I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen and thinking it was too big a day to squeeze into this little box in front of me.

Okay, let me try. Church renewed the soul, as it should; a dinner potluck with friends did, too. That ended early because there was this lecture that some people wanted to go to and it sounded interesting so we went, and… Yeah don’t have to do that one again. But whatever.

The one thing that saved it was that we ran into my second cousin (who had looked as ready for this to be over with as I had been) and her face lit up when I came over afterwards. Lisa told me she had seen my mom yesterday at her dad’s 95th birthday and how great my mom had looked. It clearly made her day to be able to tell me that, while I said, Happy Birthday to your dad!

He and my mom are the only two surviving grandchildren of their generation, their famous grandfather having been born in 1856. My grandmother had raised Lisa’s dad/Gram’s nephew for awhile after her sister/his mother had died from childbirth–penicillin was known but not widely enough available yet–and the two cousins are close.

I’m glad they got to see each other. I’m glad I got to see his daughter!

Picture #11 really sells the place. That train wreck was a long time coming. Although I bet the heating and cooling bills were low after that glacier of grass swept halfway over the house. Wow.

We could have a little fun making up AirBnB-type ads for the place. The che-Shire cat: come see the disappearing home! It’s got the Ring halfway on!

Meantime, yesterday I was trying to make an appointment about that rib but the Medicare bounced. I spent two hours on the phone, with Medicare insisting it wasn’t a problem at their end.

Without that cleared the clinic would not book me an appointment, because not only would I not be reimbursed, if I ever–once–paid out of pocket I would be kicked off Medicare for life.

Whoa.

Which is why I’m mentioning any of this at all, because who wants to learn that one the hard way.

At long long last the doctor’s office realized that why yes in fact we did spell your name wrong and that’s the problem. But by that point all the appointments were gone and I had to settle for waiting till today and someone I’d never met.

Which is how I met a great guy I’d be happy to be sent to anytime.

The x-ray came back: no breaks. Yay!

There was maybe even going to be a matching hat and cowl.

We went to a ward picnic last night at a park that always has a cold breeze coming off the Bay in the evening. Quite a few of us wore warm vests even though we didn’t quite need them when we arrived but we knew we would soon.

The start of the cowl was my carry-around project; on impulse I tucked the hat in too on the way out the door. You never know.

About an hour and a half in, there was a young dad in short sleeves rubbing his arms against the cold. His wife had their baby in a front pack and that was keeping them both a little warmer.

The baby wasn’t complaining in the slightest; he had way too many interesting new things to look at: people with unfamiliar faces but far enough way to safely just be interesting, a pick-up game of softball on the field with kids and grownups alike, Chinese elm trees waving long boas of green on the breeze, neighbors walking their dogs around the perimeter, and the smells. Mown grass. (That is no longer common around here.) Hot dogs on the grill. Salad. Fruit. Brownies. You name it. (I wonder how those come across if the only solid food you’ve ever tasted so far is something like rice goop.)

I did a mental check. Yeah the colors would do, and I said to the dad, “You look cold” as I pulled the hat out of my purse.

Yeah, it is, he said gratefully as he instantly turned with it to put it on his small son, folding it over and over to make it work into quite the headsweater. The baby had a big head but not that big but he made it work.

The thought of putting it on his own head hadn’t remotely occurred to him and his wife got to see her husband putting their child first, though I’m sure it was absolutely no surprise to her.

But I don’t really know them yet. Or rather, didn’t. It made me smile all day today, too.

Finished the baby afghan.

Reached over the back of the chair behind me for a different skein of yarn with the usual level of klutziness and I was taken aback that kind of falling on that wooden edge hurt at all, much less like… But eh.

But not eh, as the day went on. Do not twist, do not lift that stoneware, do not laugh. I did anyway, being the boss of me and all that.

So it appears to be round three of, looks like I’ll call the doctor in the morning in order to be told that yes I did break that rib. But we’ll see.

I have forever remembered with great fondness a graduation party I went to: high school was over and it was one last chance to see old friends before we might not ever again. So much emotion and appreciation and, frankly, grief.

The woman hosting it was someone I had always very much looked up to. I never did get to see Susan again, not so far, at least. But she found my blog and I ended up with a beautiful lap quilt that her four year old granddaughter had helped her with and I treasure it.

So when the neighbor next door let us know well in advance that she was throwing a graduation party for her kid, when it would be and what to expect, I was so happy. It’s going on right now.

An Amazon driver was walking to then from our door with a look of take-this-job-and-! so I opened it and waved and yelled Thank you! as she got to the sidewalk.

She looked in the direction of the neighbors and back at me to see what I thought of all of this and all these cars that had made it so she’d had to walk in Amazon only knows how far to get to our house. There was no way her truck would have been able to turn around at the end of our street.

Thank you! I cheerfully yelled again–and this time I watched her whole demeanor change: her face totally lit up.

I could just imagine her thinking along with me that these are the kids who spent so much of their teen socialization years in quarantine, in isolation, in loneliness; there is no substitute for being with friends in person.

And then they could. Right this very minute they could again. All this lost time to make up for. They weren’t being obnoxious or even overly loud but they were clearly having the time of their lives and squeezing out every moment of being together.

Still.

For one last day. They will treasure the memory. They will always hold those friends dear, wherever they may end up.

To life!

(Foil at bottom to thwart slugs.)

The ordinary weekly chore of dragging the hose around the yard, pointing it towards a tree, setting a timer, BRAAAAAP then the next then the next then the next, repeat, while taking the time to closely see the changes: some week by week, some from even just this morning when my tomato was an inch shorter and the netting tent was tall enough.

This is why I haven’t put in an automatic system. There’s calibrating to varied sizes while knowing the sizes will change but also I seem to want it to make me have to go out and spend one-on-one time with the outdoors in the evening, when I finally can in the day.

Everything’s growing. Everything’s reaching up and out to what each plant or tree was meant to be. The best of the sun to them all.

These are the moments when I think having something living to watch and nurture and see responding to care, even a seedling in a paper cup, is as necessary to the soul as the air that we breathe.

Bright, cheerful, blinking, and suggesting a tree underneath: the new neighbors put up a set of Christmas lights from the get-go. It’s actually kinda cool. And they leave them on all night about every other night.

I figure if nothing else, sheer curiosity will get me to walk around the block when the sun is safely low enough in order to introduce myself to the folks behind our house.

But there is the unwanted temptation to ask, what on earth?–nicely, while trying not to be all in their business.

I do think though that I should ask if *my* lights are bothering *them*. There’s no curtain on our transoms. No light pointed out the window, either, but you never know how it looks from the other side.

My goal was to finish the roof today, but it looks like I won’t quite make it. Still, pretty good progress.

There is not a bobble on that door, just some light that got caught on a stitch and it decided to go Ta daah! for the camera.

Barbara Walker’s version has a chimney. Only a few minutes ago did I suddenly realize that, oops, mine does not. Well then but it’s new construction, right? And California has outlawed building chimneys in new housing: something about live embers going up them that the state just somehow thinks is less than desirable a possibility these days.

That house…

Okay, when I was twelve we visited a childhood friend of my mom’s, and the friend’s kid my age had a pixie cut. All the rage. Her mom had done it and I thought she looked adorable and I wanted that haircut.

The friend wasn’t about to touch someone else’s kid and Mom said that that was not something she’d ever done.

I insisted she could. (She was Mom, she could do everything!)

She resisted.

She gave in because I was so sure I wanted this, she did the best she could–and I hated it. HATED it. All she did was make everything really short! (Well, duh, kid, she did not say, what do you think a pixie cut is. It probably helped that I was her fourth kid and she’d had serious teenager-mothering practice by then.)

Mom had been cutting my hair and my bangs all my life and I never let her touch it again and grew it out from there to two years of high school, scruffy bangs at the half-point and all. The back even reached my waist if you brushed the curls straight while it was wet–just don’t let go.

That house is twelve-year-old me staring back at me.

Well, hey, the baby is due October 31st. So a haunted house is just the thing. Right?

I was on the fourth floor of the satellite clinic, approaching the elevators. Beyond them the wall is a window, and a woman was over there standing staring out at the scene across the valley.

So I stepped forward a bit to catch a glimpse of whatever might be so interesting. And found myself staring, too.

She saw me and decided to turn away from it, enough. We got on an elevator together.

I hope you’re not having to go home that way, I told her, breaking the silence and acknowledging what we had just seen.

No, no, she said, sounding relieved, I’m going the other way.

I’m heading south, I told her. Should be okay.

But I was mentally charting reroutes, just in case. It should be far enough away. Hopefully.

The huge plumes of black smoke billowed over the freeway and the wind was carrying it southward, so once I got past it it seemed to follow all the way. The hills on the other side of the Bay became a faded-out gray/brown, almost hidden–but gradually, the smoke got lesser and lighter in color and I knew then that the firemen were on the job.

I had a pretty good guess as to just which business was on fire over by the Bay, and it was, and memory is that they got hit with a massive fine last time and I imagine they will be again. Our lungs deserve better.

I think maybe tomorrow I will just keep the car in the driveway and avoid all further excitement.

The monthly potluck.

Go around the room, Hank said, tell us a story of 1. how you met, and/or 2. something in history relating to your family.

I suddenly realized I never did know how a particular set of dear friends had found each other. I think they were living about two hours apart when they did.

She turned that part of the answer over to him, and what he said was, There was this conference. The usual tech stuff; she was representing her company, I, mine: and it suddenly came to me that in all the places in all of the universe to come it would never bring the two of us to the same place at the same time again. Ever. This was it.

Unless.

And he realized, having chatted with her awhile, how much he wanted it to.

Forty-two years. They are each other’s life, the universe, and everything.

One small corner of the sour cherry tree, making promises. You should see the rest of it!

A solid bit of progress on the baby blanket.

And…

A neighbor had a spot prepared and pots ready to go in–of some beautiful trees and an ornamental grass that is invasively free-seeding, something I’ve been fighting in my back yard and despairing over and that shreds your skin if you try to pull it out once it’s gotten bigger, but she couldn’t know that. It’s marketed as drought–resistant. I saw it as we were getting in the car for a grocery run.

On the way home my sweetie said something that turned into comparing Costco’s new employee who was clueless but trying to be helpful to the CVS employee who’d stood there arms folded smirking as she ran out the six minutes on the clock while a pharmacy customer begged, to tears, for her to just fill her prescription, knowing the place would be closed on the morrow. I later filed a complaint and so did the customer.

“She should have been fired,” he said, and he was certainly not wrong, but I was like, let’s change the subject. Living through that once was enough.

Got inside, started putting groceries away, and the freezer with the broken shelf erupted. When I tried to rescue everything, he came in the garage just at the wrong moment, oblivious, and got in the way by trying to hand me something else to add and did I want to take one of these new macarons out of the box first? They were good!

Just. (Steam, meet ears.) Wait.

Got that dealt with, came back in, and told him, I am in a crabby mood. I don’t know why I’m in a crabby mood, I don’t want to be in a crabby mood, but I am.

I will go hide in my room, he said mildly.

We had run out of almond flour. I needed it for what I wanted to make for a potluck tomorrow. That was one of the reasons for the Costco run, and once I had everything in place and done at last, I opened a bag and started the familiar pattern. A cube of boiled pureed organic seedless mandarins out of the freezer (not THAT shelf), two cups of almond flour, eggs, butter, plain yogurt, panella sugar (might as well use the last of it up), set out the blueberries, too…

When suddenly I heard the words spoken softly, but carefully just loud enough for me to hear, coming from down the hall:

“Sneak.”

(Wait what was that? Did he say?)

A little closer. “Sneak.”

(He DID say that. Where is he.)

“Sneak.” He scootched just around the corner into sight. “Sneak.”

(What ARE you doing.)

“Sneak.” And this time he reached in for what, when my parents did it back in the day we kids would grimace and tease, Ooh, mushy-gushy in the kitchen!

And I laughed and laughed and kissed him again and that was that.

The power was going to be down for eight hours today for system maintenance work at our end of the city, they warned us.

So we cooked our way through a bunch of stuff in the freezer and fridge this week. Remember the ice in the paper cup with a penny on top for checking how much your freezer has thawed out? Turns out ours held on better than I would have imagined–and that penny was very comforting. Highly recommended.

So. Got up. Made our morning hot cocoa, constantly checking the time. Yesterday’s blueberry/orange and pumpkin/chocolate muffins (use’em up, use’em up, make’em shelf stable bake bake bake) were ready.

Finally, 45 minutes late, the lights went out–with my phone immediately buzzing loudly that they were going to stay out those extra 45 minutes.

Its aging battery is good for about two hours of actual use and there would be no recharging today. No electronic distractions.

I am late to knowing about it, but a week ago someone mentioned Clara Parke‘s book “Vanishing Fleece” and my copy arrived yesterday.

My hands need frequent breaks these days and that book was just the thing to alternate sets of rows with.

Her description of the shop “A Verb for Keeping Warm” was so descriptive and so “Yes! That’s IT!” on my part. I had no idea she’d gone to college with the owner and I loved that she’d been there, too.

She lives in a town that a friend of mine from high school did for years and was a state representative from. You know I have to ask her if she knows… And my friend’s husband, who was the reporter/publisher/the everything of the town’s local paper before he died.

The baby afghan progressed. Amazing how much faster it goes when it’s 105 stitches fewer and no intarsia. The book got read cover to cover. Even after the power came back on at five hours.

To my fellow knitters? I came away with the thought, we’ve done more than we knew to help keep the last of American woolen mills alive. And we need to do a lot more.

When someone who needs to know someone knows, knows who needs someone who knows…

Jean’s daughter spoke in church today. Someone had left a glorious tulip arrangement at her door. Happy Mother’s Day? No note.

Later she saw an elderly neighbor, who said it was from her: she knew it was her first Mother’s Day without her mom and just wanted her to know she was thinking of her.

Somewhere in the conversation she mentioned how good it was to have her husband home.

? Why wouldn’t he be…?

The neighbor’s story spilled out of her.

They had, for all these many years, driven to Yosemite every year to renew their vows, so of course they went this year, too.

Her husband had decided to take a hike (and by the sound of it, it was one he knew well.) He would be back by–

–but he wasn’t.

Hours later, it was dark and there was still no sign of him. She notified the rangers. A search was begun.

He had lost the trail. He had fallen. He had hit his head and found himself in blood and confusion.

Some time in the morning after he went missing, a rescuer found the 88-year-old man, suffering hypothermia, and took off his own warm clothes and wrapped them around him. To guide him back to safety, he had the old man put his hands on the rescuer’s shoulders–and the rescuer then had had to walk backwards.

But they did it. He found him, he got him to safety, then to the nearest emergency room.

The elderly man insisted on renewing his vows with his wife back in Yosemite.

Then she drove him to the hospital here.

And now he is home.

He is still with her.

And she thought of how much Jean’s daughter would be missing her mom, and did something about it, and thereby gave herself permission to tell a kind, caring friend what the two of them had just gone through.

Knowing how much comfort Jean’s daughter would take in her beloved’s safety and recovery.

Someone was at church today whom I saw at the play last night but did not recognize.

I had no idea she was the granddaughter of one of the members whom we had all been asked to pray for a few years ago: she had been pregnant, then the pandemic began, then she found out she had stomach cancer.

It had not looked good.

Today is the first Sunday of the month, when in the Mormon Church people take turns coming up and addressing the congregation as the Spirit so moves them.

She stood.

She was so grateful for all those prayers, and for the ones she knew were to come because there had recently been some bad news again… And that was all she said about that.

The important part, she wanted us to know, is that our good works matter. Our love matters. It matters. Always. Never hesitate.

Later, during a Sunday School discussion, wanting her to know she was not alone on the human front as well as the heavenly, I described being in a hospital bed fifteen years ago too ill to do anything for myself much less anybody else and very very close to death.

Except: I was still me. If I had to go through this (and obviously I had no choice in the matter), then the one thing I could still do was I could pray for every single person who came into my hospital room.

And you can’t pray for someone, and mean it, without loving them.

One doctor confessed later that he’d written on my chart, Patient looks deceptively well. Do not be deceived. Because I was too cheerful.

I said, I knew that the doctors and staff in the hospital see people in their worst moments. If I could love every one of them, that could reverberate forward through all the years they serve there. It could help them to see the best in other patients in whatever circumstances the way I was doing with them, it could potentially ease the burdens on thousands and thousands of people.

The young mom was going, emphatically, YES! YES! You could see the relief in her face that someone got it, how she’d felt and dealt with her own experience a few years ago and that was rapidly coming at her again, someone knew, that what it had been like for her had been like that for me, too. And the result had been blessings. So many blessings. Oh the stories we both could have told each other.

I so loved her for her loving–everybody.

And renewed my prayers for Jordan. And her family, and her medical team. That much, I can do.

And it is no small thing.

We will all be telling the tale with a laugh for a whole long time to come.

We have in our ward a woman whose heart belongs to the theater. She’s been writing plays for the community since before I was born, often at the church with and for the kids.

But it had been a number of years. Colette is 91 now. The bishop asked her if she wanted to do a production again–and she was instantly the happiest I’ve seen her in a goodly while. She felt seen. She wanted the kids to feel seen. We’re on!

And so there were rehearsals every Tuesday for Jack in the Beanstalk. Two wards were involved, not just ours, over a hundred people got into it.

Tonight was showtime.

So: Jack lives in Texas. His mother is a witch, a sweet fairy godmother type, sparkles and all, but a fairly inept one. She tells him to sell their cow and go buy some magic beans so they can make their fortune.

Bull, he corrects her.

Right. Bull.

So off he goes, wandering through various story lines, including: Hawaii (we have a seriously good ukulele player in the ward, and watching one of the hula dancers I suddenly realized oh that’s right her mom grew up there), there was Mary Poppins and adorable little girls who about brought down the house, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat (which I think was included in honor of the late JoAnne K, who’d sewn that incredible coat years and years ago for one of those productions and which instantly delighted a whole lot of us adults who knew. Joseph was the tall teenage second-generation of these productions), there was New York City with little boys wearing Mickey Mouse ears and long narrow tails and throwing pizza boxes and chip bags in the air in great delight. Rats in NYC.)

And at long last a dance and a solo by a bunch of men in suits with briefcases playing Wall Street.

They had been searching. They needed a logo.

They saw Jack. He had a bull! That was it! That was perfect! Sell it to us!

No can do, says Jack: I promised my mom I would only sell it for a beanstalk.

WE CAN DO THAT! They exulted. Out came half a poster from offstage: Bean. We have an IPO and we can make you part of it! The rest of the poster came out, then another on the other side, spelling it out: LL Bean stock!