With all the microclimates around here, no matter what the weather sites say, after a really cold night you wait for the frost on the awning roof to start dripping down before you uncover the mango tree in the morning. That, and, somehow I just didn’t want to go out there this morning. But it had to be done. Be careful.

The top frost layer still had a bit of crispy crunchy glittery to it and I could feel the last ice crystals breaking as I pulled it off the lower layer.

Which was dry and felt cool rather than cold. Those old incandescent Christmas lights underneath are still doing their job.

But the top layer was heavy with liquid in whatever form, and I was putting my whole body into dragging it away from the mango to where it could dry out.

Which is why (and I know better, I’ve done this before) I was at the wrong angle with arms and legs opposite the direction I was leaning in when my foot caught a dip in the ground.

As I told Richard, my instant thought was Don’tfalldon’tfalldon’tfall as I tried to right myself in time.

And then you fell, he said, reasonably.

My back bounced off that vertical piece of the raised bed. But it wasn’t my head!

Ice. Immediately.

He was right, and I did, and I was a lot better off for it.

Mostly.

After dinner I said, I don’t see how I could have broken it.

Is the pain more localized now? he asked.

I wiggled my foot a bit. Actually, no, more diffuse, which makes more sense anyway because it was a twist not a smack.

Broken bones localize.

Yeah. Um, yay.

I found my old ankle brace but it’s still tough getting around. Elevate. Which means the UFO 1×1-stitch-switching intarsia hat that is a joy to give but a pain to make is now almost done. Yay!

Looks like four more nights of frost warnings coming up and then hopefully we’ll be done with that till, I dunno, maybe Thanksgiving?

(The top straightened out after blocking. I was running low on yarn and stopped there and never did take a finished picture of the beach, the shorebird tracks across it at the sides, the steps going up the hillside, the opening in the base of the redwood trunk to the right big enough to read a book to the child in, the raptor above. This was for a California baby with multinational grandparents. I was trying to make the design with as few yarnover holes as possible for the baby to tug hard at and I only had this 50/50 cashmere/cotton yarn in the one color.)

So. The second box.

The held mail had been delivered in one of those big white Post Office bins, like they do–and it was full of leaves and clearly had been outdoors for some time. Not sure how that happened given that I had opened the front door to the mailman seconds after he’d put it down, and there are no tree leaves left around here anyway.

I was exclaiming over the quilt and the incredible and unexpected generosity of my old high school friend Susan (thank you so so much!!) and almost forgot it in my excitement–but at last, oh, right! it was time to open the second surprise box.

The printed gift note said thank you for the blanket for Alice.

I took it to Richard going, Do we know someone with a baby named Alice? An adult? Did I get someone else’s package? We compared notes. No, her baby’s Emma. No, that’s…

Finally I happened to turn the note over to the back and wait, there was more.

They’d announced their baby girl’s arrival when she hadn’t had a name yet, and then since we weren’t in the range of close friends we never did hear and that was okay. It was from Michelle’s close friend from high school, the one I’d made the California afghan for.

Inside their thank-you gift was the once-a-year special that Dandelion Chocolate does in February, with three boxes inside for parts 1, 2, and 3 of celebrating a particular origin cacao, which this year happens to be a particular favorite of mine. Sent from the factory in San Francisco.

Now for some back story: when Michelle was working in San Diego, L. was single and living in San Francisco and every time our daughter flew into town, they met up at this nearby new shop that had just the best chocolate ever.

That is how we heard of Dandelion. So when I found a book by them, I bought it for her for Christmas. Amazon then went, People who bought this also looked at… And that is how we ended up giving a melanger to ourselves for Christmas and started making our own.

Which will never live up to Dandelion’s but we did learn a lot about cacao varieties. We’ve gone up there for fun and special occasions ever since. Favorite place, wonderful people, happy memories, the best pastries, and it was a total delight when the NY Times put them in their top 10 chocolate makers in the country.

I didn’t see the big hole in the side while opening it. I did quickly see the ones in two of the three inner boxes; I started to lift them out and open them and hastily put them back in and that’s when I saw the side of the shipping box.

Rodents had not only gone after that sweet food at the post office, but the proliferation of shredded wrapper paper after they’d gotten inside meant THEY WERE STARTING A NEST IN MY CHOCOLATE. This expensive, exquisite chocolate that the givers had spent a small fortune on.

What do I DO with this?

Tie it up in a plastic bag, he offered helpfully.

Okay. Did that. (Like they couldn’t chew through that? Who are we kidding?)

It seemed inadequate and even that word is itself inadequate, and a few minutes later I came up with the brilliant idea that baby mice (in case there were any) couldn’t jump high enough to get out of the bathtub, so I put the bag in that. (If baby rats can, don’t tell me.) I did not want more critters chewing through the plastic trash and recycle bins outside–and they can if they want to enough. But most of all, I did want to be able to take more pictures if the post office required proof. And there clearly weren’t any adult critters running around this thing now.

So now I knew why the mailman was in such a hurry not to talk to me–there wasn’t much he could do about it anyway.

With a late-to-the-party thought a little later, Richard casually opined, It could have fleas in there.

AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!!!! I ran to wash my hands just because it was something I could do.

I sent Dandelion a note explaining the situation and that I did not want to tell the people who had done this very very nice thing for me–but they needed to talk to the post office. And could I possibly get a replacement?

Because much though I love their work I, I, I just can’t…!

I got a very nice note back today about trying to make it right.

And then I sent them this picture and they went oh my that is exactly how you described it.

I had already checked–the Esmerelda’s Special is sold out.

They are scheming with the team to figure out how to make a whole new set just for us.

They are amazing. Absolutely amazing.

So now we get to be surprised all over again and find out what they come up with. But whatever it is, it’ll be good.

And now they know why I offered to drive up there to have it not go through that post office again.

She so admired the dandelion gerdan I was wearing that day.

I went back to one of my artist friends in Ukraine and explained that I wanted one of her designs for a dear friend: and so it was custom made and sent on its way, taking a little less than the usual time to get here.

Marnie stopped by today and I told her I was hedging my bets–and since I’d been able to have a choice, she should, too.

What I didn’t know was that she’d come out of retirement to teach refugees at the community college to help them get certification in what they were already trained in in their former countries: there’s an intense program that puts great demand on both teachers and students and both have to be completely committed to it–but their graduation rate is 100% so far.

Some of her students are Ukrainian refugees. She was wearing a shirt one of them had designed with a sunflower on it–she’d bought six.

We are distant cousins, can you tell?

She knew they would instantly know what her gerdan was and the enormity of the support it would convey.

I’d had no idea. None. All I’d known was that it felt imperative to gift specifically Marnie with a beaded necklace from Ukraine.

She exclaimed over the tininess of the beads and the size of needle that would require and how, on both of them, the artists had had the skill to make the thing lie perfectly flat. She was familiar with beading looms and the work involved.

I reminded her of the day twenty years ago when I’d been released from the hospital with a PICC (pronounced pick) line still in, a direct path for the next IV from the outside threading through to just above my heart: just in case I ended up back in the hospital. After going through weeks of being unable to digest food and very nearly dying, if they had to do intravenous feeding again they didn’t want to have to do that surgical procedure twice. You can’t put that stuff in a regular IV.

I had been warned I was absolutely not to get it wet at risk of transmitting infection to where you’d least want to.

And I desperately wanted clean hair again.

Marnie and her daughters had not only come by but had brought a swivel chair with them to make sure I’d be comfortable, got me leaned back over the kitchen sink and washed my hair for me.

Yeah, she said today, but that was a long time ago and it really wasn’t… I mean…

I told her that when I ended up back in the hospital with the next flare six years later, they told me, Oh, we don’t do that anymore. Too many complications. Too many people ended up with infections.

Because, (as I looked her in the eye), they washed their own hair. I have been so intensely grateful all these years.

She had earned so much more than jewelry. And it is: it was hours put in for her sake by someone who doesn’t even know her but wanted to do that for her, just to claim a corner of love in the world while surrounded by war, the gift of knowing that she was making someone happy out there by what she could offer of her skills.

After Marnie left I sat down and wrote a note to Oleksandra, saying, And my friend teaches Ukrainian refugees. They will see it and they will know they are in a place that is safe.

I pray Ukraine will soon be so as well.

Thank you thank you thank you.

After a break of several weeks to let the previous storms sink into the groundwater to protect the roots of everything, the rain is back. They said we’d get less than a half inch across three days; we had more than that yesterday, more than that again today, and tomorrow’s looking pretty good, too.

There was a gorgeous towering old oak of probably several hundred years at the church’s stake center before those nine atmospheric rivers earlier.

I can only hope the wood was put to good use, at least, when it came down.

Someone far away from her was flipping idly through TV channels. And happened to catch that the local news was, in honor of National Ukulele Day, re-airing a video from ten years ago–and she immediately grabbed her phone to tell her old friend.

I told the story a few years ago of a friend I hadn’t seen since high school who posted on FB that she was at SFO and her luggage had gone missing and what was she going to do for the presentation she had to give the next day?

And that is how Katherine found out I lived halfway between where that was going to be and the airport. I offered her my closet. Take anything. Don’t worry about getting it back to me. She thanked me, did a fast trip to Macy’s instead–but allotted two unexpected hours out of her travel plans to spend catching up with me in person. We had such a good time. We had made such good choices of friends when we were teenagers forty years earlier.

She had finally found the love of her life while living in Maine. Frank was a one man show: a lawyer in a small town, the public defender, the reporter for the one-man newspaper: all community service all the time.

When he wasn’t being a roadie for the university’s ukulele band. I wish I could have met him.

Then the pancreatic cancer. The local station covering that group’s coming to play for him while he was in hospice. Her gratitude. All caught on a video she thought she’d never see again.

She lives in Virginia now to be close to her elderly mom.

And then this old friend in Maine went, wait–that’s–!!!

My widowed friend called the station, and they were as thrilled to hear from her as she was to hear their response: they sent her a copy so that she could see it, too. So that she could have it.

From when Frank was still alive to hear his love coming back to him in the faces and music of his friends as his wife held his hand and, briefly, lifted his arm to carry the beat like he would have done had he still been able.

Their story starts at 2:12.

I took my tachycardia med, I did. I took it. So stop it, I argued half-asleep at myself for hours last night, willing to call 911 if need be but it never quite got to that point, thankfully.

It is fair to say I woke up tired. I called my cardiologist, wanting to know the unknowable: should I come in or could I go about my day as planned? (I.e., would it be okay for me to drive to the airport to meet up with a longtime online friend during her layover? Would I even ever get the chance to again if I didn’t?)

But all I got, after a very long time on hold, was the chance to leave a voice mail message. I was not called back.

Well then. That’s permission, right?

As the morning went on, a pattern familiar to all systemic lupus patients became manifest: feel like h*** when you get up, feel better and better as the day goes on and at the last indulge yourself in half-wondering what all the fuss was even about. Because it feels so good to be able to.

So at quarter to noon I hopped in the car and at long last got to meet ccr in ma, as her online signature has called her for forever.

She texted that she was walking to baggage claim and if I wasn’t feeling up to it that was okay; I texted back that I was sitting at baggage claim, black skirt black vest burgundy (actually more a deep deep rose but who’s quibbling) sweater, knitting.

We bought ourselves lunch without too many people around us and in a mostly pretty quiet spot for an airport–and swapped stories and laughed and laughed like the old friends we both are and are beginning to be all at the same time. We had so much fun. SO much fun.

Have a great time in Hawaii, friend. Wish I were there. Glad I got to go where I did.

It’s my yarn swap necklace, I grinned at him when it arrived.

Your what?

There’s someone who’d knitted a cashmere sweater for someone else, loved the pattern and wanted to make one for herself now, bought more of the yarn–and didn’t start it because she became sure she didn’t have enough. Since it was a mill end from Colourmart there was no more to be had.

Except I found out about it. I had an exact match and there was no point in having it sit in my stash when someone else actually needed it, and I mailed it off to her. This was about a year ago.

Now, I get it about queues and about knitting for yourself last except those times when you really need to recharge the inner batteries and how complicated the timing of any one project can get. So when I found out I had yet another cone that had somehow been separated from the others, I asked her just in case if she’d had enough to knit her sweater–and when it turned out she hadn’t made it yet, told her I had just found this other cone if it would help her be sure she had enough.

It would very much, thanks.

(I flashed back to childhood memories of Mom making Dad a complicated Aran sweater over quite a few months and coming up short right at the end: that is the reason I always overbuy before starting a project. Always.)

It was around Christmas and I tried to tell her it was on me but she was having none of that and insisted on paying for it.

Okay. So I turned right around and spent it in Ukraine to help them pay for backup power after the bombings because they needed that help and they needed it now.

I got an artist’s project made for me (with progress pictures! Cool!), that woman gets to feel that her country’s anguish matters to the world, the other knitter gets to be the artist making the project she’d wanted to do, everybody wins.

Pescadero is a bit south of there. Want to watch a road go, Nope, I’m out of here, guys, ‘bye, in 59 seconds? I believe that’s highway 84 in the backdrop, looking just like it did the last time I drove it.

Foggy, cool, quiet, farmland… Like the much-missed Phipps Bean Ranch there, where they grew every unusual type of bean you ever or never heard of, including what looked like a lima bean to fit in your palm rather than between your fingers.

That family lost their farm to the long drought and they were renters; our rains that took Stage Road in the video link came years too late. The little farm-animal petting zoo my kids liked is gone. Last I saw, their land had simply returned to nature.

Up Highway 1, the next town is San Gregorio, then Half Moon Bay, and friends of ours decided to brave the commute and build their dream house there with views of the ocean. Beautiful spot. Not crowded. Buy your fish straight off the boat from the captain, come for the famous pumpkin weigh-off in October. The flower farms. The nurseries.

The little yarn store in the little downtown that had Holz and Stein rosewood knitting needles when nobody else did anymore. The manufacturer’s discontinuance was for good reason, I found out later: some varieties of rosewood were on the CITES list and sellers had to be able to show provenance of the wood. Now all varieties are simply banned.

The road home again. The commute goes through open space and redwoods as it goes over the hills, and those woods alternately run dark and deep mid-day to blinding you with sudden patches of sun above the road and it has a high rate of crossover accidents. Our friends bought a Volvo as life insurance along with that house.

My heart went straight to them at this afternoon’s news–and of course to everyone there no matter who they are. They’ll all know someone who knew someone who had a gun suddenly aimed at them today, it’s a small town.

The updates suggest it was all fellow farmworkers.

Which just means that those with the least means to deal with the fallout are the ones who will most have to.

Why we aren’t doing better by all of us, I can’t for the life of me understand.

The day began with the news of the unspeakable horror of the mass shooting at a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in southern California.

I kept thinking of my friend Jean’s 90th birthday party a half dozen years ago where her grandkids brought out a long elaborate paper dragon, bright red and yellow and held high to celebrate properly as they waved it up and down racing around the room in sheer joy. Their grandmother had survived Pearl Harbor as a teen. And so they themselves had come to be. She is with us yet.

That is what Chinese Lunar New Year should be about: a shared celebration of all that is good in life.

This afternoon, the doorbell rang.

It was our newest neighbors across the street, the mom and her two young kids–with her daughter holding out a tray covered in little things that were inviting but unfamiliar to me.

I was having a hard time hearing and I did not want to get this wrong.

It was Chinese New Year, they explained, and it seemed they wanted me to pick one of these. We are going around to the neighbors, the mom said; this is what we do on this day.

I said that I was unfamiliar with the tradition and wanted to make sure I got this right (while thinking, Richard, come!)

He had heard the bell and the voices and he did just that, he came up behind me and I got to introduce him.

Her little boy made a point of moving a step to the side to be right opposite my 6’8″ husband and looked up and up and up at maybe the tallest man he’d ever seen up close and thought it was so cool and they both enjoyed that moment together very much.

Pick one, they explained. And they thanked us for the pomegranates I’d brought them from my tree a few months ago.

I briefly touched a package holding what seemed like a baker’s rendition of a golden sand dollar and asked the daughter holding the tray, Which one would you pick?

The mom picked that one up and the two others like it arrayed like a set and held them out: I saw your daughter! Does she live here?

A few cities away but yes, in this area.

(Of course, my mother always taught me anyway that it’s good manners to take the one you touched so it felt just right that she wanted us to have those for each of us.)

Because this is what they do on Chinese New Year. They visit their neighbors. They share sweets. They made sure we had plenty.

They offered love and connection as a way of being in the world.

There were two wonderfully crunchy cookies in that first little packet and we can both attest that they were delicious.

We had a twice-a-year meeting at church tonight where the theme was, live all week what we preach on Sundays, with the question, how do you get there in your day to day. How do you not forget.

They offered examples: pulling over to help someone with a disabled car, helping the kid on the opposite team back up to his feet after a fall on the soccer field, smiling at a stranger who could use it. The little things that make all the difference in the world to someone in the moment but that we almost don’t notice.

It matters so much.

All of that was nothing new, and yet: when they put us in groups to talk about it and what had we specifically encountered that day or that week, it became a very powerful shared experience. I wish I could give the enormity of those feelings now to everybody right here right now. The best I can offer is in the music:

Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together got to love one another right now. Right now. Right now.

(Runs and looks it up.) Camelspin: 328 yards to the 100g.

This has been my carry-around project for awhile. I love the yarn, 70/30 mulberry silk and baby camel, the shimmer, the softness, and it marinated in my stash for a number of years looking for just the right thing till one day in November I grabbed one of the two skeins and thought oh just go.

It’s slippery and a bit of a challenge to hands that have a tendency to drop things.

I cast on more stitches than I should have and silk stretches, so I really had to keep going to have the length/width proportions work out right. I’ll get another four-row repeat out of it and then probably another and I think it’ll be just right.

I really like it. It was worth the wait. And it comes with fond memories of kindness from the folks at Handmaiden: fourteen years ago I showed them a picture of my mother of the groom dress and they surprised me and specially dyed some Camelspin to match for my shawl for the wedding. Wonderful, wonderful people.

So far it’s for me, but we know how that goes. And I do have that shawl already. In Ultraviolet. Which given my lupus’s sun sensitivity is a colorway name that always made me laugh–like it somehow let me get the better of that particular limitation.

One of the things I found during my looking at Zillow/considering/rejecting moving, was, the nicer the house, the more likely that there was a fake-fur blanket artfully diagonally draped across the foot of the bed in the master suite in the pictures.

A really, really nice one, realistic and with great depth and obvious softness.

Wirecutter, today’s answer to what Consumer Reports used to be, actually did a report on such and came away saying, If you want the ones that everybody actually wishes for there’s no way around it–you have to shell out the big bucks at the upper end stores. But oh, what you get…!

Soft Surroundings sells some and their reviews sounded great. They know they’re a popular item. They often tie them into some promotion or other around Christmas time. I snagged one of last year’s models for my birthday at 75% off.

When I was pulling it out of its shipping box, Richard was suddenly concerned and warned, You know you’re going to have to worry about red paint.

It’s a blanket!

Oh. Good.

But it looked that fur-real.

It was my turn in the sibling Christmas round-robin to give to my oldest sister this year as another of their ads hit my inbox. So now this year’s model was that much on sale.

I already had–but–those are so nice. It would be fun to surprise her with something her grandkids would love to snuggle up in at their house, to be able to contribute to future happy memories for them all.

After Christmas, she thanked me for the apricots from Andy’s.

So there we finally were in person, seated around Mom’s table enjoying Indian take-out that first night there, and I decided to ask her my nagging question I’d been avoiding, not wanting to put her on the spot if her opinion of it was nowhere near mine: So. Did you like the blanket?

She and her husband did this mid-spoon-lift stopped in their tracks startled jaw-drop and a loud exclamation of surprise: The BLANKET!!! YOU’RE the one!!!

She scrolled through her phone to show me pictures she’d taken of it and its matching pillow (for hers you got free shipping if you forked over $11 for the pillow, ie it cost $1, why not) that she’d sent to a dear friend. Nope, not her. She’d asked all her kids. She’d gotten an invoice (you blew that part Soft Surroundings) but no mention anywhere of who had paid it. It had been a complete mystery these three weeks and it was so nice and how do you not thank someone, but who?! They were all entirely stumped and it had been driving them crazy. She’d thought of me–but no way. It would be an afghan if it was from me!

Yeah, well, y’know, sometimes I cheat…

Yes. They did. They absolutely adored it. Even if it wasn’t handmade.

And they couldn’t wait to laugh with their kids over the mystery being solved at long last.

Before the trip, I watched the forecasts and worried out loud more than once about having to drive in snow and ice as it promised the rain would turn to little white stars on the screen very early Sunday and stay that way all day. It’s been 36 years since we had to drive in New Hampshire winters, were our reflexes still there? I remember going ice skidding.

I’d forgotten the basic fact that roads are dark and take longer to get frozen.

The rain held on longer than expected; it was a mixture going into church, all fat fluffy flakes coming out and starting to powder the ground, but the streets? They were wet. That’s all.

That could change, I thought, given that our flight wasn’t till seven.

And then after our lunch of Indian restaurant leftovers I found myself looking out Mom’s windows as I wished for every minute with her to last longer.

Watching the snow.

Gently coming down.

I had almost forgotten.

How peaceful it is to be warm and inside and watching the world slowly turn itself into a soft, quiet blanket, and what a privilege it was to get to do that with my mother. The top of the Capitol building a few blocks uphill from her disappeared into the cloud.

But then the skies threw their forecast to the wind and stopped: that was enough for now, don’t want you guys to worry, safe travels.

But I’d wanted it to keep going! Like that protest was going to get me anywhere.

We drove to the airport with no ice, no snow on the road, and headed off to Vegas airport (of which you have heard) and then home.

Where I wished that I could go back to watch the snow falling quietly alongside my mom and was glad we got to have that together while we could.

So the other thing about the Vegas airport.

Southwest uses more than one terminal there and it was a long haul across the both of them. I found myself exclaiming, How big is this airport? Is it trying to be Atlanta? (The biggest in the world.)

I got an older wheelchair guy, the manager of the service with white hair to match my own, taking it briskly and cheerfully and at one point he said encouragingly, We’re about a quarter of the way there.

Me: Wow.

We didn’t tell him that my husband had taken a hard spill the day before, but he was in pain and moving slowly.

As we came around a corner, the guy spotted a woman waiting for her flight who was by a clearly-needed wheelchair but not in it just then. It was a different type from the one I was in, and just what he’d been looking for, though we had no idea.

He stopped. Excuse me, ma’am? Is that your wheelchair? Mind if I swap you? (There was a second one nearby like mine, left behind at someone else’s boarding.)

She looked confused but raised no objection as he helpfully moved it over by her and took hers. Apparently it was easier to manage for what he had in mind.

There you go: have a seat, he told Richard to our surprise, and proceeded to push the both of us at a brisk pace across the rest of the way.

My 6’8″ husband is not small.

We were a wide load and people were being oblivious and I did not want the man to lose and have to regain the slightest bit of momentum nor did I want to plow anybody down, so I proceeded to call out Beep Beep! and an occasional loud EXCUSE ME! as needed to get people to dodge us.

We thought at first we were on the brink of missing our flight but he knew better; we’d changed time zones. (Duh.) Besides, he told us, they’re not leaving without my passengers. Still, he took it at a good speed because he could.

He at one point bemoaned young people who collect money not to work, they don’t want to work, he said, they get paid to sit around at home, and I thought quietly, okay I know what channel you watch. They’re looking for better paying jobs and going back to school to qualify for them, but what I was actually hearing from him was, I can’t find enough people to do all I need done for all the people who need it at the amount I’m allowed to offer them.

But he was quite cheerful about getting to help us, as if simply meeting us had made his day.

He got us to our gate, I tipped him a good one, but before he could leave I said, A question, sir: are you allergic to wool?

That was so unexpected that it entirely threw him. Am I what??

I was unzipping my jacket pocket. Do you like green?

None of this was making the least bit of sense to him and he suddenly had no idea what to make of me.

Above and beyond, I marveled at him, not for the first time. You are amazing. THANK you! as I put a Malabrigo Teal Feather hat in his hands. I knit that on the way here, I told him; it’s brand new.

He was speechless.

And then as if suddenly remembering his manners he asked if I needed to use the restroom? I did, actually, and he wheeled me over thataway. On the way, I explained, That’s what I do. I knit things and then go find out who they were meant to be for.

You take good care of her, he said with great warmth to my husband back at the gate while patting my right shoulder and at a loss for how else to say how he felt.

A hat. Knit by hand. For him. For pushing a wheelchair.

What he didn’t know he also got was my fervent prayers for his back to be okay after all that work.

Okay, more details now that I’m not typing at midnight: the niece whose Texas wedding we missed to the Southwest meltdown? She had a second reception in Utah on Saturday so we rebooked for that–which meant getting to spend time with my mom, too, which was so great. When we flew in Friday evening we had DoorDash deliver Indian food to her house, and my brother and his daughter and our sister and her husband and our youngest joined us at Mom’s for our own mini-reunion.

Traveling tip: if you order a big restaurant meal in another state hours before you arrive in that state, call your credit card company before their fraud unit calls your land line so you can tell them yes it’s legit. Thank you Discover for calling quickly and unfreezing us before we left for the airport.

Last night on our return, there were no direct flights so we came via Vegas. There was a guy in that airport where I thought, I hope you’re not on our flight. He was, along with three family members, but they were not the first but the second family to loudly harangue the crew starting with the gate agent.

A woman we’d seen walking around just fine suddenly developed a profound limp and demanded to pre-board. The agent had seen her, and had the backup of you’re supposed to say when you book your flight if you need assistance, so she got told, nicely, no–your place in line is this number and that’s where you need to go.

That mom was angry and she let everybody know it, including telling the flight attendant once she finally got on all about how she’d been wrongfully denied and how terrible that agent was. The kicker is that she and her young son got second row seats anyway and could have spared herself the embarrassment of her ongoing public tantrum.

Richard expressed empathy quietly to the agent, who was grateful for it.

The woman’s limp magically entirely disappeared after the flight.

But that was nothing compared to the next group.

While she was still in line inside the terminal, as an antidote to what I didn’t know was only the start of it all, I figured our trip was pretty much over and it was time to put the rest of the finger puppets to use with no further need to save any. I pulled out some pretty ones and the first two flight attendants we saw, a young African-American man and a young, petite African American woman, were just so taken with them. For crying babies, I said, and as they asked if I’d made them I told them they were from Peru: the women can put food on the table, kids get happy, everybody wins.

It was clear they were both wishing for one of their own as they held them so I added, And they’re for you, too! Any ones you want. A handful more puppets came out to make sure they had enough.

So that started our time together on a joyful note, with Richard passing the little wearable animals over from me, and I said to him on the drive home, They’re good people anyway but that probably set the tone and helped them through what was about to happen.

He thought that was probably so.

I’ve never been so grateful for TSA screening. We were delayed by storms in the South but then by that angry guy. And his wife. And his mom. And their kid. During boarding he was yelling at the back of the plane loud enough for ME to hear at the front row and I would have said that wasn’t possible. But it was. And he went on and on and on and on and on and on and ON and on. Does the man ever breathe? Then his mom wouldn’t board–I have no idea what her problem was, but she finally got on. His kid (about six?) yelled for awhile, too, because that seemed the thing to do. His wife at the last was visibly shaking her body with rage in view of my window as she screamed at the plane’s door. At length.

Only able to guess at what her problem was, I thought, Lady. This is Southwest. You arrive late and there’s only one seat left on the full flight, that’s your seat. Nobody has done you wrong. But you guys don’t threaten the crew and you don’t scream at them.

The young flight attendant with the beautiful long braids was soothing, kind, wise beyond her years, in no way backed down, and at the last said, Thank you for your time, ma’am, with so much emotional honesty to the improbable words that it reminded me of when I was being calm with my teenagers: you love them and you see they’re acting that way because they’re in pain and you try to meet them where they are while still saying the rules hold. If our hero was religious, she fully lived by the Love she believes in.

She asked if anyone would like to move for this family, and boy howdy people did because nobody wanted to sit by any of them if they didn’t have to.

I have to add to last night’s remarks that Richard was every bit as much if not more of a support to her and the others as I was. Even if I’m the one who got the hug. He asked her later, Do you have to put up with drama like that often?

Her whole body did a Phew! at the question and then she laughed and said, No! 421 flights and that’s never happened before!

And yet she’d handled it like an old pro and I thought, Every police department in the country should hire you to teach them de-escalation techniques.

All of those people actually eventually sat down and shut up after she was done. I’m sure the male attendant at the back dealing with the dad was handling it just as well.

I wondered afterwards if that second family was, in effect, Westboro reincarnated: trying to anger the workers so they could sue Southwest when they kicked them off–it’s the only thing that made sense.

Nothing was going to be served during the flight, the pilot announced after we finally started pulling away from the gate about an hour late: there would be too much turbulence.

He didn’t say, and half of it has been human. It was definitely one way to keep drinks away from those guys without making the attendants have to take any more flak that would surely come with the denial. That pilot was brilliant.

We did in fact have enough of a rollercoaster starting a little while into the ride that the pilots were too busy to remember to turn off the bathroom sign. Whee! Yeah, we stayed buckled.

So. We finally land. The lights come on, people get up to get their stuff, it’s quite late.

You know how they drive the outside walkway over to the plane’s door and the little canvas-looking accordion overhead stretches out its cover?

The first eight or ten times, the gate agent at the controls approached, stopped, backed up, considered, tried, missed, backed up, again and again, till the pilot came on and chuckled, She’s new; she started in January.

This, of course, was January 15.

She tried a bunch more times and none of it was done quickly. We could see her calling someone. We could see her hands gesturing in frustration and embarrassment as she could see us seeing her. She tried again. Way off. No. On the phone again, and you could imagine the words to go with the pleading face and motions: Can’t someone come?! Has everybody gone home for the night?!

Our intrepid attendant got on the mic and said, Anybody want to hop down from the plane and help her out? We’ve been on the job for eleven and a half hours and we would like to go to bed.

The whole plane laughed with her because she was laughing and a little comic relief is always a good thing.

It had been a good ten minutes at this point. The pilot asked everybody to sit back down. We did. Then he moved the plane forward.

She considered the angle. No, no, that was worse.

Okay. He backed the plane up and angled it sideways towards that walkway as he did so, and this time, she cruised right forward. Nailed it. She connected us up, we had a cover out of the hard rain and we had our walkway, and there you go.

The poor woman was back inside at the gate and had to watch all of us go past her and we all smiled a hello of, that’s okay and an everybody’s new at a job once, we get it (it wasn’t just me by any means.)

We followed the emotional lead of our wonderful attendants and pilot, who’d repeatedly made everything all right in spite of it all.

Richard and I got home wired and tired and way past our bedtime in both time zones. I told him my body didn’t want to sleep but I was going to boss it around and tell it too bad, and with that he gave up the day to its ghosts along with me and that was that.