She had long red hair. She was the other guy’s substitute. I’ve never seen her before.

And there in our mailbox as she walked towards the neighbor’s box was the card from our eight-year-old grandson we’d been waiting for since Monday, too.

And the ballot. The beautiful, beautiful ballot.

I yelled, Thank you! and she called back over her shoulder, You’re welcome!

I filled out a Missing Mail entry after tracking showed a package sitting in a southern Californian distribution center for a week. It was too important to lose. The sender wanted so badly to connect and to put good into the world while her own was falling apart and I wanted to be able to exclaim over it to her.

The next morning USPS asked me for a description of the contents.

Mentally appealing to whoever might read it I wrote a picture of toddler blouses hand-embroidered on the front and sleeves in Ukraine by the sender, one with bright multicolor daisies, one with red roses for a little girl with Rose in her name.

It was delivered not to my mailbox but directly into my hands the next day.

It turns out, though, that you can’t send out a request like that if they’ve already scanned the item at your local post office and Informed Delivery has claimed it would be delivered that day–but then it didn’t show up. Their site says it can take up to a week and just wait, everything’s cool.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…

Everything is NOT cool. I almost went to the post office today to demand it but decided to wait till the mailman came, so of course he came too late for me to head over there.

Don’t tell us to wait a week for that ballot when the freaking election is next Tuesday.

The one relief in this is that the State itself shows it as not having been delivered. California does voting right.

Well, now I know why I posted early yesterday.

Richard made dinner last night and as I sat down to it, I apologized in advance that I probably wasn’t going to eat a lot; for some reason my belly had started aching.

Within an hour it had spread and gone wild. I kept marveling inwardly that I’d gone through months of this at a time. Months, when the kids were little and the lupus new, the chostocondritis, the pleuritis, the pericarditis, the peritonitis, all of it autoimmune. It was like this, sometimes better and sometimes worse but never entirely going away day after day after month after month while I had to get kids to and from school and going in the morning and Richard to work and back (~two miles) because we only had the one car. How on earth did I do it?!

I thought, well if I could get through it then I can get through it now. (Never mind the older body with colorectomy effects.)

I managed to feel enough better after a couple of hours to get up and go type my doctor a note.

That was maybe a little too much effort. I started barfing nonstop.

I told Richard, give me a few minutes–but then if I don’t manage to keep fluids down we need to go to the ER. Knowing full well that he needed his sleep just as much as I did and it was after ten and he’d be up all night with nowhere to lie down and then he’d have a heart attack and I couldn’t do that to him if I didn’t have to.

Michelle got me a bottle of sports-something water. We poured about a half cup…and it stayed down. Yay. Breathe. I didn’t dare try for more.

First thing I did this morning was to type the doctor a follow-up note with newer details. Only I had eaten those leftovers at lunch. Only I had gotten sick. Also this painfully distended belly thing, but it was all pretty much gone now.

The nurse typed back a list of times when I absolutely should stop trying to manage it myself and get myself to the ER.

Of the five, I’d had two.

Oh.

That will surprise no doctor who knows me well. I try to comply, I really do.

And when they ask why didn’t you go in I will point to this post.

I will have to wear one every time. That will not be hard.

I went back to the audiologist’s for an adjustment to stop the new mic from feeding back, and I was surprised at the reception as I walked in the door: as if the three women at the desk had been eagerly waiting for me. Maybe they had.

Or my necklace, anyway. A Yes! that I had one on, and a murmur to the effect of, See, this is what I was talking about!

One was the woman who’d been so taken with my seashore gerdan that she wanted the information in writing as to where to find such a thing, with supporting Ukraine making it feel absolutely compelling to her. She’d been the only employee in that waiting room last time.

And so today I wore one I was sure she would like. Pictures are here, but they don’t show the brilliance of the gold and caramel beads of the phoenix rising to the sun that is a sunflower. I happily took this one off too for them to see what it felt and hefted like as well as looked like.

Unlike my seashore one, this artist will repeat a design. FineBeadsJewellery, I said, because she doesn’t know how to spell in English. (Or maybe the translation app couldn’t.)

Oh, we’ll find it! was the emphatic response, and the others agreed.

Made my day, and I hope artist Iryna’s soon after.

Writing this down because maybe one of my kids will be asking about this when they hit their 60s.

One of the side effects of the surgery September 2025 when my retina had nearly torn through is that at the very center of my vision, when looking at small straight lines I tend to see double. Just right in that one small center spot, but it makes it hard to read unless I turn my head slightly to go one-eyed at it. The first ten or twelve months, every line of text being read split into a double of itself going off at different angles. Still does a little when I’m tired, but much better than it was.

So I wondered if I just needed to wait it out; I’d been told some people take as long as two years to recover from that surgery, and now I could see why.

After a recent comment from the retina surgeon about maybe I’ll need prism glasses, our very good optometrist was checking it out today.

I asked him, Dr. Google (I shrugged a, yeah, like that’s a good source) says that prism glasses can make the problem worse over time?

Actually, he told me, that’s true and I was just about to mention that. So we only correct it the least amount we can so the eye muscles don’t quit working as hard.

Then he did a test I’ve never seen before and asked me if I saw one square or two. Upright or tilted.

Two. Tilt.

Which one tilts?

The black one tilts left, the gray one’s upright.

He chuckled: there was no black one.

He put something over my glasses on the left and added one on the right. And now?

One! They came together! Gray!

He wrote me a prescription but told me not to fill it until I’d seen the cataract surgeon for the other eye, because then I’d be starting all over.

So that appointment finally got scheduled.

But that brief moment of a single square clear and completely upright totally sold me on getting those glasses if I still need them later.

So weird. Everything else, I just, y’know, see. As one does.

Meantime, yay for lines of text that go straight across.

(Not this one.)

I asked her, Do you remember when your mom brought those pomegranates to church to share?

She did indeed.

They were splitting open, there were segments falling into pieces in a way I’d never seen before, dead ripe, and it was easy for a lot of people to sample a bit outside on the grass to confine the mess.

I had never tasted a pomegranate like that! I told her, And that’s why–

–as I handed her one I’d just harvested from my own. The tree I’d planted because her mom had taught me what a pomegranate could and should be. She had decided that 80 wasn’t too old to try to plant something new and hope for fruit and she most definitely got it: she came to within five days of 98.

I’ve never seen one so big! my friend exclaimed.

I don’t know if whoever bought her late mom’s house kept her tree, but the memory lives on at mine.

My first year of college ended a few days before my close high school friend’s did, and I flew home by way of Greensboro, North Carolina and drove home from there with her.

It’s a gorgeous town and I totally got why Karen had chosen Guilford College for her physics degree.

Google says there are seven colleges in that county, two of them HBCUs, with A&T being the largest of those in the country.

North Carolina removed the polling places from them. The excuse given (by a Republican, of course) was that there wasn’t enough parking there.

Excuse me, sir, have you ever met college students? Most of them walk everywhere. There had been no worrying about parking when those polling places were still there. You’re not fooling anybody.

I remember wanting at 19 to buy someone’s old car and my mom (I found out later) saying to her friend to say to her daughter, Go talk to her.

She did. Shawna the daughter, my sister’s age with her own sister my age, was happy to save me from becoming her. She told me about getting a job to pay for her aging car’s expenses and how it got to where she wasn’t going to university to learn anymore, she was going to work to support her car with her classes shrinking in the background and the further she got pulled down into that cycle the more she regretted it. Don’t do it.

So I kept on walking, just like almost everybody else I knew on campus.

And that’s what these kids did. Forty-five minutes each way to the nearest polling place, making a rally of it, making our future hopeful again by refusing to let their rights be taken away from them or anybody else if they could help it. Here’s how it’s done: you go. You do.

You refuse to let them not hear your voice.

Olha doesn’t often repeat designs but she did for this one, with a new one listed for the first time since I bought mine three years ago. On a similar theme, this one.

Trader Joe’s again. A man of Slavic appearance saw my gerdan and caught my eye, his whole countenance suddenly just radiant–he knew exactly where that had come from. Slava Ukraini!

I knew what it meant to me but I wondered what further symbolism it might convey, so I went home and searched on cornflowers. I didn’t know why the artist had beaded them to be intertwining with wheat, but as I read on it all came together.

It is native to that part of Europe. As a cut flower, it has been cultivated pretty much everywhere, but traditionally it grew among wheat and barley crops–as in this Van Gogh painting–where it is considered a problem that reduces yield. Thus it is seriously endangered in most of its native habitat.

And yet they are planted. And yet they grow. And yet they bloom and thrive and are celebrated in gardens even as they’ve become rare in fields of grain.

Per Wikipedia they are dependent on bees, so their nectar is particularly high in sugar. But also: their volatiles attract a major insect predator of the major pest of cabbage plants, to the point of some farmers of brassicas foregoing pesticides–just plant the pretty flowers instead. Support the goldfinches, which love the seeds.

And now I know why someone else’s gerdan (where was that) had those goldfinches….

Years ago, someone from Stanford was invited to give a talk on his work at Xerox Parc, the research institute that was the West Coast’s version of Bell Labs. Bernard Widrow, who would be in his 90s now, was an electrical engineer trying to improve the hearing aids of the day.

He had designed a sort of necklace with seven microphones in it that were programmed to sync with one’s aids, picking up sound directionally and from the circular width of one’s chest rather than just what hits that tiny opening in the plastic in your ear. He told of trying it out on a patient with severe hearing loss on busy El Camino Real and she found she could hear every word he was saying, even against the traffic.

She burst into tears when he told her it was just a prototype and he couldn’t sell her one yet. But he was looking.

He asked for volunteers and I figured I was the deafest person in the audience. He had me try it out. So then I too desperately wanted one of those.

But no hearing aid company took it on and that was that. For awhile I was told you could go to him and have him custom-make you one but memory says it was $6000 and that was when we had four kids to send off to college soon.

That was a keenly missed opportunity.

The New Yorker has a story about an inventor who had watched his grandparents losing their hearing, their social lives, and then their brains to dementia. Note that he says they had hearing aids, but they refused to wear them. I’m guessing nobody explained recruitment to them, how brains overreact to sounds they’re not used to being able to hear and you just have to slog through the first few months of everything sounding painfully loud before normal dB levels feel normal.

He helped develop a portable sonar medical device that was highly successful, while wishing he could do more about how limited hearing aids were. The one gave him the cred and the wherewithal to eventually tackle the other.

And so he had video made of taking someone out in the middle of a busy city street with construction going on right behind him to test out what he and his Fortell team had come up with. He demonstrated what it sounds like in the mode that most hearing aids operate in.

And then with his AI.

Most of the other sound vanished, leaving his voice far more audible.

This time, I was the hearing-impaired person looking at the roadway trying not to burst into unexpected tears.

My first reaction was, well, that’s worth a trip to New York.

My second was to check where they might have expanded to.

Dude.

I guess their venture capitalists had to have a Silicon Valley location: that’s where the old Radio Shack building used to be, right down the street from Richard’s old office. Opening up next spring.

Now, that’s convenient!

Richard, who has heard the spiels of many a product manager by now, had been listening to the video from the other room.

He said “that incorporating AI into the aids” thing–you can’t take it up into the Cloud and back in real time for your ears fast enough. He was pretty sure that although they might have some really good programming, it’s probably not more or at least not much more than what I’ve already got. Color him skeptical.

So this is a great big To Be Continued. But man, it’s great to have hope. If nothing else, some good competition will light a fire under the industry.

This was the weekend of the semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

There were a lot of messages of, We are all the children of our loving Father, no matter who we are or what our circumstances or what we look like. There were warnings against the bigotry in social media. There were invocations of scripture like the woman at the well, changed by being accepted just as she was rather than judged; the good Samaritan, who saw a suffering and injured human being rather than his nationality and stepped forward to help.

I particularly loved the African woman who said that the greeting in South Africa is not, hello, but, Sawubona, meaning, I see you.

She described what that means to her people culturally and spiritually. I see you. G_d sees you. You are known. You are seen.

You are loved.

I went to get my replacement hearing aid this morning and on a whim put on a gerdan I haven’t worn for awhile: one made by a woman who lived in Kherson near the beach.

It has waves lapping the vertical shore on one side, and on the other, crabs, shells, a pearl, and as if written in sand, I love sea. (The photo doesn’t capture the depths of its shimmeriness.)

I went to check in and the receptionist was just so taken with it that I took it off so she could get a closer look.

She wanted to know how it was made; handwoven, I told her, strung with beads in the process. Glass. It’s an art form in Ukraine. I kind of laughed over the fact that Slavic languages don’t have articles, so no ‘I love the sea,’ it was just, ‘I love sea.’  I explained how Etsy had waived all fees for sellers in Ukraine at the start of the war so all that you pay goes directly to supporting them. This one had probably taken about 50 hours’ work.

She thought the price well worth that kind of time and artistry. She dearly wanted to see the seller’s shop.

But her town was on the other side of the river from Russians firing on them daily and she apparently evacuated and I’ve lost track of her.

But there are others; search for gerdan and Ukraine, I told her (and avoid the cheap string-breaking knockoffs from India), you’ll find them. And if you wear one of these and someone from Ukraine sees you they will know exactly where you got it and what it means. Support.

That meant a great deal to her.

She brought me pen and paper, wanting more. I gave her Olha’s information (that red rose!) as a good place to start.

She was so thrilled to have something she could do to visibly support Ukraine, and with something so beautiful.

My work here was done.

So is theirs: it’s such a relief to be able to hear again.

Re yesterday’s post: the woman knew she didn’t know how much she was asking so she was trying to find out if it was a reasonable ask. I suggested tie quilts because everybody could be involved in making however many and it would be more of a community outreach.

And because I was remembering the one we were surprised with and how much came from that.

Years ago there was just one girl in our ward finishing high school that year and the women decided to make her a quilt as a graduation gift; one is an easy number.

My daughter took her beautiful new pieced quilt to college and found herself with a roommate from a town in the Midwest that was going through a severe downturn.

Richard and I had lived in that state for a year during grad school: the next town over had had seven factories. Five had closed and two had cut half their workforces. I remember the Vietnam veteran dad who’d made a good wage pushing a union broom who’d never learned to read and suddenly had no way to get that income back. The ward there helped him set up a pick-your-own strawberry farm on his acreage so he could have an income while not having to pay anybody to harvest. I taught his ten-year-old, and I’ve long hoped things turned out okay for the four of them.

Sam’s roommate had a single thin blanket from Walmart and her family had zero funds for more. But she was there at college, with her whole future open to her.

My folks were visiting when Sam came home at Christmas. She and my mom went off to the local quilt shop and the two of them working together in great anticipation made a quilt for her roommate: to match hers, she told her, trying to avoid any whiff of my family has money that yours doesn’t. She told her, I’m paying it forward on what my ward did for me.

A political flyer. It was from a guy who’d wanted to set up a daycare but found himself jumping through hoops with the city such that he was paying rent for “nearly three years” waiting to get the permits to open.

So he’s running for city council. If you can’t fight city hall, get inside it and change it. It’s the American way. Good for him, was my first thought.

I looked a little more closely. His cropped photo suggests that the rent he was paying may have been on his house, but never mind.

His proposal (good luck, sir) is that it take 30 days for small projects and 90 for big ones if we elect him, and if it takes longer than that your fees are waived.

Given that the large projects can take several years to get approved after environmental reports, road studies, sewer updates–and especially given the 32-story monstrosity a Russian oligarch wants to plunk in the middle of ranch-house suburbia in the next town with no roads nor schools that can possibly accommodate that, they should–I can see why he’s frustrated. But.

There’s so much to his story he didn’t tell. Was his daycare alongside a major road where you wouldn’t want a toddler dashing into the street when someone opens the front door?

As Richard pointed out, with all the 1950s tract houses in this city turning over and new owners wanting to remodel them to match the idea of the outrageous amounts they’ve paid for them, if you’re going to knock the permit timeline down that far you’re saying you’re going to vet and hire a whole lot of new inspectors. How are you paying for that if you’re ditching lots of fees? And if you don’t, you’re essentially throwing out the idea of inspectors altogether because people can only work so many hours in a day.

And let me tell you, having remodeled years ago, you really really need good inspectors. We had to replumb the entire house for water and gas a second time when ours was done because the pipes used were substandard and oh did you know your water heater was releasing carbon monoxide the way they set this up, lady?

We didn’t know, and the inspector should have refused to sign off.

So yeah, I get where this guy’s coming from.

But I would far rather that inspections be done and be done right and pay the city those fees than fork out $40,000 in 1999 dollars again to remedy what was left behind so our house could be safe and in good working order the way we’d paid for it to be the first time.

“Lower cost home improvements,” he says.

Oh you sweet summer child.

To paraphrase Robert Frost via capital letters: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ICE… I got a tiny taste today of how it must be like right now.

The motion sensor set off a chime to alert that someone was at the door.

I saw someone’s rear end bent over right in front of its side window and waited for the person to move far enough away that I could move faster than they could to shut and lock it again if I needed to. As women do.

He’d placed a political flier. The candidate had a Chinese name and I’m guessing the, it turned out, tiny elderly man was a relative.

I am greatly shamed by the fact that the majority of white women, it has been reported, voted for the adjudicated racist rapist and I saw the result of their choice in that man’s face as my door opened and he saw mine: he was suddenly terrified.

Then he saw the welcoming smile on my face.

I picked up the flier and he took a step closer. He told me a little about the candidate. He clearly did not begin this life as a speaker of English and I thanked him for participating in the democratic process.

Such a mixture of pride and relief in his countenance as we waved each other warmly on in our day.

My heart broke for him. And I’m so glad he was willing to risk it all to help his fellow Americans learn about the candidate he was so proud of.

I was sent (thank you!) a video made yesterday on Iceland’s volcanic fissures. The land in that area is rising and they know more is coming and all you can do is all you can do.

We in this area worry both too much and not enough at all about earthquakes but it made me realize I’ve never had to worry about massive liquid fire blasting out in fountains from under my feet or flowing down our street. I idly wondered how much snow would it take to cool it down just faster enough. (Uh…)

It made me stop and notice: it is the cooling last evening of summer. There was an inquisitive bunny right up at the back door who pretended to be afraid (yeah, not at that pace you aren’t) while I pretended he wasn’t welcome because he really had to go back to the dog side of the fence because my pomegranates are starting to droop to the ground the way they do as they get heavy and ripe and I want some of that juice shared with us this year.

The world is beautiful out there.