Okay, for those of you who live in hurricane country, which I have not for a very long time now: do you ever feel the wind go right through the house?

Because there were no air vents to the right of me and nobody was walking around, but in today’s strong wind storm, there was this one big gust where I not only heard it, I felt it coming through. Not hard, but cold like outside and very startling because that has never happened here.

Edited to add, okay, today’s post isn’t about the weather after all. We just got a series of messages from one of our kids. (type type type. Delete.)

I’ll let them process their own story before I barge in, on second thought.

ERs are mostly about waiting. Which is good, when you get to have to.

Yesterday there were two massive fires in the Bay Area: one that utterly destroyed a Home Depot in San Jose that thankfully everybody in the store escaped from; there were two other small fires near it whose connection is unknown yet, and a few hours before that, a fire at the Port of Benicia in the North Bay that destroyed a pier, an important deepwater dock that imported cars are loaded onto, and damaged an oil refinery.

You know how California gas prices are super high because we require a cleaner version that’s only made and only sold here? Just on a side note.

Today I heard from another one of my old Purlescence friends.

She’s a recent cancer survivor, so when she went to Costco, the size of the crowd (Palm Sunday? People preparing for Easter?) was just too much; she turned right around and headed home.

She found herself at a particularly long red light with time to look around–and she saw him. She called 911 and said I don’t know if he’s setting a fire or trying to put one out, but here’s where he is.

The light turned, she pulled away.

The police called back to ask her to come make a statement, and she did, and they were done and she was almost to her car again when the cop got a message. He asked her to come with him in his cruiser.

Was this him?

Yes that is him.

I’ll be curious to learn how many of yesterday’s events they end up connecting him with. But they know he’s responsible for the one he didn’t quite succeed at.

I thanked her for doing the right thing and she was like, how could one not.

Every now and then, the comments are as good as the story; not every one, but certainly most. The story being about parents who meet their new babies and ditch the name they were going to give it and why they do.

We did that on one of ours. We spent most of the pregnancy trying to pick one of two names and neither one of us was able to decide which. I would just have gone with both, but my mother-in-law, I am told, hated her middle name, hated dealing with having a middle name and then four as an adult and forms only letting you put down two and a middle initial and what do you need that extraneous one for anyway, and my sweet husband grew up thinking he wasn’t going to do that to his daughters, no sir.

Whereas I grew up without a middle name and was the only kid in the grade as far as I knew who didn’t, and I wasn’t going to do that to my girls, no way.

So.

Frances (hi Mom!) or Carole (which would have deprived my niece born later of what turned out to have belonged to her all along.) For nine months.

I’d been in labor for hours when we looked at each other and had a mutual moment of truth: not those names. Something else. But what?!

We started throwing ideas at each other, no, no, do you remember–not that one, you’re right–till I said how about? and he went, That’s it! We decided to wait for sure till after we’d seen her but hey, not long now.

But it already felt like we’d finally found the right one.

Our family doctor stopped by the hospital after dinner. I had just been wheeled to my room. The baby had spent some time in what that hospital had as far as an NICU–nobody had told us till she arrived that the closest one was a two-hour ambulance ride away–and I was a little hazy on where she was at that point other than the nursery. I wanted to hold my baby. I hadn’t gotten to do that yet, they’d been in too much of a hurry when she’d arrived.

He stopped by my room to reassure me, telling me he had examined Michelle and she was looking great.

Me, having had a very very long, strenuous day, bone tired: “Who?”

He looked startled.

Oh right, right, that’s her name now, right. Sorry.

After seeing my mom, our younger son, my older sisters and their husbands, my older brother and his two girls at home and Richard’s sister last week, today felt antsy: I wanted more.

I checked our flight miles, and it turns out that after accumulating them for two years we have enough to fly a round trip free.

As my oldest niece said after her first flight when she was two, Mommy! Get air pane! Less go!

As we wait to see how this BA.2 variant progresses. I’m glad we went when we went, but for now, we’re back to not yet. Not quite yet.

Sara and Matt used to live fairly close to us; he was at Stanford and she taught dance at San Jose State and was advisor to one of my girls at church. When they moved away, Matt sold his most excellent bike to my then-teenage older son, who was grateful to have one from a fellow tall person and bike enthusiast.

Not long after that, we discovered that the man we all instantly adored whom my cousin was marrying was Sara’s brother. Small world. So the connection continues.

Sara was running an errand yesterday, the kids were in school, and Matt just happened to be in the one place in their house where he didn’t know he needed to be.

The next door neighbor hadn’t wanted to pay an arborist $4k to take out that 140′ pine and so decided to let some random guy with a chainsaw who was offering to help in exchange for the wood have at it. Video here. No license, and apparently no insurance nor bond.

We had a neighbor’s major tree limb take out a line of the fence and punch a branch through our roof years ago and that was LOUD. Even to my ears. I can’t imagine….

Last fall, due to the supply and labor issues and lumber prices of the pandemic, while we were changing insurance policies we were told that the estimated cost to rebuild our house from scratch just then–and it’s certainly no mansion–would be a cool million dollars.

I think forking over that four grand just might have been the better idea to go with.

There’s a reason we have regulations. They protect both sides.

Scrolling through my photos, wait–there was one more, with a declaration in so many languages: All are alike unto God.

So. Many. Hours. of someone’s life to create this.

Am I correct in guessing it was tatted? Can you do crochet like this?

Just one more from the museum.

I saw it almost immediately in this rendition of the Tree of Life: the fifth figure from the left. This artist knew breast cancer.

While, here at home: the flowers on the sweet cherry have bloomed to the top now.

The afghan for my niece, the daughter of my late sister-in-law, is coming along; 49″ wide by 40″ long so far, 50/50 cashmere/cotton at a 3/6 weight (size 9s for when I check back later to use up the last of this mill-end.)

Redwoods grow as tall as they do so as to capture the nightly ocean fog on their needles, where it condenses and drips off the tips while some runs down their trunks to the roots below. Which is why they have to be shallow, and why they’re so much at risk in a drought, especially down here in the valley, and why they’re terrible to plant close to buildings.

Volunteers have been replanting redwood seedlings in the parks by the coast where the trees had burned. Will it take a few thousand years to get back to what had been? Yes, which is why they’re getting started.

My long twiggy saplings have the fog dripping down around them in the yarnover spaces.

Another from the museum, and I regret that I didn’t snap the artist’s name for this one. On curious approach from the side, it looked like someone’s random beach combing adventure.

And then you take the longer view.

And the longer view.

She was there all along, waiting to be seen.

While we were at the Church History Museum, these are the two pieces that had me fighting sudden completely unexpected tears. Click to embiggen.

A crown of thorns made by olive leaves dipped in metal, and hanging from it, a thousand paper cranes, each one created with a person in mind, each paper printed with that person’s digital skin tone, the cranes separated by gold and suspended in the air and held in place only by the tension between the support from above and gravity from below.

I wondered if its creator had cared for Covid patients these past two years.

And this one. He Who Is Without Sin. It took a heartbeat to see the four (edit: five–making its point) bruises, none of them fully revealed to the viewer, where the stones had struck. The intensity of color and life above the ground in contrast to the stones returned to the dirt of the desert from which they’d come.

I came out of there wanting to be a better, kinder person: ‘First, do no harm.’

The medical news part of the trip didn’t really hit me till I wrote it down for yesterday’s post, and then the whole of it was all at once.

While we were actually there with Mom, with our son John, while we were at the Sunday dinner at my brother’s house with his two younger kids and our two older sisters and Mom, the overriding feeling was simply joy: after two long years, we finally got to see each other. We got to be there.

My niece showed me where the peach tree I’d given them for Christmas a few years earlier was growing. My sister told me hers was starting to bloom. (Pictures, and they do embiggen: my Stella sweet cherry today.)

We got to see Richard’s younger sister.

We got to take Mom out on the town. Including where, in October 2019, all six of us kids had approached a local restaurant as we were out walking and said, We know you’re booked solid but we just buried our father and our Mom was hoping for Italian and could you possibly squeeze us in tonight?

And they did. They didn’t have to, but they did.

For the memories of that day and their kindness, Richard and I took her back there Saturday night. It was the best food of the trip. Brio in Salt Lake City–if you go there, go there.

After I spent all that time trying not to grouse at my husband because I wanted to go see my 91-year-old mom and he wanted to wait till the Omicron counts were down to where it was safe for us to walk through the airport for her sake, it turns out he was very very right but not just for the reasons we thought.

They test the sewage here and extrapolate from that the percentage of the population that has the disease in that moment. He wanted that count to go below where it would be inevitable that you’d be exposed to at least one person at the airport and then bring it to Mom, even if she is boostered. I couldn’t rightly disagree.

Finally those tests were encouraging enough that I talked to him and to Mom and went to go book the tickets.

As I looked at that screen I felt strongly that I should book it for two weeks out. I looked at the ticket prices and noped out, even if the thought remained persistent, and booked for three weeks out with the idea in the back of my head that you do have 24 hours to cancel without penalty.

But I couldn’t get a hotel room. At all. Not one single room in the entire city, not fleabag nor Marriott. So I looked at the fares for a week earlier again, talked to Mom and Richard again, canceled the original and booked the new and felt an odd sense of relief about it. Hotel, piece of cake, car, got it. Sooner is always nicer anyway, right? (Later, Mom said to me, But of course–three weeks out was going to be General Conference. I was stunned–DUH. People fly in to Salt Lake City from all over the world for that. How had I missed that that was the weekend! You can tell I didn’t grow up in Utah.)

What we had no way to know. No. Way. Was that in between those two weeks, our 34-year-old son, who lives about a half hour from Mom, was going to be diagnosed with lung cancer. They caught it very early while scanning him for something else and the doctor was as surprised as we were, given his age and that he’d never smoked.

But he lucked out and he should be fine. Even so–there are times when you just want your parents with you, and there we were.

About a week before I booked those tickets, the sister-in-law of one of my nieces, having had epilepsy most of her life, died after being hospitalized for months after a particularly severe seizure. There was a GoFundMe to help her in-laws with their immense expenses, and I contributed to it because, family. And because you do what you can when there’s nothing you can do.

Yesterday her young son went to her and said that M, his five-year-old sister, had thrown up in her bed. The parents found their daughter seizing. It was her first. And it was a grand mal. Just weeks after burying their sister for that.

My mom, husband, son, and I were together when my sister texted about her granddaughter. I texted my niece, who is close to her cousin who was right there next to me, and said I didn’t know if it was appropriate or wanted but we were all ready to come immediately to Children’s Hospital to be with them, or anything else we could do.

The answer of course was that visitors are limited, (because of course they still are) but the offer was very appreciated and the support and love meant so much.

That trip. It had to be on that timing. And it was.

Of all the things in the world, this is so low on the totem pole. And yet–I hate that I so often come out of CVS with my stomach gnarled in knots.

The local store thanked me a few years ago for getting our prescriptions there, saying that corporate wants to shut them down along with a lot of others because it’s cheaper for them to do it by mail. (Corporate is actually doing that now to a bunch of stores but I don’t think ours–it’s too close to the clinics at Stanford.)

Meantime, they’re terribly understaffed and they always have been.

California law requires that a pharmacist be available to answer questions about any new med, with a list of questions they’re to offer the patient to make sure they know what the med is for and how to take it. So it appears that if they want to do business in this state they have to at least have some real live people around somewhere.

They’re supposed to call you when it’s time to refill. They don’t anymore. They didn’t announce they weren’t doing that anymore. I was going to say they don’t even print the fill date, having searched for it, but turns out it’s actually there in super-fine print that didn’t have to be. Way to tell me I’m getting old, guys. Okay, but, so that’s on me, I should have seen it.

All of which adds up to: I take an asthma med and I thought I had another box, reinforced by the fact that they told me two weeks ago that they were going to refill all my meds April 7. But I don’t. I have one single dose left–and I am flying tomorrow to my mom’s.

I raced over there to say I have a problem. They said they would call me. They did not. I finally went back there tonight just before they closed, determined to sit there and wait till they filled the darn thing.

They said, But he never answered.

He? He who? My doctor’s a woman. Whom did you send that refill request to? He hasn’t been my doctor for years, I’ve corrected that in your records before. I’ve been on this for years, can’t you just give me a week’s worth? I’d be happy to pay out of pocket. I need to breathe–and I am flying to a high altitude tomorrow.

The night pharmacist, someone new to me and stuck in the middle of all this, sympathized greatly but could not offer more than hope that the doctor would respond in time before my flight–but if not, she told me, I could have it filled at any CVS in any state, all I have to do is offer the relevant information for them to look it up.

I thanked her very much for that, and because I could see how badly she wanted to do more.

I am not flying to sit in a stupid pharmacy waiting for an hour and a half for an understaffed pharmacist to fill a prescription–I’m going to be with my mom. Family here could get it here and overnight it to me, if they were willing to take a few abrupt unexpected hours off work that that would entail, but, let’s not. So hopefully first thing in the morning, or, Hey, Mom! Want to go to CVS just for fun?

I can just hear her offering the classic expletive from my childhood: “Joy and rapture!” Except that she wouldn’t be saying it, I would.

I can just hear her laughing reading that line. Hi, Mom!

Earlier, the daytime pharmacist looked at the screen and made the same mistake I did and told me that it was not time to refill it yet–and then went, Oh wait, January February March, yes that IS three months.

Right. The April 7 thing? That was only for the heart meds, I guess not the other because it was officially expired but that didn’t make them act on it at the time. Nor say anything to me.

Headsmack.

Oh yeah. By the way. I’m flying out of town tomorrow. In case you don’t hear from me for a few days? No worries.

I’m going to save that dose for the morning.

(Ed. to add Friday morning: got it!)

(English Morello tart cherry flowers.)

With a heartfelt thank you to Ellen for this: a brief explanation and exercise from an ENT that you can do to get those wandering inner ear particles back over to where they belong and away from where they make you dizzy. Hold this position, this, this, this, this, and done. Vertigo gone, or it might take a few tries. My neck muscles agree with her that one should wait fifteen minutes between.

She figured out the mechanics of the thing and how to address it. Easiest cure ever.

By way of introduction: Dave, who’s lived here most of his adult life, was a teenager whom we knew when we lived in New Hampshire 35 years ago. His oldest is in college now. His grandfather was a rabbi who fled the pograms in Russia.

He’s a lawyer.

So he prefaced his remark in Sunday School by saying that when you think of pardons, we generally think of a Presidential pardon. The difference between a pardon and forgiveness?

You don’t deserve a pardon.

You deserve forgiveness.

The person forgiving you deserves that they do so.

To which I would add, and of course forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning, it means I recognize the humanity in you in spite of what you did. If nothing else, to keep from pulling me down to your level.

Dang. I wrote all that out because his words sounded so brilliant at the time and, Sunday School lesson or no, I still can’t find it in me to forgive the murdering little warmonger over there. I am willing to turn that job over to Christ because it’s frankly well beyond me. I just want him stopped.

I am so glad Dave got to be born here.

Why on earth did I still have these? They were pre-pandemic, so, three years old? At least.

So I posted on Freecycle.org:

‘This is a long shot, but before I recycle them, if anyone’s interested in four 50-count (one with a few missing, the rest unopened) bags of paper lunch bags, it turns out that the brilliant idea online of hiding the fruits in your trees from the squirrels that way just means to them that you’re wrapping their gift and they get to have fun opening it. Happy Birthday to them.

The remaining bags are all guaranteed squirrel-free as presently presented.’

I figured if nothing else, someone would chuckle and we could all use that right now and then I’d throw the silly things in the bin minus the plastic wrappings.

Turns out I had two people who not only asked for them but who told me why, and how do you choose between school children taking a baby plant home and a soup kitchen? I asked Richard his thoughts and he said, You can’t know–go with the person who asked first.

I said, And it’s not like they’re hard to get or expensive, so, okay, sounds good.

One of the side effects of these past two years is how easy it can be to suddenly find yourself just really talking to someone and glad for the connection. Today, she’s the one who opened up first.

Turns out that first person (the school kids one) had a husband about to have a surgery that a cousin of mine had had and whose recovery was perfect and he was completely back to his normal life. She herself had a medical condition that I could heartily relate to, so that when I wished her all the best she knew I meant it.

Sometimes all you really need to know is that it can be okay.

And I came away feeling like, and now I know why I had to hang onto those silly paper bags for three years. They were waiting for the right person and moment.