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!

Four falcon chicks now, getting dinner this evening. They’ve grown visibly since the last one hatched twenty-four hours prior.

I think the rest of this weird day is requiring a Thumper’s Admonition–but we got one business entity’s screwup hopefully fixed and the other figured out and about to be. But it took a lot of time.

At least I got some cowl knitting done while on hold.

Well that was a surprise, as I looked up and saw the worker. Had no idea that was going in.

And then the double take: how did they do that without there being any hammering sounds? And it’s not just me, Richard didn’t hear any either. Curious.

“Ginny?!”

She stopped in her tracks and exclaimed, “I thought that was you!” as we threw our arms around each other.

I was at the clinic for my follow-up to see if they needed to do retina surgery yet.

That department has always been busy in the extreme when I’ve been there, with an employee lounge turned into an overflow waiting room, but at that particular moment there was a single person in the original waiting room and the receptionists were waiting for anyone to show up. One of them called over to me with a smile, Name? Birthdate? so she could check me in without interrupting the joy any longer than necessary; it was putting a smile on her face, too.

We caught up a little bit and then they called Ginny back.

Since I wouldn’t be interrupting any other patients, I turned to that receptionist and explained, My kids are 36, 38, 40, and 42 this spring, and she was the kindergarten teacher to all of them.

Kindergarten! Wow!

I waited my own turn, sitting there remembering the time I’d attended the funeral of our favorite fifth grade teacher, gone far too soon. Ginny had been there. At one point after the service, a 6’9″ young man was helping the family move a tall easel covered in flowers to where they wanted it for their luncheon, and he spotted us talking and came our way with it.

“Alison,” Ginny said, “You need to step out of this man’s way.”

“Ginny,” I said–“That’s my son Richard. He’s coming to say hi to you!”

“OHMYGOSH! Ohmygosh, he’s not little anymore, is he!”

I wished we’d had more time. I always wish for more time when I’m with her. Soon enough they called my name. Did some tests, dilated my eyes, talked to the doctor and the med student tagging him for the day, came back out, and once again as I approached the desk, needing to schedule the next followup, she was coming out, too.

This time we had about fifteen minutes to ourselves. It was glorious. And you know a retired kindergarten teacher would love hand knit finger puppets and she did.

Both her kids had had twins, all four grands were born the same year, college is coming up in a couple of years, and everything is all at once for everybody. She asked after mine.

She had retired, then she had subbed, then covid, then–

–Parkinson’s, and she couldn’t risk falls around the little kids now.

“Oh I’m sorry!”

“Yeah,” as she looked me in the eyes, “I am, too.”

But she knew I knew about living with…stuff, health wise, and I think it helped to be able to talk about it to someone who simply understood and that you just go on with what you have the best you can.

She had put those finger puppets on and she kept them on and we laughed about flamingoes in her lawn and they were still on as they called her back to finish her appointment; we said our goodbyes.

Her one kid who lives a plane ride away is coming with her family next week, the other is nearby. There will be a grand time and Ginny will be surrounded by love and by teenagers, who are such interesting people to talk to, always.

This was our teacher who’d built a little enclosure with hanging beads, ’60’s hippy style, with the monarch butterflies inside it that she had had her students raise. If a kid was getting angry and full of feelings he didn’t know how to deal with, he got a few minutes to calm himself in the butterfly room.

Where the rule was you had to be absolutely still so as not to scare nor injure these delicate, beautiful creatures the kids had put their hearts into seeing coming to be.

The orange and black monarchs would peacefully land on their shoulders or head or arms or everywhere, wings gently folding and unfolding.

It was Ginny’s cure for Nature Deficit Disorder.

Oh, and I got to tell her when I came out: they told me things looked better than they’d expected and for now I don’t need to do surgery.

Because I knew that when you’ve struggling with a new diagnosis, when hope seems a difficult thing, borrowing a piece of someone else’s helps.

We were given the honor of being invited to our neighbor’s senior piano recital, to be held at a lovely old church.

We surprised them when we said we knew the place well: our son had had his organ recital there. The acoustics in that building are amazing.

The daughter, heading off to college in the fall, plans to minor in music.

Not only was she a joy to listen to, but her every movement conveyed the sense of what the composer was trying to offer to the world. She is *good*.

We told them our son had minored in organ performance and had played the Mormon Tabernacle Organ for his final.

It felt like passing the baton to the next generation and saying, You’ve got this.

I caught the rabbit nibbling on my sour cherry blossoms.

Then for several days it avoided this strange new thing.

Today, not so much. And it kept going back in there! Hawkproofing, what’s not to love, right?

Meantime, I had this moment of, hey, that’s it: the infamous white beam! And the gray grooved interior wall in the living room! Ours was exactly like that, only a fair bit darker of a shade in a shaded room, terribly depressing, the only thing I really didn’t like about this house. It took us six years to get rid of it and it may be why I dislike gray on walls so much. Our contractor nailed wallboard over ours, but anyway, here’s a listing that takes me straight back to when we first walked in the door here. Same builder, same floor plan. This one has not been changed much.

Picture number 18. See that white beam connecting the refrigerator side to the oven side?

Eileen, DIL of the then-owners, was in the kitchen, phone in hand, as we and the realtor came in. She saw Richard’s forehead matching up with that board and said to the person on the other end, Oh, THESE people aren’t going to buy this house!

What she also knew was that the master shower had been remodeled to be short enough for her Japanese in-laws. The shower head hit him near bellybutton level, and the stall was small enough that he couldn’t fit in it to kneel down under it.

Within a day or two we had a telescoping shower head. Later, the stall became part of the hallway to the new master bedroom and that beam in the kitchen was the first thing the remodeler took away.

So it was kind of fun to explore our pre-remodel house in those pictures without having to actually live in it again.

Our parents were three thousand miles away, her kids were off at college, and Alma became our kids’ surrogate grandma when we moved in.

When our youngest was born a year later, she was insistent that she was going to come take care of the kids whatever time of day or night it might be while we went to the hospital, so at 10:30 pm that Sunday when I said I was two minutes apart she came right on over.

As I told her daughter today, we have been grateful all these years that we so lucked out on who we got to have as neighbors.

Richard hurried home around 2:30 a.m. to thank her and relieve her, bearing the news that we now had two girls and two boys.

About 8:00 a.m. she was ringing the doorbell to come take care of the kids again so he could go off to work.

Going to work that day had not occurred to him. Nor his boss. He had been going to sleep in a bit but who was he to argue with someone being so kind–and he could see that from her generation, that’s just what you do, and so he dutifully got out the door and went off to work for a few hours.

He never told her he went and found a cot there and snoozed under his desk for a bit.

Alma and Jim had a big, old plum tree and freely shared of their harvest. (My kids would later plant me my own Santa Rosa tree as a Mother’s Day surprise.)

One year there was enough that I made a batch of jam and gave them two jars.

Jim thought this was great!

And so I ended up coming back to their door with I think it was four more jars, which is how Alma found out that his eyes had lit up at the first two and he’d gone back out to the tree and when she wasn’t looking he’d shown up on my doorstep with forty more pounds of plums. Forty. He’d slightly staggered coming up my walkway with that big bag. And you know they had to be processed quickly because the ones on the bottom all nice and ripe like that were definitely going squish under there.

Not that I said any of that out loud but she instantly knew.

JIM!

The two of us laughed and then she did too but somehow they never gave me quite that many again even if it was fine with me.

The last few pounds were pureed with lemon juice and thrown in the freezer, but I did it, I got them all done.

There was the time I walked next door a moment with toddler #2 in tow, and when Alma opened the door he promptly chatterboxed her ear off.

She listened in amazement, and then turned to me and said, He really does talk when his big sister isn’t there!

Jim’s beekeeping. The hive that swarmed and were every bit as peaceful as I’d heard described. They were in a cloud just above and next to my mango tree by the fence line. I surprised myself at suddenly wanting to inspect its flowers just then and they all but invited me to come join them in their life dance in the air. I suddenly understood why people would keep bees, and I will forever be grateful for an experience I can only describe as glorious. I would never have known.

So many years of good memories.

Jim passed a few years ago at 86.

Last night, just after I posted here, I got a note from their daughter: her mother had quietly passed away. She had been so fortunate to be there with her when she did. She knew I would want to know.

I knew the day was coming but the reality is that I cannot fathom not having Alma and all her love and shared memories right next door.

We exchanged messages and love and then by light of day today threw our arms around each other.

She travels home tomorrow and I will so much miss her, too. She and her brother are so much like their mom and dad. The best.

In photos and stories a couple dear to us gave a presentation tonight on what it was like to be the volunteer presidents of a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in central Africa these past three and a half years, arriving just as Covid was starting up. They already spoke French, and with the legacy of French colonialism there they were able to fit in pretty quickly linguistically.

They told stories of wonderful people. So kind. So generous.

You could not get medical treatment unless you paid in advance. They had a missionary who was in a motorcycle accident and found him in the hospital: in that country where almost everybody had almost nothing, someone had found him, brought him in, and had paid for his care, which surely would have been a serious financial struggle to do. They did not know who.

They told how they realized that they could make a huge difference in the lives of the African-born missionaries serving under them by getting them lessons in speaking English: those who did, their earning potential went up by 30-60% after their missions. The need for education was so great. School was only for those rich enough to pay for it.

And so they set up daily online English sessions. With the Church’s help, they added college courses as well. You might not have a bachelor’s yet, you might not have an associate degree yet, but if you had a certificate verifying that you had finished a course in (name that subject) you were already way ahead in the job market.

But the human brain being what it is, the story that will probably stay with me a long time is of how when they had to drive between the two cities, there was no rule of law out on the road. But there were plenty of people who saw white people who had a car and thought $$$ and they would stop them, pretend to be cops, and demand a bribe in order to be allowed to continue.

It is illegal for a US citizen to pay a bribe. Period. Not that they would anyway because all it does is make it worse the next time.

So Todd would just talk to them, being his sweetest self, actually caring about them personally, hail-fell0w-well-met, determined to live this religion of brotherly love he believed in, till they gave up and waved them on by.

There was one time when that did not work. The men were determined and working themselves up into serious anger despite his best efforts at deescalation. In our friends’ most intense moment of silent praying, suddenly some random guy they’d never laid eyes on before rushed to the scene going, Hey! Leave those guys alone, they’re my friends!

And they did!

On the return home there was no one and their path was clear.

And on their return home to the US he just got offered a job to help expand that BYU Pathways program to more areas like that. Education, education, education.

We were enjoying some old rock classics after dinner; I was finishing off the last of the blue on the afghan, there was the occasional comment back and forth, we were enjoying each other’s company on this fine spring evening.

And then Black Magic Woman came on.

That one always, always, I said, takes me back to that guy at the Stanford clinic in Redwood City.

He raised an eyebrow in question.

I was working on Mathias’s baby afghan, I told him, the one in the pattern with circles surrounded by contrasting colors and then more contrast at each edge: all those balls of yarn hanging down. I was well into it and it covered my feet. You were having some testing done that was going to take a long enough time for me to declare that one a portable project for the day because I really wanted to get it finished.

Just before you came out there was a guy being wheeled past me by a couple of family members and he had them stop a moment. Right in front of me.

He made a point of looking, really looking, over the expanse of afghan, the needles in my hands, and then up to my eyes, which he held in his for several heartbeats.

And then again with slow deliberate motion to make sure I understood how he much he meant this, he raised his whole arm in an emphatic thumbs-up with an exclamation point at the end, nodding.

Then he glanced over his shoulder at his family affirming that it was okay to move on now and they did.

It was one of the great compliments of my knitting life and I will never forget it.

And the guy was, if not actually, then a dead ringer for Carlos Santana.

Richard considered that a moment.

“Well he does live around here.”