Yesterday my husband and Karen and I drove hither and yon: Sugarloaf Mountain, Cunningham Falls, Catoctin Mountain Orchard (where we did indeed buy apples, and some of the biggest I have ever had) up near the Pennsylvania border, dropped by briefly to say hi to Kathleen, and called Bev: we’d forgotten to sign each other’s books. Hey! Great excuse! So we drove up north of Baltimore and took her out to dinner, where I found she’d had the same reaction I’d had to finding out we’d forgotten to: that we would get to see each other again while I was still out here. Not only that, but she and Karen hadn’t seen each other in 30 years. About time.

I wanted to mention: when I was packing for this trip, I thought, wow, that purse is heavy, and I pulled out my wallet and poured out all the change that had accumulated in there. There was a lot. No need for that to be weighing me down.

And then, though it made no sense to me and I was marvelling at why I was doing this as I did this, I sorted the quarters out and put them all back in. Not just one or two, but about five dollars’ worth. That’s a lot of weight and a lot of quarters, but they wanted to march right back into that wallet and so they did.

At Stitches East on Saturday, Lynn suddenly realized that she had no quarters to feed the meter to keep from getting a ticket, and her time was about up out there. She was stressing out about it, while I suddenly remembered that moment of sitting picking those quarters back up. I opened my purse and gave them all to her. It was enough to take care of the whole rest of the day, and she was set.

I can’t think of any time I have enjoyed a few quarters quite so much.

I know, this picturelessness is getting old. Although there might be pictures one totally unexpected place…

Sunday morning, we went to church in a building that is home to four separate wards–meaning the earliest congregation started at 8:30. Um, that would be the one we were going to with the folks. Translated to West Coast time, that was 5:30 am, and we were by then hovering somewhere in between, and the night before I’d been too tired to even glance at my email after Stitches. We decided to just go to the main meeting and then take me home to crash. Can’t let me get too tired; no relapses allowed.

Just as we were about to head out, I found myself exclaiming in a definitely unchurchy voice, as he came in, “WES!!!!!”

Wes grew up in the town in California we live in now. We knew him when. He’d left about ten years ago. Of all the people I never expected to see, but there he was. Small world.
He was with a CNN cameraman doing some piece on the Mormon church. The camera dude wanted shots of people coming in for the services. Which the second ward was doing–as we were heading out. On camera. By ourselves. Our own little perp walk. Great. Just how I wanted my 15 minutes of fame. You know, that’s a great way to keep my Stitchesified ego in check–too funny. But it was worth it; we got to catch up with Wes and old times a bit.

Hey, Wes, tell Michelle hi for me!

Two more days till we go. I. Can’t. Wait.

The last time I flew home to Maryland in October was 17 years ago. I told my California friends I wanted to see real weather and I wanted to see the leaves turn while I was there.

Oh, those leaves turned, right on cue. As for the weather, we spent most of the flight with the seatbelt warning sign on, we were the last plane allowed to land at Dulles, we skidded sideways on the runway, and the tornado touched down right at that airport five minutes after we did. We sloshed through three or four inches of standing water all the way across the parking lot to the car. Good times. So, I’m trying not to say anything about weather or not I want a nice Eastern downpour this time. (Although, I really, really do.)

But I have been watching the weather reports back there, and may I respectfully request that you all ditch this crazy 88 degree nonsense right now? You know if we pack for that, it’ll snow.

I mention in my book about doing swim therapy in the early years of my lupus. A detail that didn’t get mentioned was my friend Conway.

Conway was recovering from surgery for bone spurs growing into his neck from having broken it years earlier playing basketball with his kids. So, I would swim laps while he would walk back and forth across the narrower end of the pool, then I would go over to where he was; he would lean back against the edge of the pool, kick his legs gently in the water and tell me stories. We hung out Monday through Friday, an elderly man and his memories and a young mom who wanted to know what it was like to go through all the stages of life she hadn’t seen yet.

He was the best buddy of my mom’s older brother. Small world. They had enlisted in WWII together and had lucked out and been assigned together.  He loved to make those around him laugh, and he liked to tell stories on my uncle for me.

For instance. My uncle had bought a diamond in anticipation of proposing to his girlfriend and had showed it to Conway first: Conway guffawed, told him it was too small and to go exchange it for a bigger one. And my uncle did!

He had a heart attack. I had almost no experience then with the whole subculture thing of hospitals–they intimidated me. I heard that they’d moved him from the ICU to the step-down unit where he could have visitors, and it seemed important, so I got over myself and the vastness of Stanford’s maze and went to go find him.

He was grumpy and growly when I got there, which surprised me; I had never seen him like that. He was one of the wisest, kindest old men I knew. Fairly quickly, though, he recovered his sense of humor and was his own sweet self again, a relief to both of us.

I walked back to my car with a huge sense I could not explain, and still can’t quite even now for how strong it was: that my going had been one of the more important things I’d ever done. That I had made a difference. The intensity of the feeling made no sense to me and I argued with it, thinking I really hadn’t done much; I’d been there maybe 20 minutes, not wanting to wear him out. Someone else had come in when I was coming out, giving him a chance to tease me to his friend, and I imagined he was a pretty popular patient.

Much later, when I was critically ill at Stanford myself, I came to understand far better how much strength is conveyed to a patient by the immediate presence of people who care about them. Physical and emotional strength, in a direct person-to person transfer that makes a huge difference to a degree only a very ill patient can know.

While I was off at my 20th high school reunion, 10 years ago, he had another heart attack, at that pool, and he passed away. I was 3000 miles away and missed his funeral and have always regretted that. His wife Elaine, the kind of woman whom I wanted to be like when I grew up, moved to San Diego to be near her kids, and then she passed away too.

Fast forward. Fourteen months ago my older son met the future love of his life when she arrived in town from her home in San Diego in anticipation of starting law school.

Yes. Conway and Elaine’s granddaughter. We had no idea. If only he were here now to tease my son with that story about my uncle and that ring. I guess I’ll have to do it for him.

Knitting group doesn’t get better nor more exciting than this.

At Purlescence. The Thursday night group. Knitting and laughing away… My cell phone rang. Note that this is an extremely rare occurrence: almost nobody has my number, because I can’t hear on the silly thing anyway, and my family uses the various text features on it to contact me for the most part. It took a moment for it to dawn on me that that actually was indeed my phone ringing (and that I heard it ringing!)

I didn’t quite get it out of my purse, out of its holder, flipped open (it’s a Hiptop) and answered in time; they hung up immediately as I was pushing go. I IM’d my husband to ask, was that you.

The phone rang again. (Meantime, it turned out, my husband was IM’ing back to say ANSWER YOUR SON.)

I stepped away from the others to try to answer, clicking to speakerphone because, well, I have to, while they all tried to respectfully ignore it while I tried to respectfully get out of the way, going outside…

Listened…

And asked the kid’s permission first. I walked back over to the group, held the phone out in front of me, and announced: “This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged.”

The room totally exploded in cheers and whoops and clapping. I get to have Kim for a daughter-in-law!! She told Richard YES!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Picture is of north of the area I’m writing about, with eucalyptus trees, but it’s what I’ve got in the camera for the moment.)

I was driving through the hills above Stanford University, on my way to the freeway. There were fenced pastures to either side, where horses are often to be seen grazing peacefully in the preserved grasslands, with towering old oaks here and there for a bit of shade for them. I was surprised the first time I saw a white crane there as well; it’s not far from the San Francisco Bay, but the golden summer fields, away from the marshlands? Curious.

As I whizzed by this one day, I saw that horse. Its day was being anything but pastorally perfect. Its head was very low, its ears back, an equine version of being slumped down with its head in its hands, having a very rotten no good I-think-I’ll-move-to-Australia kind of day. It took me by surprise and I had no time to stop nor way I knew of to help it, no clue who the owner was nor how to reach them. I thought, as I drove on, that I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to get too close to a large angry animal that didn’t know me anyway.

Its beautiful long, blond tail had been flicked against a fly and gotten wrapped into the barbed wire. Hard. It had apparently tried again and again to free itself, making it worse and worse. That poor animal was stuck.

I went about my errand and then came back the same way, looking for it, prepared to try to help this time and looking for a place to pull over. Which I did. But it wasn’t there; it had given up and yanked itself free, leaving a fair chunk of tail hairs behind. A bird was there, trying to free some out for its nest, but it wasn’t having any more success than the horse had had.

I am a handspinner. This was an exotic fiber to go work with. Lookee there. Yes, I know that’s weird. I had already made a doormat out of the very rough outer coat of a yak, just because that was oddball enough of an idea that when someone said that’s all the stuff was good for, well, hey. So maybe now it needed a blond edging on it.

Some of it was just too tangled, but I got a fair amount out and piled the wirey stuff on the front seat of my Honda Accord. And then continued on my way to go pick up my oldest from school; she was in middle school at the time.

She came to the car, saw it–I’d forgotten to move it to the back seat, out of her way–and exclaimed, “Oh, Mom, what IS that?” I told her. “Oh, Mom–that’s GROSS!”

Why is it gross? It’s just hair from a horse. Don’t you liiiiiike horses, dear?… (Picture the ingratiating smile of the mother of a teenager.)

Looking at the stuff later, I decided what I really needed was someone with a violin to give it to. ( Right?) It was stiff and thick and totally not something I was going to spin. Don’t tell the horse, but I tossed its tail and freed myself of it.

Down to the last few inches on that first ball of Zephyr, time to attach the second.

In elementary school, it seems like the girls divided off into the horsey set and the making-fun-of-the-horsey set. I was one of the ones who loved them and learned everything I could about them. I practiced till I could even draw a halfway decent one (and not much else.) I told my mom I was going to live on a farm when I grew up, where nobody could tell me I couldn’t have a horse if I wanted a horse. It was going to be a palomino, with long, flowing blond mane and tail. Mom smiled and said, Well, if that’s what you want to do when you’re a grown up, then, you will.

KC was also one of the horse lovers. She got riding lessons while I got music lessons. She even took me along on a ride once, in high school. Heh. That horse knew I was all nervous eagerness and no sense–it tried to scrape me off on an overhanging branch to ditch me, and I was so bow-leggedly stiff trying to keep it from killing me (with KC shouting encouragements and directions) I could hardly walk straight for a week afterwards. That left me with a new respect for what I’d wished for when I’d been little.

After high school KC bought a horse. She actually bought a horse. She kept him all the way to his old age, and now, finally, he’s gone.

I’m knitting her the Water Turtles pattern, but I wanted to make it a little different; the original was for Karen, and she and Karen were close friends from childhood on up, but she deserved something more individually her own. Okay, so I changed the k1 yo k1 yo k1 rows to yo k3 yo. There’s a little personalizing there. I got to the end of the yoke, and then went flipping through my Barbara Walkers. Nothing grabbed me. I sighed, went back to the first volume, and started in again, a little bored. I need a 10+1, or maybe a 20+1 pattern here, maybe I should go grab the Barbara Abby volume or something, c’mon universe, help me out here a little.

Got to page 209–and burst out laughing.

Sometimes something becomes so ordinary that we don’t really even see it for what it is. That second time through, I happened to truly notice the name of that pattern that I knew so well that I’d just dismissed it without a blink.

Horseshoes.

Horseshoes!

I mean, come on, how could anything have been more perfect. And now, as I’m knitting along, the variegations in the colors make the horseshoes less overtly obvious; they’re there, and you can see them, but at the same time they become one with the trees and the sunlight shining through and the blue of the water and sky splashing down.

Like the memory of riding her beloved gelding through the woods on a glorious fall day.

I didn’t hear back from Johnna, which surprised me. I saw her before the main meeting at church started today, wearing a black dress, and thought, Oh perfect! That will look great with her new shawl! I headed to the back of the chapel to give it to her.

“You finished!?” she exclaimed as I handed it to her. And then, to my utter bewilderment, she burst into tears.

It was May when Johnna was working behind the scenes playing graphic artist and overhauling my website in anticipation of my book release, working on it till 2 am on at least one night I know of, when she had to get up at 6:00 am. Wow. I really, really owed her that shawl. I knew that, I kept wanting to knit her one, I kept going through my yarn and looking in yarn stores, going, ehhh, that’s not it. I wondered what was wrong with me that I hadn’t gotten it done already. I finally thought, alright, enough of this, and had her come over; she discovered the most perfect combination out of my stash that I hadn’t even thought to put together–that Lisa Souza silk and that cashmere/merino blend I’d dyed–and I got to work. At last. About time.

After all this delay, part of me kept thinking, finish it after the trip East. A few more weeks at this point won’t make any difference. I did put the Scharffenberger-cocoa shawl on hold; but Johnna’s refused to go in the corner for long, even after the goofs and the rip-backs. It had to get done, and now. And so I did.

I had no way of knowing. Johnna was hundreds of miles away last week as her grandmother slipped away from this life. She stayed there for the funeral, and then finally came home.

To be handed a gloriously soft shawl, the silk radiant against the cashmere. The Peace shawl. Just for her.

The timing.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite spots in the whole wide world was Cunningham Falls State Park. We would picnic by the creek, noisy water over rocks in the quiet trees, and then take a hike in the woods, Mom and Dad telling us about the birds and animals in there. I remember looking for beavers, but the beavers weren’t dumb, and none of them ever showed their faces for six young kids scrambling happily around through their territory.

A few years ago, I was back visiting for my parents’ 50th anniversary. My old buddy KC started talking about Cunningham Falls. It was a few miles’ hike to get all the way up to the waterfalls in the hillside well above the picnic area, and I told her sadly that there was no way these days. I used to racewalk four miles or so a day, back when my kids were little, but the old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be no matter how she might feel about that.

Heh. KC had a way around that. She lived out not far from there these days, and knew the roads better than I ever did. This one state road, if you turn the wrong direction, you have highly armed personnel extremely interested in what the *$# you think you’re doing there. (I am told that one of my in-laws goofed and found that out once.) Uh, yeah, a certain presidential retreat in the mountains of western Maryland, made famous by a certain peace accord back in the day… Don’t go there.

But. Go on up the road, up the endless hill, way past the entrance to the state park, on the other side from that retreat. You’re still in the park. There’s a cutout from the road, made into a small parking area: handicap only. There’s a raised wooden walkway, and nobody seems to know it’s there except the occasional passing car. (And out in the middle of nowhere like that, there aren’t a whole lot of those.) You hang your out-of-state placard, figuring nobody will mind that it says California, you get out, you read the Park Service sign explaining a bit about the area, and you walk or wheel–I’ve done both, now–down that slightly-raised walkway (up so as not to disturb the tree roots, and planked so a wheelchair can get through), and shortly you come to where, at a turn in the path, the falls suddenly surprise you, coming up right there in front of you. Water, tumbling and splashing down a long granite face. Usually, nobody else is there. Just a quiet bit of glory-of-this-earth all to yourselves.

The woods are deep green, with splashes of white sunlight on the path and bits of ground showing here and there between the fallen leaves. Gray rock above.

I found this dark green Zephyr silk blend in my stash, and a ball of Claudia’s Handpaint silk in white/turquoise/teal/deep gray. It instantly said “KC!” at me; I wasn’t sure why, till I swatched a swatch, liked it, thought, okay, and started in on this shawl. I wondered if she liked variegated yarns; I debated starting over with a plain color.

But it wasn’t too many rows before the yarn was telling me why it was what it was, and why it needed to be for KC. Cunningham Falls. A way to get through, a friend finding the path I didn’t know was there, bits of light coming through alongside moments of looking at the dark, acknowledging it square in the eye: loss and love, lived with, and it’s okay that it’s like that. And always, the growing, living green of the trees.

Here’s a recipe for the best jam on the planet: half peach, half mango. If you can find the Champagne variety mangoes (which this is not) and white peaches, dead ripe, then you’ve really found heaven. There, you can thank me at the county fair next year.

Back when we were newly married, my husband was working on his master’s degree and I was working; we were pretty busy, but not really, when you think about the natural chaos inherent with raising the four kids that came in six years a little later. So. I discovered a farmer couple where a couple of their apricot trees were set aside for her pin money, and to my great delight, she sold me a 27-pound crate of ‘cots for all of five bucks. But make sure you remember to bring back that crate. Sure, no problem.

Twenty-seven pounds! I’d been wanting to be like my mom, who would put up a thousand pounds of fruit in a year after our trips as itinerant harvesters at pick-your-own farms. Well, not that much like my mom; there were just the two of us to cook for for the moment. But I figured, I loved apricots, couldn’t beat the price, and it was a great place to start playing grownup.

We spent a Saturday together, boiling, cooking, sterilizing, freezing, putting up apricots in every form you could think of. Mostly bottled halves and jam, lots of jam. Rows and rows of jars, at the end of a very long and tiring day of hard hot work, gleaming, gorgeous, heathery-fruited jars of deep orange jam, the color of the early sunset.

And my sweet new husband turned to me, and with a gentle smile, confessed what he’d kept to himself the whole time: “You know? I don’t really like apricots.”

He’d waited till it was all done to let me know, so I wouldn’t be disappointed.

We gave most of it to his sister when we moved away. Not all, but most.

Couldn’t reach that big one up there, so I recruited the kid. He had to jump, too, but he can jump higher than I can, so that big apple we were looking at from down below was ours.

Eh, what’s a little squirrel spit among friends. (I am SO putting paper lunch bags over the apples, just as soon as I can round up enough of’em.)

Let’s see, I put in the new one when our youngest was in I think kindergarten, and he’s now 19…

I once had a tree service guy look at the two ailing apple trees in our yard, not long after we bought this place, and he told me they were simply dying of old age. Dwarf apples live 30-35 years, he said, this house was built in ’55, they’re toast.

Oh. I decided I needed a new one, then, and went looking for what we should replace them with. Since we were talking about eating an awful lot of apples from it for an awful long time to come, they might as well be the best, I figured. I went to specialty shops and organic grocery stores and plain old Safeway, trying out every type of apple I could find.

Now, the best and most memorable apple I ever ate in my life was a Spencer, bought on a very cold autumn day at a small roadstand on Old Route 3 just north of Merrimack, NH, back when we lived in that town. On impulse, I’d ignored the looming naptime, pulled the car over onto their gravel, and hauled my babies out of their carseats and walked shivering through the offerings. Never heard of those, sure, let’s give it a try, throw a whole box in the car and head for home.

The most perfect crunch. The most perfect balance of flavors, much more interesting than just plain sweetness, although, it was plenty sweet. It was what an apple aspires to be. But I’ve never again found a Spencer apple since we moved away.

I learned a lot about fruit trees from our real estate agent as we traipsed through house after house here. That orange trees have to be in just the right location, preferably with the heat of the afternoon sun reflecting off the house right onto the tree, or the fruit wouldn’t get sweet at all, not like in southern California. Apples need so many hours of below freezing in the winter to get a crop, some needing a lot more than others. Citrus dies if the whole tree freezes. The nurseries here market varieties by how well they fit into our microclimate.

The locally-sold apples I liked the best were, at the time, a virtually-unheard of variety, and I was quite pleased with myself at finding both the apple and an actual sapling. A Fuji. I bet you’ve heard of it by now, huh? It’s not rare anymore. That’s what happens when you’re good.

I dug that hole and I planted that tree. But, year after year, no apples. Where were my apples? Why no Fujis? A gardener friend suggested adding iron to the soil. I did that. I hung those AOL discs that kept showing up unwanted in the mail in the branches (hey, anybody got any string to run through this, or, you know, yarn or something, so I can hang this with? Oh, there you go, thanks!) Scare off the birds and squirrels. It worked just a little. And then, as I wrote a few months ago, I discovered that snails were eating the blossoms at night in the spring. They’d never touched the old tree as far as I could tell (one of the two old ones is still standing–the root stock took over when the top died, turning our old Gravenstein into a suddenly-young Golden Delicious), but they loved that Fuji. And only the Fuji.

Oh. Huh. That would account for a lot. I put out eggshells around the trunk to keep them at bay. I figured it was a lost cause, that the squirrels would strip the tree anyway like they did the Golden Delicious, but by golly slugs and snails were one thing I wasn’t going to feed if I didn’t have to.

For the first time. THE first time. There were apples on the Fuji AND they were on the tree long enough to actually start to turn pink and ripe. I picked one yesterday. I cut it up. We ate it. It was sweet, not the usual green-as-all-getout-trying-to-beat-the-squirrels-flavored, picked because there were only three apples left on the whole darn tree by that point and they were darn well going to be eaten by humans, but actually sweet and ready to be enjoyed and with a fair number yet to go for us.

Sometimes the learning is slow, but it’s worth it when you get there.

I wonder if there’ll be any Spencers to be found in Maryland in three weeks?

I miss real green. California tries, but it’s not quite the same. I miss the deep blue-y green of back East and the omnipresence of tall, leafy trees that aren’t struggling for water and dependent on sprinkler systems. The ivy that grows freely up the telephone poles and races down the wires like leafy squirrels, too exuberantly full of life to hold back. Such an abundance of growing in that rainforest climate. I only allow myself to get wistful about it when I know I’m about to go home to Maryland and actually immerse myself in it all, and thank goodness for Stitches East and books to sign as an excuse to go!

Early this past spring, a routine check on my bloodwork showed that all hell had broken suddenly loose, with my white cells crashing and my bilirubin zooming. I had tolerated my chemo just fine for four years, and we didn’t know why I was reacting now. My beloved Dr. R. wanted me to cut my dose.

Now, that is the one doctor whose judgment and intuition I absolutely trust, and yet, that was a hard pill to accept: I have been through what Crohn’s can do. I don’t want to go there again. And steroids do nothing for me, I’ve already done the Remicade, so I’m pretty limited. Eh, a few white cells missing, I’ll just stay home and lay low a bit for awhile, right? To me, 2.2k was just a number.

He called and we discussed it a moment again. I was resisting, and he said, in anguish, “I don’t want anything to happen to you!”

Now, to some, that might have seemed less professional. Less detached. To me, it was doctoring at its purest: he knew what I did not, he had seen consequences I had not, and how I did meant the world to him. I had to change that dose. I couldn’t inflict the suffering and worry on him if I did not. No hedging.

And so I did. Eventually, my white cells climbed, a good news/bad news thing, and my lupus started to creep up on me, landing me in the eye doctor’s first a few months later. There’s always this immune/autoimmune tradeoff. Then, the Crohn’s started waking me up at night. Not bad, not bad yet, but I didn’t like the trajectory. I went to the lab for the latest check, and I made an appointment with Dr. R.

I wanted my dose back up. He was not quite entirely convinced. We compromised at 3/4: but only, he said, if I would go get an expensive test my insurance probably wouldn’t cover, after being on the higher dose for awhile.

I did. We just got those results back.

For the first time in I think three years, my bilirubin count is right in the middle of normal. Look, Ma, no jaundice! My white cell count is where it needs to be. It was the best news I think it could possibly have been.

And there was a note from Dr. R yesterday from the clinic: “Excellent therapeutic range…” And then the part that really spoke to me: “Keep knitting and stay well.”

Indeed I shall. Indeed I shall. And I shall fly home and celebrate amidst family, old friends, my fellow knitters, the trees, and the changing of the seasons.

Till then, as I wait, I am knitting with a large photo my brother Bryan gave me of our old back yard in Maryland, propped up next to me on one side. On the other side–I haven’t been able to make myself ball it up yet, it’s so gorgeous as a hank beaming in happy possibilities–I’ve been keeping a surprise gift next to me, sent by my friend nhknittingmama Amanda, in Blue-faced Leicester she hand-dyed. In just the most exquisite shade of green. A shade that I went all over Stitches West last February specifically searching for. I have been sitting knitting surrounded by the happiest of deep greens on both sides.

Thank you, Bryan. Thank you, Amanda. And thank you, Dr. R, for inscribing my name in the Book of Life for yet another year, and many to come. I wish you and your loved ones a blessed Yom Kippur.

I had a post in mind to write today, but then I read Stephanie’s. Go read yarnharlot.ca if you haven’t yet. Beignets and bottle trees–that is the best-written piece on New Orleans I have ever read. Absolutely essential. And boy did it bring back memories: I will try to add some old pictures in when the technical help in the household is around. I loved the place.

I was 16, my little sister was 15. We had had a fabulous dinner at the Commodore Inn, where the cute waiter actually flirted with me, which, when you’re 16, is totally and dizzily mindblowing. We were staying in the French Quarter.

After dinner, Dad told us, “Come on, girls, I want to show you where jazz was born.” We started walking along Bourbon Street. There was a street musician sitting at a corner, playing a jazzy tune, smiling and nodding to us as we went by, including us in in his fine summer evening.

Being a good little Mormon girl, I knew nothing of the culture of the bar scene, so when I saw one door that was right up against the pedestrian-only street with a sign saying, “No Cover,” I opened my mouth to ask Dad what that meant. Just then the door was thrown open and a girl stumbled out, fast. I looked at her and what popped out of my mouth instead was, “Dad. The sign’s right.”

My father, boulevers’e with embarrassment at exposing his teenage daughters to more than he’d expected, wheeled around on the spot and pronounced emphatically, “I think you’ve seen enough of where jazz was born!”

So. Sunday night we got an email from Dave, familiar to those who’ve read my book as Dave-and-Wanda Dave. He was going to be in northern California on business and wondered if he could stop by Thursday night for a visit on his way back to the airport? Well YEAH! I asked him if he would mind going and asking Wanda her favorite color?

Note that the original shawl I knitted for her was in a color that was a total guess on my part. Blue is a pretty safe bet for most people, but there are all kinds of blues. White would have been good, too, but at that particular point in my life I couldn’t bear to knit any more white stitches for awhile.

Purple, he emailed back a few minutes later.

I did not have enough purple yarn in the right weight. And every single store in the Bay Area that sells Blue Sky Alpacas AlpacaSilk (which is an exquisite yarn) was going to be closed Monday. Every one. My stash and I were on our own.

I had some lightweight baby alpaca and what was once a full pound of Jaggerspun Zephyr silk/merino (thanks to my friend Karin, who used to own The Periwinkle Sheep.) Together, those would give me close to the same weight, and I could dye it when I was done. I did have purple dye in the stash. And so, as I blogged, the race was on.

I showed a picture of some of those rows I frogged. What I didn’t say was that after that I made another brainless mistake and had to frog it again. So I started 11 pm Sunday night, but in effect I might as well have started Monday.

I alternated knitting with icing my hands and was able to keep on going, hour after hour, Monday all day, Tuesday all day, then Wednesday I was the speaker at a lupus support group meeting and didn’t get to my needles till mid-afternoon. At about 7:30 pm the shawl came out of the dyepot.

I figure, Wanda knew what I was up to the moment she was telling Dave purple. And that’s fine. I love the way the silk in the Zephyr took up the dye a little more slowly, and so came out a little lighter than the baby alpaca and the merino fibers: it shimmers against them. I love it. White is nice, but purpleifying it brought out the best in it.

And I got to give it to him in person. That is SO cool.

(Now, did anyone get my visual pun on that metronome? Given what Dave did for us in the story I wrote in the book, I had to reference the piano while anticipating his coming.)