The mail came.

I’d wanted darkening gradations of the color mix I had in an out-of-print colorway and I could not have asked for better than what was in that package. I opened it in the moment of truth hoping hoping almost not daring to hope–and then stood there just staring: They. were. perfect. Thank you Alison in Australia!

Then in the evening we went to hear our niece’s husband playing in a band in a local park. He’s in the symphony but he also plays bluegrass for fun. This was the fiddle’s turn and those guys were good.

A kid put on a purple dinosaur costume that I hadn’t seen coming. He had to pull the clear chest part down a few times so he could see but eventually he got the hang of it.

A two-year-old girl with a big princess flower clip in her hair ran over to investigate this brand new thing in her life.

He pulled his head out from the opening just below the clear part to show her not to be afraid and waved hi.

Next thing you know he was back inside and they were dancing together to the music in wild abandon.

Oh! her face said. I stepped on its tail. Is that allowed?

Yes! Dance!

Yay! (Twirl.)

It was just the most adorable thing you could ever have hoped for.

So the phone line that AT&T is taking away in six weeks died again at the same hub across the neighborhood a week after they finally repaired it after waiting months but at least this time they sent someone out right away.

Who after some hours over there and over here said he thought he’d fixed it–but he’d turned it off at all but one room of the house, till Richard went out there with a test phone and helped walk him through what he’d unplugged and got everything restored by getting him to plug those over there back in like they’d been before he came. (No you are not going to be able to say it must be inside the house so the company can charge us for the visit because it never was.)

And then I had to take a second try at figuring out how to say what I had to say because there was so much that could go wrong. Yesterday’s rough draft? Edit edit edit.

There was a long long line at the post office for that registered letter I wanted to send.

IRS, huh? asked the guy to the whole crowd. Gee thanks dude.

Oh well, might as well now, so, Yeah, I told him, they hit us last year with a big fine over an account we have nothing to do with, we paid it, they went oh sorry our mistake and refunded the fine (they paid interest on it!) we thought that was all settled and they suddenly decided a year later that we owe it all over again.

We don’t. So, yeah. IRS.

I didn’t say, and they sent us a threatening letter months after the check had cleared last year, telling us to pay it a second time, and our protest of that is what got them to go oh wait and refund us.

Possibly because there are three people with the same name in the same town? Two on one street till last year. Redelivered their mail when I needed to but never did get to meet them.

On the way home there was a shiny new big and black gas-guzzler Ford 150 pickup with a bumper sticker that was–supposed to be funny? I mean, they certainly didn’t put their money where their mouth was? “I identify as a Tesla.”

Then why didn’t you buy one?

It was not a day for relaxing and knitting. But finally after dinner I made myself sit down with it.

And promptly knitted a purl row in knit stitches all the way across before I realized it.

I decided to fix it by dropping each stitch one at a time, flipping the yarn to the other side, picking it up, and knitting the next row right then and there. Easy, right, and progress, too!

Two hundred and twenty eight times. Don’t do that. It’s harder to keep the tension even, and with a splitty yarn knitted doubled on the purl ridge where it will show the most… An hour. Next time just tink back and start over.

Some days you just need to stop and go do something else.

I need some knitting to relax me from my knitting. Just not that one right now.

To which my helpful brain suddenly earworms Rick Nelson’s song written after performing at Madison Square Garden: “And if memories were all I sang? I’d rather drive a truck.”

So there I was, finishing up that fifth repeat before the distance between the waves starts to shrink going towards the shore, and I was remembering that time we went to the beach with my little brother and his wife. Pacific Grove. After a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The tide was out and there were large rocks strewn across that beach. Not much in the way of sand, just smaller stones everywhere. The kids started climbing up to play king of the mountain and they were having a good old time, so, hey, why not. We’d already cautioned each other about never turning your backs on the ocean and sneaker waves and all that, even if the water was a fair bit away.

So I climbed up on one, too. Above waist high as I remember. So did our visitors. We were all a little spread out.

Now, this is a really dumb thing to do when your sense of balance died in a car crash and there’s this ocean thing that means the visual ground isn’t holding still.

My sister-in-law took in the situation and quickly ditched her rock to climb up on the platform that mine made, and just barely in time–I suddenly in spite of myself started to pitch forward headfirst onto the rocks below and she grabbed me hard and fast and pulled me back to safety.

We took a deep breath and I thanked her as I got immediately off that rock, common sense reclaimed. I was and will forever be grateful to her.

Stitch after stitch after stitch… What would make this more interesting and more of a memory…

That day at the beach!

I started thinking how I could add rocks. With yarn overs? Add stitches, since lace expands and crossed stitches contract, then cable them? I tried to visualize possibilities.

If you make like a honeycomb cable, only bigger, so that you have three or five stitches in the center at the widest part, you could with that center do a yarnover-p2sso-yo. It would be a depression within the cable-raised circle with a focal point at the center. You could have another bit of Old Shale bumping up against it with the k2togs split and the purl ridges sweeping around the outer edges. I’ll have to try it out.

I might not have perfected rocks yet but I just figured out how to knit tide pools by texture rather than color and I am inordinately pleased with myself.

I booked the appointment.

I said to the cardiologist today, I don’t know if I’m over reacting, under reacting, or just fine. But I found myself struggling hard enough for breath at Costco last Friday that a random stranger stopped and asked if I was okay and if he could help? (ie, he was clearly debating whether to call 911 anyway when I smiled and said I was fine.)

The nurse took my blood pressure. I’ve taken a med for 25 years to raise it but it does still tend to run a bit low.

The doctor did his careful history and exam.

An initial reading of 80/32 had left the nurse freaked out so she’d done it again with a different cuff and it had come out more normal and she’d blamed the first one.

The doctor made it clear to me that there was nothing wrong with that cuff.

I have been prescribed more salt in my diet. (Again.) There are other things they can do but that’s the easiest. He also said, Next time, put your head down to the level of your heart: that alone can raise your blood pressure 30 points.

Will do.

—

Peregrine fledglings video here. One did a Whoops! and got rescued.

Seven sons and a dad who could fix anything. One said, Dad never took the car to a mechanic and so now neither have I, and described starting out sitting on a chair handing tools over as directed, to actually helping his dad do the task, to, many years later, his dad sitting on a chair holding the tools and handing them over and doing the watching.

Their dad was a friend to every human being he ever laid eyes on. He told bad dad jokes to embarrass his kids, because that’s a dad’s job. To anybody. His ice breaker question was, What kind of music do you play?

George was an electrical engineer and a tinkerer. One of the sons called out my husband on the time he and his dad were shopping electronics parts and ran into him. We were all nerding out, he said.

When one kid described his dad taking the dashboard apart on his car to hunt down an electrical short and the adventure that took them on (they did get it fixed), I quietly laughed: my husband did the same thing back in the day, only in his case he couldn’t quite claim the same success. He got the turn signal working again–except that the inside lever and the outside signal were now switched, so you had to remember that signaling left was actually signaling right. He was not going to go through all that again just for that: up lever or down. You know, you do. Good times.

As a boy George started off with piano and quickly went to fiddle and guitar. Loved him some high brow, loved him some bluegrass. Went to every music festival he could. One of his kids described his own friends in high school going, What are you *listening* to! to then deciding, since he kept playing it, that they liked it.

That kid plays professionally now and he described meeting one of his bluegrass heroes.

The man looked at him and exclaimed, You’re George’s kid?!

He took off his battered hat, threw it into the dust, stomped it with his foot, picked it back up, put it on his head and said, Kid? You’re alright.

While the young man (with his own signature suede hat with a feather) watching this, thought, What just happened here??

George is the friend who’d been checked into the hospital just before Richard got checked out. In the months since, nobody was completely sure he was still in there very much but they all came to see him and they say the hearing is the thing that stays when all else goes.

So they played the music they’d jammed with their dad so many many times. They kept him and their mom company. They strummed those strings. They sang. They talked to him. They brought their kids.

One of them was singing to his dad and playing his own instrument when, he told us, I don’t know. Telepathy? He just felt like he needed to put it down and play his dad’s favorite guitar. So he did.

His dad’s breathing relaxed and slowed down. Slower. And then quietly, with love, he slipped away from them. He was just shy of 84.

A friend’s funeral is tomorrow, and there were so many people in town today whom I hadn’t seen in years. Kids I saw grow up who now have their own kids going off to college, or in some cases, kindergarten. Hugs and catchings-ups and grief and love. George with his music would have loved that we’re doing an encore in his name in the morning.

And then we bugged out of there to go hold the baby and see Richard’s sister, who had flown in to see the new little one and be yet another surrogate grandparent for what time we have together.

She was about three. She had had enough and decided to say so. She opened her mouth comically wide to give it the best wail she had–

–when some random white-haired lady tried to offer a finger puppet to her mom. The distraction totally stopped her.

The mom wanted it, she almost let me give it to her, but she wasn’t sure she understood what the expected transaction was going to be here no matter what I said and decided no, with a smile. She didn’t have to say, Besides–my kid’s being good now. She appreciated the offer. We parted with a smile.

Then in that same aisle at Costco I tried to reach something my husband wanted. It was stacked in the refrigeration unit so tightly that it wouldn’t come out and so high at the top that after several tries I thought, oh well, and started to turn away.

Just then a man who’d watched the whole finger puppet thing stepped up and offered to get that down for me. And did. I thanked him, and every time we passed each other after that we gave each other the biggest smile. Thank you for your kindness.

Past the nuts, past the bread…

A grandma was being delighted by her little granddaughter in her cart. The two of them said, Thank you! together and with that, they redeemed that same finger puppet with its curly antlers and big eyes that wanted to look into a child’s and be her friend.

—

I owe you a better picture. Here you go.

What we have here is a fine case of what the right would yell socialism at us for. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So: I typed out a note to the city public works department and said, My understanding is that Bradford pears usually live 15-25 years. Mine was planted in 1987. As far as I can tell, it’s got a bad case of fire blight and that fire blight has started infecting my other trees.

I asked them what my choices would be if they chose to replace it.

I sent that off Saturday night. Monday morning comes a response (including an apology that no, they don’t use fruit trees as street trees. Well, no, I didn’t really expect they’d want plums plopping on the sidewalk nor cherry pits under the tires but it was worth trying.)

Half an hour later they were at the door to inspect it and to plan what to do.

The guy thinks it can be saved. That will mean chopping away maybe even half of it and hoping the rest makes a comeback; there are bird nests up there, it’s been a beautiful tree, as he looked up fondly into it. Clearly he loves his trees.

There is no curing fire blight; there is only cutting it out. Maybe, just maybe, that will be enough.

He left and I thought, we are so lucky.

Gas, water, electricity, sewer, garbage–the city owns those, too. No fighting the endlessly manslaughtering PG&E, you just (remember this one?) call city hall. They’re right on it.

Because their city hall bosses will get voted out of office if they don’t, the council members know it, they have incentive to treat people well, and by and large our people take pride in serving and being a part of the community. That’s the one good thing about PG&E: everybody who doesn’t have to deal with them is so grateful to have the good guys on our side.

The pipeline that blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno? Which runs for miles including a block from our house? The state required PG&E to inspect every inch of it. They ripped up the street here. They cut corners. They broke the law again. They had to come back and do it again, with a temporary gas line laid out on top of the road next to traffic. That was fun.

It is so much nicer to have people that answer to us and all the better, who don’t mind at all that they do. Who take pride and who value that they get to do their job well.

One of my semi-guilty pleasures is the New York Times Spelling Bee, a variant on the old Boggle game except that it requires that every word use the middle letter of the seven. Any letter, any direction, any number of times. Given that my TBI messes with word retrieval, I figure it’s a good brain exercise.

Suggest a word, the site helpfully offers in the how-to section.

Oh honey you better believe it. Their dictionary is…limited. I started keeping a list of rejected perfectly good words and finally told them, I can tell your guy’s not a fiber artist. You don’t get felt without having fulled the wool.

And yet. I’ll occasionally randomly type and watch the screen cheer at–what the heck was that? (Grabbing my hardback Merriam Webster.) A skateboarding term? Who knew? A term for a jet with three engines?

There seems to be a cross-cultural divide here.

Doesn’t stop me, though.

Back in the day, the elementary school let out twenty minutes earlier for the little kids than the big kids; there were no school buses after Proposition 13 passed and they wanted to stagger the parent pick-up times a bit.

I had both for awhile there. So I would come for the first set and wait for the second. I was The Lady Who Knits, adding a bit of adult supervision to the playground.

My youngest graduated from high school twenty years ago.

I was at the eye doctor this afternoon. It took me a moment. It was a jolt to see the years in another parent’s face and halting walk.

You wait, they call you, they measure your eyes and send you back out, you wait, they call you back, they dilate and at last you see the doctor. So there was a lot of coming and going on repeat in the waiting room.

On the last of her returns before I was done I managed to catch her eye and smile–and to see her face go, Oh wait. I think I do know you.

She came over, nodded at the lace cowl on my needles and referring to both it and where we were, said, simply, I bet you could do that with your eyes closed.

I laughed. I said I could. (I’d been knitting a fair bit of it without looking at it.)

She walked back to her seat halfway across the room before I could reintroduce myself, and that was fine.

If she does figure out where she knows me from it’s definitely the knitting that will clinch it for her.

—

Edited to add: the banding video. Could you put your legs over that wall and let go? I most assuredly could not. The ledge that they’re rappelling down to is 18 stories up.

Shower taken, hair still wet, no hearing aids in yet, didn’t hear the bell.

I was standing in my kitchen at 8 a.m. when some random strange man walked past just outside the slider ten feet away, wearing a backpack with orange warning stripes and some kind of uniform and looking official as he was about to open the gate and leave our backyard.

In my astonishment I simply stood there and mouthed a bemused, Who? Are? You?

He laughed, bless him.

Turns out he was the AT&T lineman. They actually still exist, and we had been complaining for some time that ours was down. They just don’t seem to have a lot of people left who do that work but they were still good at charging us for it.

Wait, nope. They’re refunding us three months. Good.

Landlines carry more frequencies of speech than cellphones do so they’re easier for impaired ears to hear on.

Or were, but these hearing aids BlueTooth directly from my Iphone 16 and give as good as I’m going to get.

But the landline stays on when the power goes out, and there’s something to be said for not having to use up the juice on your connection to the outside world in an earthquake.

I cannot tell you how good it felt to hear the phone ring and to have it not be dead when I picked it up to answer.

—

A side note: yesterday the peregrine eyasses stumbled out of their nest box for the first time. Today was banding day and there will be video posted of when the parents were going at the researchers and these babies got the first radio transmitters with their leg bands. For the first time in all these years the count was: four males!

They decided to do something a little different for today: so they asked ten people to give two-minute talks on Mother’s Day.

I was second to last. I didn’t mention all the national parks, I didn’t reference Simon and Garfunkel’s “We’ve all gone to look for America,” I kept it short.

I said, When I was ten my family drove from Maryland to Wisconsin, where we rode a boat up the Wisconsin lakes, to the Peace Bridge, across western Canada, then down the West Coast, to Texas, into Juarez, Mexico, and home. Six kids and a camping trailer. Two months on the road. Mom spent it knitting my sister a sweater and I wanted one like that and I would study her hands. She taught me how to knit on that trip.

I said that my brother as an adult had told Mom he didn’t think he could ever have the patience she had to raise a future family like that.

Mom answered in astonishment, How do you think I learned it?!

I said, If you wanted any help, if you needed something done, if you needed a kind word, my mom was–is, at 95–the one to do it. I want to be like my mom when I grow up.

A friend told me afterwards that the two little girls sitting behind her, sisters, had protested in unison out loud in outrage: “But she IS a grownup!”

Like, She KNOWS that, doesn’t she?!!!

Often when I’m coming out of the pharmacy I see the same guy on the corner where I have to do a U-turn standing at the center divider holding up his sign, his pup quietly at his feet: I would guess a veteran, maybe 30. By now he recognizes me and I him and I give him a smile and a small nod if he wants to make eye contact. (My car door is always locked.)

Today while I waited for the light to change I found myself going through my purse.

I rolled down the window, batting away the sense of vulnerability to it. Aging has its privileges.

“I only have crackers,” I told him, wishing not for the first time that I had the packaged shelf-stable meals I used to keep in the car against emergencies that I don’t think are on the market anymore. Surely there’s a good replacement out there–but I’d have to look for one to know. And I’d have to remember to put it in the car where I can reach it without having to get out of my seat.

A small package of BelVita oatmeal cookies, or, as the package says, ‘breakfast biscuits.’ It wasn’t much but it was something.

He thanked me with a warmth I hadn’t seen in his face before. Suddenly the little bit of human connection that was really what I was trying to offer became what he, to my surprise, all the more gave to me.

This afternoon we got the text we weren’t expecting quite yet and I quickly assessed: no, it wouldn’t do. I changed my clothes because only the softest cashmere would do against her sweet face, should it be that I might get to hold her.

We both got to.

We visited for about an hour, not wanting to wear our niece out, telling her and her husband stories from when she was born that she hadn’t known and there was no longer anyone else who could tell her. How she’d slept so well vs my newborn who didn’t. Eight hours.

We reminisced over how, when Richard and I had just started going out, he was two hours late for a date and I was thinking I had just been stood up for the first time in my life–but by him of all people?! What was going on?

My doorbell finally rang. He had been at her folks’ house an hour away and her dad had been woefully late giving him a lift home.  He knew this was not good. So to keep me from getting mad he’d done a master move:

He’d borrowed a baby.

I opened my door and there was this 6’8″er while I was still trying to get used to that and he had a small baby over his shoulder and my immediate instinctive reaction was to think, What is that baby doing so far off the ground?!

Which made no sense and has been a joke between us ever since.

That of course, I told her, was your big brother.

So many stories this new family will make of their own.

At the sound of it, I am just not that adventuresome. And yet if you put some in front of me, most likely life and being a good example to my grandkids of being unafraid of something new would require that I gamely give it a try.

Maybe.

In a NY Times article called “13 Dishes You Should Eat to Understand Food,” the first thing mentioned is Rommegrot.

Sour cream porridge with smoked reindeer heart.

…Say what now?

Can you just hear my Swedish ancestors laughing and going, C’monnn, you can do it!

I’m picturing those reindeer we met on a farm in Palmer, Alaska, gently eating little bits of dry reindeer chow out of our hands (reindeer are surprisingly small.) The guide told us to be careful not to touch their antlers, because the soft velvet stage while they grow out caused, as a matter of protection to the animal, a great deal of pain if you did. Once the antlers were fully grown and hardened and much less vulnerable to damage and no longer full of blood they could lose, then they were fine.

They were gentle and trusting and happy to be fed.

On a cool day after we got home from our trip, I put on a sweater–and felt something in the pocket.

A single small piece of reindeer kibble had fallen in and followed me home.

Eat their hearts? But they’ve won mine.