Found the bottom half of one of our apples in the driveway, welcoming us back. The Yellow Transparents must be getting sweeter now.

Doing All The Laundry…

Ate five plums off the tree and the first peach of the year.

Two more days and we get to do it all again. This time I won’t forget my phone.

I got to meet Sherry in Idaho today! Except she wasn’t in Idaho, she came here and we got to swap family history stories. She’s a hoot.

At one point there was a bored toddler being watched over by his parents in the lobby we were meeting up in and he started whining.

I looked at her and over to him and back to her and asked: Finger puppet time?

She chuckled. I think so!

Which one of us is more spry?

She laughed. I grabbed one out of my purse, asked the mom and then gave it to her, got to watch her face light up and then his and went back over to Sherry.

Who told me a little of some of her own finger puppet-giving experiences. I’d forgotten she’d taken up the sport. It was great.

Clearing up after dinner tonight, Mom dropped the peppermill. I sat down on the floor to to pick up the strays rolling briskly around; they were near the trash can and it seemed the easiest way to get them.

Coming back up I misjudged distances and hit my head on the bottom of the table. Which should have been nothing.

Note that about a week ago I noticed with quite a bit of satisfaction mixed with relief that I seemed to have finally gotten over that last concussion.

It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it wasn’t a hard bump, it’s all psychosomatic, I told myself as my head started to feel pressure a few minutes after Anne’s son Grant swept up those peppercorns. I have no idea what happened to the ones that had been in my hand.

A little later, I asked my husband, Where’s John?

He looked at me and said, He went home. He said goodbye.

Oh. Did I say goodbye back?

You did.

Oh.

I had another question: did Anne change her shirt?

Anne overheard and moved across the room to me and said, Just different lighting.

No–did you change your shirt? Was it turquoise and navy stripes before?

No. Purple and darker purple, all day.

My brain insisted still that it had been turquoise and navy. Every time I look at the purples-striped shirt it knows this for a fact even though I know it’s wrong.

Yeah, I think we’re definitely starting concussion #8.

The City solved that problem: tomorrow’s also our trash and recycling day. To make sure the trucks can get through, No Parking Tow Away signs got posted this morning on both sides for several blocks and barricades are stacked and ready to go on the morrow.

Heaven is finding out that not only is Bernie Sanders doing a rally in Silicon Valley, he is doing so a two-minute stroll from my house.

Some may remember that my oldest used to live in Vermont. Sanders was her Senator, and before that he’d been mayor of the town, which sets at the edge of Lake Champlain.

That waterfront was coveted by developers who knew that view could command big bucks.

Sanders said no: once it’s gone it’s gone forever. He rallied the town around the idea that it had always been for everybody and it should stay that way. The hotels could be built further out. They could even have more reasons for people to want to book rooms in them: and so the waterfront was made a park with biking and hiking trails, and that is why, snow levels and all, Burlington recently got named the #1 nicest city in the country to live in. And let me tell you, it is gorgeous.

I liked Sanders’ vote against the Iraq war and his willingness to stand up for what he felt was right again and again–coupled with a willingness in The Amendment King to reach across the aisle to make small changes for the better when the big ones were out of reach. Ethics and practicality both.

I don’t agree with all his planks. And yes, he could stand to freshen up his stump speech and I wish he were younger. But I value his character and his experiences, going all the way back to his Civil Rights Movement arrest.

I paid each year’s college tuition in the late ’70’s with summer jobs; my daughter paid $60,000 tuition for a one-year grad school program. The cost of living did not go up by a hundred times in between to justify that. I don’t know that public university tuition should be free but it should definitely be a lot more like it was when the Greatest Generation was sending its kids off to college. You want people to be able to choose to get ahead, you make it so they can.

Anyway. So. Sanders is having a rally and it’s right there and how could it possibly get more convenient then that?!

Hell is finding out…

…that it’s at the same day and time that you were going to be leaving for the airport.

And remembering all those news stories of people camping out in line before dawn.

All those thousands and thousands of people trying to find a place to park will also be hoping for a two-minute walk. From my street. Whether security will be stopping cars to this far out I have no idea, I’ve never been through this before.

I’m missing getting to see the guy who likely won’t win at this point, but whose voice–and ours–still matters. There have been a lot of Presidential-contest losers whose ideas still won out over time because enough people wanted them to.

This guy champions my grandchildrens’ future and I have long wanted to see him in person to cheer him on.

Only for you, Daddy. Gladly, for you, Daddy. Happy 90th. I love you. Mwah!

I love being a grandparent in the age of Skype.

Parker, 5, had lost his first tooth and wanted to show us.

“Did it wiggle around a lot before it came out?” I asked him.

“Yes!” Said with his finger exploring the unfamiliar new hole in his lower jaw.

Hudson, 3, showed us with an impish grin that he still had all his.

Maddy, 17 months, toddled up to the camera and grinned and grinned and grinned at us. She knew exactly who we were. She even said–something, don’t ask me what the two syllables were supposed to say but she was definitely declaring something and that she was happy.

As the old Ma Bell ads used to say, it’s the next best thing to being there.

By the time I figured out the needle size was really a bit big for the yarn (much better picture of it here) I was not where I could grab a different circular so I just kept on going.

The yarn saves it. It will definitely do.

Today I had an appointment at 2:30 but I had it in my calendar for 1:30. Going back home and coming back would have taken way too much of that hour, so, hey.

And that is how I very nearly finished this. I could have cast off and handed it over on the spot to the dental assistant who exclaimed over it and told me she’d tried to knit but had gotten discouraged at not being immediately good at it. She said this as she reached to touch the project and exclaimed over its softness and the colors in the yarn, and I thought, You really are a knitter, you just don’t know it yet.

But the other two assistants would have wanted one, too, and I’m not quite there yet. So I let it go back in my bag for a few more rows.

The philodendron (The Man Eating Plant as it’s always been fondly referred to around here) will from time to time produce a tiny leafy bit that encloses an actual new leaf and then that green outer covering dies away. The plant grows a little faster than geologic time, but not by much, so I’m sure we get a new leaf in the summer but I’m not sure we get much more than that in a year.

The latest new leafing out seemed…different this time. I noticed that just enough to remember today and go oh, that’s why!

Because that abnormally swollen not-actually-a-leaf-cover finally opened up.

We’ve lived here for 29 years and we have never seen the thing bloom before.

Hiding in there was this weird blob that instantly reminded me of Margaret’s wool.

Years ago, this elderly friend at church gave me some wool yarn she’d had since the ’60’s or so, when natural scratchy wool with the lanolin mixed in was the fad. Over all those years, the lanolin had splotched and dyed it randomly yellow and I knew from my handspinning classes that there was no washing that out. It just was.

I didn’t love the stuff but I was determined to try to at least do something with it, for her sake. And so I stuffed the whole two pounds’ worth in my dyepot to make the coloring a little more deliberately random. The bad part is, I did it without tying enough ties around the hanks because I didn’t want to bother and I told myself it wouldn’t matter even though I knew I knew better.

It. Felted.

I mean, it felted! Like crazy. Random parts of random balls, all in one big hopeless tangle. I threw the whole mess in a closet and didn’t want to deal with it and was grateful Margaret never asked.

My folks came to visit awhile after and Mom discovered that wad. She insisted on pulling it gently apart and untangling it. I tried to say it wasn’t worth her time, but she wanted to do this for me and so she did.

It took her two days.

Only a mother… A mother who knits, that part helps, too, but still, only a mother loves us enough to take on such a task.

So yeah. Looking at that blossom? I had to look it up to find out I should be calling it a spadix. But to me there’s really only one description for that thing. Yarn barf.

Good friends, good times, good night.

We ate the first three Stella cherries today, even though they’ll be even better in a week. A raccoon had pulled the bottom of
the birdnetting open and we wanted to be absolutely sure we at least got some. I fixed the netting.

Monday: the airline sent out a message saying that due to TSA issues they were currently recommending getting to the airports two hours early.

And then flights were delayed all over the place, my first by an hour when I only had a 43 minute layover–I was sure I’d missed my connection, but no, I got to the gate two minutes before boarding.

This was still flight #whatever going to SFO?

Yes.

(ohthankyouthankyouthankyou!)

Landed, got my baggage, made it outside six hours after I’d left for the first airport (a direct flight is 70 minutes) and called Richard to say I was ready.

He said he was coming but then he didn’t come and he didn’t come. But it was okay, that seemed to be going on with everybody: the crowd by the curb was not thinning. We were all in this together, whatever was going on.

A couple with two young girls of about four or five and six or seven joined me on the long polished wood bench outside the Southwest arrival doors. Like me, they waited.

The younger one started playing a video game on a parent’s phone. It was dark and probably past her bedtime.

I caught the mom’s eye, pulled out–you guessed it, two Peruvian handknit finger puppets–and asked her if it was okay if I offered them to their daughters. She hesitated just an instant and then broke into a smile and said yes, so I gave two to the littlest, who was closest to me, and she handed one right over to her big sister.

She didn’t examine them first to see which was cutest to her eyes for keeping herself, she just instantly passed one along and then started looking to see what she had. I was impressed.

The older girl looked at her white rabbit in pink overalls munching a carrot and exclaimed happily, “It’s a bunny!”

“Happy birthday!” I told them both.

At that their faces just lit up. The dad said to me, gesturing towards the older one and looking very proud and very happy, “It really is her birthday!”

“It is?! How cool! Happy Birthday! Oh that’s just SO cool!” (I was so very very glad I hadn’t run out of puppets.)

San Francisco Airport had moved their park-n-call to somewhere even further away (it was already a get-on-the-freeway maneuver) and more difficult to get in and out of, my husband apologized as he drove up at long last.

Ah, so that’s why….

As we pulled away, to my surprise a certain young family was happily and enthusiastically waving us goodbye, parents and children both, and in that moment the fatigue of the day suddenly utterly vanished.

Since when were there no direct flights? What happened to them? I had to take Salt Lake to Phoenix to home.

I’m very glad now I did.

As I sat in the first airport yesterday a man walked briskly up and asked if I minded if he sat next to me. There was a small gap between the two seats and of course, no problem, and his friend appeared a moment later and sat down on the other side of him. He too appeared to be the outgoing type.

Which is probably how the woman who sat down a few minutes later next to that guy suddenly burst into tears and sobbed out her story, all pretense of control in public dissolving away.

After a few minutes I leaned over to the man nearer to me and told him, “I’m hearing impaired. I can’t hear what she’s saying and I don’t want her to feel isolated.”

He said he couldn’t hear it all either but that there had been an accident in Moab and one of her loved ones was involved. “Bad one,” he added quietly, “I heard about it. One person died.”

We looked at each other, so sorry.

He decided I could be trusted with his story and that it was the place to tell it: his infant son had seemed to be fine…till suddenly at six months old he was in the hospital needing heart surgery. They had had all these wires and things attached to him and the sight of it was just so hard.

His baby boy reached his arms to his daddy, his whole body pleading fervently, Hold me Daddy. I need you.

And he wasn’t allowed to.

They wheeled his son away.

He had had to go down to the hospital’s garage to deal with the car (move it, feed the meter, I wasn’t sure, but the incongruity of the importance of it to those who manage such things was just blowing him away in those moments) and as he stepped into that garage it just washed over him that this was life. It was out of his control. All he could do was live it and do the best he knew how and it was enough.

“It’s in the hands of God,” I answered.

He held me in his eyes, affirming.

“My son’s fine now; you’d never know it. He likes to play basketball.” He laughed a little, the joy at the possibility measured against the memory’s pain.

I told him, “Two years ago, we got the call no parent wants,” and I described a little about my daughter’s being hit on the freeway. Physical therapy is a necessary and ongoing thing, still–but worth it.

“Two years?”

“Two years.”

He took that in.

I started digging around in my purse that at times like these just seems too big. Hmm. Maybe I did give it. But no, it was bugging me, so I looked again–and I found it. It had to be that one. For whatever reason out there it really had to.

I grabbed my cane and walked over to the woman who’d been crying. In my hand was a small very vivid pink knitted octopus with a tiny black hat (I have to wear a hat in the sun, lupus and all that) and that pink was very much the color of the shirt she was wearing. “This is silly, but,” I said in a quiet voice that affirmed that no it was not as I opened my hand and offered it to her.

She reached for my arms and I into hers and we held each other.

This which I have goes with that which you have. I see you.

As I sat back down in my own seat the young man to the other side of me, who up till then had seemed engrossed in his phone, touched my shoulder ever so gently. I turned to see him and he told me, Thank you.

Last call for flight # (whatever) to City (whatever).

We were at gate 14. The two men who’d started the conversations suddenly realized that this whole time they’d been in the wrong place and grabbed their bags and dashed across the aisle to gate 15 in time. Close!

You know they were where they were supposed to be when they were needed right where they were with us.

The airline pre boarded me and I sat on the second row where I wouldn’t slow too many people down.

The woman who’d gone through so much this past weekend went past a few minutes later, saw me, and made sure I saw her telling me, Thank you.

I wanted to thank her. She’d let me.

The young man who’d touched my shoulder, he came down the aisle a little after. I was ready for him. A small alligator, and bless him, his face lit up in gratitude that he would have the perfect memento of all of us strangers wanting to come together for her in those moments as he accepted his small finger puppet.

I had to enlist the help of the young woman sitting in the middle seat to get it to him and explained, “He was very kind.”

“Do you give those to everybody?” she asked, amused, having no idea as far as I know of the context of all that.

I considered a half second. “Pretty much!” and found her one.

She loved it.

My grandparents built their dream home long ago and Uncle Bob spent his teenagerhood in it.

But then Grampa got elected to the Senate and they sold that house and rented a basement apartment for their Utah address–two apartments, the other in DC where there was a postwar boom and housing shortage, were enough to have to pay for.

And so another couple lived out their lives in my grandparents’ lovely place with the stone front and the floor-to-ceiling windows across the long living room at the back, very Californian and with a beautiful view across the valley.

And then that house came on the market again at long last. Uncle Bob snatched it up. But he too had to have a DC spot when he won his father’s old Senate seat, and so my aunt and uncle split their time between the two homes. After the next-door neighbor dropped a large tree on their Salt Lake City roof…the Basement Troll tradition began.

Our youngest was one of several nieces and nephews over the years whom they took in to help them keep tabs on the place. But mostly it was to look out for the kids more than the house–it’s hard to get started without a little help.

So many stories. So much generosity. So much more than I could ever describe. My cousin with $61,000 in medical bills (and that was with insurance) after her baby girl died while waiting on the heart transplant list, leaving her healthy twin a singleton. Uncle Bob could do something about the money part of it so he quietly did.

Here, meantime, the day was basically this (after a quick trip to Purlescence to replace my broken wheel band, thank you Sherry, this is the last of your purple cashmere) and this. I think I got very gently rear-ended in the rain, too, but when I pulled over the person drove off and on that ten-year-0ld bumper, well, what’s one more scratch, right?

I think the screw in the tire came later.

A little normal life. It’s a good thing, really. We thanked the AAA guy and he seemed less stress when he left then when he’d arrived, and that felt good.

Some of the best notes of the day:

Here–wait, nope, what lives on Facebook wants to stay on Facebook. Scott Howell recounting a conversation to the Utah Debate Commission. Let me summarize.

When Uncle Bob got primaried by the Tea Party, he went home that night feeling very low. Went into his study (and I can just picture him in that big brown leather chair there) and tried to fathom what had just happened.

The phone rang.

He wasn’t going to answer it. And yet, something about it… He picked up the phone rather in spite of himself.

“This is Barack…” Our President told him how sorry he was to hear about the election and said he wanted to thank him for his service to his state and his country, for his willingness to reach across the aisle to listen and to work with his colleagues. He left my uncle feeling that he had been the right person in the right place at the right time when it had mattered.

That phone call made such a difference to Uncle Bob.

And then there was this release.

One more thing: my cousin Jim added that when President Obama found out that Uncle Bob’s cancer had metastasized, he sent him a handwritten note. Personal, comforting, just a lovely thing to do, because he wanted to reach out to his old friend. Again.

Today just felt like the day.

It was also the day I decided to test this mobility thing after a month of staying away from driving. I went to the dry cleaners. I dropped off a return at the UPS store. I went home and checked my messages, rested, ran another errand, went home and checked my messages.

Picked up Richard and asked him to drive now; sure, no problem.

He found himself turning right on a whim and we went out for ice cream because the day just needed something frivolous.  Came home and the first thing I wanted to do was check for messages.

When we walked in the door together there was a beautiful dove on its back on the patio, its chest glowing peach in the fading sun. It surprised me. Its fragile legs were red, its splayed feathers a riot of white and black.

Its closed eyelids a bright light blue.

All this color, not such a drab little bird after all; who knew? But what a way to see it so vibrantly. It must have hit that window hard.

There was no sign of the hawk. And a Cooper’s won’t come back for something it didn’t kill–it is not a scavenger.

I was not about to invite the ravens around.

Richard called his dad to catch up a bit, and in the course of the conversation I asked DadH how long it takes if I… I…don’t want to dig in the spot in a year or two and get totally grossed out. I knew he’s been an avid gardener.

Six months, a year at most, he encouraged me.

And while we were talking that message came in.

I knew…

I went outside. I picked up the shovel. I immediately hit rocks. Lots of rocks. The previous owner had made a pathway of them and many many years later they went down pretty far and maybe they always had.

I wanted to see how far. I didn’t care. There was sunlight and there was room and I’d long wanted that spot and I wanted to make it work and if I had to dig under every stone by hand to pull it out I was going to do it, and I did it. There was a large root from the tree cut down over a year ago; I worked around it. I spent about forty-five minutes working those stubborn embedded determined hard gray planet-bones out of there and putting them aside to where, later, they would help hold the water in place for me and work with me.

It all looked like the scattered weeds and grass and dirt on the right before I started.

Yes I’m still supposed to take it easy. But sometimes, sometimes, hard physical productive work that anticipates the bounty of the future is exactly what life requires of us.

And then when I finally had that small gash in the earth wide enough (about 40″) and deep enough and soft enough to add soil to and plant my pea seedlings in, then, at last, it felt it was time to go to work on that dove’s final resting place. I took a few steps to the left and behind the mango tree. Its roots wouldn’t be that far over yet (and oh good, they weren’t) but eventually the little bird could offer it sustenance.

Here, moss grew on the smooth surface here and there.

The spade slid right in to its full depth. Such a different experience.

And again. Then I put it down, walked back to the patio, and unlike my usual careful measures picked the dead dove up in my bare hands to take it to its new place.

It was so beautiful. It was so soft. I was sorry it was gone but grateful to it for how it would feed my fruit. Then for all that I’d dug the dove was so long that I wondered if it would fit in there gracefully and with a pang I wanted its spot to do it honor.

Somehow the space was wide enough after all. I put it in deep and packed the soil back around it. I put a bit of the moss back on the top and watered the spot to settle it all in. Then over to the peas.

The message. My uncle, my love of an uncle, the one who invited us to stay at his house any time we were in town, the kindest man you could ever hope to meet, quietly let go of his pancreatic cancer and the stroke that had made his last few days all the harder and with his family around him, slipped away this evening to where he waits to embrace us all. As he always has.

The Washington Post put the story on their front page within an hour. Maybe they’ll correct the number of grandkids by morning.

The Salt Lake Tribune’s, here.

One of my friends was asking on FB how on earth it could be that someone (read, who had a lot of money to leave behind and who hadn’t been feeling well, i.e., Prince) could possibly not have planned out and specified what he wanted done with it all once he was gone.

And my answer to that is that he was human just like everybody else: subconsciously afraid that, where there’s a will there’s away.