See you at Heindselman’s Yarns in Provo next week! At 4:00 Wednesday, a few hours after I wave goodbye to John at the MTC. Have author’s pen (not to mention kid), will travel.

I was starting to pack for the trip, going over things and wondering: do I have any good shoes that actually have an enclosed heel? Been too long. I could just picture myself flicking Utah snow up into the backs of my legs as I walked with these. Went looking, and found a pair of uncomfortable pumps (they all are. It’s the nature of being 7 EE) that I think I’d bought for and then hadn’t worn since my grandmother’s funeral at 96…meaning, in ’96. Old.

A friend of mine came over yesterday, dashing through a storm and on up to the door, and as I opened the door, was going, “You can really tell it’s winter out there!”

I tried, I really tried–but it didn’t work, and I burst out laughing in spite of myself: “Shovelling 72″ in 17 days!” I responded. (Where we’d moved from in New Hampshire.)

“Well, for *California* it’s winter out there!”

Ah yes. California winters. Where the–well, you go look at this. Christmas lights in palm trees. You tell me if that’s nonpsychodegradeable or not.

Blogging with pictures saved by the geek! Go Richard! (Yeah, and somebody taller than me had reset my camera to a setting I didn’t even know it had. Heh.)

Okay, for fiber artists, you can skim past this first little bit, you already know this stuff: there’s a great myth out there that you handwash wool or cashmere sweaters in cold water. Balderdash. There are three factors that contribute to inadvertent felting: water, temperature change, and agitation. Cold water can shrink up a sweater just as fast as heat can. Sweaters should be washed ever so gently in tepid water–and yet, you can do it in a washing machine, IF: you put them in after the water is already in, you don’t let it agitate, and you don’t let any water spray on them during the spin cycle. But you can use the machine for soaking and spinning out, making sure you take them out of there while it’s filling up again for the rinse cycle.

So. Being raised by a knitter, my kids have each gotten that lecture. Wash them in the sink or the machine, I don’t care, but remember, tepid water, etc etc.

I was cleaning out the laundry room, getting to the long-neglected bottoms of the big hampers that my four kids used for all those years. Things had been frequently cycled through the laundry towards the top, but, I found, were turning into sedimentary rock way below.

This is what I found down there. In the home of a fiber artist whose kids were taught about wool as if it were a religion. At least, it’s still great for dusting; the little scales in the sheep hairs clean like you wouldn’t believe.

The rest of you can go feel better now about your own sweaters that came out of the dryer a toddler size 2.

(Click on the picture for the full effect.)  Abercrombie and Fitch would be so proud.

Last night, our neighbors were celebrating the many accumulated, small, moment-by-moment good decisions and unselfishness that had led up to their marking fifty years of marriage. And we were invited to come share in their joy with their loved ones.

We ran into Penny and her husband there–or rather, Penny grabbed my arm as I walked by through the crowd, oblivious: I found myself suddenly exclaiming, “PENNY!”

The first time I ever attempted Barbara Walker’s Checkerboard Mesh Lace as a newbie–the pattern I used in the body of my Blue Jay shawl–I used it with cobweb 2/48 yarn and size 0 needles for a wisp of a scarf for her. We still had children in elementary school together back then.

When things were winding down, Richard headed towards the foyer and turned back to see if I was following; I was finishing up one last conversation first. And then when I came out:

“Are you all right?” he was asking a woman about the age of our moms, who was sitting on a chair near the front door. I found out later he had already asked her several times. There were other people around, but nobody else seemed to have quite taken notice of her state.

She was not seeing us. She was keeling over to the side in very slow motion, one arm splayed out, her hand tightening up. I hunched down so that I was looking up at her face, and repeated Richard’s question.

She began to come to herself again, and said something I couldn’t quite hear. There are times I rue my deafness more intensely than others, but she said again, faintly, “I feel ill.” Gradually, though, she regained herself as we quietly talked. It was just a touch of indigestion. Maybe it was a hot flash. Yes, she told me while Richard was sent off looking for a friend of hers, there had been pain down her left arm, but only for a moment. I told her, trying to gently counter her denial, that I had had that shortness of breath and classic pain radiating down the left arm–at 31. She was surprised. I was hoping to convey, being clearly no longer 31, that acknowledging what was going on and treating it was important.

She did not have any memory of Richard’s asking her if she was all right.

While he was gone, I mentioned my having lupus and Crohn’s–not to complain, just enough to let her know that he and I both understood and were there for her. When he came back, we asked her if we could call 911. She glanced out the front door, and I knew what she was thinking: the sirens, the paramedics, the loud and disruptive exclamation point to the lovely party and everybody going home with that as what they remembered of it, when maybe it was nothing, nothing at all, no reason for all that–and she shook her head no, while wondering out loud, though, whether she should be turning us down. I told her, “Better to call them and not need it than not call them and need it.” I almost had her talked into it. But no.

The wife of the bridal couple came out and saw us concerned over her and was concerned, too. She came over and spoke with her a moment, to convey, along with us, that it’s okay to be ill if you’re ill.

In the end, the woman allowed Richard to drive her home in her car while I followed behind in ours to get him afterwards. I thought we should sit with her awhile. Women know to come, to sit, to be there with others going through the transitions and upheavals in life. But he was the one who had gone with her, he being able to hear her subdued voice in a moving car when I knew I could not, and she was less open to him than I think she would have been to me. Nothing personal; more a gender thing. But she did at least let us take her home.

And I emailed our neighbors when we got back to our own home, to fill them in and because I knew they knew how to contact her, and that they would want to.

I came away from the whole thing feeling, the signs were subtle. Not sitting up straight, the not seeing, the shaking, and then her not remembering–which we wouldn’t have known had we not asked her questions. We probably should have called 911 on her anyway, but we gave her the autonomy and respect to let her make her own decision. I am hoping that once she was home alone, without a crowd of people around her who might be able to step in, she called for that medical help after all, or at least is getting checked out today.

But still. I woke up this morning with a profound sense of our having been in the right place at the right time. And that she was willing to listen to me, whether she immediately did what we hoped for or not, because I had cleared the path ahead by having already walked down part of it.

Women have always been there in the transitions of life. We all go sometime, but it’s the not knowing, it’s the fear of what lies between and ahead that leaves people feeling alone and afraid. Rachel Remen writes, “Fear is the friction in all changes.” By simply being with her, that woman, whoever she was, gained strength, emotional and perhaps physical. She had not been alone.

And she had given the gift to our mutual friends of keeping the evening a celebration of their lives together.

The CT scan suggested lymph node involvement. There was none. The surgery went very well and was deemed a complete success.

Marguerite will be okay. And my intense thanks to all who wrapped her in thoughts and prayers of healing, alongside mine.

There was a news article a few days ago, saying that some researcher had discovered that migraine sufferers have thicker cortexes than the norm, and MS patients had thinner than the norm. It was conjectured that the thicker ones might have to do with an increased susceptibility to pain.

I don’t have MS, but one autoimmune neurological disease is as good as another; my ability to feel pain in some areas has become impaired. I said to my husband, who gets migraines, “So. That means you’re thick headed and I’m a numb skull?”

Every year, my family tells me I have enough amaryllis bulbs already, fer cryin’ out loud, and that I’m not getting any more for my birthday nor Christmas. And that’s final.

And every year I fall for it. Because every year, I look around and go, well, you know, I *do* have quite a few, and mine do tend to bloom year after year, unlike some people who simply toss them when they’re spent for the season.

And every year, I dunno if they were plotting it all along or if they cave at the last moment: after all, it’s such an easy way to make me so happy. I adore amaryllises. I adore planting them. I adore watching them grow. I adore seeing them bloom. The only reason their pictures aren’t plastered all over the front of this blog is that–well–there’s just not space for one more thing. Oh, wait, I think I see a pattern here…

Mail came today. A box. “Jolity”? I don’t…where? When did–wait, did I…? Who…?

I opened it. A Candy Cane amaryllis bulb, with a biodegradeable pot, soil, bulb, all ready to go.

Chunks from cocoa trees (how perfect is that?) for helping with drainage at the bottom. A few wheat seeds to add a grassy effect if I want. Even the tiniest tip of a flower bud, and when those start to come, you have to add water quick and let it grow or the stalk will come out stunted. I hunted through the packing slip, trying to figure out where this was coming from–and no, I didn’t wait till my birthday to open it. I’m not getting amaryllises for my birthday or Christmas this year, John said so. So there.

“This just screamed you… Best, Lene.”

Oh, Lene. Oh, wow. Oh, THANK YOU!!!

If you’ve read “Wrapped in Comfort,” you already love Nina and Rod, and we do, too. A month or so ago, they took a chance and invited us for Thanksgiving this year, knowing that we always spend it with my husband’s aunt up in the mountains of Los Gatos.

Turns out the aunt was flying to Arizona this time. Thank you, Nina, much appreciated, and a grand time was had by all yesterday (hi, Maryam!)

Michelle decided to make the two pies I’d volunteered to bring. Only, as we went along, why stop at two? She made two batches of rolls, two chocolate silk pies, two pumpkin pies and a pecan pie. Go Michelle!

Nina had specifically told me to bring my knitting, and at one point, thirteen of us sitting at the table after the meal, she and I pulled ours out as we chatted away. I said to her sister-in-law next to me, “You know you knit too much when you see someone’s project and instantly know what brand of yarn it is,” spotting the Noro in Nina’s hands. I finished two scarves, the Blue Moon one and this baby alpaca one that I’d dyed, adding a bit of burgundy to its natural brown; it had been a UFO threatening TOADhood for awhile, and I rescued it on our way out the door, somewhat on impulse, and now it’s done. After three months of having it be seven inches long, it’s kind of hard to believe it actually grew up at last.

Today we go off to a friend’s way up in San Ramon that we see once a year, and I can’t wait to offer the wife her choice of colors. That brown I think will be perfect for her, but I’ll let her decide. Over the bay, and through the woods…

I have had times, as a mother, when I learned the importance of following my inner instincts for my children. Telling the pediatrician she needed to check my daughter’s eyes, regardless of any past testing. Telling her, another time, that that other “cyst” had to go. She dismissed me and it, but eventually, as I continued to push her, referred us to a plastic surgeon, who was sure I was regarding it out of vanity and warned me that the scar on that child’s neck would be more visible than the cyst left alone.

No. Out. Now.

Okay, then. And he went to the operating room expecting to deftly nick that little lump out of there–and found it to be the tip of a long iceberg of growing fetal cells growing around the child’s neck and starting on its way down the back, not cancerous yet but on the verge of becoming so. He thanked me profusely for following my instincts and not letting their dismissals of it get in my way.

So.

I do think she’ll be okay this time. I thank each one of you very much for caring, and I want to return the favor by saying see, it all turned out fine, just like I said. Obviously, I can’t quite say that yet, but give me a month or two and then hopefully I will.

My daughter was seven when I watched–something, I don’t even remember what–go past her face on the playground at the elementary school. What stayed with me was the look on her face: an utterly bewildered, helpless, I don’t get it!

I hauled her to the pediatrician’s and said, Humor me. I know you just tested her vision six months ago.  Do it again.

She sent us to the pediatric opthalmologist, who found the cataract and operated on it, explaining that most pediatricians would never see a case and could easily miss it, but that he saw quite a few.

And every now and then since then, we’ve had an occasional blip related to that eye. They saw a cyst last summer, and asked that she come home from college this week to get it checked again.  I wouldn’t mind having her home for Thanksgiving, would I?  Hey.  Twist my arm.

So today, they checked it.  A cyst?  Maybe not, now.  They do think it’s benign. Ultrasound at Christmas break.  That’s suddenly a lot longer away than it was.

I knitted away in the waiting room on a lace scarf out of the Geisha yarn left over from the shawl I gave Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, picturing it on the person it’s going to and looking forward to their face lighting up when I give it to them; it’s lovely stuff. As I sat and other patients and parents came and went over nearly two hours, two toddlers got antsy, and I had a Peruvian handknitted finger puppet for each of them. Both of them instantly lit up, as did their parents and everyone around them.  They put their fingers in them–a whale and a parrot–and brought them to life, dancing in their hands.

And I think things will turn out okay.

Sitting here in our family room, these white flowers whose name I wish I knew suddenly required of me that I look up out the window and notice them. That I notice that it’s November and that they’re blooming and that there are things about living in northern California that I enjoy very much.

So I picked up the camera, walked outside–something I, with my lupus, too seldom do–but it was 3:30, the late-fall San Francisco fog had rolled in, and the sky was darkening; the exposure seemed like it couldn’t be a risk. The flash went off repeatedly as I was snapping pictures. The leaves on the apple trees are a beautiful bright yellow. The lemons are turning color to match. I picked one, and as I sat here quietly typing away again on my email, its lovely scent was on my hands, so much so that I went back out and picked more and now a lemon cake is happening in my kitchen. I will cook down some frozen mixed berries with just a smidgen of sugar to pour as a sauce over the slices after it cools.

My mother and mother-in-law were newlyweds together, friends living across the street from each other in DC proper, before they bought houses and moved their growing families to the suburbs. They both owned the then-recently-released Betty Crocker cookbook, and Mom Hyde told my mom that the hot milk sponge cake was a great recipe to try.

When I was a teenager, I stumbled across that same cookbook, 1950 edition, at a sale being held as a school fundraiser. I recognized it, and since I was about to go off to college, it seemed a good idea and I bought it.

Mint condition. Original edition. Looked like it had never been opened. I have since been told it would have been worth a fair amount had I left it like that, but like our mothers before us had done, I put it to the good use it was meant for.

And when we moved here, I pulled out that same hot milk sponge cake recipe that I remember my mom making more often than any other cake, for a treat for my kids, except, I made a substitution. And later told my mother-in-law about it.

Why, she asked me, even if it was so good, why would I want to use fresh lemon juice for most of the milk? Wasn’t that, like, hideously expensive?

She’d forgotten we had that tree.

Tart and not too sweet and the top with an intensely lemony melt-in-your-mouth texture like the filling of a fine pastry. Almost no fat nor guilt. You can have your cake here, and enjoy it, too.

Kristine at lilacknitting.blogspot.com says that she doesn’t want to hear anything more about nesting. (Her first baby is due next month.) Ah, well. Here’s her thousand words’ worth, with photo by permission of Jens Birch http://jensbirch.smugmug.com/ of Sweden. (It’s on page two of the birds gallery.)

I want to thank each one of you who has left a comment on Marguerite’s post; there is great comfort in reading those messages. Thank you to each person who simply Thought Good Thoughts, too; caring matters. The immense message of illness is that we’re all in this life thing together, looking out for each other.

And I want to thank each person who ordered a pattern from Lynda at http://home.comcast.net/~lmmichaluk/Lilly/ and http://luna-knits.blogspot.com/ She had a problem with IE with her computer for awhile there, and Karin’s comment gave her the heads-up she needed; it’s fixed now.

Meantime, Toni has a kiwi-faced clock on her blog to show which time zone she’s in. I got a good chuckle out of it, and told her she’d just triggered my next blog post. Ergo.

It was back in the day before we were on the Do Not Call registry (which expires soon, by the way, just a heads-up that you need to renew your place on it.) Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was doing her first book tour to the Bay Area, and I bought some Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk at the yarn store she spoke at, Stash, in Berkeley. I found several balls on the shelf, and they assured me they had more in the back, but with the crowd that night there was just no way–would I mind if they found it later and mailed it to me?

Sure, no problem.

I got a very sheepish message later: they didn’t have more after all. They were very sorry, but there was nothing they could do.

I wasn’t about to drive the 45 or so miles through the worst traffic in northern California to return it; I just had to try to find more of that dyelot somewhere else, then. I started poking around on the web and made a few phone calls.

One place was happy to say they had it. Great! They mailed it–and it was a different one. I reported back, they checked, and went, oh no! The dyelot number stated on the outer bag was the one I’d wanted, but the actual balls inside didn’t match it. Okay, scratch that one. I mailed them back.

The next place took my email and phone number and promised to get back to me when they had a moment to go check. Fine. It didn’t occur to me to tell them where I was.

At the time, we were getting many a cold call from random hopeful newbie Wall Street stockbrokers and the like. Occasionally, you would get one that did not stop to think that there was more than one time zone in this country. Sir, what on earth makes you think I would ever be interested in your spiel about investing in your proferred company at 5 am!?

So. It was dark o’clock, and we were out cold. The phone rang–you know, it’s great to be deaf…and my husband, assuming it was a Red Cross dispatcher, woke up and grabbed it, trying not to drop the old heavy princess phone on my head as he fumbled around for it.

Then he thrust the receiver at me, grumbling sleepily, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.” Busted!

At that, I finally appealed directly to Blue Sky for any help on where I might be able to find what I wanted. They had some themselves, it turned out. And not only did they send it to me, but they generously gifted me with it for my troubles.

And so I redesigned Wanda’s shawl to match their yarn as my way of thanking them, and the yarn they gave me is there in that particular shawl that is pictured in my book. And here in this post.

Written Saturday, waiting to be able to deliver it.

So much to say on this one, as I wait for it to dry.

The first day I was at Stitches East last month, we got to the end of the first row of booths, something soft-looking caught my eye and I went, “Ooh, I need to touch that.”

Karen and Amy wheeled me instantly over to it. I was just going to stroke it and be satisfied with that and go on; to me, it is a given that you never ever buy the first yarn that catches your attention at a Stitches event. It’s Disneyland for knitters with major sensory overload and you have to kind of scope out the place before you can make any decisions with any kind of sense, even if that means you miss out on a few things that other people snatch up before you can get back to them.

But it was their first time going. Cashmere? It was exquisitely soft, some of the best I had ever felt. I liked it? A good price? They weren’t letting me leave till I got it.

There were three to choose from. The dove gray was emphatically not my color. That shade of vivid orangey red is exactly what makes my balance go bonkers. No way. There were only two skeins left of the white, so I thought I was safe–no luck here, okay, let’s move on.

But no, they were telling me I would find just the right person and I would be disappointed later if I didn’t get it and I had to buy it and that was that. I argued and we went the rounds for several minutes.

Now, that’s unusual enough, coming out of those two, that when my inner feeling was, okay, just go with the flow here, I finally counted up how many balls I would need, took a deep breath, and bought a half a pound in that red. One or two for a scarf didn’t seem to cut it: I needed enough for a shawl. But I wondered why; I kept picturing a particular friend it would look great on, but hey, I had other yarns already in my stash I could knit up for her (part of why I kept trying to put Karen and Amy off). How many ages was that red going to languish in the back of my stash, I wondered, as I signed that credit card slip. It was so much not my color.

Fast forward.

My friend of twenty years, Marguerite, let it be known at church last Sunday that she’d been diagnosed three weeks before with breast cancer.

But. But. She’s too young! She… Her kids…

I wondered whether I should knit an afghan for her teenage children and husband to wrap themselves up in when things got just too hard, or whether I should knit her a shawl, or maybe eventually both. Knowing what I know and what my own family has gone through, I truly felt for them. I had to knit–something!

I walked over to the bag of yarns I’d bought at Stitches and thought at it, If I’m supposed to knit her a shawl, tell me which of you it’s supposed to be out of. Just, please, tell me, and I sent up a prayer to that effect. I opened the bag, poked around–

–and that red cashmere leaped into my hands the instant I saw it. I held it in front of me, going, Of course! Nothing else could possibly do–this was it! This was why! YES! I did a mental count: it had been three weeks since I’d bought that cashmere. And she was exactly the person I was thinking of as I did so. The only person. Even though I know plenty of other people with her coloring, certainly. But she was the one that I’d argued with myself over. It all made perfect sense now. And that red! For someone of Chinese ancestry! It was perfect, and Karen had been right, if I hadn’t bought that I would have been sorely disappointed now.

Marguerite and her husband used to live in Ann Arbor. I started with my Nina’s Ann Arbor shawl pattern, scaling it down in size to fit Marguerite better, and, because I only had so much yardage. As I wrote a few days ago here, I began, but then I frogged that first yoke. It wasn’t right this time. Not with this yarn. I replaced it with fern lace. Ferns are soft and airy looking, but they have the strength of ancient wisdom: there were ferns on this planet in the days of the dinosaurs. They seemed to convey longevity to me. Cheerful survival. And they are lovely to look at.

Marguerite and her mother are master gardeners, and her mother often shares her floral arrangements with the church. Bougainvillea, I thought, as I knit those red arbors. Or brilliant autumn leaves for Marguerite to enjoy, fall after fall. It was my speaking to her of autumns to come, my inner feeling, wrought in cashmere, that she would go into remission–for how long, I do not know, but she will go into remission. I feel that. I strongly do. And I knitted those feelings into life with this shawl.

Karen and Amy were thrilled to find out what an essential part they’d played. They live 3000 miles away and have never met Marguerite, but now how she does is important to them, and their prayers are added in with mine, befriending her from afar, whoever she may be, no more strangers but fellow travellers in this life. They had intervened for her sake without even knowing it, and now they do because they know it.

……

I wrote this last night. I held off posting it; I wanted Marguerite to have her shawl first, and I wanted her permission.

We compared notes today: it was October 9th that she was given her diagnosis. It was October 12th that Karen and Amy talked me into buying that cashmere. Marguerite said, “I hadn’t told anybody yet. Not anybody.” And yet there I was, thinking about her, thinking about how good that color would look on her and letting myself be talked into buying that yarn.

And after I knew, nothing else could possibly do.

“Lost in thought.

Send search party.”

Back on July 12th, I wrote about the shawl I gifted to the woman at UCSF who was six months along after having had a late miscarriage. Having miscarried my first and worried about my second the same way, it felt imperative to me that I wish her and her baby well with the efforts of my hands. To wrap her in comfort, in my publisher’s phrase.

I’d been wondering the last few weeks… She was due in October sometime…

I got the most wonderful message yesterday. She sent me photos of her new son, just the most exquisite pictures of great happiness of her and her husband and their little one. It completely, totally made my day, and it was so kind of her to think of me, and at the most sleepless time of new parenthood, I’m sure; I remember the days. My husband and son looked at the screen, too, and cooed, “Oh, cuuuuute!”

So then I went off to Trader Joe’s feeling absolutely on top of the world for a quick grocery run, you know, just mundane little stuff on the side. I’d run out of Valrhona chocolate. This wouldn’t do.

There was a young mom there with a small baby in a stroller that she was trying to maneuver through the aisles and between people, carefully. There was a pretty good crowd for a Saturday night. I thought, oh cool, another baby, and let her pass as one of the employees watched the baby go by, blinking cheerfully up at him. He caught my eye a moment later and told me that he was in awe of women who were moms. They had so much to do and to deal with; he was one of four kids himself, and he didn’t know if he could ever manage what his mom had. He hoped someday, when he had kids…

Now, I’ve seen this guy many a time and I’ve never seen him open up like that. He was glowing, just radiant in appreciation, towards his mom, towards every mom, completely different from the busy no-nonsense at-work persona he usually gave off. It surprised me, and I came away with a new appreciation for him.

A few moments later, that mom passed by me again a few aisles down; her baby was about four months, just old enough to be constantly looking for faces, and then smiling in great delight when she found one. And the face smiled back at her! And that one too! Yay! There is nothing quite as powerful as the goodness in a tiny child to light up a place. The whole store got happy. And, having been in the young mom’s shoes, I know how much it means to have strangers respond like that; it helps one cope with the colicky moments that come, too.

At the checkout line, there was a young couple behind me, and she stepped away for a moment to get one last thing. He’d smiled at the baby, too, and he, too, was still smiling. He struck up a conversation with me, and when his girlfriend came back, I ratted him out: “He’s been bragging on you.” He blushed; she was pleased.

There were three 71% Valrhona bars left, and they had all gone into my cart. The girlfriend saw them, and I told her, “Best chocolate on the planet.” She looked on the shelf–but there were no more. I handed her one of mine. She wanted to know how long it took me to eat one, and I answered, “I open the bar and nibble a bit every now and then as I go by; it’ll last me about five days.”

“Yeah, me too!” While her boyfriend was shaking his head with a grin, declaring that he just snarfs the whole bar at one sitting. I told him my hubby would, too. (Although, to be fair, nowadays he’s cut back.)

I was thinking at them, it’s comforting, when you’re new at this relationship stuff and it’s still in the baby stages, to know that other couples approach things differently from each other too but in the same ways as the two of you. It’s just part and parcel of life, and you grow on from there.

Two babies. Two brand new people, and all the grownups whom they made into instant friends yesterday. They’ll never remember. But we can.