The sender of the less-consequential package sent me a new tracking number in response to my heads-up. Richard thinks that means they never actually mailed the original, or they’re simply resending it. So my friend who loves getting fun colorful wool socks for her Aug. 2 birthday will finally have happy feet.

I went to USPS’s site to try again on my gerdan. I got this:

As outlined in the Terms & Conditions, the postal carrier has the final discretion to leave your package at this address.”

Wait–what? Okay, I can see why there might be circumstances they need to say that for, but given our mailman’s history of keeping the neighbors in touch with each other, that was funny. (I did NOT want Paul down the street’s property tax bill along with my own, thanks.)

Okay, try again. I signed up for all updates on its tracking number. It has now left southern California. In transit. Who knows, I might even get it this week!

Meantime, it turns out flu shots are hard to come by here at the moment and appointments are required but I found one CVS and only one locally that got us a slot for tonight, while all the others said not for at least a week. So if I sleep through tomorrow that’s why.

I put off getting that shot (or finding out that I couldn’t yet, as it turned out) because I didn’t want to miss the mailman ringing the doorbell for a signature for my package from Ukraine when he was originally expected to come.

They got that package moving alright.

It’s now 370 miles south of here.

Oleksandra noticed that before I did and instantly sent me a heads-up, telling me she’d wondered if she’d written my name or address down wrong or something and had checked but no, she’d gotten it right.

I found that the business card I’d been given had the official email as well as the phone number of that postal supervisor, so the documented trail of messages (no response so far) has begun.

Her fourth sale on Etsy. She told me it would take a few weeks to get made, and I, picturing one woman holding down everything while a frickin’ war is going on around her, told her I was in no hurry: in whatever time worked for her was good for me.

She was very pleased when that went out and after a long wait in Kiev, noted when it continued on.

The package (we won’t blame the gerdan inside) landed in San Francisco, got taken to my town, decided it liked the bar code scene better up in The City and hijacked a mail truck to get back to drinking in the view at its favorite hangout, got caught, and got brought back down here.

Where it sat in timeout.

And sat.

And sat.

While this good woman who’d spent so much time creating sunflowers of her own design out of Czech beads sent me an agonized note: she’d been following the tracking and had begun to believe it might never come. (She didn’t say, we got it past the war here, what on earth is up with the American postal service?)

She may have been afraid that I would make her make another one at no pay to make good on the order, but I’ve been following that tracking just as much as she has and I know she did that work and this is not her fault.

I assured her that if it didn’t come today I was going to drive to that post office with the tracking number in hand.

Usually the mail comes after dinner. Today it came in the afternoon. It was not there–but for once I knew what the status was for the day before the place closed. I kept my promise and drove over.

I told the kind and concerned clerk my story: this vendor in Ukraine had created this for me and was distraught that it might be lost. Could you help me help her feel a whole lot better about this one thing that she’d put heart and soul into?

I actually had another package of no particular importance that had been sitting there for a month, per the tracking, and could they find that, too.

She spent a long time in back while I read the latest Ukraine war updates on my phone, silently cheering their successes. I thought about Oleksandra, whose brother is in the army and for whom I had mobilized in my own little way because at least it was something I could do.

She finally came back. The tracking number for the other package didn’t exist, she told me. (I notified that vendor that they were going to have to go after them.) This one–pointing at the number with UA for Ukraine in it–was delivered this morning.

I assure you it was not, I told her. The mail came but it was not in it. (And if someone ever tells you I ever get mail in the morning other than during Christmas rush they are outright lying to you, I decided not to say out loud. We are at the end of their route.)

She gave me the supervisor’s business card so I would have that phone number and assured me they were being notified.

The hope is that it is still on the truck and that it will come tomorrow.

But either way, I have Oleksandra‘s back and that’s what matters.

After a bright but dark-ish blue noon cloud cover that looked like it might even rain, the wind blew the local headlines this way and it was definitely a fire sky now. We’re far from the flames, but people we care about aren’t.

After dinner, I went out to take a look, and instead of being one solid mass like earlier, there was a definite formation within, scattering out a bit in spots into the distance–

–let me step back a bit to see–

yeah, that way, but when you have to replicate a sense of balance by where the ground is and feels, taking a few steps backwards while looking upwards and touching anything unexpected means your brain suddenly doesn’t know where the ground is at all nor which way that idea of up ran off to.

Which I suddenly wasn’t.

I knew my personal five minute rule, but I also knew sprains hurt more the next day and I ought to take care of that, so I iced my wrists awhile.

Which was boring.

So I sat down and figured out the branches stage of the afghan that had been impatiently waiting for me to get on with it, and got on with it. Sheer orneriness isn’t the motivation I would have been looking for to kick the knitting back into gear but hey, whatever works.

Thirty-eight years later, I think I finally got my answer.

My dad was an art dealer and spent his career trying to help talented French artists find an international audience. I grew up with paintings on the walls and tapestries that took a month per square yard to create. Our living room’s cathedral ceiling and wall of windows looking out on the woods made for the perfect lighting in beautiful scenery.

When my husband and I bought our first house, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but something was missing, like it wasn’t quite a real home yet–despite the fact that we had picked out the model and the lot and watched it being built in a then-boom town in New Hampshire and every thing in it was something we had chosen.

Our second child was born seven months later.

My folks drove up from Maryland to help out for a week.

And then.

Dad opened the big trunk of their car and started pulling out paintings, thoroughly enjoying how surprised and thrilled I was. THAT’S what it had been missing! Art on the walls! Now it could finally feel like home!

One of those paintings had always been a little bit of a mystery to me and now it was mine. Oh, that’s Deer Island, Maine, I was told, like that should settle it.

Okay–but why? I’ve long wondered. Why did someone travel way out there to paint that out in the middle of absolutely nowhere?

The Washington Post just published one of their reporters’ traveling to meet the people and place of the favorite haunt of his favorite author a little more personally.

Now, when I was maybe ten I got a thick heavy book for Christmas full of horse stories. My kind of thing at the time. The further you got into it, though, the darker a turn the stories took. John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” is not something I’d give a ten year old, but it was in there.

And then in high school I read “The Pearl.”

That was it. I was done with Steinbeck.

So I was surprised to read that not only was he a favorite writer of this Post reporter, but that rereading him inspired the guy to pack a bag and go learn for himself what the people and place were like where his hero began his “Travels With Charlie” from.

Deer Island, Maine.

The painter was a Steinbeck fan. Clearly.

And I feel like a decades-long mystery has been solved, and not only that, I actually am looking forward to reading that Steinbeck book. Who knew.

At 8:15 a.m. we were next on the list for the omicron shots.

At 8:20 a.m. we were doing the required sit-and-observe aftermath.

A dad came in holding a baby almost old enough to walk. The baby wasn’t too sure about being in this strange place at a strange hour with strange people around.

Man, it felt good to be able to offer a handknit Peruvian finger puppet just like the before times and delight the guy. The baby was pretty cool with it, too.

Then a couple with two girls of about two and four came in, and those parents approved of the unexpected distraction, too. Their little ones instantly went to town having a grand game of make believe with each other.

A few minutes in, two suddenly very shy little girls found themselves encouraged to walk ever so hesitantly to where I was sitting. They were not the least bit sure of this. Maybe I might make them give them back? What would I do? I had said Happy Birthday, but the older one knew it was not a birthday and the uncertainty was grabbing at her ankles like a monster under the bed.

“Thank you,” she said in a suddenly very small voice, both of them studying my eyes intensely, wanting to know what would happen next.

I gave them my best, biggest, grandmotherliest smile behind my required face mask (they had them on, too) and told her and her sister, “You’re very welcome!”

They RAN back to their mom and dad, joyfully this time. Yay!!

And with that our time was up and we waved goodbye, easily as grateful to them as they were to us.

(Woke up to a second power failure but it cleared up quickly.)

The CDC had a list by zip code of providers of the new covid vaccine. (Lots of helpful links there.) I started trying yesterday, but the one local entity’s site refused to load, and when I asked Richard about going to Santa Rosa for another provider his reaction was that with our having driven three hours to Antioch in traffic and two hours back for his first covid shot, going even further was not enthralling.

Today, still not able to get through online, I called the local one even though their site said not to.

They said yeah they were scheduling but it was going to be weeks, possibly months before they had any more openings–they were booked.

I realized afterward, well, they are the closest off-campus pharmacy to Stanford Hospital.

Which is also I’m sure why the CDC got it to them first around here.

There had to be…

Today the CDC added CVS: one store in one location and they had openings for one single day, so I grabbed them. But I was still hoping for something sooner.

I checked our clinic’s site and got nowhere, so I called them, too. Oh! They do! But they said you could only schedule the covid shots by phone–just like last year’s first shot in the first weeks.

Turns out you had to wait while someone asked you all your ID information and all the health questions and dutifully entered them in while everybody else waited on hold, with him playing a human buffer in the scheduling that would keep all but the most determined self-screened out for now while the supplies are scarce. The on-hold robot voice kept urging me to hang up and schedule most appointments online, which I knew would just shove me to the back of the line on the phone again and nevertheless I persisted and knit and knit and knit, glad for hold music loud enough for even me to be able to put the phone down.

I got in!

You want them–this week?? Uhhh, let me see…

(I’d figured it didn’t hurt to ask.)

CVS is now canceled, he let me jump through the hoops for the both of us, and we are getting our Omicron boosters in the morning. And our flu shots.

(Edit in the morning: CVS was going to do both shots, but the clinic was only doing the Covid. One down, one to go.)

I had a mouthful of toothpaste last night when everything suddenly went very dark.

Spit.

So did that mean that when the Flex Alert said to wait till after 9:00 pm to do your laundry everybody started theirs at the same time? Along with turning on the dishwasher for the night? (Guilty.)

Earthquake readiness says we’re supposed to have flashlights by our sides of the bed. He found his. Mine was AWOL. Of all the things not to be prepared about after all the warnings re the power and the heat, I was apologizing to him that I… Oh there it is. I gave him his back.

He called to report the outage and it turned out no one else in our neighborhood had. What? They were saying 12,000 out, not quite reaching to our street (but it did.) Was everybody else in bed at 10:30? Seems like it.

We read to each other, like we do every night, and doing it by flashlight was kind of fun, like when you read under the covers as a kid and tried not to get caught not going to sleep.

Then we tried to turn off the lights in the dark.

But you know those dimming/brightening switches with the flat rectangular panel rather than a small black piece sticking out? How do you turn one of those off when the power’s out? I asked him. So it doesn’t flip all the lights back on in our faces in the middle of the night?

He confessed he did not know, which sounded to me like, Face it, honey, we’re hosed.

And yet. Turns out the bedroom lights were the ones that didn’t. It was the ones in the closet and the hallway, the ones with the flip-it switches that I’d missed because I hadn’t known which ones to turn off, and, well, we know who the light sleeper is who took care of that.

Let’s not do that again. Which is why breakfast and dinner were both baked at 7:30 this morning, side by side, 25 minutes and off fast, just in time for the dentist to call and ask me, Could you come in a few hours early this morning?

I am writing this several hours earlier than my usual. I’m trying to beat the next outage. And probably so was the dentist.

Oh, and one other thing to add: Happy Birthday to my late Grandmother J and Happy 100th Anniversary to my Grandparents B.

If you ever wanted a brain exercise for word retrieval, and the official New York Times Wordle only lets you play once a day–which it does–fear not. The colors are brighter on HelloWordl anyway, and you can play it as many times as you want. Even use it to warm up the brain before going on to the official  version where your wins are recorded and tabulated. No pressure.

I have never been addicted to computer games but this one actually has a bit of self-justification to it: when you’ve got a TBI, anything that helps.

But what I want to know is, wait. How much is this doggy in the Window?

I bought a vyshyvanka for my granddaughter Maddy, who’ll turn eight at Christmas, and it came today with the surprise of a beaded bracelet and beaded head covering with ribbons to tie it on with, because Nataliya is wonderful like that.

And there was this. Made of wood. It could be a small sunflower coaster, sure, and definitely a symbol for a country that grows most of the sunflower oil in the world, but all those little holes are begging for laceweight or beading thread or something and to be used as a tool.

What kind and how, though, I am guessing at because I have no idea.

For that matter you could loop yarn through one of the petals and wear it as a large necklace of about the size of all those VW emblems that were being stolen off cars right and left in the ’80’s. (I’d forgotten about the Beastie Boys and VW offering a free emblem to anyone who asked in order to save their customers’ cars and their future sales figures.)

No but seriously, if anyone’s seen one of these before, what is this? I feel like I should know.

Rescheduled twice till the original reason for it was history, I finally got in to see the neurologist today, six months after the fact. We’re still pretty new to each other.

I was knitting that blue cowl when he came in.

We talked about a bunch of stuff and then it was time to do an exam.

He had me try to stand on my toes. I managed not to fall on him but it was a near thing. He had me lift my toes to stand on my heels. Again the involuntary collapse.

He asked me to grab my cane and repeat both of those and with that extra tactility to tell my brain which direction the floor was in when parts of my feet had abandoned it I had no problem, it was as easy as sitting down.

An offhand remark: he wasn’t mansplaining, he was marveling when he just had to tell me that he’d found out that you can’t just knit something–quickly. That things like sweaters and blankets, they take a long time. A *long* time!

I chuckled. Yes. Yes, they do. I did not say, And you’ll get your turn, but I knew his appreciation had just shown me it was so.

He grabbed a pin from a tall box and poked it around. I could feel it in my hands and arms but more as a slight pressure than anything else. Legs and feet? Okay, that’s a prick point.

I discussed a little family history: (sorry for the repeats to those who’ve read these before.) My grandmother never had a headache in her life, she had no idea what it was like to have one. My cousin was born without the ability to feel pain–like the time he got hit by a car, walked home, told his brother, said he was tired and was going to go lie down, and the brother ratted him out to their nurse mom who rushed him to the hospital in time to save his life. I told him one of my kids wasn’t that bad, but definitely on that scale. And also got hit by a car as a kid and tried to shrug it off.

I had started out as normal myself but for years now my own ability has been impaired. I told him of the time my tall husband took off his undershirt, hit the overhead light, shattered it, ducked the falling glass and fell into the oak  hamper while I, still in bed, just heard the loud thump against the wall and leaped out to save him. Like I was going to pull him out of the hamper? I found myself running across broken glass.

And just sat down on the bed and laughed because we’re such a pair of klutzes–and because I knew that in five minutes I wouldn’t be able to feel the pain anymore. And I didn’t. This can be a bad thing, like during the heart attack and not calling 911 because, um, wasn’t it supposed to hurt, but at other times it can be quite handy. It’s like the bod says, Okay, listen up something’s wrong, okay now I told you–you go deal with it.

He (clearly fervently) wished he could offer his other patients a way to not hurt after five minutes and pronounced me as pretty fortunate for that. He’s right.

On my way out I found myself about to go past a quite elderly woman with a head covering I’d guess as Slavic as she was being pushed in a wheelchair, her face a blank. I was wearing my hand-embroidered, very traditional red and black on white vyshyvanka and the effect on her was instant: an energy that hadn’t been there a moment before as my shirt had her full attention and recognition, she looked up into my face in wonder and smiled. No words needed.

And I looked in her eyes and loved her too and smiled back.

I said to Richard later, not for the first time, And this is why I wear these. This is part of why I buy these.

Yes.

The Alaska afghans had a dandelion in them because I was so enchanted by the one outside the kids’ door at their old house in Anchorage that was blooming well above knee-high. And because I got to feed some to well-fenced-away elk through the chain links after the farmer there said that that was their favorite food. There were a few blooming just, just past where the animals could reach to and they were happy to grab the ends and spaghetti-slurp them up from us (and thank goodness for how long those stems were; the reindeer over to the left were tame but the elk came with warnings.)

So.

I decided this afghan needed a dandelion, too. A few rows after this you’ll be able to see better where the yarnovers settle into; it’s kind of a stick figure of a flower.

But it got me thinking of Dandelion Chocolate, because they make the best there is and the pastries to match and because bite by daily bite we had just finished off our last bar from them. Chocolate and sugar. Two ingredients. That’s all.

A few people in Ukraine are making, among other things, beaded necklaces with dandelion flowers below and their seed poofs floating off above.

On a whim, I sent them a link. Not that they need to go buy jewelry for all the staff or anything–but sometimes it’s charming to know someone created something both fun and meaningful that’s out there in the world just waiting to be admired.

Of course they loved it, but then, how could anyone not.

One of the upsides of dealing with a frustrating customer service for way too long a time in my day–I had a response in my inbox to which I flatly said No and we went back and forth from early morning till after dinner time–was that when it was finally resolved and they finally made it right I needed that knitting over there. I needed it in my hands. I needed to see progress and progress that was happening because it was doing what I told it to do when I told it to do it and it was blossoming beautifully and each stitch that I did was done and stayed done and not only that, its whole reason for being was to make a friend happy. And it happily compliantly will. And I get to enjoy the cheerful anticipation of that in every single hour while I’m working on it.

So there.

I had a routine checkup and was wearing a vyshyvanka (Etsy link) from Nataliya, a lovely woman from whom I have now bought similar ones for my granddaughters.

One was to be for Lillian’s third birthday? There was the surprise of a small bracelet of red wooden beads tucked away in the package in celebration of a child she did not know simply because she wanted to share in the joy.

The female doctor and nurse admired my blouse and I did a little advocating for Ukrainian starving artists.

But what really made my day was the older woman I passed on my way out who stopped me and with a thick Slavic accent asked, You shirt! You make eet?

A woman in Ukraine did, I explained.

Ees beautiful! Beautiful!!

She was so happy to see something clearly so familiar to her and in that moment it felt like we were offering each other this wonderful, mystical sense of a universal place called home.

Next Tuesday, Amazon said. The box showed up today. Ask me if I mind.

Comes assembled, they said. But, it turns out, screw the knob on the drawer yourself, lady. Yeah, I think we can handle that. (Note the lack of application of said knob. That drawer came in handy already!)

I tested out the setup by talking with my mom while trying not to lean on its slight wobbliness, and we now know that my sister Carolyn’s name types out as Kill Christmas. You know, I can actually do that kind of word mangling better than it can but it’s trying.

Speaking of whom, she and her husband have been househunting online. A few days ago, she flew to see her grandkids in Ohio with a day trip to the town in New York where she’s been looking. On that very day the most perfect house for them went up for sale–and now it’s theirs. Great condition and reasonably priced, to top it off. And she got to see it in person. Because it was on the one day.

I can’t wait to see what she does with her new horse carriage in back. Would it kill Christmas if I asked her for a pony? Always wanted one when we were kids.

Nina got her peaches and dried apricots from Andy’s and I threw in some of his plums, too. The lady at his farm agreed with me that fruit straight off the tree was the perfect homecoming after time in the hospital.

My heart monitor came off and went in the mail per protocol.  So did a birthday present for Lillian, who is turning three whether her Grammy can fathom that number so soon or not.

Writing all this it suddenly struck me what it was that I didn’t do today and I didn’t even think of it till just now: I didn’t knit.

Wait, how did that happen?