I was sitting behind her at church, silently admiring my friend’s new scarf. Amazed that an edging like that could be attached by a machine to look like that and wondering where the stitches that should be bisecting it were that had sewn it onto the outer edges–it looked instead like it had been single-crocheted directly into the fabric.

When the meeting we were in was over, turns out M had been waiting to tell me about the experience.

There were no machine stitches. That edging actually was tatted and it really was all done by hand, gold then white then dangling tiny perfect red flowers that matched the print of the fabric above and moved when she did. Many flowers. It was a huge amount of work and done in a fine thread (and TATTED! I didn’t find anything quite like it but this was the closest–imagine that at about an inch)–you would need really good eyes.

But that wasn’t the best of it: she had been traveling and had befriended an elderly woman and that woman had made that gorgeous work of art and she’d wanted M to have it. She gave it to her.

She gave it to her.

With love from Turkey, forever.

A little more super-power Seventh Generation on those two (it was two) spots and the dress is finally totally clean.

Meantime, a quick trip to Trader Joe’s and there was a mom with twin two-year-olds pushing mini-carts and an infant in a stroller. It was dinnertime. The toddlers were setting each other off in alternating and then cascading meltdowns, the baby was starting to fuss, and the mom looked like she was about to cry or yell or something right there in front of everyone while she was struggling mightily not to lose it.

Me, purse suddenly up on the seat of my cart, fishing through for finger puppets, thinking, no, you can’t give one a bright one and one a dull, no, not that one–yes! A zebra and a giraffe. (Found the second giraffe later.) Twin enough, and I offered them to the mom.

The look of gratitude on her face…

It didn’t make everything perfect but it made it a lot better. I saw her a few minutes later at checkout, the baby now up in the front pack. I told her, “I had four in six years.”

“So you know.” Said with great emphasis and relief.

“Yes,” I smiled. Her little ones were so adorable. All those curls just like mine had had.

And all because Costco didn’t have nonfat milk in stock and I had had to go run a second errand. I owe them a thank you.

There were about a half dozen years in my life when my children were babies when I wasn’t into knitting.

I was into smocking.

This involves creating tiny pleats in cotton fabric and then embroidering over those pleats and sewing up the little outfits. This especially lends itself to cute baby dresses, and I made dozens and gave many away to other new parents to welcome their little ones.

At one point, my sister Carolyn and I were due at about the same time. I made our daughters matching dresses, even if, given how hard it is to travel across country with toddlers and babies, we would never see them together in them before they outgrew them. Given Second Dress Syndrome, I kept them simple and quick. (Those sleeves match when they’re not arguing with a camera.)

When my lupus started four years later I could no longer hold those tiny needles but I still needed a creative outlet. Something that stayed done in the happy chaos. And that is when I rediscovered my love of knitting.

But meantime, my kids had outgrown the various smocked outfits and I had set them aside for future grandchildren.

Then we remodeled. It was the seventh year we lived here, and the first six had all been drought years. That seventh was a doozy, though, and I started joking that if we ever had a drought again we just had to get the state legislature to fund remodeling our house again and that would end it–it just wouldn’t stop raining.

When our contractor thought he was pretty much done our roof had seventeen leaks, all of them new. It took every bucket we could find while we tried to get that taken care of. There was a leak in an overhead light fixture over here, and over there, water was pouring out a light switch. More from the new sky lights, others just randomly wherever. Fun times.

Meantime, those smocked clothes were in a box with a lot of other boxes that got shuffled around depending on where work was being done on the house just then.

And one day I discovered that roof juice had permeated that box and those clothes and despite all I could do with a washing machine, those stains did not come out. All that work, all those memories, all that generational anticipation! I couldn’t throw any of them away–they were beautiful, aside from the damage, I just couldn’t.

Yesterday I stumbled across this simple little bishop-style cousins dress. It somehow was not stored with the others, as if it were waiting to be discovered, a spokesman for the others. It took me this long to figure this out? Hello, lady, you’ve got grandchildren… I wondered if my niece, now the mother of three little ones herself, might still have or even know about her matching outfit. I hadn’t thought about them in a long time. I think the sense of pointless loss had made me avoid them.

I had to try.

I rubbed some Seventh Generation detergent into the spots, put a little more in the sink and sudsed it up at the tap (not too much! It’s a drought! Tell the legislature they’re not doing their jobs!) and put it in to soak.

For eight hours. I squished water through from time to time.

The water turned brown.

And look at that. No baby food stains either.

I actually missed one roof spot near the bottom, so I’m going to rub more in and do it over. But look at that! Twenty-one years and three grandchildren later and I can actually start passing these down now.

I’ve got me some work to do. At long last.

p.s. I don’t remember if I used the Ultra Power Plus or their older version; I have both. But they’ve earned the link they didn’t ask for so here it is.

I dangled what I hoped would be happy anticipation: I put this picture on Facebook with how to make it and said I had a lot more of these zucchini/pattypan hybrid squashes to bring to knit night.

So. Cut cupcake squash in half and place cut side down on plate.  Add a spoonful of water; nuke for three to four minutes till soft. Turn right side up again and scoop out seeds. Fill each with a big spoonful of Alfredo sauce mixed with one egg, sharp cheddar (or blue cheese and/or parmesan as you choose) and cherry tomato halves. Bacon bits if desired. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Found one more squash this morning, but to be sure before heading out tonight I checked under those huge leaves one more time and found two more of a good size: how on earth had I missed those? (Well hey. Zucchini.) Seven went into a cloth bag.

All the way to Purlescence I was seeing the most unusual cloud formations–dalmation dog. Leopard print. Lots of little clouds against lots of blue.

Reactions when I put those green balls on the table ranged from oh cool! to oh okay to facial expressions of no no no please keep those far far away from me.

David came out of the back at the last and his face totally lit up when he saw those last two squash and I thought, okay, now I know who saw that post and was hoping. All yours, hon, please, take them–I have five more tiny ones and these have got to go. (I did not count the blossoms. I couldn’t bring myself to. I know you can stir fry those but an awful lot of them seemed to already have even tinier squashes already attached.)

He totally made my day as he made off with them in great delight.

Just before the shop closed down for the night, someone threw the doors open so we could hear the sounds and smell the ozone: it was RAINING! In August! And no it had not been in the forecast. A little, then more, then a good steady rain and lightning as I drove home. Rain rain actual rain, .04″ worth.

Those five tiny squash? With that extra water I’m guessing they’ll be full grown in time to try to ditch them at church.

Of course I went back. We’d eaten the last peach. Besides, having not bought any of those monster Flavor Heart pluots last week I had to.

This time I got to meet Andy Mariani himself, the rock star of great fruit as far as I’m concerned, and if I sound a little starstruck, he’s worked hard to earn it.

UC Davis created a great peach that’s too ugly for the mass market? He sells by flavor; Baby Crawford is now a customer favorite. The Kit Donnell in my hand is bigger than the Lorings were and was bred by Andy himself from those Baby Crawfords and named in honor of a friend of his, a fellow rare-fruit enthusiast.

He told me about a customer who asked him if she had to wait till the peach turned red to know it was ripe–she didn’t know that some peaches come in yellow and even green and red is not always an option.

And he picks his ripe.

I brought back last week’s box and got it refilled with various fruits and like in a good chocolate store, his manager wrote down the varieties alongside each row. (Never mind that smaller but not small plum squeezed in there where it could fit, we know what it is.)

I was curious about the Greengage plums listed on their site, but it wasn’t till I got home and found an article about their orchard that I realized there had been some right on that table the whole time and I’d skimmed right past them.

I’ll just have to go back. Twist my arm. We’ll just nibble on these first, shouldn’t take long at all.

Ellen got to see all the fruit trees last week while she was here, and walking around the yard she said she loved how the place had all these nooks and crannies.

In the drought-absence of a lawn I have gained a respect for the lowly dandelion: they don’t stab and they don’t grab or prickle and they delight little children at every stage. I have just a few.

But the ones that love a desert… I’ve got the worst of them by now but I want the rest gone before the rains come. I’ve seen how fast they can flower after a shower–one day. One. Day. Across species.

And so, it being our allotted watering evening (9-6: not allowed) rather than coming inside between trees as I moved the hose around, timer in my pocket, I stayed out there, my entire upper body against the little pricker factories, pulling as many up by the taproots before sundown as I could.

And came in at last, dead tired, and explained to Richard why I hadn’t come in during each eight minute interlude to, y’know, go knit or something: “I was weeding a good nook.”

Seven-month-old Maddy giggling again and again as her brothers jumped on bubble wrap off camera in yesterday’s video. Can’t get it here yet, but then FB was freezing part of my keyboard, with a particular dislike for a, s, g, and h–the thing worked everywhere else. Go figure.

Today we got to see her giggling for ourselves via Skype while Parker told us all about his legos and Hudson described his favorite book and showed us pictures: tractors. Trucks. These are the important things and we needed to know about them.

(How long has he been talking like that? we asked.

Just in the last two weeks or so.)

He was speaking in long sentences while searching for just the right words with all kinds of big facial contortions for emphasis. Twenty-eight months is a fun age.

So is the scooting backwards when you’re trying to crawl forward stage, giggling and grabbing your daddy’s nose. So is four and a half.

Life is good.

The doorbell rang. I needed to sign for a package. From Peru, oh okay, not one of Richard’s, I know what that is.

I got one once that was simply cotton muslin, almost a burlap fabric, possibly even handspun and handwoven and closed with rough string. My address was written across it with a sharpie, just legible enough. I pictured it inside a donkey’s bags, making its way carefully over a mountain pass to get to the nearest post office; it did take some time to get to me. When I saw it I was utterly charmed–I loved that it shared its background with me. I wanted to meet the people who had done this.

This one was an ordinary manila envelope. Just as much happy anticipation and I still wish I could meet the people behind it.

Because inside were 61 hand knit finger puppets.

I sent the vendor a note: his price had come to 69 cents each–I had only been expecting 60, I owed him 69 cents.

No, he wrote back via Ebay’s message board, he always puts in an extra “in case one fails.”

That was such an unexpected statement that I laughed. I wish I could show him the faces of the small, tired child starting to whine at her mother behind us in a ten-cart (!) line at Costco today in the moment when one of those finger puppets came out of my purse. Magical. Absolutely magical.

I got a shy, happy wave bye-bye not long after as the mom beamed.

There’s more where that one came from. And I am so glad. They came!

If only I had thought of it a day or two earlier I could have shared some of this with Ellen–and likely there would have been more. She, though, gave me a nectarine from her travels in the Central Valley and pointed out the tiny dimples: the farmer had told her the unusual rain striking the skin had done that.

So the story: I exchanged emails last winter with Andy Mariani, the owner of a well-loved orchard a ways south of here, and he was delighted to find someone who knew of and liked Loring peaches like he did.

I didn’t think we got enough chill hours for them to grow here. (But he’s in a slightly different subclimate.)

Yes he did have a few trees. Get back in touch with him come summer and he’d be glad to put some aside for me.

A tad late, I remembered all that and shot him off another note.

The market stand was sold out, he answered Thursday, but if I could come Friday they would be picking the very last few that morning. Maybe three pounds’ worth.

I don’t care if it’s just one single peach, I said, for my first Loring in thirty-eight years it’s worth the trip!

And so they managed to find ten peaches for me tucked among the leaves and set them aside. Michelle and I got there, and the woman at the counter asked, You’re Alison?

She offered samples of a Silk Road nectarine, too. I prefer peaches–but that was like no nectarine I’d ever tasted and would have been worth the trip down all on its own. I’d never had one run juice to my elbows before and I did not know they could have such an intense, interesting flavor–so some of those came home, too.

I did not get the name of the dappled, pretty, ripe, green–cherries? So they were. In almost-August. I’d never heard of such a thing.

We came home with our treasures and cut up our first Loring. That first picture is not a trick of the camera angle–that thing was 508 grams.

Michelle closed her eyes a moment and pronounced, Now that is a peach!

Relief! After all that buildup, it just couldn’t be a letdown, it couldn’t…and it wasn’t.

We took one to Timothy at the chocolate shop. “You didn’t go to Andy Mariani’s, did you? You did? Yes!” He shared it with his employees. Our favorite hot chocolates showed up at our elbows.

The one I later shared with Richard needed one more day to ripen perfectly but it had bruised slightly from all the juice and a little jostling and needed not to be wasted. He too pronounced it good, though I told him Michelle’s was even better.

At least I got to send Ellen off with homegrown Meyer lemons. She’ll just have to come back next July.

She sent me a picture and Richard sent me some from his phone and they’re too big to go here and I’ll try to shrink them tomorrow for you.

But let me just say that Ellen is absolutely as wonderful in person as I always knew she would be.

She’d had a huge drive from her trip to Fresno to make it here. The funny part is that at three and a half hours into it my doorbell rang and I opened it with You’re here!

And it was my next-door neighbor. And so Richard and I got to talk to her a little while and I was halfway walking her back over to her house when Ellen pulled up in front of it. And Ellen? That’s the neighbor who just missed being in the big tsunami in Phuket and who then spent a month driving a relief truck to stricken areas long after her vacation was supposed to be over. Because she could.

We had such a good time! She and Richard and I went out for chocolates and sandwiches at Timothy Adams, then dropped him off at home and headed for Purlescence.

I had no idea one of the regulars listens to Ellen and her twin sister Jan’s podcasts–she did quite a doubletake and went, Are you–are you–!

It was a treat to watch Ellen belong on the spot among my friends just like I’d felt with her as she’d stepped out of her car the first time. Heather got to tell her she’d knit a hat for the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign. Everybody introduced themselves.

It was late by Ellen’s time but she let me bring her back inside after the shop to dip some of the strawberries she’d bought us driving across the Central Valley into some sour cream and sugar as we three chatted some more. It was a struggle not to be selfish with her time. I am so glad she came.

And she brought nectarines and a melon and plums and tomatoes and good news about a good farmer who’s making a difference re water usage there.

Richard took pictures of the two of us….

Nope, no sign of basal-cell recurrence here, and the dermatologist liked how the scar on my scalp was healing at my yearly checkup today.

Mentioning again in case someone out there needs to read it: my oldest had a highly aggressive melanoma diagnosed at 27 years old. They apparently caught it in the first two weeks and were able to operate it out of there without her having to go through chemo or radiation–speed and a doctor’s intuition about that mole six years ago saved her.

Get checked.

And then I went home and made an appointment for the next mammogram, as long as I was being all grownup about it.

Sunday night, just after the lemon pie launching: a Welcome Home party, old friends, a bunch of Mormons.

There were more people than seats outside so a bunch of us simply plopped down on the grass  in a circle off to the side to chat, surrounding a thirteen-month-old at his level. He was just starting to take a few wobbly steps (you can do it you can do it!) and the grass was soft on his feet and cushy for falling. Grass is a rare and wonderful thing these days and I think we were celebrating it, too. Formal we were not.

Out came one of my Peruvian finger puppets, one of my brightest and prettiest. A parrot. His toddler big brother got a puppy.

And that puppy never again left those hands no matter where he ran, jumped, or skipped–success! New favorite toy! I told the young parents the puppets were theirs to take home and that hey, I had just ordered sixty more.

And I thought they had when they left early to put their boys to bed, even though the baby was totally at the hold, look, and drop stage. We all glanced around and it seemed to be gone and that was fine and we went back to our conversation, but a few minutes later I spotted the parrot still there next to the guy furthest away from me.

I motioned towards it in the grass. “Hey, would you flip me the bird?”

Startled, and then the both of them totally cracking up, the guy next to him pronounced: “You did NOT just SAY that!”

“Hey, anything for a good pun.”

Such a rebel.

(Oh, and, I can’t take its picture because it went off with another three-year-old today during his family’s farewell party as they move away. Someday those kids will all have a grand reunion and compare finger puppets.)

Michelle had us over for homemade lemon meringue pie and sent us home with the rest and it was very, very good.

Looking at the overly full fridge, I put it at the back of the top above the fruit juice and milk that I knew wouldn’t be moved or touched for several days till the stuff in front would be used up. Knowingly, not a bright move, but I had cleared out the lower shelves a few days before and still there just wasn’t room for the height of that pouffy meringue.

This would do. Be careful, is all.

Tick…tick…tick….

Before I even had that fridge door open again all the way the entire right side of the top shelf dominoed over and threw itself down towards my feet. Lemon makes a great cleaner, so, hey, it was just being helpful, right? The sides, the drawers, the door shelves, the floor, my feet, my clothes, even somehow underneath the fridge. If it was possible within the realm of physics for pie to land or bounce there it did.

The most points of impact! Olympic gold! And the crowd goes wild. The Blobsledding champion!

I was at the satellite Stanford clinic today for the first time in maybe a year and a half? I wondered if he still played. But it was Friday afternoon, one of his times, and when I walked in there there he was at the piano in the atrium still (intro to Piano Guy in that post).

His face lit up when he saw me, and after finishing one piece he made a point of getting up and coming over and telling me he’d worn that hat I’d knit him just last week.

There were cushy couches and chairs and elderly patients who were taking the time to listen, like I was; it’s not often you get offered a live concert simply for being present.

One woman walking past saw the knitting in my hands, smiled, and pulled out the burnt-orange wool in stockinette stitch from her bag. We had that moment of mutual recognition that knitters everywhere get to share before she continued on her way.

Piano Guy came over to our little group again with a piece of paper, where typed in quite fine print was a very long list of songs. He said he plays maybe 20% from such a list on any given two-hour set, and did I want to pick one?

The elderly woman he’d asked first had apparently picked a Beatles song. I–and I wondered immediately after what had possessed me, but I picked Candle In The Wind, and he smiled and said sure and looked pleased.

I’ve been told he’s a cancer survivor and that he plays there to give back in thanks and to make the day a little easier for others going through such ordeals. He’s a gifted musician, and I wondered what he would do with that piece in that context.

He made it into a searching, honest, positive, uplifting piece of music. I doubt the elderly there knew the words (although come to think of it they likely had kids my age so who knows.) He made it something a patient would take strength from. It was the most amazing rendition. He looked my way and nodded as his hands flew.

And then, hey, while we’re on Elton John he continued on into Daniel my brother…

He was playing the next thing when three young women walked up and singled me out and asked if they could ask me some questions, since I wasn’t doing anything.

Uh, my head was nodding and my foot tapping while my hands were knitting to the time of the music and I was actually quite engaged in the moment, but what I said out loud was, Sure!

The leader plopped down next to me and started talking, utterly oblivious to the scene around her and the look of distress of the woman who’d gotten to hear her Beatles song.

Playing music is a thing you do and become and are in the childhood that I grew up in, not incessant background chatter to ignore.

But they were so intent on their mission that it just didn’t even enter in.

Their questions were not going to take fewer than thirty seconds–I pulled them away down that hall thataway. (Reluctantly.) But they were offering me a chance to help other patients in their own way: they wanted to revamp Stanford’s patients’ website’s user interface.

And fixing that particular site was something I could totally get on board with. It’s been a wreck. If the patient with username and password at hand can’t even get in…

What did you do, did you call?

Yes, I called.

The leader asked the questions, the younger two took notes to compare against each other later. She presented page after page after page, if they had it like this, what would be good/bad about it? What about this? Which do you like better?

The eye is drawn here, I said, and that button up there in the corner is not intuitive–put it here and put a second one there by this and by that. Make it easy. Make it make sense. This? This is trying to put everything on one page, one of the problems you already have. The elderly might not know to scroll. Have a page for this, a page for that–no, you should be doing that before you get to the list of providers, it makes no sense to put it after.

Would you want a dropdown list of all the providers? Or just all your providers? Or a truncated list of yours, based on the ones you’ve seen in, say, the last year?

How many doctors are there at Stanford? (!) All one’s own providers, and that Find A New Provider entry on the next line. If a patient is seeing an individual doctor, do this, but if they’re to see any doctor within a group in that specialty at any given time without getting to choose just the one, then set it up this way.

“I do have opinions,” I laughed.

“We want opinions!” they laughed in return. “That’s what we’re looking for!”

I had totally lost all sense of time by that point, and so it was that they sent me on my way with a $10 gift card for Starbucks in thanks, apologizing that it was so small while I said No, thank you, that’s cool! (Thinking, it offers a sense of discovery: a Mormon inside the ubiquitous coffee chain, ordering hot chocolate and–a pastry? Bagel? What do they have? I just never go, it’ll be an adventure. They had no idea.)

Turns out I walked out the front door with that elderly woman I’d been sitting near and she told me our pianist had left immediately before us. I’d just missed him.

I had wanted to thank him for how he’d played Candle.

But I didn’t really need to. He knew.

I almost sewed today. It was going to have two layers.

I had ordered two identical silk dresses for a grand total of $22 with the idea of cutting the one up to use for parts for the other: the style was eh but the colors were pretty and it had a lot of possibilities.

I knew going in that dye lot could be an issue, but when I held fistfuls of each together against incandescent, fluorescent, and sunlight they always looked good to go. I know, that’s like winning the lottery but it seemed I had.

I could also do this, and this… I cut the one across at the armholes so I could actually see the possibilities in action before ironing and pinning.

And all those times I had checked couldn’t show me what wearing both together did: the dye lots didn’t match after all. So very close, but. Not it.

And that started off a whole new set of tangents: okay, so, the cut one can now become a skirt that will be longer than what it had been because the armholes are now down at the waist. This is good. The other can be shortened to be a tunic over a navy skirt.

And it wasn’t till I typed all this and was about to hit post that it finally hit me just why I’d bought those dresses. Flower prints are generally not the first thing I reach for, but it hadn’t been just the colors and the price after all.

When I was eighteen my paternal grandmother had cancer. Cross-country traveling costs for a large family being what they were then, I had been lucky to see her two years before, not knowing it would be the last. She had always been an avid needleworker, even after rheumatoid arthritis hit, and with my babysitting money I had bought a little kit. I embroidered wool flowers above a little basket motif, set it in the prefab wood frame it came with, and my dad sent it off to his mother with a get-well (I wished!) card from me.

It was pansies. I had always loved purple pansies, and so I was sending her some from my heart the best I could.

Purple. Pansies.

Suddenly I see.