I wrote about wearing the huge sunflower gerdan in protest and solidarity the Sunday after the election.

What I didn’t mention was ABT coming up to me, wanting to know if that meant what she thought it did.

Support for Ukraine and made in Ukraine, yes, and I’d promised the woman who’d made it that I would wear it in celebration the day her country wins the war.

That meant a lot to ABT.

Two weeks ago I motioned her over at church. I asked her, Do you remember? and she went Oh, yeah!

I told her, I ordered something and this artist gifted me with the extra of a small gerdan–one that I already have one quite like. Is blue a good color, and would you like it? I pulled it out of its bag, its beads sparkling. (Not all do, but that one does.)

I knew, but didn’t say, how insane rents are in this area and how they can leave a young couple without a dime to spare. One of the perks of being older is getting to share. She got a little emotional at the sight as she took it in her hands.

I didn’t run into her last week so she made a point of finding me today. It matched her blue dress perfectly. It matched her and what she so hoped for for the sake of good people fighting for their freedom, and in the face of what our terrible leaders did to Zelensky this past week, wearing her support out loud felt imperative. And now she could.

And there I was, doing the same: that large loud sunflower was back on me.

I go in every six months to see if it’s time for that retina surgery yet and today was the day.

Look at the blue dot, the tech said. Not the red line moving up and down. Look at the blue dot.

It took concentration not to let the red distract me–the blue held still and had a touch of a halo to it that was charming but that line, if you can call it that, wiggled and wobbled and threw its edges around like a spider’s legs on a wall while looking like it had been cut lengthwise with pinking shears.

Then they did the other eye. Now there was just a plain line going slowly up and down. No drama, just round and blue, straight and red, each conveying their information.

Looks great! said the retina specialist a few minutes later, pleased. It’s stable. That’s very good. Come in every six months and we’ll keep tabs on it, but we don’t have to do surgery for now.

Then this doctor, a man of color, asked me about my experience of how I was seeing, though, and I told him frankly, That (nodding towards the computer) surprises me.But then, in a flash of truth as I realized how it had been affecting me more than I thought–

–and what followed was one of those moments where you know you said just the right thing and that the person wasn’t expecting it but was so relieved and gratified to hear it–

I said, But maybe that’s just because of all the political noise going on right now.

One blue dot connected with another and we saw each other clearly. He seemed a little lighter of step walking out of there.

I finally decided to spend the $600, I finally made the appointment, I finally went in.

The ear molds on my hearing aids aren’t just a chunk of plastic–they have microphones to back up the mics in the upper pieces behind the ears.

You clean them with a fine wire threaded through–but it almost never went through anymore. Too many pock marks to catch on after three years, I guess.

If your weight changes, the ear molds don’t fit anymore: gain weight, they can start to hurt, lose weight, they get loose and don’t transmit sound as well. But also, with my connective tissue disease, my ear canals are easily irritated and last time they cut the things down and short so they wouldn’t, literally, make my ears bleed.

But maybe a little too much. And seven pounds I lost with the flu in December somehow never came back.

It all adds up.

So, said the audiologist on Tuesday, what made you decide you need new molds?

I looked at her. I said, You’ll have to repeat that because I didn’t get it at all.

Aaaaah. Got it. And we discussed details from there.

(And also because she’s retiring and it was my last chance to see her for sure and I’ll miss her dearly. Nothing like a deadline.)

The hearing aids needed a software updating so they did that. The ears needed wax out to make the proper mold, so, yeah, that, too. She injected pink foam into my ears, waited for it to solidify, and then off it went to Oticon.

I did it, I finally did it.

Except that now I have to sit here and wait and not have my new improved hearing yet that I’m suddenly allowing myself to want so much and it’s been two days already. Gee, what could I do with my hands to keep them busy and me distracted in the meantime.

They called out a special truck, clearly; I’ve never seen that one here before. It was the length of a semi with a flat bed with planks along the sides like an old gardener’s truck, painted in the cheerful white and green of the city’s recycling contractor.

The toddler next door would have loved this: the guy wheeled the treadmill over to the back of it, where a lift brought it up to the height of that bed. Then he wheeled it further down towards the front–and as far as I could tell my treadmill was the only thing on there.

I took a picture and waved hello in thanks. The guy waved back.

Later when I went to bring the bins in, I found it: Ruth had made the key to turn on the treadmill easy to find and hard to lose by beading a bright piece to attach to it. And then a second section that clipped onto that, just to really be sure. Primary color beads, then the pink and turquoise plaited plastic.

That second part was easy to get off if you wanted to (while keeping the key, just in case.)

And there it was, lying in front of the empty recycling bin, waiting where he knew I would find it. Kind of like half a friendship bracelet. I’m sure he assumed I had put a fair bit of time into making it.

It completely made my day. Such a small thing, but a thoughtful thing, and that’s everything. Hey, RUTH! (Since she’s the one who did make it.)

That truck left just barely in time for the neighbor’s contractor to pull in. More potential two-year-old-boy thrills: it was a cement truck, twirlywhirly in back and all, ready to pour the not-new neighbors’ new walkway. Last week’s weather was too rainy for it but the forecast said we had ten dry days ahead.

Two hours after they arrived, it rained for half an hour.

I don’t know when the actual pouring happened, but two hours after the skies cleared, I left for an errand. Passing that house, with echoes of the returned chaining hovering in my thoughts, I stopped, rolled down the car window, and said to the tired guy closest by, “It looks great!”

His face lit up. He thanked me. He looked at it: it did, didn’t it. He turned to go tell his buddies and I headed out and on my way, suddenly hoping those four men and their families would have a brighter day all from the actions of that recycling employee, too.

It was on their back patio right by the sliding door, protected by the awning, but still: relegated to outside and out of the way because they just were not using it any more at all. That’s when I knew it really was okay to accept it from them.

Ruth traded me that treadmill for a chocolate torte. Which I baked and then froze before we made the roughly two hour drive to her house near UC Davis so that it would be safe on arrival. She fed us lunch, we had a great visit, her puppy was cute, and then we used a wheelchair ramp to roll the treadmill into our minivan and drove it home.

I used it pretty much every single day for eleven years.

Then the belt jammed. Richard tested it recently and said the motor was slow now, too.

I was used to my walking time and I was going to get my walking time and since I can’t be in the sun I started simply pacing around the house for it–and doubled my time because now I wasn’t afraid of falling off that thing (once was enough.)

Maybe we could get a new belt.

Belts cost $99 for that old model, and quite possibly it still wouldn’t work.

Our city has twice a year Clean Up Days, where the usual one-tiny-can garbage restriction is lifted and you can put up to so much of things of this size, this size, this type and/or that.

Tomorrow is that day. We had talked about this for awhile, reluctantly.

But it took up so much space.

We both have temperamental backs and neither of us wanted to have to deal with it.

Yeah but I also had determination, so it started with me trying and failing and then him helping and then me wheeling it down the walkway once he got it past that doorway rise thingamagummy down there.

Gone. (Wait, I probably shouldn’t say that till the morning’s truck leaves.)

A little icing of the back, a bit of time doing stretches, and a whole lot of hope that tomorrow we’ll be fine, but man, it feels good to see that space empty. I expect the garbage folks will lift it with the truck’s mechanical arm, and wouldn’t the two year old next door have fun watching that?

It was a great gift and greatly appreciated and always will be and was much used. But it was its time. It is good to see its metals and plastics sent back into the recycle stream.

It’s not anywhere near as hard as when the childhood home in Maryland was sold.

Mom and Dad were visiting Salt Lake, where Mom grew up, when an old and dear friend told them they had to come see this unit in her building that was on the market. They had no intention of moving after 40 years, but to make her happy they said okay–and walked out of there going, Heyyy. Never shovel snow again. (Where’s that ambulance story around here.) The light rail line a block away to get to the grocery store without driving, free concerts every week just down the hill, grandkids an hour away, a master suite at each end so live-in help when we get really old could have their privacy and space…

No furniture. The previous owner’s kitchen wallpaper that Mom and Dad were always going to get rid of is finally gone. (Yay!) So different. Wiped of any sign of memories and ready for new ones.

The walkway between the kitchen to the back door is set up for a small laundry area, but each floor has its own laundry room so the folks took theirs out and put in a freezer instead. Not sure what the agent was thinking when they snapped a picture of that freezer in that narrow space and labeled it the kitchen! But anyway.

Mom’s place went on the market today. All those closets are a knitter’s stash’s dream.

There was a grandchild on the way at the time and I went to Cottage Yarns to get some Malabrigo Rios for a baby blanket.

What leaped out at me was a bag of the thicker Mecha in their Anniversario colorway. It demanded to be bought, it demanded to be knit, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it because it wasn’t what I was planning on at all. Meantime, the Rios got bought and the baby blanket happened–but this did, too.

It was really too heavy for a future toddler to drag around as their blankie, and the thick loosely spun yarn wasn’t really made for what a baby would do to it anyway.

So it went into a ziplock bag and waited its turn. Every now and then I pulled it out and tried to get it to tell me who it was for. I wondered/expected that the day would probably come suddenly all at once.

That it did.

As I wrote to my sister’s son and daughter-in-law: Malabrigo began when Antonio, whom I’ve met a number of times at Stitches, had a flock of very fine-haired sheep but felt, Can’t anyone make something pretty out of my wool?

So he started dyeing it himself. He grew a business that was just starting to really take off–and then his mill burned down.

I told them, my local LYS was upset with them because suddenly their orders were unfilled and there was no response to their emails. They had no idea.

Antonio and his sister and brother-in-law, good, good people, not only rebuilt the mill, they went solar, and they’ve done so well that they’ve revived the sheepherding industry in their part of the world. For awhile there it cost more to pay the shearer than what the farmers could get for their wool; Malabrigo’s promise was, sell us the good stuff and you’ll get a good price for it. Not by the pound (coarser hairs weigh more) but by the micron count.

SO soft.

At their tenth anniversary they celebrated by throwing all the colors at once into a new colorway: Anniversario.

I told them, my son-in-law drove us up a mountain above Anchorage a few years ago in hopes of showing us the northern lights. We didn’t get to see them–but I knitted this to make my own version.

And at last I know why it needed to come to be.

This is the niece and nephew whose house in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground, her childhood home and entire neighborhood gone, my nephew and sister and her husband visiting to fix up the place barely escaping with their lives.

I grieved their loss. I wanted them to have a hug from me always.

Wool has a natural tendency to extinguish flames.

The forecast had said an inch and a half, then suddenly jumped that by an inch last night as it was starting to come down.

We got 3.22″ of rain. It was a good day for not going anywhere out there.

So.

My ear molds no longer fit (changing the size of your ear canals is the weirdest part of changing weight), I’m going in next week to get new ones made, but meantime it makes every bit of wax a problem and sound isn’t getting through well enough anyway.

I forgot I was holding one hearing aid in my hands to clean it when I heard…

What on earth was that? I listened intently. Screech. Another skunk vs raccoon fight? A little early in the season for that, isn’t it? Although, I guess, food, anytime, though I didn’t know what the source might be. Neighbors talking loud enough to hear across the yard and through the glass? I mean, no, but, what?

I finally got up and walked in the kitchen, asking, Do you hear that?

Hear what?

Just then I looked at the screen behind him and instantly remembered what was in my hands and not in my ear.

‘Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here.’

Well, I was now!

My friend Ellen sent me this picture some time ago and I’ve had the tab open ever since. Any time mine are bothering me I want to say to the ophthalmologist, yeah, feels kinda like that.

It’s a honeybee.

I would say waiting for a good meal to catch its eye.

Old story, but… Our honeymoon, in a comic strip. For us it was marshmallows being toasted over a fire. Just one skunk at first–but it came up right between us and was brushing its tail against my new husband’s arm as it reached over the fire and settled our surprisingly emphatically held opinions over whether a fast burn-and-crisp-and-melt (me!) or a slow browning (him) was the proper way to campfire the thing.

His slightly browned one was it, thankyouverymuchdon’tmindifIdo.

While his face silently begged with everything that was in him at me not to laugh. Pleeeeeeeeeease?!!!

We left the bag on the picnic table as we edged away after it was done. It called its best buddies over and the four of them threw a party. They ate them raw. Heathens.

Good times.

We did it, we finally did it. We talked about it at Christmas when they had a good deal but there were too many unknowns in the air re the other lines on our account.

Verizon has non-stop promotions, says he, they’ll still have this up after Christmas.

Nope. They had offers, just not of the ones we wanted anymore. I checked almost daily.

Yesterday they changed that.

The one thing I needed to know was, would the heavier phone be too much for my hands.

It was raining. That is absolutely when you want to go to Verizon during a good promotion. We learned that lesson long ago.

The display models were leashed to the wall with a bulky apparatus covering most of the sides so you couldn’t really tell what the heft of the phone itself would be, and I lamented that fact.

The saleswoman, who was clearly enjoying the fact that we were the only customers in there so she didn’t have to be pulled in multiple directions at once, thought about that a moment.

And said, Well, I can’t hand you a 16. But I can hand you a 16 Pro: mine, and she did.

It has a better camera, it has better battery power, it’s a little longer but not much wider–but it’s an ounce heavier and the moment I hefted it I instantly knew the one thing I’d had to know: would holding those 7.03 ounces, like during the two hours of reading captions in church, damage my ability to knit as many hours as I wanted to.

The answer was yes. I thanked her very much, gave her back her phone, and she rang up the 16. Which currently is free with my trade-in (which made her laugh when I told her it was an iPhone 6) and that three-year commitment not to switch to their competitor. Fine by me.

But we both upgraded on memory (but it doesn’t have to be teal! You wanted teal, get the teal) which means the models weren’t in stock. (The future Otterbox will cover that teal right over.)

Well, if you’re going to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the mail you might as well be using them to knit. Got six rows done today.

Earworms: the music memes of the brain. After being stuck with one long enough, he transferred it to his mouth and then I got stuck with it. I hadn’t heard that one in decades.

Thus the following conversation:

‘Old Screwball was a racehorse,’ he sang.

Stewball. I still heard consonants when I was a kid, that’s a t, I told him.

I always thought it was Screwball, he insisted.

I went and looked it up. Nope. Stew not screw.

He was trying to remember some of the words in a later verse.

It’s, ‘I bet on the silver, I bet on the bay, if I’d a bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.’ I always assumed that meant a slave wishing he’d been able to buy his freedom.

Is THAT what it means?!

I always thought so. (There are reminders of that hellish institution where we grew up, including a blacksmith shop just down Seven Locks Road that was used by George Washington.)

Turns out it’s an old folk ballad about a real race. Peter Paul and Mary recorded the version we knew growing up, but Stewball was an actual racehorse and the song was sung by, among many others, slaves in chain gangs dreaming of freedom. My heart broke a little reading that.

1741. How many horses, I asked him, have been so famous that 300 years later we know what year he was born?

Not many, says he.

He’ll even sing it as Stewball, just for me.

Remember that truly brilliant idea someone gave me to freeze a paper cup of water and then put a penny on top, so that if you ever had a power outage happen while you were away you could check to see if your frozen foods had thawed and then refrozen and were unsafe?

I kept thinking the last few months that evaporation was getting to mine and that I really ought to refill that cup, but the penny was frozen onto the top and, eh. It’s cool.

The door on our garage freezer bounced slightly open and was apparently like that overnight–on a night that hit 31F. (Unless we had a very small earthquake that shook it ajar. Dunno.)

There was this moment of horror, followed by the realization that I could actually know something about the effects: check the penny!

It had slipped to the edge of the cup and then slid down the side and was frozen in place upright. The door had not been closed yet but the ice seemed solid. The food seemed solid, even the bag of cranberries on the door right next to that cup. Small things thaw faster, exposed things certainly do, and they weren’t.

Lucked out.

Never seen them before.

Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.

(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)

Then I saw her brother.

Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.

The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!

The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!

Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.

When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.

I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.

We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.

They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.

It’s late, we’re home, and we got to listen to a Tongan choir tonight.

One thing I like about living here, you get to meet people from all over the world. Sometimes you even get to hear them sing, in a language I do not know nevertheless fully shared in the music and the faces of the choir that was giving of themselves and their time to bring those notes to the rest of us.