I got the large wide flat boxes from my Dad maneuvered between the wheels and out from under the bed and was trying, including using a broom handle, to reach all the stuff that had fallen between the headboard and the mattress.

Note that a startup company a few miles away, years ago, decided to make a competitor to the then-popular Palm Pilot with more features, like a camera–and decided at the last second that it might have an even bigger market if they added a phone. Rumor is that they almost didn’t but smarter heads prevailed. There was an early version of text messaging.

And that is how the Sidekick came to be. All the cool people in Hollywood had one, all the tech nerds wrote about it. Not that that’s something I would normally know or care about in the slightest, and not that I normally aspired to own the latest electronics. But Richard’s co-worker camped out in front of the store to get one of the very first ones to be sold, showed it off at work, and then my hubby went straight there at 5:00 pm to buy one, too.

The moment he showed it to me I said, And did you get two? Because this is a deaf person’s phone and I need it more than you do.

It was extra cool that the young handsome face on the box clearly living the happy life with this perfect new gadget just waiting for you inside! happened to be our daughter’s high school classmate. Hey, I didn’t know Dan modeled! (Probably his mom worked there, and she knows a good-looking kid when she sees one.)

Richard went back.

And that is how the smartphone craze got started: a company called, don’t ask me why, Danger.

Can I…reach that… I snagged it!

Out it came from under the head of the bed.

An empty box for a Palm Travel Kit. Had a charging cord and everything, it said!

I stared at the thing, trying to grok it. That’s like a leash to go take my pet dodo bird for a walk.

She called this afternoon. Could we come pick up our car?

Blink. No almost-three-week wait this time? Sure!

The rental people had said I could leave the car there and they’d get it; Richard was talking to them while I was hurrying off to get ours.

I paid the deductible, but they were closing early because that was their last task of the day, and I asked, “How do I get the key back to Enterprise?”

“You give it to me,” said a by-now familiar voice as he walked in behind me.

I joked to her, “I’ll see you next week,” and she, knowing what we’d gone through twice now, half-joked, “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

They hadn’t gotten back to me and they’re usually really good about that, so about noon I finally called.

The agency receptionist asked whom I’d been referred to yesterday?

She hesitated. Did I want to just call Hartford’s claims directly? She’d be happy to connect me.

Something about it made me wonder if the problem was my insurance agent maybe battling covid and her not wanting to say.

I found myself talking to a very helpful person at Hartford, who then stayed on the line while she connected me to the repair shop when their side kept breaking up to make sure I got the information right.

The same repair shop, same tow truck.

The same guy at Enterprise picked me up, and when I asked if the same Rav4 was available, said it was if I didn’t mind waiting a bit but it was just then being washed from the previous customer; did I want to come inside?

Where there was a seat and no sun. Absolutely, thanks.

I opened my purse–and suddenly remembered I’d taken my carry-around project out for a Zoom Knittalk meeting and had forgotten to put it back in.

He totally got why I was unzipping that purse and asked me what I was knitting now.

That took me by surprise and it made my day. He was just waiting for it, watching what he could of my face as he asked, hoping it would.

I laughed at the ziplock-free state of the thing and said, Well, I guess I’ll just have to read my phone like everybody else.

Which made him laugh.

Which was a wonderful thing.

We all matter so much more to each other in these days of isolation and I find that so often now, we’re less afraid to show it.

Just like that, the car was already ready before I could even type in the password and I was on my way in that same dark blue car again.

My next door neighbor told me he heard that sound and groaned, “Oh no!”

A different cop came.

The insurance agent, like last time, didn’t get back to me today so there was no rental car yet and the med that I’d gotten in the car to go pick up had to be picked up, so Richard walked the mile and a quarter to the pharmacy on the grounds of needing the exercise, then grabbed an Uber home.

Clearly we’re going to be driving a rental car again for however long it takes this time to get the catalytic converter part in stock.

And so we’re putting off the new driveway, again, because you can’t risk getting that stuff on the rental. Nor can you get it on the new mattress, and that hasn’t arrived yet, so delay delay and delay some more, with apologies to the contractor.

So this is fun.

My friend Tony was talking about the skunk at his house. I invited it to come live under my car.

Thank you all, no pain last night and a much more productive day. I couldn’t get all the bags into the two recycling bins and the trash can; some will have to wait till next week’s pickup.

But the business card for the guy who worked at the long-gone Netscape? Boy did it bring back memories. Phil Karlton, one of their original engineers and an old friend, who wore a scruffy beard, a red and black plaid lumberjack shirt and a brilliant pink tutu to the Halloween party and was so fun with our kids. His wife’s paintings. Her post-polio syndrome.

The newspaper headlines in the 90’s about the first online funeral notice. The standing-room-only service for Phil and his wife Jan, who’d been on vacation in Italy driving down a road that had no stop sign nor marking that a highway was about to cross it. The loaded gravel truck doing 60 that broadsided them.

All the people across Silicon Valley who showed up in support of their suddenly-orphaned young-adult son.

The town in Italy that put up a memorial and the stop sign the townsfolk had long wanted.

The boss who paid for the son to go see where his folks had died, providing everything so he wouldn’t have to worry about the details, the gratitude of everybody for the humanity shown him; he was the son of all of us in those moments.

The business card, these decades later, of the mutual friend of my husband and Phil. I understood why it was still here.

I remembered, I considered, I hoped the son has had a good life since all those people came together for him at that beautiful Unitarian church and silently wished him all the best.

And then I let the piece of paper go.

Every now and then my lupus reminds me it’s still there and I still have to stay out of the sun. 2:17 a.m., woke up with pleuritis sharp enough that lying on my side felt like it was breaking my ribs. Same on the other side. Man, I reminisced silently into the dark, this used to be my normal life for months at a time and how did I even deal with that but it’s been years and hasn’t it been nice.

(So why is it doing it now. Yes I overdid it to exhaustion Saturday. So what. Stop it.)

Isn’t it nice that being on my back is okay? Except that there was no falling asleep that way, and any time I started to I rolled onto my side and Groundhog Day-ed the scene.

The sun came up.

The best thing about today was that it will have gotten me through to tomorrow, where I’ll get more done. And my lungs almost didn’t hurt at all.

It took me a moment to recognize it.

I think. I think. That was Lorna’s. It’s been so long, and I have visual memory damage.

I have rightly or wrongly always semi-blamed Noni juice for her loss, because it was popular at the time, she took supplements, and the FDA later posted a warning on their website (I have no idea if it’s still there) that it can trigger autoimmune liver disease.

Lorna was in a knitting group of mine and this was about twenty-five years ago. She found out she had autoimmune liver disease right after she found out she had cancer, and the one meant the other could not be treated–one round of chemo nearly did her in right there and there would not be a second one. She couldn’t process it. She was going fast, and she knew it.

I visited her in the hospital, knowing it would be the last time I saw her. She told me she wanted me to have some of her yarn, some good yarn.

I promised her I would make something beautiful out of it and remember her by it.

That meant the world to her, and there a few tears on both sides.

All of us had promised her we would knit at her funeral. She liked that idea.

And we came. It was a lovely old chapel, full of old and well-turned wood and windows reaching to the sky; I can see why she felt at home there.

I leaned over to Nancy before the service began and whispered, “I’ve got my knitting in my purse.” She smiled back in recognition, “I do, too.” Another friend later said hers was in her car but she hadn’t quite been able to make herself bring it in.

We didn’t knit during the funeral itself except in spirit, but we could have, and it was enough.

Lorna had never married, and her mom called Nancy and asked for people to come get her yarn stash and help her clear it out.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t make that one on short notice but the others saved some for me.

Leftover amounts. Scratchy wools. I have no idea what her stash had been like so it was what it was. There was the longest swatch I ever saw, where she’d tried out stitch after stitch, and that was pretty cool but it wasn’t something you could do anything with and there was no more of that handspun anyway.

And there was the front of a cotton sweater. (Photo taken pre-washing.)

I could be wrong, but I remember that as coming from her. It was still in the purple Lisa Souza bag Nancy had given it to me in.

I’m a fair bit smaller than Lorna was and don’t love knitting cotton but it was beautifully done in a gansey pattern.

In a shade of beige I didn’t wear.

I couldn’t rip all that work out and I couldn’t go forward knitting it for nobody and I’d made that promise and it was my one hope, if any. And so it got put away, till it was so away that it was long forgotten.

I came across it today. I remembered that purple bag but I didn’t remember what was in it. I opened it up.

It sank in.

I stopped right there mid-cleaning project, carried it out to the family room, looked at the stitches and yeah, that’d be about a 4mm needle, sat down with it and ripped out those rows of decreasing for the top.

And then with that now-wiggly squiggly loose yarn I cast it off straight across.

And then I worked in the ends, noting that Lorna had ended one skein just above the ribbing right in the middle of the row with a knot at the back and after that she’d changed skeins at the side edges so as not to do that again to it.

And then I ran it through my washer and dryer, where the loosely and unevenly spun cotton shrank into a thicker, tighter fabric. It was marvelous. The gansey purls stood out more and it was so soft. The ribbing still didn’t pull in at the bottom much at all–it’s cotton–and the sides were all pretty much straight.

And then I hung my new smooshy-thick soft oversized dishtowel on the upper oven handle, folded in half. (The amaryllis towels that Holly embroidered for me circulate on the lower oven to help them stay pristine.) This one is going to be a workhorse.

It’s absolutely gorgeous there, and a statement of knitting sisterhood. It’s so inviting: Touch me! Feel this!

I have no idea why I let that cotton or color defeat me for so very long and why I didn’t do this sooner, but I did it, I finally finally did, I made something beautiful from what Lorna gave me even if she’s the one who really did it. It didn’t have to be a sweater, it could be its own thing and now it is.

And I remember her by it.

Just like I’d promised.

And I absolutely love it.

Somebody is eleven months old today and cannot wait to be able to take the next step.

I forgot to ask the car repair shop my Prius got towed to to inscribe the car’s VIN on the new catalytic converter. I would have thought there was no real purpose; there was no way it would ever be found, much less returned, should this one end up stolen, too.

Apparently I shouldn’t have been so sure.

Thousands of them piled up, $300,000 in cash. Busted.

It was the fingerpuppets.

I was looking through my purse for something and there they were, a handful of those handknit little characters from Peru for making small random children happy as I go about my day. The old guy who got one for the joystick on his motorized chair. Airports. All the times those had cheered up a kid or their parent who just needed to be seen and to be distracted.

In five months of quarantining I had actually forgotten them.

Edited to add later: I’ve spent the last hour watching a livestream of the peaceful protest in Portland tonight. It is powerful and good. They are honoring John Lewis’s memory and admonition of “Make good trouble” as they stand up for our country’s ideals for all of us–joyfully and in solidarity. I just signed off there holding my breath that the Feds will still treat them with the respect owed to all of us as the crowd thins down.

I had something I was looking forward to writing about tonight.

At some point in the middle of the night I will wake up with a jolt and remember what it was.

Sterling asked how I was and I didn’t really answer because I was still trying to figure it out. The nausea and dizziness are thankfully gone. Tomorrow’s another day further away from the concussion, and the day after that and the day after that and I figure this’ll all be temporary just like the other times.

Meantime, Milk Pail offered flats of peaches, ran out, restocked, relisted them for this Saturday morning’s pickup and I grabbed one. I’d passed on it earlier because I was going to drive to Andy’s and there was no way Milk Pail’s could ever live up to his. Plus I was hoping Andy might have a few last Anya apricots left.

That drive to Morgan Hill is not happening no matter how much I want it to. Richard will be doing the local pickup.

My head still just wants to hold still. Walking around the yard, I have to watch my feet constantly because they don’t entirely know how far away the ground is with each step.

Which isn’t really new, it’s just my brain doing Groundhog Day and back at the starting point.

Colourmart had a mill-end sale awhile back and I bought all they had in a deep reddish brown merino. It’s supposed to be superwash, though I’ve never tested that out; I had just enough for an afghan and I didn’t want to waste a yard. (They have one color left in an earthier shade of brown.)

Dear friends of ours–the story is someone else’s in the family to go into detail over, let’s just say I felt I owed them much, and I aspired to knit them an afghan in thanks but then found myself making blankets for three grandkids on the way in a row instead.

In January I found that it was suddenly at the front of the queue telling me that it was its turn now.

Finally! Cool! I pulled out some yarn I’d had in mind.

But I just couldn’t make myself get going with it. Which disappointed me in me for dragging my feet. C’mon, it’s taken you long enough to get to this point, what’s the hold up?

I finally caught on and got a little more humble about it and said a little prayer: You know what they’d like best. I only know what I’d like best. Please help me get this right, because they’re the ones it’s for and for all that effort I truly want to make them happy with it.

I immediately found myself opening the small cabinet I keep some of the best to come tucked away in and going straight for that deep burgundy I’d bought a couple years earlier.

Really? It surprised me. I held a cone in my hands and considered. The color would go great with their living room. It was extra fine merino, which is very soft, but it had a lot of twist to it, which made it less so, although that would cut way down on pills or fuzzing out. Definitely a practical wool: thick, warm, not itchy, cuddle up, wash it, it can take it.

And so I made this afghan.

But with the shelter-in-place orders, neither Richard nor I could quite justify breaking quarantine just for that. Soon, surely, but again and again it came down to, but not now. What if I exposed them? What if I exposed them to the pain of finding out they’d exposed us?

And then, knowing none of this, Sterling asked me to knit his co-worker a baby hat. And you know the rest. One that looked like the logo of their project.

Which he finally got to come pick up tonight. He told me he’d shown the picture to some of his co-workers, including some that were knitters. (I was like, hide those rainbow color changes…!) But nobody had tipped off the recipient. I got to see the sparkle in his eyes as he said, That’s tomorrow.

And nobody had tipped off him.

He reached into the bag, stunned, feeling the edge of his and his wife’s new afghan, and looked back at me and said, marveling, That’s one of my favorite colors!

—————–

Edited to add–I was getting ready for bed when suddenly the obvious hit me and I came back here to say: if we had gotten that afghan to them earlier, Sterling would never have asked me to knit that hat because he would have felt like it was just too much to.

That, most of all, I think is why that waiting had to happen. That hat needed to happen, and that shared happy anticipation on the part of so many on behalf of the expectant parents and their little one about to arrive. I mean, they would have anyway, but sometimes you get that rare chance to help make love visible.

I almost missed seeing that.

Pomegranate tree picture just because. It grows like a yarn barf ball that the cat got into.

Seaching for something at the back of the middle shelf of the freezer in the garage this evening, several things from the top fell down on my head. Because I had just put them back in wrong.

I tried not to do a small freak out.

Including half a dozen concussive-type events with actually getting knocked out, I’ve had twelve.

My friend Phyllis’s sister died in middle age after two concussions in fairly short succession. I am a little too aware of the possibilities.

Got dinner done, went to go check on a plant, and was both opening the slider and stepping through when the bottom caught, the top bounced way back, and it smacked me so hard on the ear that after I caught my breath I had to take out the one hearing aid to ask Richard if there was blood. I have these semi-hard things in my ears, y’know, and, yeah. Not that he could see, though, so, good.

Next thing you know I’m trying not to throw up. Richard had me go lie down awhile with his, I have no idea what you call it: an ice head belt? It’s black, it’s like fabric-pot fabric, it has pockets for ice packs, velcro hinge-type things to flip over and hold them in, and sideways velcro to hold the contraption around your head. Good for migraines.

The room was spinning. It’s been worse, but. I was quietly feeling like, don’t leave me. I didn’t actually ask. He stayed with me.

After about 40 minutes, I got up and watered the now-four-branches baby apricot and veggies out of sheer cussedness: those pots dry out fast and I’ve put too much into them not to now.

Then I typed all this out so I would be able to go back later and see what date this was.

And went, but you know? What I really want to do? Is to finish that stupid hat I keep not wanting to work on.

So I did. I sewed on the ears–in a solid line down the sides of the upper face this time. I worked in all those ends and I used them to cover up some of the mishmashed color changes as best as could be done, and-

–wow. Who knew. Sterling was right. That one is a lot cuter than the second try–or just different, but, it matches much better what he was hoping for and it’s a really relatable, cute face now.

I can’t wait to get it to him.

I’m going to let him be the one who’ll drive over here. I’m taking it easy for awhile.

It’s worse than buying a car. At least with a car you get to drive it home.

We’ve been saying for over a year that we needed to replace our mattress. It’s a Stearns and Foster and we’ve had it for 26 years and it’s held up–made all the more marvelous by the fact that the previous one did for all of two before neither of us could stand it anymore–we were totally burned. The current one is still pretty comfortable for me after all this time, but not for him anymore, and it used to dampen movement but really doesn’t anymore. At all.

Which is bad when you’re a light sleeper and the big guy isn’t.

I spent hours, on several different occasions over those months while we debated, trying to learn everything about buying a mattress. The first thought was, go high end again: nobody expects one to stay that good for that long but our expensive one did and it more than paid for itself vs the costs of replacing again and again and again.

And then I read that S&F got bought out.

And a review by someone saying they weren’t what they used to be.

Now, I don’t know if that’s true nor fair but it stopped me–I knew no serious alternative. Not when you want zero off-gassing.

But last night was sleepless. It was time. I went back to Consumer Reports, only I decided not to look at individual ratings–I looked at their ratings of the brands themselves.

And then at the top mattress of their top company, because my 6’8″ husband is not lightweight and I wanted not to have to deal with all this again.

Charles P. Rogers “Estate Lifetime.” Gotta love a name like that, and yeah, it’s all marketing, but–I have a talalay pillow and know how comfortable it is and it is the only pillow I’ve ever heard of with a ten year warranty. (Maybe down pillows do? I wouldn’t know.) The Fourth of July sale was still on, and since Stearns and Foster’s ends tomorrow one can only assume Rogers’ does, too because you know they know who their competition is.

The movement dampening was a particular claim, both on their part and at Consumer Reports.

My sweetie and I talked about it. I asked many questions via the company’s chat.

I walked away, let it percolate for awhile, came back, talked to Richard some more, and then we sprang for it.

And now all we can do is hope.