspun–she’s the one who’d dragged me kicking and screaming to Karen’s shop to learn how to spin, back when my kids were in elementary school. Pam’s is handdyed cashmere/silk–Pam was one of the test knitters for my book, giving me feedback on how I’d written the patterns out and reassuring me I’d done okay with them. Llama, wool, mohair, smooth, boucle, chenille, sock handpaint: every square is done in a yarn and pattern that reflects the knitter. And every one is a huge burst of love. I was. Stunned. Speechless.

How could I not be well, with all that love and goodwill buoying me up? I went home, showed off to my husband and my youngest, and then fell into bed and slept for ten solid hours.

And woke up much better.

I wrote another note re roses last night, while giving my hands a rest from knitting and being too wired from all the Scharffenberger chocolate to sleep:

When I was in college, I was dating an older fellow with whom I was supremely incompatible but whom I was, for awhile, in love with, and who very much wanted to settle down and marry me. Meantime, my old friend Richard, whom I’d known since I was a week old, was off to France on a mission for the Mormon Church.

Come summertime, his two years being up, Richard came home. There was a large party held for the twenty-something young adults in the area, and we all came. So it was that I ran into my old high-school buddy–we’d never dated, we’d been good friends, more akin to siblings than anything else–and I took one look at the guy I’d been dating right there, and I simply knew that that was that. He just didn’t measure up. It was over. It didn’t occur to me that I’d someday get to marry Richard, just, I knew I had to marry someone as good as him.

It wasn’t too long after that that Richard asked me out on our first actual date. It felt so much better being with him than George: with Richard, I wasn’t careening from wild highs to low lows, I was simply home. Eventually, he proposed; it felt so wonderful to say yes.

Word got out–I don’t know how, ’twasn’t me–to the first guy that I was engaged. He showed up at my doorstep. With (oh goodness) a dozen red roses, supposedly as a congratulations on my happiness. Can you say awkward!? Mercifully, he simply left quickly after thrusting them into my stunned hands at my door.

Richard showed up less than an hour later. I was living in an apartment with three other single women; he looked from the doorway to the kitchen table, and asked, curious, whose roses those were?

“Mine…” I was beyond chagrinned.

“Who gave them to you?” It certainly made no sense to him. It made no sense to me either!

(Oh man what do I do with this!?) “George…”

“‘Scuse me a moment.” And with that, he spun on his heels and disappeared. I had no idea what he was going to do nor what to say. He reappeared not too long after, with One. Single. Rose. The very longest long-stemmed red rose I had ever laid eyes on in my life. It was big, and it was in direct contrast to the bunch that had so many littler ones crammed together into that vase, a crowd noisily vying for attention all at once. Richard’s single rose had presence, it had self-confidence, and it was from the man who knew he had my full heart.

So I occasionally razz him gently about the big bunches of red roses at Valentine’s; one will always do it, for me.

But I’ve also learned, however he wants to celebrate it, let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing. He always has.

You’ll meet my friends Nina and Rod when my book comes out, but in the meantime, a week ago Sunday, their college-age daughter ended up in the ER with her appendix gone bad. Laparoscopic surgery, and they sent her home the same day (wow).

Towards the end of the week, her parents were heading off for somewhere about 40 minutes away, and G. didn’t feel up to the excursion yet. No big deal. Their house had been having a power failure, so they hadn’t been able to recharge their cell phones. Again, not a big deal.

But that is why G. could not reach them. So she called her sister, who’s a veterinarian in another state. Who told her, Go! G. had the sense to know she was in too much pain by that point and had better not try to drive herself, and called a friend from church who just happened to have flown home from college for a couple of days. (“You could have called me!” Oh. Didn’t think of that.)

Which is why, after Nina and Rod returned home, they got a knock on their door, and the friend saying, um, G. isn’t home because I took her to the ER at Stanford and they’ve admitted her. Thought you might like to know. Sorry I couldn’t stay, I’ve got to run to catch my flight, ‘bye!

My hubby and I went over to visit G. yesterday, and we were thrilled to see how well she was recovering from her abscess. Meantime, her room was in the same ward, same floor as where I’d been in October, and I saw one of my old nurses. Two rooms over from G. was her high school teacher’s mom and the teacher was there visiting, and G. somehow made the whole thing feel like a party: if you’re going to be sick, you might as well celebrate the flowers.

She and her friend just got added to my to-knit-for list. I’d better get to work. Meantime, just to show off, here’s my newly finished teal Sea Silk shawl.

I once snagged quite a few pounds of an undyed light brown cashmere at $15/lb from a wholesaler I knew. The catch was that it was extremely thin and single-ply and too fragile to knit up even as lace; it had to be plied on a spinning wheel. Well, guess what I have. Hey. Ply, dye, felt the hanks with some merino, perhaps, for a little extra strength–I can manage all that.

I have made three afghans with it so far. My mother knitted some into an exceedingly elegant aran sweater. And I have five pounds, half of it dyed into all these colors (we are still working on the camera thing), all waiting to be made up into the next afghan; I’m picturing a windowpane quilting pattern or some such, the undyed skeins framing the blocks of color.

But it’s been sitting in the closet, ready to go, for several years. I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to Stitches in a couple of weeks, that the new stuff tends to push the old stash further back in the lineup, and I’d really like to see this yarn finally grow up. So. I pulled it out and looked it over.

It stopped me, just like it has every time since I dyed it. Some of the colors came out brighter than the others. Swatch swatch swatch, and yet, I don’t believe I can really know how they’ll all play together as a whole until I’ve gotten a piece done that’s way bigger than a swatch. If it were an even balance of bright and subdued, but it’s not. It’s odd; I mean, they’re all overdyed on top of this same light brown, you’d think…

So the past few days, I’ve been thinking: my hearing loss makes it so I don’t hear some things, but, I notice things that other people sometimes miss, because they’re too busy hearing the whole words while I’m focusing on the nonverbal aspects of the conversation. So. I wonder… I have a friend a few blocks away whose husband is colorblind. The walls in her family room are yellow. I wonder, if I took that stack of balls over to them, if he could tell me better than I can see how the color tones/values mesh? Since he’s missing the distraction of the reds and greens, akin to the consonants I tend to miss. I wonder if it would be clearer to me myself, if I put them in the context of the yellow walls? Or if I put it on top of her white grand piano with the white living room walls as a backdrop and looked across at them rather than down. Curious.

My mail just came. There was a package. The return address was from a city my sister lived in–oh, nearly twenty years or so ago. I looked at the name, and thought, both, Hi, Niki! and, huh?

And inside was this gorgeous pair of Koigu handpainted-yarn socks. Made as if she’d measured them to my feet as she’d knitted along. Wow. If I could make everybody’s feet feel like mine feel like right now with these on, nobody would ever again ask why anybody would bother to handknit socks. Wow.

Thank you, Niki!!!

Joan Schrouder is often referred to on the Knitlist, I think rather to her embarrassment, as Saint Joan, because of how she answers technical knitting questions and calls for help with a great willingness to puzzle out problems for other people. Joan also happens to be a nurse. She gave me permission to post this email exchange we had this week:

Joan! Joan! I just found my book on Amazon.ca! Not on plain old Amazon, but .ca. No picture, and they hyphenated my name, but hey, they had to do SOMEthing to keep me from hyperventilating!

To which she answered:

Quick! Print this out. Take paper, fold into a tube, pinch one end shut and *breathe slowly and evenly into open end. Repeat from * until circumoral buzzing ceases and vision clears.

Seriously, congratulations! So how soon until it’s actually out on the stands?

Joan

Too funny. The answer I told her was July. Today I heard from my editor, working from home so she didn’t have my contract in hand, saying that sometimes the timing changes; she wanted to make sure I knew the release date was now set for June 11.

ALRIGHT!!!!

p.s. I just checked, and they’ve got “Wrapped in Comfort” on Amazon.com now, no hyphen, although they’ve still got it as Alison Jeppson-Hyde on Amazon.ca. Either way, it’s me. Wouldn’t want anybody to get confused, you know, looking at that hyphen, and think oh, then, well, that must be someone else…

Stitches West, the Disneyland of knitters, is coming up in a few weeks. This morning I was remembering the Stitches of two years ago, when I arrived at the Santa Clara Convention Center and was unloading my motorized wheelchair from my minivan. I don’t use it often, but for long days out and about, it’s essential. Unfortunately, the sticker on my ramp had been placed on the wrong side, and I set it up according to that rather than by simply seeing how the ramp was supposed to be, the way my hubby always did. So the hinge was upside down.

Which means I had 250 lbs collapse on my foot.

I had waited a year for Stitches and I was going to Stitches!!!

And then the supposedly newly-charged-up battery was about gone. Great. Now that I REALLY needed that chair. I had just enough juice to get it back up into my car with the help of a random passerby to whom I will always be grateful.

The end result is that the teenage son of a friend pushed me around for several hours in a manual belonging to the center–one very decent kid there, go, Sam–and then I drove home carefully with my left foot, got met at the door by my husband, and got hauled off to the Urgent Care Clinic for X-rays.

It was a fairly quiet day at the UCC, or else maybe the technician just made it seem so for me; he took all the time in the world to get that foot just so as comfortably as possible. He asked how I had done this, and was intrigued at the knitting I had with me and the idea of Stitches: all that creativity gathering together! He told me a little about his wife and four stepchildren, and his face just glowed as he described them. He was as gentle a soul as you could ask for at a time like that. It helped.

My sweet husband, as soon as we were done there, hauled off to the store where that chair could be repaired before their closing time so that I could go back to Stitches the next day and go see my friends.

Last summer, at the time the first round of my manuscript and my projects were due into the publishers, I caught pneumonia. I collapsed on the floor at the FedEx place with a raging fever, (my son drove, not me) but by golly, I got that thing off. I had misplaced a ball band or two on a project, but oh well. I did it. I did it!

A few days later, my hubby hauled me off to Urgent Care again. My fever was 103.2, and I couldn’t keep fluids down. They stuck an IV in me, sure that a little hydration would bring that fever right around. It shot upwards instead. I was sick enough to be feeling, please, someone, remind me why I wanted to live? Please? And I meant it.

It was a long wait lying in the clinic’s bed for the doctor on a very busy day; someone in the waiting room with a broken bone suddenly dropped with a heart attack, and–yeah. (He turned out okay, apparently. Right place to be.) Finally, they ordered me over to X-ray.

Imagine gray hair skewed all over the place as if I’d stuck it in the blender, a dishevelled hospital gown, a mask covering a lot of my face, and a very different appearance from that day with the foot. I was groaning, They want me to walk!?

But then I saw my old technician in the hallway. I exclaimed, “You’re the one that X-rayed my foot when I dropped my wheelchair on it!”

He smiled back, “Did you have a face then?”

Oh. Oops. I whipped the mask down to my neck a moment, and we both laughed a bit in recognition.

The power of laughter is intense. The power of a good person placed at just the right place at the right time is immeasurable. I do not remember that man’s name; I remember that he loved his family.

Enough to include me in his warmth. And that made all the difference. Again.

I promise to put the ramp right-side up this time.

Are you sure? I asked Nancy. They’re so different.

Yes they go together! she answered. She pointed out that I was the one who had picked up the two balls and put them side-by-side in the first place, and told me I’d been right.

One ball Colinette handpainted kid mohair, oh I forget the name of the yarn. But that’s what it is. With one strand of Jaggerspun Zephyr silk/wool of semi-endless yardage in I believe the Emerald shade. Lost the ball band a project ago.

I started this a week ago, when I needed a brainless project; somehow those two balls just grabbed me. I got it halfway done, and then after all that initial enthusiasm it just sat there for three days, defying me. I didn’t know who it was for, so it got stuck. Till I offered to knit a scarf for someone, asked her what her favorite colors were, and she reeled off a list straight off that UFO on my needles, along with a mention that she loved handpaint yarns. Huh. Whodathunkit. You never saw a project finish up so fast, after that…

Now off to try to catch the mailman with it before he’s gone by for the day.