(Second picture does the color better. Richard went, Oh, that’s soft.)

Richard at 8:40 this morning: “They’re here.”

And so we rushed outside to capture video of the green crane for Parker; he would have been in heaven if he’d been able to watch it in person.

But it was brisk. The temperature dipped today, and inside, four layers and wooly knee socks and the space heater just weren’t quite enough; I debated pulling the other one into the room. I wrapped a warm scarf around, felt like a kid in a poofy snowsuit in New Hampshire, and tried not to let it get in the way of what I was knitting. Brrr.

Joe and crew kept going till close to sunset and I listened to them hammering away up there, hoping to finish the work tomorrow before it starts to rain. Now *that* would be cold. Our rain always comes packaged in northern ocean.

Just before they left, the mailman brought a completely unexpected padded envelope. I looked at it, puzzled, and it seemed to be something soft in there. Huh. I hadn’t ordered anything…

I looked at the return address and exclaimed softly, very pleased, Oh, Heather! Having no idea why it was there or what it was, but I did definitely have some idea of who she is. Yarn?

Heather is someone whom I’d emailed with for years before the day she, having finally made the trip north to Stitches, stood in front of me grinning and waiting for me to read the big name tag hanging at about her belly button. You know that moment when how you picture someone without even realizing you were doing so collides with the real-and-here and it’s really cool that they’re really here and you have to blink a moment to readjust the brain?

You’re HEATHER!

…Prefab yarn, hon. I cried in delight and took it out and wrapped it around my shoulders, marveling. At the gift. At the immediate difference it made. At the timing. Look at that! (Totally echoing our friend from Fiji yesterday.) I’m finally WARM!

It’s beautiful, beautiful, thank you, Heather B! I will try to live up to this wondrousness!

I’m debating typing this. I don’t want to sound like I’m patting myself on the back. But then, actually, it started with what seemed for a long time like a mistake on my part, and more of one as I held doggedly on to it.

I saw a jacket–on sale, a very good price, lined and good and warm. And it was a deep blue teal, just subdued enough, the short-shearling-type lining a slightly greener teal and lining the hood, too. Gorgeous. I seriously coveted it. It was too big for me, but my daughter needed a jacket and there you go, decorating a daughter is even better than decorating yourself and so I bought it.

She, however, was a teenager at the time and the kiss of death at that age is to have your mother go bonkers over an article of clothing she expects you to wear. (Hey, I did it to my mom, too, I get it.) She did humor me enough to try it on once and as far as I remember that was that.

Both girls are a lot taller than I am, and no matter how much I liked it, the sleeves especially were just ridiculous on me.

And yet over the years as various things have come and gone, that jacket has stayed right there in that closet, with me unwilling to let it go. I gave a coat to a shelter, knowing it was much needed. The jacket, though, for whatever unfathomable reason, stayed. Out of sheer stubbornness. Or something. Someone had to like it as much as I did, darnit.

For the last few weeks, I’ve thought, y’know, I really should take that to church (but kept simply forgetting it, good intentions or no good intentions)…

…Instead, finally, that part of church that I kept thinking about came here.

We got a phone call in the middle of all-the-everything that’s been the furnace stuff: making sure that we remembered that on the monthly calendar we had signed up to serve dinner to the Mormon sister missionaries tonight. We had utterly forgotten. Had it been just one more day, had we known when we signed up, we could have had the whole house nice and warm for them, but oh well.

One of them is from the States and one of them is from Fiji. I had some very good coconut-curry sauce (thank you Costco) unopened in the fridge and hey, cook some raw shrimp in that, a few minutes stirring on the stove, done. To make the beautiful young woman with the slightly English accent feel at home, and she was ecstatic. (That wasn’t the only dish, but it was the most successful one.)

Richard had pulled one of the space heaters into the dining area as we’d sat down to eat  and we’d explained about the no furnace. Between it and the cooking, though, we had it reasonably comfortable in there.

We visited awhile, and at the end, I asked her: I had this jacket. It’s been cold. She was from a warm climate. She was taller than I; would she be willing to try it on and see if she liked it?

Her face lit up in surprise and hope and I ran and got it.

It fit! She LOVED it. “It’s *warm*!” (And boy did I relate to that sense of endless cold right now with having had to open windows to air the carbon monoxide out and all that.) She loved everything about it as much as I had, and just kind of danced around a moment in it holding it tight to her for sheer joy, the other sister missionary as happy for her as anyone could ever have asked for.

Turns out my instincts had been right–our tropical friend had been shivering and I should have done this long since, way back at the start of the cold, but at least here we now finally were. She had been going to go take the hit on her funds at long last (and I can’t imagine what that would have been for her at American prices) and just go and buy a jacket tomorrow. Tomorrow.

And now she didn’t have to. This was everything she needed. It fit. And she loved it.

It had been waiting for her for a long time.

A good evening with friends, and at the end…Huh. I checked my purse.

I hadn’t put it in there.

We got home and I sent off a note to the owner of the restaurant, describing the handknit hat in detail, the cable around the brim with a seam at the back, the stitches going up from there with no seam. Saying that if someone found it and treasures it and that’s where it is to be now, I will be glad they have it–and yet. It is a twinge.

I don’t normally knit cotton because it hurts my hands to work with, but I had this time as a chemo cap for my late mother-in-law. It was such a plain yarn but it had come out so pretty–I had been surprised, and pleased for her sake. In the end, it had come back to me now, and I had kept it as a memento of her.

….And now I put it to God. There is something very freeing about that. He knows better than I where it could do the most good.

It suddenly dawned on me: the stove. The fan for it is retractable, lowering down behind it, and for 20 years I’ve been closing it up on winter nights.  It staggers noisily downward and then the little flap flips over at the end to cover it to be one extra layer attempting insulation: crashing and bashing and then this graceful little, Blip! One of its charms.

This fall for whatever reason it wouldn’t budge. Broken or just unplugged? I kept thinking I ought to check it and fix it if it was something really simple like that and yet every time I went to do that–to cut out that source of cold fresh air so that that end of the house wouldn’t be quite so chilly in the morning–it just didn’t feel… some part of me, I recognize only now, was adamantly pushing back No No No don’t do that, loudly enough that I never did get around to checking that plug behind the pots and pans underneath.

Who knew.

Midnight last night. We were just settling in.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Thirty-three hours after we disconnect the furnace?! After we air the house out all day?! (Oh wait–I opened the windows in all the *other* rooms–talk about CO-stupid.) NOW it tells us.

“Maybe the unit’s telling us it’s going bad–that one *is* old,” opines the hubby. Adding that he’d tested them to know their sounds and the real alarm is a straight-on siren.

So I unplug the little monster, I open the windows in there, turn the space heater to full blast, get the CO monitor from the kitchen, and and plug it in instead.

It stays blissfully silent. (Um, and the bad one was quiet in the kitchen. Details.)

Meantime, Joe saw Richard coming out the door to leave for work this morning and stopped him where he was, standing gently guarding a moment. They shook hands–it was the first time they’d seen each other during this job–and Joe pointed out the tiny bird at his feet lying on its side.

It had hit the window, “But we saw it move, still,” and he didn’t want any further harm to come to it if possible. He was just making sure it got noticed and not stepped on. It had been fleeing crows, and as a matter of fact, they’d seen a big hawk with a meal and the flock of crows harassing it trying to steal it, and this little one had scrambled to get out of their sight. (Joe got to see my hawk!)

Richard explained that if you just left it alone a half hour or so, and if the crows didn’t notice it, then it might well recover and fly off. Sometimes they would be blinded by the impact, though; we all hoped not.

I had joined them as the conversation was going on. Went back inside a few minutes later, got the phone and got its picture, pleased to see it sitting up now. Tiny, tiny little thing. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a California gnatcatcher before, or certainly not up close. They come an inch and a quarter longer than a hummingbird–with gnats on the main menu, yeah.

About a half hour later I wondered if I could get a better photo–but it saw me coming and it flew over and into the tree, dodging quickly away from me. Safe! While I thought, it saw me! It’s not blind!

One of the last things Joe said on his way out the door at the end of the day, in a tone and shaking of the head of, but of course you didn’t, was, Did you see what happened to the little bird?

I told him, and in great relief he exhaled, OH good!

(Edited to add, if you didn’t see this story, don’t miss it. A Make A Wish wish went viral and 11,000 volunteers turned out to cheer on Batkid as he saved Gotham (San Francisco) from evildoers. The Batmobile. The damsel in distress tied to the cable car tracks. The kidnapped mascot, saved at the ballpark!  Even Lois Lane came out of retirement to write the story, Clark Kent leading. So cool.)

I saw Joe walking past the door and I apologized to my parents on the phone, who said no, no, go talk to Joe, and as I hung up I opened it.

Joe. You saved our lives. And I told him about my headaches and their rarity (and Richard had them too), about the spike in the red blood cells that had made no sense to the doctor till I told her, how she’d confirmed that absolutely, yes, we had carbon monoxide poisoning.

I said, You came right away to give us that quote and you wanted to start right the next day. Even if I couldn’t afford to pay you all of it that soon. You insisted we needed to get right to it, and you did. You saved our lives.

He looked like he might suddenly burst into tears and turned with a quiet, Let me go check on that unit.

And he checked on that unit. He opened it up and got a really good look all throughout it. Burn burn burn in there, there, and there. Rust rust rust. Metal parts that should be solid moving easily (he took a video). Now we knew what the black stuff appearing out of the vent in the living room too high for me to reach was: the thing was burning mad and it blew a gasket. Totally gone. He showed how the carbon monoxide had come to be specifically directed towards and pushed down the vents instead of dissipating outside.

There’s no way to make that thing safe, is there, I asked. But it was not a question. Those pictures were the mechanical equivalent of my colonoscopy five years ago.

He thought out loud things he could maybe do, not wanting to pile on our costs, knowing how tight things were…

But your conscience wouldn’t let you do that.

It was not a question: it was me verbalizing his face.

No. No, he nodded, agreeing fully. It just… It isn’t…

We were both thinking out loud, word by slow word.

Then, let me talk to Richard to confirm, but I know what he’ll say (and he did). We replace it. It’s the right thing to do. We knew we would probably have to. Don’t worry, it’s okay, Joe, and thank you for worrying about us. But we need to do it, so, we need to do it. We’ll make it work somehow on the money end. (I wrote a chapter in a manuscript as the footsteps tromped around above my head earlier. It’s something, at least.)

So since we can’t take down three trees and part of the fence before Monday to make way for Joe’s lift, and given the tilt of the driveway, there will soon be a crane in front of our house. Parker would be in absolute heaven if only he could watch it in person. We’ll have to take a video.

So this was nothing like that.

Except in the ways that it was.

After two winters of paying obscene heating bills, knowing that to replace the damaged ductwork on the roof would cost us a minimum of $6k (hah! I wish!), as I was paying a utility bill I told Richard what the next one would be. And the next.

The next day, he bought the first of our two space heaters after resisting them for so long for fear of fire hazard. We set it up near the thermostat to blow across our bedroom at night and turned the furnace, which had been set to 66, to where it simply wouldn’t come on at all with that thing near it. But we didn’t quite turn it off.

And the headaches I’d been waking up with every single morning went pretty much away. I’m not someone who gets headaches but very rarely. It was such a strange thing. I’ve had no energy, but I ascribed that to having recently had the flu.

Joe and his crew came today. Eight thousand dollars (so far) and there will be no new flooring before the grandchildren come, I’m afraid, but two space heaters alone does not cut it with a toddler and a by-then crawling baby around; when it came down to it, we had to have honestly working central heat again. Ours seemed to just blow cool air, never warm–better than what was outside, but.

They had about half the ductwork ripped off the roof when the city’s recycling truck came by–hey, that works! Metal is metal, you guys want this? And so they loaded it on, there you go, everybody wins.

The first contractor had left nice shiny metal ductwork up there, years ago, and the birds (we heard the woodpeckers going at it) saw either a mate or a competitor, don’t know which, but they left many many holes in it. We hired someone to fix that; he wrapped it up, ignoring the holes, oblivious to the fact that it was full of rainwater inside and that the HVAC unit now had to heat that water to get anything to us. Thus the thousand-dollar heating bills that were just killing us.

But when the crew got all that stuff down from there, Joe inspected the now-disconnected furnace.

He came down from the roof, sobered, and knocked on the door. He showed me the pictures on his phone. This is what’s there. This is the rust. This is what it means.

I stared at him, speechless; it took me a moment to explain to him, in a voice that surprised me at how small it sounded, why that hit so close to home.

It had been blowing carbon monoxide through our vents.

My doctor said this evening that yes this explained the abnormally high red blood count two weeks ago, absolutely. Richard’s still not sure; after all, the alarm in the kitchen was still plugged in. But we don’t know how much was venting or where.

And last time this happened my CO count was way higher than his. It just was. I always assumed because of the pregnancy, though I wonder now. (I have been grateful all her life for Michelle’s good health…) But then, come to think of it, at least re this time, I’m in the house all day and he’s not.

My head is directly below one of the registers as we sleep. We had only had the furnace on at night. For Richard, a headache is an ordinary thing but for me, not at all. We did have a CO alarm at the far end of the bedroom–and I went and checked it after Joe left: it had been knocked ajar from the outlet it was plugged into, no way to know when. We’d had no idea.

My sweet husband two weeks ago went from no, I’m never getting a space heater, to, sure, dear, it still worries me but I’ll get you one. And a few days later, the second for the other end of the house.

It is November, we’ve had night temps in the low 40’s and even below, and not once have we turned the furnace on all the way to see if it could actually make the house feel warm. We’d talked about it, how it might be a good way to test to see if this was when we really did finally have to call Joe, but somehow it just felt like…don’t…don’t even want it on…

Lo these many years ago we were all hospitalized with carbon monoxide poisoning from a coal-burning stove in New Hampshire, and these headaches had reminded me of that only not nearly so bad–but to the point that I had said something out loud to Richard about it reminding me of back then, and of asking a firefighter friend at Kathryn’s party Saturday about some of the calls he’d been on. It seemed pure hyperbole to my own ears to even make the connection; after all, that time I had fainted not from lack of oxygen (as far as I knew at the time) but simply from pain beyond what my body was willing to stay conscious through. I woke up when I hit the floor but couldn’t really get off it.

This one was just a nasty headache. It made it hard to sleep, too. (Just like… Oh wait…)

Suddenly the pain of paying for Joe’s work doesn’t seem so much of one.

Get an alarm if you don’t have one. Check it. Be safe.

(Edited to add, the doctor says it should take about three weeks to work its way out of our systems.)

Twenty-five years ago, my sister had her fourth son, and maybe he would have been the youngest. But Nicholas did not live through his first day.

Garrett, her oldest, (he would have been I think seven?) remembered that they had always had a birthday cake to celebrate and welcome the new baby home into the family when his little brothers had come along, and asked if they could have one to celebrate Nicholas, too.

It was only right.  And so they did.

Anne had another baby boy after that, and then, still not quite done hoping for a girl, the surprise of twins: identical, you got it, boys.  “Well I know how to raise boys,” she told me happily–and she adored my girls as if they were her own, to my and their great gratitude. Every child needs a non-parent adult who thinks they’re just the best.

And I thought the world of her boys: they had great parents. They’re great kids.

It is 11/12/13 and so it will always be easy to remember and figure out how old they are: Garrett and his wife’s twins arrived today, Anne’s first grandchildren, early but apparently healthy. Layla Jaymes, 4 lbs 4 oz,  and her brother Nolan Nicholas, 3 lbs 5, absolutely beautiful, both of them. The boy seemed to be waving the paparazzi away, as one friend commented on a Facebook photo, and I thought, Anne finally gets her girl!

Nolan. Nicholas.

It was only right. And so they did.

The annual stroking of the ego. I confess it freely.

The Scouts were having a spaghetti dinner tonight with a dessert auction fundraiser. I made two chocolate tortes for it. Bergenfield cocoa, bourbon vanilla, manufacturing cream–only the best.

And people were just waiting for the moment (while bidding on other things and Dave ratatatating off encouragement and numbers. DOIHEAR30? 35! SOLD, for 35!

There were lots of desserts, lots of laughing, gradually a slowing down and more chatting but then suddenly attention and a whole lot of hands shooting up as he started off on the first torte. He told everybody, “Now, there are two,” but still–the first went for $62. $52 for the second.

And as I watched the winners across the room cut them up on the spot and gleefully hand pieces around their tables and to anyone who allowed themselves to look interested, it felt pretty darn good.

Thank you everybody for the input on the cowls. Good ideas, all.

The neighbors have been doing some repair work on a fence, which means there’s been about a six foot opening between us the last week or more. They’ve been doing a much more thorough job than the professionals we hired for the other side of the yard did ten years ago–this one’s built to last.

I didn’t go out there the last three evenings, so I was surprised when I went to go water things to find that the gap was nearly gone. They’d been working hard. And they’ve got a good 15 years on us at least. I am in awe.

The wife heard or saw me going by and popped her head through; I was delighted, and we chatted awhile. Then her husband waved through the opening and we all took turns dancing sideways through the small gap, me the most easily, with some teasing going on.

We considered the thing.

“Maybe we should put a gate here to finish it off,” she said, not wanting our impromptu through-the-fence meetings to come to an end. So we wouldn’t have to go so far around the streets to greet each other. The song “Taking the long way home” started playing in my head.

“My grandsons would get through to pick your tomatoes.”

She laughed.  And then we got talking about homegrown tomatoes, looking at their still-green-but-no-red plants.

It was time for me to go pick Richard up and I had to let them go at last. In the time I was home again before I went off to Purlescence for knit night, I heard…a hammer….

And was grateful there’s still one last section they want to replace later. First we have to take out the weed tree growing through it. All in good time.

I’m actually quite wishing for that gate.

I spent four hours in the car today: it was almost like having kids in soccer and music lessons and track and basketball again.

And one of the things that I had to do was go to the post office. But after the first three hours–drop Richard off at a routine doctor appointment, sit in rush hour traffic, drop John off at the airport, sit in rush hour traffic, pick Richard up, drop him off at work–I just wanted to sit and put my feet up a minute before going out again.

Which I did. And then picked up my purse, ready to go… And found myself putting it back down again, wondering at myself.

I swatched some yarn I’d been thinking of playing with as a carry-around project.

I did some laundry. I puttered, the house feeling very quiet.

I looked at the clock again and wondered, what is my problem here? Come ON.

And yet it still took me another ten minutes to pick up that purse again and get back out that door.

And that is why I was leaving the post office just as Earl was coming in–one half minute earlier and I’d have missed him.

His daughter went to kindergarten on up with my Sam; we’ve known each other a long time. And about once every year or two we run into each other, usually at that post office.

I was not there the time he suddenly fell to the floor in front of those postal clerks and woke up–and was very, very lucky to wake up–in the cardiac unit at Stanford. Another dad we knew from back-in-the-school-day, likewise an African American man in his 60’s, was not so fortunate.

Earl looked older now than I wanted him to, and thin. He asked after each member of my family and after my health and I after his, rejoicing.

There was the unspoken, I’m so glad to see you’re still alive.

There was the unspoken, You’re still here and so I’m going to be, too. We have to do this again. And again and again and again.

And so we do.

An online knitter who befriended me and likewise in return as of some time ago posted a question on Facebook: what is your favorite memory of Halloween?

We moved to California with a baby who turned one while we were living in a hotel for a month, waiting to be able to close on our house, a toddler who would turn three a few months later, and the oldest, who turned five on moving day. John would arrive a year later.

We had a neighbor who’d moved in about a year earlier herself after a divorce that it was clear she hadn’t expected nor wanted. Her kids were newly grown and suddenly there was just her now.

We went out of our way to say hi when we saw her. She was shy and tended to keep to herself, and of course she had her own life with a busy work schedule, but if we saw her we claimed her for a happy moment of waving and calling out to her as we went by.

It was probably our third Halloween here that our kids got a stomach virus. There would be no trick-or-treating. No costumes. No playing dressup. No sorting through the loot afterwards that’s more than their parents would want them to have.

I don’t remember if it was later that night or the next day, but our doorbell rang.

It was that neighbor.

She had gotten the usual snickers-type stuff for what few kids there were in the neighborhood at the time, but for ours, she had made the trek all the way to See’s Candies, where she’d bought a perfect little paper haunted house filled with very nice candies for each of our kids. Quite the gift. She had waited and waited in happy anticipation of the surprise, keeping them out of sight of anybody else who might knock…

…And our kids had not come. Something had to be wrong. So finally she came over to us, hoping everything was okay?

She was at last claiming us in return, cementing a friendship that has stood firm for a quarter century now.  And this time of year every year I remember and am grateful–even, now that that part’s long over, for that bug. For what it made clear.

I was sitting waiting for a prescription to be filled, my instructions a piece of typed paper on my knee that I checked from time to time, my cloudweight of lace in my hands. An elderly woman (Chinese?) was silently entertaining herself in her nearby seat by watching me knit. I rather wished I had spare yarn and needles there to offer to share with her.

I looked up from time to time and smiled and nodded hello; she smiled back. I held the glance for just a moment the next time, trying to give her permission to speak up if she wanted to.

She simply smiled back. I went on with what I was doing.

And then I went fishing through my purse, crossed out  the ( and the ) and the word twice and scribbled in what it should have read there, tweaking the pattern.

And suddenly noticed the woman was startled, staring, perhaps even a bit distressed.

Was it that I wrote on the page? That I was making it up as I was going along? (I partly was.) I wasn’t sticking to the script! I *wrote* over the instructions!

At that point I really would have loved to have had a conversation, to have found out where she was coming from, what stories were behind those eyes, what they had seen, but for whatever reason, be it language differences or simply the ongoing quiet, the words didn’t break through. Goodness, honey, I didn’t mean to bother… I mean… Too funny. Huh.

I smiled I hoped encouragingly and knitted on, and she settled back into watching me do so. We went back to as we were.

Then the pharmacist called my name, I tucked it all away, and that was that.

There was a convocation at Stanford tonight, the speaker being a former conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and now dean of the college of the arts at Utah State University, and Richard, his sister, her husband, my father-in-law, his sister and her husband and Michelle all went.

I didn’t risk it. Nobody needs my germs.

The speaker told of the time he ended up performing on a USO tour and how the experience had changed his life, and how he only got invited to do so because someone else who was to be on it had been drafted at the last second.

He didn’t say the drafted soldier was a dear friend. He did say that the group he thus got to be in sang for a soldier who had lost all his limbs in his service in Vietnam and the man had never spoken a word since his injuries. He did not seem to have any response to their presence.

Their last song was “God Be With You Till We Meet Again,” and at that there were tears running down the man’s face and he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.”

They’d shared their voices and he had at last found his own.

The power of presence, the power of music: the experience changed what Craig Jessop did with his life.

The friend who’d been drafted, he did not know, was sitting in that audience listening to him tell the tale–and that was Richard’s Uncle Nate.

The family all stopped by here afterwards for a brief visit and hugs, braving my germs and I finally got to see them (Richard did yesterday); it had been a long day, though, and Dad was tired, so they didn’t stay long before heading back up the mountains. We sent them off with a chocolate torte out of our freezer for their last full day in California tomorrow.

It was very kind of them. I’m so glad I got to have a little time with them at last.

And so glad that Nate got to see his old friend.

My friend Gracie Larsen, the founder of the Lacy Knitters Guild and to whom at least one of the Interweave lace books is dedicated, and a member of our local knitting group, talking to me about eight years ago: “Alison! How’s your book coming along?!”

“It isn’t.”

“Well, that’s no good!” and she asked me what the holdup was. Then she handed me the names, emails, and phone numbers of some of her dear friends to get the ball rolling again for me.

Including, among others: Meg Swansen.

Barbara Walker.

One of the things that had been stumping me was that I wanted to use some of Ms. Walker’s lace patterns within my shawls but I had not a clue how to reach her to ask, nor whether she was even still alive; my mother had bought her stitch treasuries around 1970, and I had no idea how old she’d been then. My father had spent ten years researching and writing a book when I was a kid that someone else later pirated a great deal of, so copyright issues have always been near and dear to my heart–I wasn’t going to just appropriate those stitches.

I had finished my shawls. They had sat there.

Meg was as gracious as anyone who’s ever interacted with her in any way would know she would be. Barbara was deeply gratified at having been asked; she told me she sees knits with patterns she knows she created pop up in various places with no credit given.

My son was living not far from Barbara at the time, as it turned out, and we swapped hurricane stories a bit. I tried not to take too much of her time but was and am very grateful for her generosity and her goodwill towards me personally and the whole of the knitting community.

My husband came home from work that day and I was still just too stunned, trying to take it all in, who I’d been talking to that morning–wow! Grace’s gesture had been the knitter’s equivalent of, here, go talk to my friend the President, here’s his private line! Like it was the most natural thing in the world. And once online or on the phone with them, they made it feel like it was indeed. (Terry Martin then at Martingale, too.) Good people.

Why I’m mentioning all this. Barbara Walker is having an auction, via Schoolhouse Press, Meg Swansen’s company, of things she has knitted. Things she photographed to go into those stitch treasuries. You just have to go have a look: if you’re a knitter, this is part of our history. Pretty cool stuff.

Thank you, everybody. Thought I’d  mention a little about Bruce and Paige. When our oldest was going off to college 800 miles away, we decided to drive her to school: we could see her dorm room, hopefully get to meet her roommate (I think she hadn’t arrived yet, we never did) and, hey, see our old stomping grounds at BYU. Any parent who’s been there knows how hard it is to send your first off into the world.

Not that it gets easier with the others.

Bruce and Paige found out we were nearby and invited us over, and we spent a wonderful evening catching up, swapping stories, feeling that sense of belonging beyond words.

Sam was off at some freshman thing, the only one not there.

They made a point of saying that she was to call them at any time for any reason, a ride, a hug, whatever they could do they were there for her.

I can’t begin to say how grateful we were for that. We returned home knowing she was in good hands and she, too, was relieved to know she had family backing her up should she need it. Just knowing that made the adjustment to college life easier.

(I got a call: Mom. It’s SNOWING. I have my electric blanket set to Deep Fat Fry and I am NOT coming out! She laughed soon after that yes, snow was fine now.)

We didn’t know that due to local school district date changes and autoimmune flares, she would be the only child we would get to do that with.

I talked to Bruce yesterday: soft gray, turquoise, he says. I actually have, I think in that bin… But I’m not breathing on nor touching it till I’m over my flu. I’ll just have to wait to see.

Speaking of Sam, she took the job: she really is moving to Alaska.

Which is really, really, well yes really cool.

The knitting needles, they are going to be busy.