He actually had to go in to the office today, a goodly commute that leaves us glad that that’s a rare thing.

I smooched him goodbye at the door and said cheerfully, Drive carefully!

Somehow that second word just-perceptibly caught at us both and he stopped there a moment, looked me in the eyes, and pronounced, Yes.

I found myself musing afterwards, like, did I really feel that? as he headed down the sidewalk. Said a little prayer for him like I always do and then forgot about the whole thing.

I got the text about an hour later with the pictures of the license and face of the guy who’d sideswiped him at freeway speed at his driver’s door. He’d seen him coming at him but had had a truck right at his other side.

Both men are okay. That’s what matters.

Kidney donor Nate is awake and making jokes and his wife and kidney recipient Heather, whose operation started later and went longer, was just awake enough at last cousin check-in (with her sister reporting to the family) that now all they have to do is heal from it all.

Along with a lifetime of her being immunosuppressed now, but hey, a lifetime, now.

To all who Thought Good Thoughts their way or said prayers, I am grateful. Thank you. To life!

We did something way better than going to San Francisco for chocolate: we visited our friend in the hospital and chatted and cheered and swapped hospital-food stories and left her and her husband with smiles on their faces–and ours, too.

I somehow left out of yesterday’s long list (I thought it was in there, but no) that our elderly friend Walt had died that morning. That I got an email from a mutual friend asking if I could help out, that when I answered, Sure, what do you need, expecting it to be about Walt’s wife in a nursing home because of course you’d expect that, the answer I got was a clear phishing expedition. “I’ll pay you back when I get back in town…” As if. He’d been hacked. On that day of all days.

I can’t hear our new widow on the phone and she can’t type to me and I don’t feel mobile enough yet to risk driving. Aargh.

Today a fake-Amazon spammer called every two or three minutes and one can only wonder if I got put on a list of suckers who’ll respond. The same recording. For hours. It makes no sense; I mean, who ever caves and believes their lie after hanging up the first twenty times?

What finally stopped it is when I let it go to the answering machine several times in a row. I should have done that sooner, except that the machine is where Richard’s working.

I just got a note: the friend who’s been in the ICU had canceled the phone number I’d been texting messages to.  That’s why she hadn’t answered. Okay, got the right one now.

And I think I found the right yarn. But it is 600m and it is not wound yet and my back said, listen, buddy, I’m working with you on this and you gotta admit I’m getting there but you have to meet me halfway and that is not it.

So it is still a hank.

I started in on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s autobiography instead.

Today was a day that refuses to stuff itself into a neat little package. There was the Jan 6 Committee, the evidence, the videos, the emotions, the finding out a friend has been in the ICU but may go home by Sunday and she was going to answer our question about visitors when her doctor walked in and that was that, the joy of another friend in her photos with her new baby after they’d been trying for years, my being able to do my full 20 minute race walking for the first time in nearly two weeks although some of it was slow walking as muscles threatened but still, I did it and I read in a book that seeds sewn by birds flying around after eating are seriously called craplings when they sprout and I didn’t get any knitting done because the yarn I’d picked just wasn’t the one and I don’t know which is and the pumpkin that’s vanished from the market because people are using it to get pills down their dogs and that’s apparently a really big thing right now and I finally found some on back order a few weeks ago and it was even actually Libby’s which is real pumpkin and not butternut like most canned stuff and I’d forgotten about it and it showed up today and then I had to get a dozen heavy cans in that box over the doorstep and I should have sliced the box open and taken them over the threshold one by one and I should simply have called Richard from the other room to help and I didn’t want to stand in the sun that long and got the whole thing lifted over the doorjamb and scooted over with my foot and my back yelled WhatdoyouthinkyoureDOING when it had been doing better than that at least and I’m icing it right now again too but I got my walk time in and I made pumpkin almond muffins and put chocolate chips in a bunch for Richard and I got everything done and nothing done at all it feels like

and it was just that kind of a day.

Y’know, about 90% of the posts on NextDoor have me wondering why I’m still on Nextdoor. But just, just often enough you find out something that really is actually relevant to the neighborhood that you’d kind of want to know about.

Not that this was one of them, but dang did it grab the attention. Per the conversation there:

There’s a hiking path up in the hills alongside the San Andreas fault line, park land because you’re not about to build on that. (Actually, on the east side of the Bay they did exactly that in the 1950’s because it was the cheap land and every hospital on that side is within something like 100 yards if not feet of their fault. Yow.)

So. There’s a contractor who either followed his surely-infallible GPS or skimmed rather than read the map. Or entered things wrong. Maybe we could even blame autocorrect! Didn’t notice that there were two monte-something names.

It appears he did not stop when what he expected to be a road quickly became a path cut into the hillside that might have room for two joggers to pass each other if they’re careful but most certainly not his big vehicle.

There was a spot just downhill from that track where there was a depression area created by the San Andreas.

He nailed it. He rolled his company’s new big work truck right over into it, fitting neatly upside down into the spot per those who have seen it up close. The only way it can come out is to be lifted vertically, and as he’s already demonstrated, there is no room for the machinery to do that in.

The scuttlebutt was that it’s been there for several months and the county or park service has decided to make it a training exercise: dangerous rescues and all that. Although on the human level, thankfully, there’s a door that is slid open so it looks like he got out just fine.

I imagine they’re waiting for the rain so they don’t set the whole hill on fire when they do it.

But dude. That is not the way to ask your boss for a raise.

The weird thing is, it’s not just that the back twinges–it’s that it suddenly refuses to hold me up and I find myself on the floor. If I can hold myself up with my arms (I learned in the shower this morning) I can breathe through it and it lets go before I have to.

This gives new meaning to the word backpack. Just ordered one. It should help a lot.

In between dealing with all that, I’m a good way through reading “Dearest Ones” by Rosemary Norwalk. Highly recommended. She was a Californian who ran a Red Cross outfit at a port in England during WWII, offering coffee and doughnuts and a smile to every single soldier whose boat came in or left from where she and a few other women were stationed, be it 4 a.m. or 11 p.m. the same day.

There was a big fuss made when the millionth such soldier arrived. And again at the two millionth. Red Cross headquarters: You want HOW many more pounds of flour?? They didn’t believe it. They had to come see for themselves. And then they sent more women to help out as well as supplies.

I have a friend who was born just after his father went off to serve–who never so much as contacted his wife and son after the war was over but vanished into some other life. Rosemary described friends who hadn’t seen their spouses in four years falling in love with people they served with every day in spite of themselves.

She was not going to become serious about anyone till after the war was over and she could see them in their normal lives, not this temporary circumstance that by its nature tended to make people feel close as the Nazis changed from bombs you could hear incoming to ones you could not. Not her, no sir, just here to do her job and serve.

She wrote many a letter home, signed, Love, Roses, and asked her folks to save them all–while writing in her journal the extra details she didn’t want to tell them yet.

And those became this book and a glimpse into the world of her youth.

Don’t tell me if she ended up marrying Bob, clearly she did but I’m not there yet. (There are at least three Bobs so that’s not a spoiler. Mostly.)

It’s always the most innocuous thing that finally nabs you after all the warning signs: all I did was lean down to put two small Corelle plates in the bottom of the dishwasher.

…And give an almost-four-year-old two piggy back rides two weeks ago. A sleepless night last night probably clinched it.

Ice, stretching exercises, more ice, along with consciously relaxing the muscles that want to seize up, and hopefully tomorrow will be better. Realistically, it will be a process.

I knew I should have kept doing those exercises this past week.

This is a little bit out on a limb–and yet.

I’ve mentioned how I was instantly smitten with a beaded sunflower necklace designed by Oleksandra in Ukraine. I waited several weeks before ordering it to see if its effect on me would wear off; the lower sunflower in particular is really big and I don’t naturally tend towards the ostentatious.

And yet. Those flower halves lifted as wings to the sky, the inner petals below curled as if caught up in the velocity above: it spoke to strength, resilience, survival. It reminded my eyes of peregrine flight, if you remember my volunteer remote-cam work towards their recovery. Yes, I could wear that. Thinking of strangers’ eyes lighting up on seeing me wearing a vyshyvanka: I would. For them.

It somehow felt a compelling part of the historical moment that I wanted to bear witness to. My father would have loved the art of it as well and I missed him, and that was somehow wrapped up in it, too. My little sister and I were with him on the plaza in Santa Fe when he fell in love with a shadowbox turquoise necklace and spent a long time talking to the artist about how her creation had come to be and about her work; he’d bought it for Mom, just like his dad had once picked out a large turquoise and a setting type and had watched another Navajo artist create a ring to surprise Dad’s mother.

That ring was big. It was almost ostentatious. And I treasure it. I’m the granddaughter who got to inherit it.

And so, wondering which granddaughter’s this would someday be, I bought that gerdan in July, back when there was only one, and I’ve written here of the long international back-and-forth wanderings that thing has been taken along on ever since.

My longtime mailman rang the doorbell Friday and I said quite gladly, You’re back!

He enjoyed that.

He’d been away when the post office had been unable to figure out where to send that gerdan. I knew he wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

Meantime, Oleksandra had been avidly following that tracking every day, even though for me it hasn’t changed since September 17.  She sent me a note a couple of days ago to let me know what the American postal service hadn’t been able to say: it had arrived back in Kiev! She was going to go retrieve it, repackage, and re-send it. She had made another two of those necklaces anyway even though I had told her that if it never showed up to please consider it a donation and not to worry about it.

But she was determined, and luck turned her way, and so, one way or another, there are strung-glass sunflowers coming my way shortly. Maybe it will spend the usual month or two waiting in Kiev to leave the country again; maybe it won’t.

And here’s where part of me can’t say/part of me can’t not say it so I’m just going to put it out there:

I was woken up very early this morning, October 3, by a dream that stayed vivid and still is, which is not a usual thing for me: that, however long it might take this time, I was once again at my front door opening it to our longtime guy and he was handing me a package. It was, it was my long-hoped-for necklace from Oleksandra, my personal connection to a family with a loved one defending their country there.

And as he handed me that package from Ukraine it totally capped off the day for both of us as we found out that we had both heard the news:

The war had ended that day.

Ukraine had won.

I know that all the fiercely wanting it to be so does not make it so. I know a dream does not require reality to bend to it. And yet the wild irrational hope holds on hard and it utterly refuses to let go, and all I can do is pray hard in grief and love and longing.

All I can say is, we shall see.

And that I wish that there could be overnight delivery on that thing.

We’re going to take a detour on the story here to go to the ringing of the doorbell today.

I had ordered a dress two months ago for my high school reunion, which was to be next weekend–and which got cancelled last week because not enough people had RSVP’d. Oh well.

Tracking said it had arrived in town Friday; the woman in Ukraine who’d been doing some special tailoring had gotten it out in time for that event–

–but once again, there was no mention of when it might actually be delivered, just where it was. Right in town. Going nowhere. After my mail was held over the weekend, this morning’s Informed Delivery notification said no packages today nor soon on the way. Great, I thought, here we go again.

I opened the door to find the new mailman. He asked me my name. He asked me my address, which confused me, I mean, you’re right here, right. He asked if I knew Juliaa, looking briefly at the yellow puffy package.

Yes, from Ukraine, I answered, I’m expecting a package from there, (with my vyshyvanka silently backing me up that that’s something I do.)

He asked again just to make sure. I said Juliaa… Plumarii? That was her business’s name–which was not on there. But I told him it was a dress.

And then he explained why. I didn’t see till later that the Contents box on the label said Embroidered Dress. I’d clinched it for him.

Because, again, the street address had been bungled, with the first of the three numbers gone missing but at least this time it had the other two. He was very proud of himself that he had worked out that this was mine and clearly relieved at the certainty with which he could say that now because it could be awful if it turned out he’d been wrong. There did used to be another Hyde family at the far end of this street. He wasn’t about to risk handing something international and important to the wrong person and he was new on this route and didn’t know anybody yet.

I thought, what is it with Etsy and this street addresses thing? Is it the Cyrillic alphabet/Ukrainian translation? That’s two vendors now. I thanked him profusely for having gotten it to me.

We probably both knew in that moment about the fuss I’d raised over the package that is still listed as “in transit” on its way back to Ukraine that I’d tried so hard to retrieve first. The Post Office had sent me a survey afterwards and I’d wondered what effect my responses would have on our guy, because the lowest person in the pecking order always takes the worst heat whether it’s deserved or not. So I’d tried not to yell, but, This Was Not Okay.

I need to make sure they hear that I’m so happy at what he did for me this time.

I thanked him again as he left.

It came. It had gotten through. He’d gone the extra mile.

And the dress, oh, the dress: it’s perfect. All of it is. The color, the fit, the quality of the fabric and the work. I’d requested it be of a piece with no slit at the neckline and no opening above the knees like so many of the traditional ones do. (I fall a lot and ya gotta maintain at least some dignity.) They did all that, and the embroidery is on both sides of the seam, going all the way up to the closed embroidered crewneck rather than how it is in the picture. It’s exactly how I’d wanted it to be and the whole thing is just glorious. I will love it for years to come.

The motifs, Juliaa had told me, are representative of the bounty of the harvest.

It was too big for a selfie so Richard helpfully tried, but when someone is 15″ taller and looking down, even while trying to crouch down his photos still made my head look like a swollen basketball and maybe I’ll ask a friend so you can see it. Or we can try again when his back is feeling a little better.

Speaking of which. We did have such a great time playing with the kids on that trip.

Just walked in the door, haven’t checked my messages yet, just a quick note before we collapse.

It’s the weekend before Spencer’s fourth birthday and we flew to go celebrate with the grands there.

Taking a cowl project out of my purse to get a few stitches in, I found myself with my seven year old granddaughter asking if she could work on it. More on that later. She first asked me who it was for, and I told her, I don’t know, as I thought of the times I’d worked on it during knitting zoom meetings and a doctor’s waiting room with that same question in mind.

Still not done, and it was still that grayish blue from stash that just didn’t do it for me so it had been in no hurry. I’d started it to try to make that yarn find its rightful home at long last. Someone out there would love it if I used it.

I had, as it turned out, enough time on the plane and enough yarn on the first of my two balls (I think it was shade 3251 there) to do two last repeats and that was all it needed.

The plane did some descending. I was casting off.

The plane went lower still, though the view out the window showed no signs of city lights yet.

I used the tip of the needle to work the yarn ends in as if I were knitting stitches into existing edge ones. Finally, I left little dangly ends that needed to be trimmed off because enough already, and I called it done with less than five minutes to spare. We touched down.

I eyed that ball band on that second ball: Plymouth Solstice, baby alpaca/extra fine merino/yak, squishy and soft.

I told myself, don’t be dumb: don’t save the ball band for some possible future project and recipient when you have one right in front of you that you won’t have time to say a word to about anything. It says hand wash only as well as what it’s made of and she needs to have that information and I don’t have pen nor paper. So I did, I took the band from the one and wrapped it around the new cowl by way of introducing her to it.

We were getting our stuff from the overhead bins, just steps from the front of the plane–and she’d vanished. Even just saying, Where is she? while looking to left and then right was holding up the long line behind me.

Turns out the tall male flight attendant was blocking the view. She looked up at my question and in that moment we saw each other, and I pressed it into the hands of this older black flight attendant who’d put on a good face to the passengers the whole flight, but up at the front, had looked like she just might cry in spite of herself at any moment. She needed someone who understood her situation, whatever it was. She needed a hug.

I could do none of that in the time that I had but I needed to do what I could.

I wanted to say, Thank you for helping to make it so that we could go play with our grandchildren this weekend. I wanted to say, this is how you take care of it, tepid soapy water in a sink/as little movement to the water as possible/the lace will stretch out once it’s wet, that’s normal. I wanted to say, snip off those ends it’s okay sorry for leaving those/no scissors. I wanted to say, I am with you all the way wherever you are and whatever it is.

Instead she simply got my eyes meeting hers as she exclaimed in disbelief, having watched part of this coming to be in my hands those past 80 minutes, “For me??!”

(Anybody want that second skein, just let me know. No band, sorry/not sorry at all.)

And now I know why the kids had a last-minute change of schedule not of their making that meant that we changed our schedule to a flight an hour earlier than had been planned. Change fee $0 was a nice touch to top off how that worked out. Thank you, Southwest.

The view out the back windows this morning.

The view out the front door in the time it took to walk those few steps to snap its picture, too.

Within five minutes it was raining in the back yard, and sunnier if anything in the front.

California skies can still, after all these years, feel so weird.

The new post office guy on the case sent me a picture of the address it was sent to: where my street name and address should have been, in transcribing from whatever Etsy or PayPal had told her in an alphabet much less language different from her own, she’d put my phone number.

And so it was now on its way back to her.

I asked him, You had my (obviously-local) phone number right there on the package; why didn’t anybody call to ask my address? Someone took a picture so someone knew I was looking for it. Someone had it.

He wrote back that if I had phoned before it got to this point they could have intercepted it.

(Head smack) I went in in person as soon as I knew there was a problem and filed a report. How could I call to stop you from sending it to Carson and now Ukraine back when I didn’t know anything yet except that it was supposed to arrive?

*crickets*

The ironic thing is that it got through the postal system in Kiev in two days, which is lightning fast–four to six weeks is more the norm during this war.

Oh well. At least the artist and I both know now where it’s actually going and I asked her to let me pay for the next go-round on the postage.

Meantime, re the afghan, the trees are on their third sets of branches. I can at least make something make progress!

The gerdan saga, continued: I got a note from the local postmaster with a makes-no-sense subject line that my problem had been resolved! (Their exclamation point.)

He said that the package had the right zip code but apparently a wrong street address or something. Which left me thinking, their machines can’t read European handwriting on numbers, having puzzled over a few of those myself.

He suggested I go to the USPS site since it hadn’t left the country yet.

Say what? I didn’t send it to Ukraine, Ukraine sent it to me, what? On further thought, were they threatening to return it? So you bet I went there, and re-entered the declaration of a missing package.

The system told me that Oh, it thought that was all taken care of, okay, it’ll get back on the case, here’s the new case number.

And man was I glad that I’d paid attention to that subject line.

“Your package is moving within the USPS network and is on track to be delivered to its final destination. It is currently in transit to the next facility.”

I’m going to hold them to that.

Meantime, I am well into the second tier of branches on the afghan. Three are planned, two more short ones at the top are a maybe for the momma and poppa redwoods with the little one in between staying shorter.

It’s getting there.

If it’s a race, at this pace I sure hope that gerdan wins it.