A circle of trees estimated to be 400 years old, growing from a shared original base close to the ground: a fairy ring that the little ones squeezed into and climbed around and through in wonder. Redwoods close behind, a trampoline hanging by chains from far, far overhead in the bay laurel (here’s a picture of one), made into a swing in the shade big enough to lie down on and look up at the branches.

Flowers for butterflies. Monarchs in summer. A little wooden bridge over a now-dry creekbed.

A friend our parents’ age was widowed not long ago and, knowing that we too are from the East Coast, invited us over tonight to see her southern dogwood tree while it is in full bloom. I wish I had thought to take its picture. I did take hers but sent it only to her.

We had dogwoods growing wild in the yard where I grew up, small slow-growing shade-loving trees under taller canopies, and I miss them. There are vanishingly few of them to be found here.

Her tree was the most magnificent specimen I think I’ve ever seen. It has grown in her yard a long time.

She planted it.

She is a weaver.

A young family had been invited too, a chance for her to get to know some new people, and their little children loved exploring her woodsy back yard with her as their guide.

When the three year old got too close to the rails on that little bridge I put my cane out straight to hem him in a bit, and his four year old brother just in front of him grabbed it gladly as his guide forward and for steadying comfort in the deepening dusk. Sticks and little boys just naturally go together anyway. I walked very carefully to make sure it didn’t fail them in any way.

It was the family I’d brought the blueberry cake to and the baby, having figured out I was okay, played peekaboo with me with great glee.

She shared cookies and lemonade with those blossoms just outside the window as the sun called it a day. When the little ones finished theirs, she showed them the path around the kitchen, the living room, and back again to the dining room so that they could run in giggling circles as we talked.  We picked up the baby a few times when his feet didn’t quite go as fast as his eyes did while trying to keep up; he stayed happy. He has just started to babble. We were charmed. We had such a lovely, lovely evening of it.

Sometimes all we need to do is simply get together.

Stumbled across an article in the New York Times vitally, and I use that word literally, important to women dealing with potential surgery for fibroids or more.

There are quite a few comments there by Hooman Noorchashm, the doctor who started the raising of the alarm. He is facing losing his 41-year-old wife, also a doctor, the mother of their six children, because her OB/GYN did what has become a standard surgery in that specialty: laparoscopy with morcellation of the fibroid. Far faster recovery, tiny little scar, back to work much sooner, what’s not to love.

But.

Dr. Noorchashm, a surgeon himself, points out that morcellation is not done by any other surgeons in any other specialty–and for good reason: it not only breaks up the offending tissue and sucks it out, but it also spews it widely within the abdomen, and if there is any cancer lurking in those cells it’s suddenly everywhere and in the bloodstream.

Which is what happened to his wife. Her fibroids could have been removed intact and sent to pathology and instead she was suddenly an instant Stage IV leiomyosarcoma patient.

Leiomyosarcoma, he points out, is incurable and a fast death.

It is also what my mother-in-law died of a year ago. She was told that maybe when they did her hysterectomy years ago they missed a few cells which turned into ovarian cancer, but they found that that wasn’t quite what she had.

Going by the commenters on that article, it is believed in the leiomyosarcoma community that that misdiagnosis as ovarian accounts for quite a few of the cases of what MomH had, which our family was told was a highly rare disease.

Maybe not so much. Dr. Noorchashm says it’s one in 400 to 1000 of the fibroid cases that go to surgery and that every one of those cases could be treated by intact removal. Or have it go like his wife’s case. The cells might lay dormant for years and then suddenly go wild or they might get right to it, but either way it is not treatable at that point and invariably fatal. He is agitating, with good cause, for morcellation to simply cease to be done. Size of incision is not the purpose of surgery, he points out.

There’s a lot more in there about the economics of the device manufacturers and of some hospitals’ requirements that doctors do so many to keep their privileges to use those machines. There is even a morcellation procedure that encases the tissue but it is much less often done.

Patients are typically not told that the surgeon intends to do morcellation during their procedure nor what it means. A patient commented that it was not on their Informed Consent list. Patients need to know. If the doctors aren’t changing their methods to keep up with the new information, the patients need to stand up for themselves and ask and then tell them no.

And to think two or three years ago I was in an OB/GYN’s office debating whether to have fibroid surgery. We decided to see if a little more aging would take care of it, and it did. I had no desire to have my abdomen opened up yet again even a little bit and the gynecologist wasn’t pushing it.

I had no idea….

I’m trying to help get the word out to make sure that others do.

Spent the day in the car and later working on one. I think I’ll duplicate-in those couple of stitches missing on the tailgate (charts…) when I tighten up those wheels.

Even with an official ground-ship label from the seller, you can’t send lithium-iron batteries back without the covers to all the connectors. And we’d lost one when we were opening the box up before we knew one of the batteries was a dud.

Last night Richard tossed out some ideas of where I might be able to replace the little thing. Wait–the Batteries Plus people ought to be the best bet, even if they’re a hike, but hey, said he. They’ll recycle the old batteries anyway so you might as well try there.

I went down there today and the guy smiled and said, You’ve been here before.

Yes, I smiled back.  Then when I pulled out of my pocket one of the covers that I still had and explained my dilemma, he and the younger guy chuckled, no biggy, the younger guy dove into a box right next to him and he pulled out two. I asked how much I owed them and they waved me away and said it wasn’t anything. “It’s $140 to me,” I told them gratefully; now I could return both.

When I got home I found he’d given me two sizes, and the first one I tried was close but it just wasn’t quite it. The second? Perfect. Covers went on, I taped them down for good measure like one site had said you had to do for safety, took the things in the original boxes within the box back to FedEx–and stumped the clerk.

My printout of the barcode for them to print out the shipping label wouldn’t scan. She didn’t know what to do. She was about to turn me away. I had one of those moments where I had the bright idea when I needed it rather than afterwards and I asked if I could forward Martin’s email to an email address for the store, and there was one and she scanned the thing from her own machine and that worked. No charge to me was very nice.

Assuming Starkpower finds no fault with our handling of the batteries–and they absolutely shouldn’t–we are finally finally done with that expensive chore. (Now to finish the taxes…)

Meantime, Purlescence last night thankfully had one last skein of the Cascade Longwood green that I used on Parker’s sweater and I could finally get going again on Hudson’s matching birthday sweater. I could have used the leftover orange from Parker’s digger for the car, and maybe should have, but as a Prius driver somehow going green seemed the way to go.

Maybe I’ll add a sun?

Something nibbled on a one-inch peach, found it terrible, and went for a second. Time for the clamshells.

——–

I met her boss briefly a year ago. We had just flown back from my mother-in-law’s funeral and my daughter was on a two-day bereavement leave, but there was something she needed at her office and I drove down there with her–it was a time of needing to simply be together as a family as much as possible before ordinary life took over again. Such a strange thing that would feel like.

He came downstairs along with another co-worker and, as I quickly put my knitting aside and rose to my feet, they introduced themselves to me and warmly offered their condolences. I came away glad she worked for them.

Today  found me driving her back to that office: the boss was transferring to another country (home, for him) and there was to be a surprise going-away party for him and she didn’t quite feel up to that drive and back.

I said I would sit in the car and quietly knit for however long, no hurries. I cracked a back window–it’s the warmest day we’ve had in awhile–and she looked askance at that and said we can’t have you exposed to the sun like that. (Re the lupus.) Come on in the lobby. He won’t see you and he wouldn’t recognize you if he did.

Oh, ask I, intrigued, does he have face blindness? (Too? Like me?) But how many women does he know with gray hair and a cane and, this is the big one, *knitting*? There? I didn’t want to give away the surprise.

She wasn’t about to diagnose the guy but she assured me it would be fine and said he would never recognize nor even see me and so I cranked the window back up and found myself inside on a nice leather seat near the door where you could see people coming down the stairs or in the front door or out from the hallway off to the left–same chair as last time.

But I was prepared. I didn’t just have my knitting. I had my Time magazine. So I could go, y’know, incognito like that. Only, as I pulled it out of my purse, apparently I had just recycled this week’s (the truck came today, it’s gone) and kept last week’s because I have a great visual memory like that. Checking the cover? Oh. Darn. I flipped through a few pages, thought oh well, put it back and pulled out my knitting. A skein of Jacques Cousteau from Madeline Tosh, the one I bought at the MadTosh shop in Ft. Worth when we went to visit with my mother-in-law for the last time, actually; it was my souvenir skein from that trip.

Wait. I think that’s? But no, he didn’t look my way at all. Huh. The idea that I would recognize someone a year later after only seeing their face once was very highly unlikely anyway, so, okay, not.

Michelle showed up awhile later having clearly had a great time. And laughing, because….

…Hi, Michelle, I saw your mom downstairs!

He’d gone out the front doors for just a moment, forgotten his badge, had had to go to the security guy a few feet away from me and ask permission to go back in to work–the guy had chuckled and waved him on in, he was hardly a stranger–and there I was, right in my spot, I think with even the same color yarn as last time, knitting away.

Totally busted.

First, a side note: Starkpower immediately resolved the battery-shipping issue. Good people.

And:

The alarm was blaring and it was dark and, wrenched half-awake, it took me a moment to figure out what on earth was wrong with that stupid thing. It had no business going off like–oh. Right.

We piled in the car and drove through traffic and across the Bay as the sun rose, and since I wasn’t the one at the wheel I got a good view of a peregrine falcon (!) perched on a light pole at the edge of Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge. Saw a red-shouldered hawk on another one. Coming back later, there was a snowy egret near the edge of the tide in the breeding plumage that gives it its name, wings held out just enough that I got to see such a sight for the first time in my life. Glorious.

We made it to the Park and Call at the airport just as she was walking out from her plane, her old college friend happily married off now. I leaped out and grabbed her bag for her and swooped it into the trunk. Um, on the second try because I’m a klutz like that. I got back in behind where I’d been so that she could recline the front seat and give her back a break  after her flight.

Dropped Richard off at work so I could take her to her doctor appointment later in the morning because, as early as we got up, she got up a whole lot earlier, while jet-lagged, too, not to mention the whole major-pain thing still going on for her.

I was thinking ruefully a few minutes ago that with people coming over tomorrow I didn’t get much done today, much though I wanted to; I’ve been just too tired.

But you know? Actually, I did. A lot.

The blue silk/merino got frogged again.

The missing W-2 has not shown up (but thankfully we have a month.)

I seem to have taken no notes on Parker’s sweater and thus must do–and trust in–a gauge swatch (I hear all you knitters laughing out there) to use the same yarn and same needles to make Hudson a matching sweater. And not have it fit his big brother instead.

UPS, USPS, and FedEx all steadfastly maintain (I held out hope and didn’t ask the last one till today) that they will not let me ship the $140-each batteries back, even if FedEx shipped them to me in the first place. No can do. So sorry. The magic words “lithium iron” stopped them right there. I left a note with the guy asking okay, now what do I do? I’ve since thought that, well, hmm, we can take video showing the one battery lighting up and the other one dead dead dead, at least.

Sometimes something has to go the way you want it to, which is why I drove to Gwyn of the fancy swiveling scissors this afternoon and she whacked off a bunch for me. It feels great.

(Edited Saturday: I found that note to Starkpower still in my drafts folder today unsent. Which would make it hard for them to answer. Fixed that fast, and my apologies to them.)

Where *did* I put that form?!  I know better than to put incoming tax mail anywhere other than right straight in its folder. Guess I didn’t.

Knit night was a welcome relief from a day spent trying to get all that done. At least it’s only once a year.

From Books Inc last Thursday to literally, knitterally, books inc: they increased.

There is a monthly Friends of the Library sale and the Monday after there is often a books giveaway to clear out the leftovers. Notice is posted on freecycle.org.

I hadn’t seen those notices in awhile. Were they waiting for the time change and more daylight? I have no idea.

I forwarded it to our ward’s chat list, and lo and behold: the daddy and daughter who were just inside the door last night receiving chocolate torte were just inside door #2 tonight at the former high school as I came in through it. They were quite happy to have heard about this. They were just on their way out and glad to get a chance to say thank you on the spot.

Bring boxes and bags, the notice had said.

No need, thought I, I’m only going to get one or two books, max, I can certainly handle that in my knitting bag.

Right.

One twist in that plan was the staff person who was disappointed that a handful was all I was taking: the thing was about to end and please, she pleaded, couldn’t I take more? There are some good ones here if you’d like cooking. Knitting? Crafts, right here.

They don’t say it, but from what I understand the majority of never-claimed books end up in the landfill. One can understand a bibliophile’s plea that they be rescued.

The books vs cane was–well, I didn’t hit anyone all those times I dropped them–and I put the first batch in my car and dove back in. Hardcover James Herriott! Wallace Stegner–still here! And I got there after people were loading up full pickup loads on my way in. A photographic expedition of a river in West Virginia that Debbie would surely love to have (it’s yours, Debbie). Another by someone who boated down the Merrimack River, which runs behind our old neighborhood, and the writing seems to be good enough to spend more time on.

The second trip to the car made it seventeen books and at six minutes to closing, arms aching, I decided I’d better give it a rest.

There will be more Cooking With Fruit happening around here shortly, no doubt.

They moved here just a couple of years ago. I know that along with missing old friends it can take awhile to feel truly rooted in a new town, both at work and within the community; having school-age kids does help, and a church community, definitely. I’m glad they’re part of ours.

Good friends of theirs where they’d come here from made the news in the last week or so when they didn’t show up where they were supposed to and concerned family called 911: one of the gas appliances had leaked carbon monoxide into the house and they had been overcome too quickly to get out.

Their old friends were abruptly gone from this earth. It was one of those things that just was and was just unfathomable all at the same time. It hit home for me because that was so nearly us too this past November.

Neither of us said anything about that to the husband as he stood in the doorway tonight quite surprised at the chocolate torte he had certainly not been expecting to find in his hands of a random evening. It simply was their turn to have a grownup version of a doorbell ditching. You should have seen the delighted anticipation in his face as he looked at all that beautiful chocolate he was about to share with his kids and his wife when she got home.

It was what we could quietly do.

I was wrong: the first peach tree has not two or three like I thought but 46 peaches visible now. Fourteen months old. They weren’t kidding when they said that variety was precocious and prolific.

One more story on Stephanie’s visit.

A few days before I saw her, there was a comment on her blog that someone should bring a pair of needles they didn’t care if they never saw again and some wool and cast on at her talk and pass it on down and up the rows in the audience, everybody adding a bit for a scarf for Stephanie.

I thought that was a great idea! But now, you know the chances of an actual scarf being done in that hour that she would be speaking were, well, what they were. Still: why not have fun with the idea.

I had a pair of plastic circs, about 5.5 or 6mm, given me by someone who once unloaded her old everything-knitting to get rid of it.

And I had a ball of Malabrigo single-ply thickish yarn in a subdued apricot, not too thin like most of my stash, and hoped the color would do.

And so I cast on at Books Inc and started to launch into a short lace pattern–and immediately realized that not everybody knows what to do when last row’s yarnovers are coming at them and given the number of people there I didn’t want to hog the thing to do a multi-row repeat. So I backtracked and stuck with plain old stockinette and let others decide what they wanted to do on their own turns.

It went down our row, people getting into this idea with mostly grins, and then I tried to hand it to the people in the last row just behind us.

Now, I remember twenty-four years ago (my baby was two, and officially as of yesterday that made 26-2=24, so it’s easy to tell how long my return to knitting has been) I started knitting in public for the first time. I was very self-conscious about it, very sure that someone at some point was going to pounce and tell me no, no, you’re doing it all wrong, don’t you see you’re supposed to wrap it like this? Hold it this way!

Because I didn’t do it at all the way I was taught. My mom, I know now, knits Continental style and taught me thusly when I was ten. When I was sixteen, I wanted a sweater in one of her knitting magazines and she gave me the classic Mom’s line of, Go make it yourself. I wasn’t about to deliberately look incompetent by telling her I didn’t really quite remember how, though I did get her to refresh my memory re the cast-on part. Only because I had no choice but to admit to that. Mom was the only real knitter I knew.

Then I went into my room and hashed out how to work this. I remembered, as I looked at it, how the yarn was supposed to go around for a knit vs a purl. I knew you were supposed to run it between some (which?) fingers first. I grabbed the yarn for each stitch and got a feel for the thing at last and I was off and running: I made that cabled wool vest I wanted, then a wool Norwegian four-color intarsia sweater (Mom sewed in the inset front panel, bless her), all with my babysitting money, a vest in ribbing and stripes, an intarsia snowflake vest in the most gosh-awful acrylic in the horrifying shades of blue that were popular that year, a more sensible all-0ver cabled zippered white wool Vogue sweater. (Mom sewed in the zipper,  and again, bless her. I’m still grateful. And the zippers for the pockets. I was supposed to sew the fabric pockets in behind those afterwards. I still have the sweater. I still fit into that sweater. I still have never made those pockets, so those sideways zippers open to whatever I throw on that day.)

I drove some of my teachers crazy by knitting in their classrooms. My mom worked in the English department at my high school and if my teachers (Mme Whatzits in French I am looking at you) ever said anything to her she did not put a stop to it, though she did counsel me with a wry grin to sois sage.

So. I knitted, and I knitted at a good pace, but I knitted like nobody else I knew because it sure didn’t look like how Mom did it. And years later I still knew only a very few knitters and none of them lived near me now in California.

But when John was two was also when I was diagnosed with lupus and so I was in doctors’ offices a lot and I was knitting in public where there were a lot of people with nothing to do there but watch the one thing in the room that was moving (besides my kids). My fingers.

What changed everything was the woman with the British accent in the eye doctor’s waiting room who stared, and stared, and stared some more at my hands as I worked as I got more and more self-conscious in response, and finally she exclaimed, I wish I knit like that! That looks a lot easier on the hands!

That saved me then and forever after. She gave me a great gift and never knew it. Knit on!

So. Thursday night, there we were, adding rows to the apricot-scarf-wanna-be, and we handed it to the people in the back row behind us.

I had no idea we were going to be putting anyone on the spot. Several people there did not want their hands to be the ones to mess up that Malabrigo. They did not want to be seen struggling with it. There were all these people there wearing fancy handknits….

Everybody starts out a beginner and there could not have been a more encouraging place for a newbie. We said, it’s okay, this is only if you want to.

And I wished that that long-ago British woman–I was trying to *be* her–could step right up and tell them the beauty of the evening was way more than skein deep and adding on or not, they were there and that was the important thing.

I have no idea where that Malabrigo ended up after we left. We were near the end of the line when Stephanie was signing books but that still left a fair number of people. Did anyone cast it off? Did it join the squares she’s been collecting? Did she even see it?

Last I saw it at a distance someone had added maybe feather-and-fan, but whatever, a lace pattern that spread it out at the top like a tulip opening up in the spring.

—–

P.S. Happy Birthdays John and Kim!

It was 3:30 when I headed out the door to get my husband so I could get to my carpool so we could get to hear Stephanie on time. So we all grabbed a bite before heading home after the 7:00 talk in San Francisco.

But before I crash, I had to share a picture. Baby Jack (whose mother drove Mary and me) is not quite three months old and is just starting to nail this idea of smiling back at people–and his smile lights up the entire room.

Stephanie’s does, too. It was so very good to get to see her finally–been too long. The bookseller was putting names on post-it notes in book copies as the line inched forward and Stephanie grinned at me for the woman’s sake, “Oh, I know how to spell HER name!”

Made my day, I tell you.

Midnight. Saw DebbieR. Saw the neighbor a block away sitting behind me, who did not know that I knit (and vice versa, obviously).

More later.

So how was your day? he asked.

Well, I finished the purple cowl I was working on on our trip down yesterday–I’d had about an inch on it before we left, it was about 2/3 done when we got home, and today I finished the knitting waiting at the lab;  I rinsed it and now it’s blocking.

“I never saw a purple cowl, I never hope to…” he teased me with an impish grin that finishing that line might get him in trouble and skipped over to, “But I can tell you anyhowl…”

Re the lab. I guess the hyper- and hypo- thyroid autoantibodies evened themselves out: my counts that they affect are back in the normal range. No surgery and no thyroid meds needed at this time.

One last note on the Birkenstocks: they were my half of a Christmas gift certificate to the two of us, and the more I try them on the more I love them. I love being able to say I got that much out of my relative’s generosity, and mine was only the half of it!

Nina and Rod, meantime, came by to pick up their Mel and Kris mugs–an excuse to hang out. And this was after a pot-luck get-together to see our mutual friend Johnna visiting from Vermont.

It is amazing how the few minutes we spend together in person can have such an outsize effect forever after.

I said to one friend of Johnna’s I met tonight that when we moved here, my best friend in New Hampshire had been Nina’s old college friend, and so when we moved here Nina and Rod had invited us over for dinner on moving-in day, not knowing us from Adam but just because we were Virginia’s friends and because they knew what it was like to deal with movers and the upheaval of being in a strange place.

When I added, And that dinner was Nina’s first attempt at putting on a Seder, the woman I was talking to looked at me with big eyes and exclaimed, Wow.

She knew what that meant–and from that moment Nina was someone she knew would be a friend to her in an instant, too, whom she felt like one to in return already.

That invitation and that incredible dinner twenty-seven years ago continue to keep on being a blessing. I could run into this new friend again ten years from now and what she will remember about me is that I have an incredibly good person in my life and that she wanted on the spot to be like that too.

Me too.

It rained today! And is supposed to continue the next few days. Cold and wet and so desperately needed.

It’s been bugging me that I didn’t give due credit Saturday night. When we were taking the scooter apart at the convention center, I stood up from it and grabbed its seat to put it in the back seat of the car, but my balance being what it is I was immediately staggering hard against the back of the car instead. The woman who’d been admiring my shawl raced to go help as best she could: by opening the passenger door for me.

I needed to wrangle the seat into the back passenger door first and there was a moment of wait oh that one, but I was exceedingly grateful that she was trying to make a difficult task easier for us as best she saw to do.

I so empathized with her sense of loss that her chance at getting that pattern was going away, but the generosity of her stepping forward was a big part of why I swooped that book out of the scooter’s basket and signed it for her. One stranger doing a good deed to another and in return.

But she deserved more credit than what she got that night as I was trying to write up the day’s Stitches events quickly and collapse in bed. This post is overdue.

Michelle had a long day today with three appointments in two cities, a bit much for her at this stage in her recovery from her accident and so I offered to drive.

After all the years I played taxi mom, it was in a way an odd thing to be back in that role, hair gray now, my daughter towering over me. But it meant I had a fair amount of time to sit and work on my current project that I so much want to get in the mail and on its way to the person who needs it.

So now it’s almost done–and then I’ll be able to dive into the new Stitches yarn my fingers are so antsy to get to.