The doorbell rang: a friend of Michelle’s I didn’t recognize and whose name I tried really really hard to get her to say loud enough for me to hear, since I was the only one home just then, offering up a blooming pot of narcissus in condolences. It was very sweet of her. Darned if I know who she was.

I remember the last time I had to be in real weather in winter, I felt very Californian because the only shoes I owned that had a closed heel were sneakers. (Other than the Wookie horsehair shearling-inside mukluks someone once gave me, but never mind.) So there I was in Birkenstock clogs, flipping snow at the backs of my quickly-freezing-wet legs as I walked.

Wookies are great for Halloween night as I hand out candy, funerals, not so much.

Young professional daughter to the rescue, Chan to the rescue by having given me a heads-up about a site to check out, and though they weren’t perfect, a new pair of size 6.5 EE-width leather boots in a price I could fathom right now was actually found. (A good time of year to be looking, too.)  Not flats, which I need, but at an inch and a quarter, close; we’ll see in express-shipping time if they fit, and if they don’t I will actually have to be dragged out shoe shopping, trying to find that one physical store among the millions of people in the Bay Area that has what I want in a size I can wear. Just a plain, classic, comfortable, no-frills pair of black leather boots. Hopefully they’re already coming.

That backup pair in that picture is motivation if nothing else. Family photographs will be taken. Um.

(Sorry for the sideways.) Richard did a doubletake when he got home as he went to put his stuff down–where did those come from?

My friend Kathy came by, I told him, and she’d read the post about the spilt pea soup. Says you can put hot soup in these, the lids lock down on the top, you can transport it safely–she has–and they wash in the dishwasher, and she’d wanted to help keep our car clean the next time.

Very cool. Thank you, Kathy! I had no idea these even existed. Got room to make a triple batch with these guys.

Meantime, I particularly like this picture from the Inauguration. A husband, a wife, a mother-in-law.

(Ed. to add after reading Don’s question: it’s a package of three, each holding more than a gallon.)

Awhile ago, maybe two months or so, Mary, who I know has knitted some beautiful things in her day, asked me something about a book. I didn’t quite hear which she was talking about but I was glad to help. Ah, she wanted me to have one–oh, thank you for thinking of me!

And then I didn’t hear from her and forgot all about it.

Yesterday morning Michelle showed up at work and blubbered the news and her boss sent her straight home to be with Richard and me. He was Skyping with his siblings; plans were being made, dates and places decided, and after all the phone calls and messages, it seemed so very quiet around here.

The phone rang in the afternoon. Somehow on that day of all days, Mary had felt moved to remember that she had had this book she had wanted me to have, and she asked if she might come over. We don’t live particularly close, especially for a woman of her age, and on any other day I might have had the presence of mind to have offered to come pick it up instead to save her the trip.

I was surprised at how stooped she looked as I opened my door, much more so than I remembered. “I’ll never get through all these now,” she chuckled, waving it away.

Turns out it was a first-edition 1970 Barbara Walker, her Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. Wow. I was delighted, but in case someone else might need it told her I did have the complete set of the more recent reprints–as a matter of fact, the day before, I had mailed my mom’s old set to my daughter and her roommate to have fun with. (My mom had let me have them when she’d downsized.)

She hesitated a moment. I thought, And you came all this way, and my bad hearing, and…

I told her about my friend Gracie Larsen, who knew Barbara Walker and quite a few other big names in knitting, who had pushed me to get my own book out there and who had given me Ms. Walker’s phone number and Meg Swansen’s (her publisher’s) email and had told me to get to it. I’d needed permission to use some of Ms. Walker’s lace patterns within my shawls, and she graciously gave it to me but asked for attribution. Which I gave to the fullest extent of my editors’ cooperation–but it meant that Richard had come home from work that day and I was still fairly speechless at just who I’d talked to that day–wow!

Mary was flipping through her Walker book, and I loved out loud that unlike mine, hers had color.

She grinned, decision made, holding it out. Yours. She knew I would find someone who would appreciate it and love it as she had, starting right now with me for the moment.

I grabbed a waiting copy of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls” and asked her if she would like? Oh, yes! I flipped through, going, and that one is Julia J–, and that one is Nina P–, names she knew and whom I’d designed those shawls for.

Cool!

She left and I prayed her a safe journey home, marveling that on that day of sorrow, she had brought generosity, love, light, and thinking of something I might like in order to make me happy and to further my skills and had gone so far out of her way to make sure it happened. Because it had felt like the right day to come.

When the call comes in at that hour, you know.

I quietly turned off the alarm on my side while Richard talked to his brother-in-law. He confirmed to me the news from what would have been his mother’s point of view as she’d struggled through it all rather than ours in our sense of loss, telling me, not, She’s gone, but rather, It’s over. I wondered at how he’d somehow said what felt like the right words for her sake. He then in turn called each of our children, with tears.

Tuesday, after Lynn’s loss, when Richard got home I had told him CALL. YOUR. FOLKS. He felt it too. He is so glad he did.

Wednesday, I was flipping through the CD changer and stopped at an old Carole King album I hadn’t listened to in a goodly while. I don’t know if it even got to this song before I turned the stereo off and walked out the door, but her “Only Love Is Real,” followed by the line, “everything else is illusion” sang in my head all evening yesterday as I went off to Purlescence, all night, and first thing this morning when that phone rang with the news.

I’ve been trying to send a card every week with nature scenes, mostly birds, for some time now as my small part in supporting everybody there from our physical distance. I missed the mailman yesterday, ruefully, and got one ready a few minutes too late and put a Forever stamp…on… and looked at that envelope and that stamp and felt in my bones, she’ll never see this one.

But they had given them encouraging news two days ago that the time was not so imminent, I protested to myself, not wanting it to be true. Her youngest had flown in that afternoon and I wanted my sister-in-law to at long last have more time than that with her mother. Sister-in-law had been recovering from cancer treatments herself and was finally able to make it there.

Goodbye, Mom Hyde. We love you.

Richard added that the brother-in-law who’d called us had already told Dad he had a place to live with them. No need to uproot again. Never to have to be alone. At the timing of his choice.

“Oh, something smells good!” as he climbed in the car.

For a long time, I’ve had good reasons not to sign up.

But the clipboard came around again at church after I’d gotten several days of political-group emails talking about a national volunteer day.  I’ve never been one to run with a crowd so I picked my own day but it just felt like time to step up.

It was for the Ronald McDonald House families by Stanford Hospital. I talked to the coordinator about how to pull this off. Walking with a large full heavy pot of sloshing soup with a cane in one hand and lousy balance while trying not to spend any time in the sun while needing to drop the soup off in not the late but the early part of the afternoon–it was going to be interesting.  She was delighted to have a new volunteer and assured me there was a handicapped spot right by the door; just check in at the desk and surely they’d be glad to help carry.

And so this morning I chopped two heads of celery, some big red and yellow peppers, a couple of onions, a good handful of seedless red grapes cut in half–don’t miss those–a whole lot of chicken broth, I cut up a no-nitrates ham steak, added two pounds of split peas, rinsed first. Simmer. Stir!

My dutch oven was very full. I got up and stirred it every couple of minutes for two and a half hours, partly to make sure it never got up to a big boil–there was just no room. I was supposed to bring enough for 16 people, but given how much there was I  only felt a little guilty for scooping a bit out for Richard and Michelle.

Good thing.

Split pea soup is a favorite around here but it was also on the list of foods I got told to my great regret not to eat anymore post-op. I do, actually, but only a few spoonfuls, watered down with lots of fluids.

I am so glad I saved their part out.

The little boy had just gotten out of the elementary school up the street and was clearly enjoying the speed of his bike. He was alone. He was careening through the pedestrian island where the main road crosses his and it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to stop in time–I slammed hard on the brakes. The guy behind me slammed his.

Nobody hit the kid. Or anyone else, either.

But what was–I glanced down when I felt safely well past him, and there was what turned out to be half of that pot of soup splashed across the floor.

It wasn’t till I got to the Ronald McDonald house that I was able to fully assess the damage: the carpet was just the start. Part of the dash, the center console, my right shoe, the little lever thingy to pull the seat forward and back, behind there–and yet somehow there was still more soup in that pot.

I went to the check-in desk and got a very helpful woman who brought a cart and towels: no need to carry that pot in, and there, put the towels on the bottom tray when you’re done. She hovered, wanting to help, but the passenger side floor of a Prius is a one-woman operation.

I gave it up for the sun exposure of it, not explaining more than, I’ll finish this at home, thank you so much for the towels and the help! The moral support especially is what I really meant.

We walked through what turned out to be a beautiful building, very well designed as a healing place for families of sick children. Into the kitchen. There was a row of crockpots waiting, and I wished for a smaller one but was surprised at how much of my offering still, after all that, went into that big thing. Loaves and fishes!

Back at the car, I smiled wryly. It ain’t easy being green.

I posted something brief on Facebook, and a local friend (thank you Suzi!) mentioned that the car-washing place over thataway will do a carpet shampoo and shopvac in a small area after a spill. Good.  The little boy is okay, that’s what matters most; I can only pray that the little ones of the families staying where I took the soup to will be, too.

I picked Richard up from work and his comment as he got in the car made it instantly clear that this was a dinner he was going to thoroughly enjoy. And somehow that, too, made it all worthwhile.

And even after I dropped half the rest of it on my other foot Michelle got some after she got off work late. Ooh, Mom! Split pea soup!

(With a p.s. for Phyllis: your plates of cookies I delivered sat demurely on the seat the whole time and showed that green stuff down there How It’s Done. They were fine.)

Lynn, here, the post where I got to meet her in person in Texas the day after she got engaged, her happiness lighting up the whole church. I got to see her again last month when we came back to see my in-laws, and Lynn and I spent an evening at her old knitting group in the Madeline Tosh ship in Ft Worth where she’d been a regular before she’d married and moved a few towns away.

I twirl a small forkful of Lynn’s late mother-in-law’s orange honey that she gifted me with about every other day, savoring it, trying not to run out too fast, thinking of her and how grateful I am for her friendship every time I look at that jar. How glad I am that she and her Beloved found each other in their lives.

Yesterday was their first anniversary.

Today her beloved, one of the very best, slipped away before hospice could even finish setting up at their house.

I’ve wanted to grab the next flight. I can’t afford it. What I did do was go searching in my house, for–something, I didn’t know what, and found a shawl project that I’d long ago stalled out on: it had been put aside while I’d debated how to finish it and while I had had people needing the love from something hand knit Right Now, and so the shawl had become abandoned altogether and at last pretty much forgotten other than the occasional guilt twinge in its direction.

I didn’t even remember which pattern it was; I was surprised when I pulled it out to see it was Y not Z. Huh. I always did like that yarn.

I sat down with it. I decided, seventeen months after I’d started, at long last what to do: a few rows there, that’s all it had needed all this time, that and a decision, and I cast it off, blocked it, and with that I tied up one loose end in my own life. It is done. And after its submersion in the water, it feels like one of the most beautiful things I have ever knit.

And it’s not at all Lynn’s color, darnit.

See, that spot that was supposed to be healed at eighteen months, it’s been bugging me more rather than less as of late and there’s a new one over here.

The dermatologist noted the raised crusty area at the edge of the indentation (I’ve been trying not to touch it nor irritate it, I told her) and apologized that she was going to have to take some of it off so she could see below it.

Hey, you do what you have to do.

Nope–no sign of the skin cancer returning. She was pleased. (She knows my daughter had melanoma at 29.) Everything else checked out healthy as well. She noted that I had new hair growing in at the spot, and it wasn’t till I got home that I realized that oh wait–she was talking about the floofy little mohawk coming back in from when my hair got sucked into the back of the hairdryer while we were defrosting the freezer last summer.

There are way worse ways to lose your hair. And it’s nice to be able to laugh over it.

The thumbprint in my skull is kind of strange and I guess permanent, but after ignoring that lesion for months till Sam’s wake-up call, I got off way lucky and I know it.

I got a note from an old friend from junior high, who knows I knit: might I be interested in a commission?

Not sure what she was asking and worrying it might be aran sweaters or who knows, I replied, I knit for love, not money; money just takes all the fun out of it. (Trying not to inwardly protest that I just got this perfect yarn from DebbieR that she instantly knew was for the pharmacy clerk I wrote about and sent it to me, and when I opened it I had the same reaction–this is it! So I have that hat to make. And I have someone else whose wife’s scarf is coming along, and the purple for Purlescence. The queue…!) But I said none of that.

Betsy thought on it awhile and got back to me today with: would you knit a hat for love, for me?

I laughed. Of course I would. Any allergies, what colors do you like.

It just so happens that Michelle had dumped a whole bunch of my yarn stash in the family room and I’d been sorting through projects and skeins all day, so it was easy to find what I was looking for. And: the missing size 5 that was driving me nuts and keeping me from getting that guy’s hat started? I’d been short circ-ited. Turned up two rows after I braved through the start of Betsy’s on ragged old bamboos, gold-plated Addis no less, boom, there you go. I’ll do hers and then his. I found them!

What she had no idea of, and neither did I… As I sat down and got started, her yarn next to me started plotting, rubbing its woolly little paws together in glee. I had had this half-baked idea for some time, and a hat is a great way to test a pattern on a small scale, and I’d needed a woman’s hat to do that with, and wouldn’t it be cool if Betsy’s request got me to finally work that idea out?

And I’m off. And if I push I can still finish all of those projects by the end of next week. Betsy, hon–I owe you, bigtime. Thank you!

Things started off way wrong, with the best of intentions. I had good reasons why I went over to someone’s place to drop something off around 1:30–and then her apartment complex turned out to be a maze, with 1, 2, downstairs, 3 upstairs, 20, 21, 22, down, up–wait, 7 here? Huh? And with wreaths covering the numbers on the doors, so that you had to brave a sense of trespassing to find out where you were. I wasn’t good at that.

I finally found 25, keenly aware of my outdoorsy California setting (even the stairs) and that sun. Got back to my car–and the fob wouldn’t work. Couldn’t get in. Finally fumbled the key out of the darn thing and got in the Prius.

My face felt sunburned. With the lupus, it doesn’t take long. If I can just get through the next three days without getting sick from this, let’s hope….

I was not a happy camper as I kicked myself repeatedly for not simply ditching the errand altogether.

Got home. Walked in the room to see an email from the person I’d run the errand to, how delighted she was. It helped, definitely. Walked out of the room. Walked back in the room.

And there, after not seeing it for so long, was the Cooper’s hawk on the fence. Big and bold and beautiful.

It saw me and fluttered a few feet away to a perch on the neighbor’s side, slightly uphill, where it kept facing me as it finished its meal.

But when he was done, he flew back to the fence.

Then the barbecue grill (nope, no scrub jays under the trowel.) He called out.

Then the handle on the lawnmower.

Then the nearer part of that handle, the closest perch he could find.

We were now six feet apart from each other, just the window breaking up the space between us. Again, he opened his beak and had something definite to say about this.

He fluffed out his feathers, relaxed. One side of his orange-and-white chest had a feather a bit short, growing in.  His wings and back were blue-gray, his feet yellow, his eyes red, his tail folded up like a fan highlighting the stripings at the edges, the tip highlighted in white.

We saw eye to eye, minute after minute. Every detail, every marking, all in close up. Someone told me once that female sharp-shinned hawks are nearly as big as male Cooper’s hawks and look very similar; I can tell you at last that there is no question mine is totally Cooper’s.

He bobbed his head now and looked around at the patio floor between us. At long last, he hopped down and walked around the wooden box, then spread those big wings and broad tail and flew to somewhere in the trees where the dense leaves are still green, always, here. Disappeared in a wingbeat.

It had been ten full minutes of one-on-one. The wild with the wide-eyed.

It took an hour for the finches to come back, and shortly after they did, there suddenly was a Cooper’s again on the very same spot on the fence, not on the hunt but surveying its territory as the birdfeeder flock flinched and fled.

Only, and I don’t think it was just the later light. This one seemed darker across the back and larger,  which would mean that we seem to have a female paired up with our male again. Perhaps she was responding to his calls and perches. I could be wrong, but it seems we will again have a fledgling hawk or two investigating the amaryllis pots this spring. I hope. I cannot wait.

Meantime, on our side of the continent…

New year, new policy.

The young man at the counter at the pharmacy this afternoon was staggered. Spluttering. “Do you want to see if the doctor can prescribe something else?!”

No, this is what there is that works and I guess this is just what it costs.

“But…!”

Yeah, I sure didn’t like it either, but what can you do? “We’ll pay it off.” (As I wondered how fast.)  He repeated again the number of thousands and hundreds in disbelief, then laughed wryly/bitterly as he added, “And thirteen dollars. And seventy-two cents.”

He shook his head a moment. “But what about the next month?!” I could see the wheels spinning, the medical bankruptcy right before his inner eyes.

“Well, by then it should be okay,” I tried to reassure him. We went back and forth, with him trying to figure out some way not to have to charge us what he had to charge us.

And then I told him the retail price on my ileostomy supplies is well over $900 a month (for those bits of plastic and sterilized pectin for an utterly captive consumer group, I didn’t say) and we have absolutely no choice on that, either. Except that, having hit our large deductible for the year right there today, our insurance should help out at least some from here on out.

He was trying hard to champion my cause from a position of zero power.

I think someone deserves a handknit hat, don’t you? Let’s see, color, color, hmm, he likes things bright and cheerful. He’s a good one.

(p.s. And as I walked in the door at home, the phone rang. It was the pharmacist, apologizing. She’d forgotten to fill the other prescription.)

Note DebbieR’s comment two days ago about the 80-mile drive to Purlescence.

She came with her mom, a kind and gentle soul, and now I know where Debbie gets it from: the kind of people where you walk into their presence and you know you’re among friends. The kind of person who knits fingerless gloves for someone else’s daughter they’ve never met just because they really, really came in handy for Sam, who loves them and all that they convey.

We swapped stories and laughed all afternoon. There was a middle-aged man I didn’t recognize who came in and was quietly knitting away behind their backs, not looking our way, not butting in, but breaking out into a big grin at all the punchlines.  (It’s a big room like that.) I loved it. I did apologize to Nathania at one point for monopolizing the soundwaves and she grinned and waved me away, You’re fine.

Pamela was there, and bless her, came over at one point and told me, You’re not drinking enough.  She grabbed the cute little 7 oz thermos that Michelle had given me as a souvenir from Japan and went and refilled it, taking good care of me when I wasn’t bothering to myself: without a colon I have to drink 8 oz every two hours. Debbie and her mom approved. Go Pamela.

Near the end, Debbie had a thought and asked, And by the way, how are you?

I hesitated but confessed: I had woken up this morning with BAM, instant Crohn’s flare, totally unexpected and out of the blue. It did get a little better as the day went on–and then all this laughing and loving and I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s not gone, I added, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.

Crossing my fingers.

To be more specific: this morning’s angry belly had had me thinking, if I barf I’m in the ER. Do. Not. Barf. I hesitated, but there was just no way I was going to miss out on this afternoon, and certainly not after they’d driven all this way for it.

And then afterwards I found myself feeling like, and look at me now! This works! (If only it were always so easy.)

I ran a quick grocery run, got home, hadn’t quite finished putting things away when the phone rang.

It was our daughter Sam. She *did* barf, and she *did* end up in the ER. Turns out someone had offered her a quinoa salad at a New Year’s Eve party, not realizing that couscous mixed in there means wheat–and Sam’s a celiac. Throw in a lupus flare and an ITP platelet crash and her roommate ended up picking her up and putting her in a wheelchair and getting her to the ER faster, she told us, than the paramedics could have done it.

The roommate brought her knitting and started and finished an entire scarf in the 24 hours it took the doctors to decide to admit my daughter.

Taking deep breaths and saying lots of prayers. And wishing I could send DebbieR and her mom to make Sam laugh like they did me, while grateful to Sam’s roommate who sounds like she’s pretty good at that herself.

Heard an interesting talk at church today, creating one of those inner visuals that will stick with me a long time. The guy likes dogs as much as the next person. But. He was in a foreign country and had a long walk back that night to his hotel; he decided to take the shortcut that took him along the pier, a rough area, it turned out.

He found himself approached by six mean-looking–not men but dogs, a hungry, feral pack, and they meant business. There, there, good doggy? Not so much.

He instinctively did what they teach kids to do here re mountain lions, which is to put your hands over your head and make lots of fierce noise. The dogs weren’t intimidated in the least and actually the growls and the threatening stances increased. They were a pack and they had meat in front of them and they and he knew it.

“I said the” (he hesitated, looking for the words to describe it) “shortest prayer in my life. Father help me.”

Immediately he heard, “10, 20 meters away,” the hiss of a cat on the top of a tall fence. The dogs wheeled away to chase their mortal enemy–and he was saved. And so, for that matter, was the cat by where it was as he escaped to be able to tell the tale.

Someone died on my first flight, she told us, and we have been diverted… It was someone’s grandma, and the defibrillator and medical personnel were on board and they did all that could be done.  The plane landed at the nearest airport–which wasn’t designed for one that big, so then there was an extra two hour wait for some kind of inspection.

And then her luggage and that of several others went to who knows? We spent an extra hour at the park-and-call, waiting while she waited till they gave up and called off the search.

But Sam is home safe and sound. We had all decided together to wait till she arrived to open gifts, but then instead once she got here we simply sat and talked and caught up and reveled in being in each other’s presence, all the more keenly aware of how fortunate we were that we could. I cannot tell you how good it feels to watch my children loving each other.

Dinner was served–Michelle and John had been working on it while Richard and I were at the airport for so long, and I tell you, it was way better than any Christmas dinner that I’ve put on.

We Skyped: Parker apparently had gotten into this Open Presents! theme really well, with his birthday being five days before Christmas and his delayed (ouch, thanks Amazon) present making it so he got to open one on 12/21 as well as 12/20 so what are we waiting for for the rest of these! Thus 12/24 got in on the act, too, after he figured out there was a truck in there and trucks were Parker territory, right? He jumped for joy, showing off his new treasures, and would have jumped right through that Ipad to show us in person in his excitement if he’d been able to.

There was a stuffed peacock to match the photos of him toddling after one in the park a few months ago.

And then, at long last, the material stuff here, too. The fun and the frankly frivolous. But still fun. Oh, cool, thank you! over and over.

We know how lucky we are.

Wishing the peace of the season to all.

It was a homecoming at church amidst the annual celebration of the Christ child, the timeless mixed with a time warp again and again, seeing this family, then that one over there, and then another. And ohmygoodnesslookwho’shere!!

We’d had no idea any of them would be here much less that they’d get to cross paths and see each other. California, then Missouri, then Salt Lake for one family–now there’s a random-sounding set of uprootings. There were people who’d grown up here, people who had lived here when their kids were little and now were back visiting family for the holidays, all of them finding themselves surrounded by old friends, arms open forever.

This child was born after her family had left–but three wasn’t too old for a cheerful game of peek-a-boo, ducking between her daddy’s legs. That child still loves her hat–and is in college now. Another, middle school and braces.

Welcome home! Joy and wistfulness wrapped in the words in pretty bows.  It was so good to see them. Y’all come back now, y’hear?