Snap peas and round zucchini: last week we ate green veggies from our own back yard two days in a row and aside from tomatoes I don’t know that we’ve ever done that before in all our married lives. The few times we’ve tried, we had poison ivy winding up around each plant back East and the broccoli I grew here one year tasted horrible nibbled right off the plant. Cooked? All those tiny flowerlets opened up to show a tiny now-dead beetle in each. Yow.

But that explained it. I still have zero desire to plant that ever again and the lack of bugs in farmer-grown broccoli inspires for me a certain reverence.

The sense of at-long-last-success and the relief at it was instantly contagious.

And so, one new $2.79 packet later, a plastic pot a tree had come in, a bit of leftover potting soil, and voila! Way too many spinach seeds got planted tonight. Won’t take but a few cups of water a day, I hope, and the crowding will just make all the more incentive to pick off the extras at the baby-leaf stage. I’ve read that spinach doesn’t like heat but we’ve got air conditioning if need be. One more reason for the pot rather than the ground. Mobility.

That plus I’d probably have to clear away more of those tall flower stalks otherwise and having a hummingbird dance a ballet in and out of the blossoms right in front of you is incentive to let the things stay, prickly sun blockers or no. It put on quite the show last night.

Meantime, someone nearby has a peach or nectarine tree because twice today a squirrel, one gray, then one black, came running down the fence towards our yard with fruit that had just started to get a bit of color to it. What surprised me was watching this one eat till he was full. In years of plenty, squirrels have stripped my apples clean in a day, months pre-ripe, picking and biting them all trying to find that one ripe one they’re so sure must be there.

The little guy wasn’t wasting any of this precious resource this year.

(Photo of its leftovers taken with my unsteady hands above my head.) My peaches were all accounted for and untouched. I wonder whom I should be telling about the clamshells idea.

You know how here in the drought we’re supposed to catch the water in a big dyepot while we’re waiting for the shower to warm up?

When you’re in a rush to get ready for church and you’re trying to feel prepared to give a talk, certain people might find it counterproductive to drop their good size 13 black shoe in that pot that got set not quite far enough aside afterwards. Just saying.

A trying-not-to-be-growly, “Dear, would you help me with this hair dryer?”

I laughed, I mean, what can you do, it was just so unexpected. “I was going to dry my hair.” (We got both done, pretty much.)

As we were pulling into the parking lot, Richard happened to say that the best talks he’d ever given were the ones where he’d prepared it and then had just winged it with what it felt like he should say.

Because I was saying I’d written a good talk but it just wasn’t quite…something. It was a perfectly good talk and I didn’t want to admit to myself after all that work and this close to standing up that it felt like I might be disappointed if that’s all I gave.

And in the moment of truth when I was at that podium I did what he’d done and was glad for that conversation. I said I’d prepared what I’d thought I was going to say–and I was chucking it. I set my sheets of paper to the side there.

And then I spoke straight from the heart. I knew a few people there had already heard bits and pieces of this and that but here was the whole of it in one piece.

I mentioned a woman I’d never seen before who was clearly badly struggling with–something that day, and I took a leap and said what turned out to be just the right thing for her.

Someone had seen. And in that moment we were strangers no more and I saw the burden visibly lift from her. I knew no details, just that she had found what she’d needed in that moment. We have to be willing to be present for each other and the smallest interactions matter so much.

I talked of my faults. I said, I was asked to speak on reverence within this Sacrament meeting and yet I’m the disruptive one, I’m the one who gets up and moves away if someone sits down coughing near me. I talked about why. I said, But there is no place for me being grumpy or growly when someone does. None. And I have been, and I apologize for that. We all come here to find peace, not just me.

(It was a no-names public apology to the old woman who’d come in late and coughed on me (again) after having previously given me bronchitis doing so. She’d had no way to truly know what it was like and she had never deserved my grousing–there are better ways to handle things and as you my own blog readers pointed out to me at the time and I thank you for that, she had just as much a right to sit where she wanted to as I did.)

We are here to serve God by loving one another. That only is what we should bring here (or anywhere else). Full stop.

I talked about the first, and then the second big Crohn’s flare, where my immediate reaction to it was, but, but, I don’t need another experience like this to teach me to be a nice person–I think I did a pretty good job of learning a lot the last time around. Do I have to go through this? I don’t want to!

So I prayed.

And the answer to my prayer was this:

All I had was who I was.

Okay. I decided to pray for each person who entered my hospital room after that. I wanted them to feel their work had meaning and they were valued for who they were as well as for what they did. I figured if I could drop that pebble in their ponds the ripples would go outward to countless patients after me, remembering Dr. Rachel Remen’s books in which she said there’s a certain kind of immortality in acts of kindness.

I said to the ward, You can’t pray, really pray for someone without coming to love them.

And thus one Stanford doctor came to confess one day that he’d written in my chart, Patient looks deceptively well. Do not be deceived.

Because you aren’t supposed to be that cheerful when you’re that sick.

I ran into that doctor a few months after I got out of that hospital and I called out his name. He had no idea–and then—-!!! He was ecstatic! “LOOK at you!!! You look GREAT!!!”

Love strengthened life and I was still here.

He had wondered. And now he knew.

And he knew his own caring had made a difference.

So: do I tell you that I’m to be one of the main speakers at church tomorrow or wait till afterwards to rat myself out? Because, y’know, no pressure and all that.

It was a drought year the year we moved into this house and that one lasted seven years. Then we remodeled. (After the ’89 quake our kitchen cabinet doors kept falling on our heads–they had to go.)

The contractor did damage to the aging roof and we ended up with seventeen buckets catching the incessant water leaking inside. It rained so much that winter that a beam he’d had waiting in the yard for a few days warped enough to soon crack the new window set against it–so that had to be replaced. We named the inside downpour roof juice and joked that if the legislature should ever again need to end a drought, all they had to do was re-remodel this place for us.

I’m waiting….

And then it turned dry again. So we’ve been pretty good at not wasting water for a very long time now. The San Francisco Bay Area, for whatever reason, has been better at water conservation than the whole rest of the state and is under slightly less drastic cutbacks. My one fault was frequent laundry loads, because having gone through that one good-sized earthquake I just really don’t want anyone to be out of underwear when the next one hits.

Relandscaping this past year, though, with the extra water that new trees need and with sixteen fruit trees–when they said cutbacks were going to be mandatory, I thought we were totally hosed. So I bought us more underwear. More favorite-color-blue oxford shirts for him. Bigger laundry loads done less frequently, well okay, and I have thrown some loads together that my momma taught me not to mix, but, drought, so, yeah.

Not because we wanted to, but, we bought a much more water-efficient dishwasher. We replaced that outside faucet at last, and although that wouldn’t show up in the bill yet, that will make a difference, too. And tonight, with Richard’s back giving him grief, I unloaded four monster bags of mulch from the car.

I just went to pay the utility bill and just kind of stared at it a moment. There’s a line where you can compare how much you’re using to how much you used in the same time period last year. It doesn’t show you two years ago, and that’s the number the state is comparing against, but it still definitely gives us an idea.

Our city is under a mandatory 24% water reduction starting June 1. I was sure any laundry savings was being offset by my trees.

I had to do the math to make sure we hadn’t already hit that target. We are so very very close that replacing that tap was all we needed and laying down that mulch will top it off.

Gee, maybe I could have planted that pomegranate I wanted after all.

Next year.

Hey, Jerry Brown, maybe just painting the outside and redoing the driveway would be enough this time?

Every bit of green on this tree is an act of triumph.

We bought this English Morello tart cherry tree on March 14. Bare root season was pretty much over but over there on the cool coast of Santa Cruz the tree was still dormant (and cheap!) It was the variety I wanted.

I haven’t been mentioning it since…

We planted it. And then we waited and waited and waited. Given that it’s the one we expect to grow to block the view from our windows to our neighbors’, having it just sit there mutely gray was not in the plan. It was even on standard rootstock, no dwarfing–that way it would take off faster, like the Indian Free peach has, even if it meant it would take more pruning effort later.

The fig tree we bought at the same time has leafed out nicely with new branches starting, doing what the newly planted do. It has clearly recovered from all the cutting I had to do to its roots to separate them from each other.

Eventually I was clearing away spurts at the ground from the cherry’s rootstock–that is so not the variety I want to grow. And then at long, long last we got just the beginning hints of green up above where there should be.

Then they shrank.

Grow.

Shrink.

Grow.

Shrink.

Yet I never saw anything touch it and the other trees were doing just fine.

Finally one night when it had started a flush of green yet again I went out there with a flashlight and my stars: the whole thing was a completely solid mass of black beetles stripping every bit of leaf straight down to nothing. They weren’t touching the ones from the impatient rootstock that wanted to get on with this living business, just the English Morello part.

I did what I could to clear them off, feeling just sick. Grape Koolaid anyone?

And then we went off for four days for the weddings.

Our friends Krys and her husband were at the second wedding we went to almost straight from the airport.

And they wanted to know: had it worked?

I had forgotten all about it. Back when I was fighting an ant invasion in the garden I’d read something about how the barbecued ash from charcoal briquets breaks ants’ joints and kills them and our friends had shown up at our doorstep with what they’d cleaned out of their grill for us. It had worked; the ants were gone. Wonderful!

And then I had utterly forgotten all about it.

So there we were talking and they were saying, We bet we gave you a lifetime supply of that stuff. How was it?

Oh, you bet it worked! Thank you so much and you can clean your grill any time, I’ll take it!

As the obvious hit me upside the head–Duh! I had had it right there!

We got home very late. There were the very barest slivers of maybe two leaves left, and I doused them and the whole tree with that ash. The next night I looked again and still found two beetles; one disappeared fast, the other reared up on its hind legs as I let it have it, then fell off.

But over the next few days the tips of what was left (meaning, pretty much everything) shriveled and turned black. I didn’t know if it was from the ash or a disease from having been bitten.

I went to cover the mango that night and suddenly realized I had a second cover on hand. How about a physical barrier for the night bugs?

And that, that, is how, on Memorial Day, our cherry tree is finally beginning to look like it’s early March. It’s still got a few bites but it was so very close to dying on us and now, now, it’s going to be okay. That picture is a week and a half’s worth of growth and it definitely has some catching up to do, but now we know it will.

It had just needed the right treatment.

The knitting grabbed me and it wouldn’t let me go. It’s been awhile since I’ve kept going until I had to stop to ice my hands. It felt good to get something accomplished.

Except now, if I end up waiting in the doctor’s office and then again for chest x-rays tomorrow–we’ll see what the morning brings, not sure yet whether to make an appointment–I’ll actually have to plan a new project and bring the yarn to start it, because this one’s going to be finished pretty soon.

Which is a good problem to have.

Jess the plumber came and I have a new toy. It doesn’t leak. You turn it a quarter turn to get full volume. It’s ready to take care of my fruit trees.

The original plumber had not only used a substandard part, he had welded it on so that it couldn’t be replaced without having to pay someone to cut the metal pipe and start over; now though, and Jess showed me, all you’ll have to do if/when we need to is just unscrew this and screw on another. Done.

I told him a little about the guy who’d installed the earlier one, trying to explain how we’d come to have such a mess there. The man had also installed not-up-to-code gas and water lines across our roof that had all had to be replaced and should have been caught by the inspector. He’d tripped over and broken another subcontractor’s lamp as its owner watched–okay, things happen–but instead of apologizing, he had defiantly said he’d done no such thing. And he’d stolen our bicycle tools.

Jess grieved, exclaiming, “That’s so sad!”

YES. Yes exactly. We can buy new tools and pipes. He can’t steal his way to feeling good about himself. And I liked Jess on the spot.

He counseled me, “You have to be careful.”

And I thought, and sometimes you have to luck out. Which I did this time.

When he was done he took a moment to marvel over my yard–“all those peaches!”–as well as the other fruit trees. He told me he used to work on a farm, and it was clear he missed it. I pointed to that that that and that one and said, “Peaches for June, July, August, and September.”

He was so happy for us! Me, I was wistful and said, “I wish I had something ripe I could offer you. Lemons?”

He laughed, shrugged, and admitted, “I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

But he was particularly taken by the Yellow Transparent apple. Look how it had grown back! He told me it had lived by love. He told me I’d loved it.

I hoped I deserved that compliment–I do love it now but honestly, it took me a few years. First I had to know it better, and a huge thank you to my sister for explaining spring apples to me, much less Yellow Transparents, when I’d never heard of them and couldn’t figure out why by fall the thing was always a total loss. It fruits like crazy and its branches are particularly laden this year, to the point I need twice as many clamshells as I have.

And then he told me a little of his own story. He’d been in an accident when he was a kid: he wasn’t supposed to walk again, he wasn’t supposed to talk again. His speech was slightly slurred but I thought, given that history, I’d take slurred, definitely.

And in the long recovery he’d had to go through everything had all come down to love. Love is survival. Love governs everything, every waking moment, it IS the awakening and the everything.

I recognized that. I’ve been at that edge of life, I know… But he’s never lost sight of it. His very speech reminds him, and he is grateful.

And that apple tree–it just so captured it all for him. It made him so happy.

At the last, he motioned to the big dyepot that had been catching the drips. At about 35 pounds, I admitted I’d hurt my back emptying it the night before, which is why I hadn’t moved it more out of his way than I had.

It was full again. (And then some in the night, but I’d done what I could.)

“Here, let me, where would you like it?”

And so he reverently poured that life-giving water in a circle around the base of that tree.

And it wasn’t till afterwards that I saw how much it had meant to him to be able to take care of it as well as he did of me in the time he was here.

Thank you, everybody. Today was definitely better.

And… The outside faucet now refuses to turn all the way off. Yow. This is so much not the time to be wasting water— $135 for an hour of a plumber’s time tomorrow will be money well spent, for my sense of guilt as much as avoiding being fined.

Meantime, five fire hoses full time, 100 gallons a minute each for eight weeks, the most pristine Yosemite-area water in the state when free recycled water was available right nearby but, y’know, then you’d have to pay the truckers… That link gives a whole new meaning to Candle in the Wind.

I can’t fix them (ah, okay, here’s the followup article) but I can fix mine.

Overdoing it Saturday caught up with me the last few days. Spent most of today sick in bed.

But we did eat the last cherry and it did help.

Still pondering that woman from yesterday.

She was–maybe–young enough to be the age of my oldest, and I think that helped my reasonable-Mom reaction snap into gear. Raising four teenagers taught me not to take offense even when it’s intended because it means the kid is hurting badly and needs understanding and not taking it personally. And a firm guideline, definitely.

As I think back to a screaming 16-year-old, a soft answer in utter calm and love but utterly to the point, a slammed door, and, after two hours’ self-imposed cooling down, a complete angel reappearing who never kvetched about any of that again.  One of my memorable moments of motherhood. Who knew that it would help get me ready for yesterday.

I marvel that this woman had happened to knit–and with the weather that had been chilly for May, had happened to choose that day to put on that one–that particular simple but unusual pattern that I could spot from a mile away where you get to the end of your shawl knitting on the diagonal and then drop stitches spaced just so all the way back down to the beginning. Clah-poe-TEE. A French-speaking designer.

I marvel at the timing. My unusual arrival time due to the schedule of the day paired with her departure time from Costco: seconds off and the whole thing never would have happened.

Frankly, I marvel at what she did, of course, but whyever she did it clearly had nothing at all to do with me. She was reacting to something that I represented to her, whatever it may have been in her history, and her choice of outfit made it so I could offer her an out: anybody who didn’t quite see what had happened could have thought we were just two knitters striking up a quick conversation with an implied compliment.

But the experience offered her a choice: if she’s any kind of a good person, then the starkness between her behavior and mine was a heads-up that she needed to confront whatever the source of her angst was that was causing her to lash out at complete strangers and to do better.

We’ve all had moments. We’re all human. Sometimes we simply need to see ourselves more clearly to find our way back up when we’re down, hopefully with the support of those around us.

She’ll never know it, but I’m rooting for her.

The day here started off quite chilly and I wore a sweater.

Richard was off at Maker Faire (I want to see that 3D printer in chocolate too someday) with Michelle. SPF 100 sunblock is good, but it’s not that good so I didn’t join them.

While they were gone I was coming into Costco doing the usual slightly awkward thing with the cane and the cart and trying to manage past others coming and going from the same tight in-and-out area, when one woman who wanted to be done and out of there fast kind of shoved her way forward through everybody in her path, abruptly turning her cart in front of me in such a way that I was forced to do a little dance to avoid hitting her, skittering to a stop with the cane askew–you know, being graceful and all that.

I was thinking, eh, we all have times when we’re in too much of a hurry and we just don’t see in time.

She looked me in the eyes and made a rude face at me.

That, I did not expect. (And not out of an adult.)

In that same moment I noticed the pretty handknit around her neck, a large wrap in a pattern that was all the rage a few years ago. I asked, with a straight-out-of-Stitches smile, “Did you knit your Clapotis?”

Busted and she knew it.

The briefest hesitation, then, “Yes, I did,” she answered with a half smile in a mixture of pride and agony as she beat it the heck out of there.

He’s been working from home this week, fighting the edge of a bug (so am I) and keeping it away from his co-workers.

But this afternoon he suddenly realized he had a prescription we hadn’t picked up yet; was I up to going and getting it?

I was in better shape than he was, so, sure.

We’d just had a bit of end-of-season rain-blessed-rain earlier in the day, .16″, but looking at the sky and the weather report, that all seemed over with and the forecast said there would be no more. I reminded myself to be grateful we’d gotten that much, such as it was.

I drove home through a total cloudburst. In May? In California? Not that I’m complaining! The gizmo on our roof recorded .54″ by the time I got home and it’s at .58″ now. The yard is muddy. Water! (Edited Friday to add, and it rained some more overnight even though Wunderground said it would not. The total became .63″.)

Oh, and. I was going to tell you about that other cowl I stuffed back in the bag a week ago. It was done in soft Malabrigo Finito, knitted up in a twisted infinity scarf.

Sunday I went to see my friend Edie, as I do every Mother’s Day.

She surprised me with red and white miniature carnations and perfect, deep red farmer’s market strawberries.

Her son’s picture was on the mantle as always, forever the handsome, gregarious, blond 18-year-old who had been my daughter’s classmate. Her son-in-law greeted me with a warm smile, as did her other one when he arrived soon after. Her grandchildren were playing in the kitchen and the back yard, and I was suddenly glad that I’d grabbed a bunch of hand knit Peruvian finger puppets for my purse; I fished out five, one for each little one. A zebra and an alpaca and a…

She was wearing red. The cowl was red, and she exclaimed that it had been her son’s favorite color as she put it on in delight. “I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never owned one–and now I do!”

Adrian, Edie, and me. Why I come. And now I know why it had had to be that one. I can just picture Adrian looking over my shoulder as I picked out the yarn and then among the finished projects, knowing what would help his mom feel him close by.

Several years ago she’d given me a dwarf hydrangea plant and it had brightened my back yard ever since–but, I confessed to her in embarrassment, when the tree guys took out the olive it had been next to and the tree next to that while it was dormant they had moved some large rocks around and I’d lost my landmark of where it was. It had to have been under those rocks, because I’d never seen it again.

I sent her a photo yesterday. Mentioning it to her had gotten me to go look again–and there it was, coming back up, now, finally, after it had been dry for so long, against all the odds. Right there between my mandarin orange and my sour cherry tree, how could I miss it.

I can just picture Adrian grinning.

Time for a few pictures.

The bride’s little nephew was just old enough to have learned to not  just walk but run and so nothing but running would do, although he often had to lean his head down to watch his feet go to make sure they landed in the right places.

And here he is. After cutting the cake, Mely and Derek turned around to give one eager little boy the next bite.

A few pictures of my family too from our trip.

Wednesday, we flew in for Richard’s sister’s son’s wedding, got our rental car, and drove to my parents’ for a visit and a late lunch.

And as we sat eating, their phone rang.

It was my sister’s son, calling his grandparents in Salt Lake to let them know that his wife had just had an emergency c-section at seven months along and the baby had been airlifted to Children’s Hospital near them. His wife, meantime, having just had surgery, was going nowhere for the moment. He had a toddler to watch, a wife in one hospital in one city and a baby in intensive care in another where things did not look good.

He was trying to figure out if he needed to ask if he could crash their place from time to time while having no idea how long he’d be having to ask for or how much. The baby had had a mass…

Michelle, meantime, hadn’t joined us for that lunch because she was going to meet up with an old college roommate at a restaurant. The roommate had a toddler and was also seven months pregnant.

Michelle arrived and waited, and waited, and waited, no answer either… And finally just ordered and ate, wondering what on earth was up.

Her old roommate was suddenly in the hospital with no time to call and explain.

She lost her baby.

And so we went off to the rehearsal dinner the next night intensely grateful for the lives of our loved ones and our newly loved ones we were meeting and everybody else’s everywhere, keenly aware of how good it was to see ours. Of the fragility of life. Hugging our grandchildren, cradling Madison to sleep, and looking around at the entire wedding party and thinking, Let the love not be fragile. Ever. We need each other for this.

Saturday, our niece was able to be released from the hospital in time for them to make the drive to Salt Lake, where there was nothing more to be done. The medical staff disconnected their son from the machines and he passed peacefully in his grieving, loving parents’ arms, together.

Saturday, we celebrated Gwyn and Sterling’s wedding in San Jose, and for the second time in two days rejoiced with all our hearts over two people who were so clearly and dearly meant for each other.

It wasn’t till the next day that we got the message that the brother of our sister-in-law had passed while we were flying and celebrating.

There was a knock at the door tonight. It was Michelle, and her hands were too full and she needed help with an enormous, gorgeous floral arrangement she was trying to bring in.

It was left over from Gwyn’s wedding and Nina had asked her to share them with us. I inhaled the orchids: they were perfect and so was the timing. I’d needed that. I exclaimed over the colors and Michelle explained, They’re dyed, Mom.

Okay, somehow that felt just too funny. A moment of comic relief.

To life.

So much to say.

The bride’s father, struggling somewhat with the English, was delighted to find that we had a mutual second language (third for him) but laughed when I said I was deaf in English and French both. (Not quite kidding there in the happy noise of that crowded room.)

The ceremony on Friday was in Spanish. The love was universal–and it was intense. So. Much. Joy., almost as if we humans are almost too small to comprehend and take it all in. It filled everything. If ever there were two people meant for each other it was Derek and Mely.

My friends RobinM and Kunmi in Maryland gifted me some time ago with the surprise of a very generous gift certificate to Purlescence; I wish they could have seen my face or Nathania’s happy anticipation at the shop as I opened that envelope and gasped, stunned, thrilled, trying to take it in.

I got to see that same look and I wish they could have, too.

A few weeks ago, I had in my hands the last skein of the Cascade Epiphany I bought with that gift: a blend of cashmere, silk, and royal baby alpaca, the finest grade, one of the softest yarns in my stash.

And it was red. Slightly on the bluish side. Which *I* like but I dunno… Sometimes it’s an effort, though it shouldn’t be, to let go of working with the yarns that I favor and to use ones the recipient would rather.

Not having met the bride yet at that point, I went combing through Facebook photos. I wasn’t seeing it. But still it felt like nothing else would do–one would think I could reconcile those things, stash, dyepot or yarn store if need be, color choices showing up in pictures, but I couldn’t so I threw the problem in G_d’s hands: please help me get over myself and my love of this yarn I’d been saving the last of for just the right thing if what I’m supposed to be knitting her is something else.

Stubbornly, nothing else was coming to me and that red just felt all the more right. Huh. I didn’t know what the climate was like where the bride was from but I did know she’d be living in a cold one for awhile here and that Epiphany would make a good warm cowl against the skin. And so I knitted it up.

We were some of the first to arrive at the rehearsal dinner Thursday, guessing on the rush hour traffic on the careful side, and so I had a moment to hand the bride a small gift and to tell her, This is for (specifically) *you*.

She was wearing a fabulous dress–and that cowl was an exact match. The tape had come undone off the top of the wrapping (never buy flocked gift paper, it sheds little glitter bits all over everything and it doesn’t stay taped) and she peeked in and gasped. “That is my FAVORITE color!”

Several months ago I knit another warm cowl out of Malabrigo Arroyo. The colorway was beautiful but not really mine; I kept thinking it would look fabulous on someone who was Latina, but whatever, the feeling was that I needed to knit this and I needed to have it ready on a moment’s notice. It’s easier to knit something in happy anticipation of a specific recipient but I had no idea who the who was. Just that it needed to become a thing.

This was before my nephew announced his engagement. Even after, the cowl being finished and put away and forgotten, it didn’t dawn on me.

And I made another one out of silk that didn’t get very long, just a sweet little thing is all; my hands were hurting, the lack of give to the yarn helped not at all, I had no idea why I was making it and at the time I just cast it off and called it done. This was right after the Arroyo.

Last Tuesday I was packing my bags for the trip and wrapping the bride’s cowl in happy anticipation.

At the last second, when everything else was in the suitcase and ready to go, on some impulse I went looking and I found those two forgotten cowls. I found a third–and felt no not that one at all, put it back, and I did. More on that later. But the Arroyo and the silk went into my carryon. I still hadn’t figured out why.

I did very quickly after I met Mely’s family: her mother was a cheerful, sweet, funny woman (I didn’t have to speak the language to enjoy how much laughing went on wherever she was) but she was seeing her daughter off in marriage to a good man–but one who lived on a different continent, as would her daughter now. I can only try to fathom how that would be. She needed a sense of connection to the love all of his family feels for all of hers during the lonely, missing times to come.

Mely had probably shown off her cowl to her mom by the time I opened my purse again at the end of the rehearsal dinner, but I don’t know for sure.

Two cowls.

Her mom exclaimed over the knitting, and her close friend, who had been sitting at our table during the dinner getting to know us a little and who now lives near where the bride and groom will be living and who had played translator quite a few times over the course of the evening, told me something I didn’t quite get about I think the mom’s attempts to learn to knit. I could have gotten that wrong. Whatever, they both appreciated what had gone into the making of those two things.

And then her friend got it and translated what I said again to the mom: Choose. Pick your favorite.

Mely’s mom gasped, stunned. It had not occurred to her! And–! Really?!

She considered a moment, stroking the fabric on the soft Arroyo; she held it close to her face and neck and then holding onto it threw her arms around me. She laughed in delight and put it on. (Not so much on the matching on that one but there are other outfits. Definitely colors that look good on her.)

Her friend, meantime, was wearing a dress that quite matched that bit of silk that I was wishing I had made longer–but it was enough. I turned then, and, picking it up, placed it around the friend’s neck.

Now SHE gasped. “It’s my favorite color!” And it did match her dress.

A very small, almost trivial part of the weekend. And yet. In an evening of love, of changes ahead, of returns shortly to where we live with everything different now, we all felt a little more that we were home among each other.

And that good woman has a tangible reminder of trust that her daughter is well loved where she has landed.