From the late Gracie Larsen, then head of the Lacey Knitters guild, founder of the Lace Museum in Sunnyvale, friend and mentor whom I simply lucked into as a member of my local knitting group.

And instigator of my lace shawls book. When I didn’t believe in it she sure did and pushed me forward. After Martingale published it, at the next Stitches West Gracie surprised me with this exquisitely fine lace leaf in a sandwich bag with a tag offering congratulations in tiny writing. So that I would have a piece of her to remember her by forever.

And oh I do.

People moved away, the group fizzled to nothing, and it was a treat to see her like clockwork at Stitches every year manning her guild’s booth where anyone who wanted to learn any kind of lace was offered guidance on the spot. Tatting, knit, crochet, you name it.

I had almost forgotten this leaf. It had been so carefully tucked away.

So this time Richard did the Saturday Trader Joe’s run.

He wanted to reach over for something and found himself saying, Excuse me, ma’am.

She looked up at him. And asked, Are you a ___ high school parent?

I am!

She said, Are you a ___ elementary school parent?

I am! Or was.

And… Is your wife that sweet little thing?

He laughed telling me this part and said he’d answered, She is!

And does she still knit?

She does!

He came home and told me he’d given her this address and I said, I’d better write something good tonight then if Penny’s going to be reading it! I’m so sorry I missed her!

Back when the Barbara Walker books of my childhood were republished in the late ’90’s (I used to pore through Mom’s copy of the first one in high school), I taught myself lace knitting from them, and when I started, I was only using lace weight and tiny needles. I made wedding ring shawls, ie ones so fine you could pull them through a ring. I was quite proud of them.

I also made a few people a smaller scarf or stole on those size threes. But I had to really love and admire you. I was new at giving away my knitting, much less making anything like that.

Penny was not my kids’ teacher, but she was one of the teachers at that elementary school when my kids were there and she got one of those. Only a handful of people ever did.

Hi Penny!!

I got a pro tip I never would have thought of: pop your hood every now and then. Let the sunshine in.

When we had the shed cleaned out, the men pointed out where mice had nested after seeing them leaping away.

All that area is open and empty now and I wondered where they’d gone off to.

Some Japanese cars use soy in the covering on their wiring. Richard told me, Oh, yeah, we had one guy who had to replace all the wiring on his new car three times–and it happened while it was parked at work.

Sounds to me like the coyote often seen trotting around that building (sighted often, even I saw it) wasn’t doing its job.

So. My car didn’t immediately respond to the accerator three times in a row between here and the pharmacy but was fine after that. The garage said intermittent problems are the hardest to track down but come on over and we’ll see what codes come up.

The codes were fine.

The mouse nest in the engine compartment that they cleaned out, judging by the look on the guy’s face as he returned my keys, not so much.

We’ve had that car 17 years and we’ve never had that happen before. I can just picture them skittering out across his garage floor, and close to closing time at that when their doors were about to come down and seal them inside their shop. Unless they tracked down every one and succeeded at getting them out. Not that they said that out loud.

I am SO sorry! I said, horrified.

Oh, said the woman at the counter, trying to be nice, we see a lot of that.

Yes, but…!!

Glad I wore a mask yesterday. Woke up this morning hoping I hadn’t infected anyone. There was a luncheon after the service but I didn’t stay for it; I’d been exposed to someone with what was hopefully just a mild cold–but you never know, and the utilities sampling says current incidence is very high here. I couldn’t risk the elderly folks by taking it off.

Awfully glad today I’d kept it on.

Got out the covid testing kit and found it had expired two years ago, so we’ll just see what tomorrow brings.

It was a good day to knit.

We were the parents of three, soon to be four. We had just moved across the country where we knew nobody and had more than doubled our mortgage payments. Things were quite tight.

Monajo simply randomly decided that it would be a great day to go visit the new young couple, and with a call and a would-it-be-alright, she stopped by. The surprise was that it was with beautiful homegrown veggies from her garden.

And what a garden. I had no idea. In this city of postage-stamp lots, she had at least an acre with a creek at the back looping in a half circle near the very old bay tree that had grown multiple trunks into what she loved to call her fairy circle, with a very large hammock suspended at the center.

She was a master gardener and loved making arrangements. One day she donated a large number of her flowers in order to teach a flower arranging class on a Saturday at church.

However you place them, visually, you want things to be in sets of three, she told us. Upper, middle, lower, is the traditional Japanese way, or…

I got there late–kids’ schedules and stuff–and there were very few left to choose from, and this was not my field of expertise whatsoever but I tried, I really tried.

She came over to see how mine had come out and helpfully said, Let’s get you started.

I looked at her.

Well, actually, I thought mine was done… (Thinking, and I will never be as good as you at it but that’s okay because we have you and you are a treasure.)

She was the original instigator of our December Birthday Club. She would have turned ninety at this year’s.

When I saw her infant great grandchildren I understood why the delay; those babies had needed to arrive before their mothers got on planes.

The flowers at her memorial service today were glorious, as you knew they had to be and where they had come from. Her children have their mother’s master’s touch.

And there were these tiny seed packets with a note for every person who came: explaining that sweet peas had been Monajo’s favorite flower. She had passed while they were in full, glorious bloom. These were the seeds from those flowers, and she was inviting us into her garden one last time and forevermore.

Got in to the ENT rather early this morning to get my ear canals unclogged. Badly needed.

I was a bit early, he was actually surprisingly late, but I figured I had about four hours left on that skein. No rush. I do need more cowls in my FO pile, hats don’t do it for everyone.

Lovely man, got it done so carefully. I turned to thank him for my extra hearing.

And found myself looking him in the eyes and asking gently, Are you okay?

His whole body exhaled as he said, I just put my son on a plane to New York.

I debated asking which university but simply said, Monday I put my Boston daughter on a plane, too.

Parent to parent in that moment, we knew.

He walked out of that exam room with a warm smile on his tired face.

A chance encounter at the curb before they leave in the next day or two and all of us grateful for it. Messages sent are a help but eye to eye is so much better.

We’re not using our second recyclables bin this week, I said; do you guys need the extra space?

Oh thank you yes we really do.

What they put in my bins last week could have gotten them rejected: that would be considered trash, that one could have been too heavy, but now they knew what the stricter rules are with the city’s new contractor.

It was not going to be a problem, and I knew they were good for it.

The issues of last week were irrelevant anyway, as long as you sort right: tomorrow’s the big Clean Up day where you can even set furniture out and they’ll take it. Slap a Reuse label on good stuff and it’ll get donated to charity instead of being landfilled.

I apologized for any stress I might in any way have added to all that they’ve been going through and thanked them for their realtor who introduced me to her contractor who cleaned out our shed for us for a good price.

At the last, the sister wondered what on earth to do with the big Rubbermaid bins her mom had labeled Block Party: where should all that go? Paper plates, bowls, cups, it was all still perfectly good.

I’ve been trying to get the annual block party going again, I told her; I’d be glad to take it.

I didn’t say, I got zero feedback from the neighbors on my initial query on the subject–but if I were to say that in her parents’ loved names and with their party stuff let’s do this and celebrate our late neighbors who brought us all together in the first place and kept us going for years and years, making so many connections and memories, and now we have six new sets of neighbors to welcome in in this square block since the pandemic–

–I think for that, yes absolutely a good number of them would come. With her parents’ help we were halfway there already.

Watsonville farmland, 247 acres of broccoli, beets, and lettuce by the ocean that flooded out last year and this.

With lots of private, state, and Federal funding, 65 acres of Beach Ranch is being turned back into the tidal wetlands it once was, offering a buffer and protection for the other coastal areas and leaving room to retreat further if need be into the other acres that will be rented out for farming as long as possible. Migratory birds will still have their estuary as the slough downstream gives way. Other farms will have greater protection as the area calms the sea and absorbs winter storm runoffs.

Sometimes money can buy common sense.

It was Stake Conference, which means a Saturday evening adults-only meeting and a Sunday one for the combined wards in the area. It’s a glorious zoo of old friends running into each other. Carpooling is highly encouraged; we did.

We got there early and I pulled out the ball of yarn and needles I had tucked into my purse on the way out the door to start the next carry-around project.

Someone I didn’t know at all cried in delight, Another knitter! and came over and sat next to me with her own new project. I got to see on her phone some of her greatest hits, and she is good! She got to see a few of mine.

Six months from now we’ll have another such meeting and I’ll get to ask her how that one came out.

Then the meeting was about to start and we both tucked it all away.

Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.

Fire-sky rainbow at sunset. (And no, we’re nowhere near the fires.)

Kind of looks like the arc of a firefighter’s hose, reaching as high and as far as it can go.

The air is so seeded that, with the fog rolling in for the night, it’s supposed to rain any second now. Not even a hundredth of an inch, just enough to draw a few Dalmation spots on the ground below.

(Walks outside, holds a hand upward, a single drop lands on it.)

Nope. Added a few more–259 stitches, because a couple extra inches in width is always a good thing, right? It was a tired day but at least I got three rows into the thing.

James Beard wrote, in a cookbook that was given to us as a wedding present so that gives you some idea of how long ago, that the only way to eat a mango was in private in the bathtub.

I’m not sure I’d ever seen a fresh mango at that point so that description stayed with me.

Fast forward. I didn’t have a box the right size to put four of Andy’s peaches into nice and upright and you can’t stack those, so I took a small paper bag, put them in in a line and  held the thing shut with one hand and supported the weight with the other after texting my neighbor.

Her teenage son met me halfway and carried those balls of fruity juiciness just as carefully. He knew.

I knew they didn’t have enough bathtubs but they could make do. Most definitely.

While I knit… (I think the yarn is Malabrigo Washted, not Mecha, in which case the London Sky tag in the bag was indeed the wrong one.)

We have a shed divided in two parts that was added onto the house maybe before we were even born. The near side had built-in shelving on both sides, the other side nearer the street was open space for a trash can, lawn mower, that sort of thing, with a concrete floor.

Which got jackhammered out when we had to remove the redwood root up to the house five years ago.

That involved my hauling out a good hundred pounds’ worth of wet rainy redwood needle droppings that, over time, had broken through the very aged plastic roof out there. Everything else got moved to the other side of the shed wall.

The near shed had accumulated construction stuff over the years, now-rusty paint can remainders, tangled hoses etc etc and made worse by that sudden extra, and with that broken roof, very little of it was in good shape.

We didn’t replace the roof because we wanted to replace the whole structure and you can’t anymore because of updated fire codes and we wanted to have that shed so it all just sat there.

I got quoted $1500 for clearing everything out. Then a grand. Money that was easy not to spend since you couldn’t see any of this unless you went past two gates on that side of the yard. It was hard to let go of the thought of getting it done ourselves, to acknowledge our bodies had aged out of the task (although those wet needles had definitely made the point.)

The fence guy of two weeks ago offered at $400. Not including the broken roofing, but we can do that, we just needed the heavy and tangled stuff dealt with and those crazy long pipes one contractor inexplicably stuffed up at the top out of there.

They came today. They transformed the place. The condition the shelving was in was threatening to pull the whole structure down, but the shelves are gone now as well as everything that was on them and the structure looks the most sound it has in many years. It just might last after all.

Time for metal freestanding ones to go in there.

On their way out, the two men asked if I wanted to keep the spade with the handle that would rip your skin off. No.

The blue –? I’m not sure they knew what that thing was; it sure didn’t look useful for anything they could think of.

I laughed and explained that the day our moving van came, the neighbor across the street had come over and said, I saw them take a snow shovel off the truck. What do you think you need THAT for?!

I told him we’d rent it out for $75/hr if it ever snowed here.

Good old Mr. Seedlock, long gone. I thought of him and how it would make him laugh and told the men, It stays.

Scene: pharmacy. Picking up for the both of us.

Waiting in line, the guy who had pulled in next to my car got out of his black mustang with the vivid yellow duct tape pretending to be painted racing stripes–applied in very careful lines, but the ends looked like they were flapping just ever so much in the wind now–and very cheerfully made a scene asking for the keys to the bathroom. The clerk seemed to recognize him. She smiled. Bless her.

Tall, a little high or a little drunk (hey you stagger too lady writing this what are you talking about) or maybe this was just the way he was, with a vivid yellow wildly printed shirt I took to be of the shiny nylon that was all the rage for about a month when I was fifteen that I’d worked so hard to talk my mom into letting me have. Mine was silver. (And then we Maryland kids were dying in the heat and swore off that particular fashion and blamed it on California, where we decided they didn’t know a thing about humidity and clothes needing to breathe. That shirt and that guilt over not wearing it so as to thank Mom but but but it was so hot! were exactly what got me sworn to natural fabrics. But I digress.)

Eventually he reappeared and ambled around and then got in line behind me.

Meantime, the clerk had found my meds and my husband’s and put them on her side of the counter and said something behind her mask that I told her I couldn’t hear–then, after rummaging around the shelf some more, she disappeared.

I stood there. Our meds sat there. No clerk.

Eventually I heard the guy talking again, but that seemed to be what he liked to do best and I ignored him till he got loud enough to be clear he meant me.

Excuse me, ma’am? Excuse me? Are you picking up your meds?

I told him I was, but I explained I hadn’t been rung up yet so I couldn’t walk off with them, and, *shrug*.

He said something else I didn’t quite get, but he was cheerful and friendly and happily boisterous and entertaining, so, okay, whatever.

I was wearing a vyshyvanka with embroidered flowers on the puffy sleeves and a beaded gerdan with dandelions, so clearly I was a fellow hippy traveler and he was happy to meet me. He was happy to meet anyone. Life was fabulous.

Two clerks came out and went searching together. Turns out an extra med had been declared pick-up-able today  and neither could find it, but the pharmacist said no it’s out there, and the whole thing took so long that there were now a whole bunch of people waiting.

At last they got done and as I turned to leave, Mr. 1970 screaming-yell0w-zonkers shirt told me, Peace out! Have a blessed day! and I wished him one, too.

Getting back in my car, I glanced over at the license plate on his. It seemed to be an area code and then HE double hockey sticks and since when does the DMV let that through–they used to be really strict on such things. But I guess a younger generation is running the show there now. Okay, cool.

Got home, and out of sheer curiosity looked up where that area code referred to.

Richard heard me guffaw hard from the next room and I had to explain.

It was the specific area code assigned to a college campus. Utah State.

You always meet the interesting people, he told me.