Yesterday, it seemed like one of the crew by the end of the day was tired and grumpy, and I expressed concern; was everyone okay.

Maybe he’d just needed someone to notice and have it matter to them, because today they clearly were. I heard laughing between them again and again, enjoying this fine day and each other’s company as they worked.

There’s a skylight in the hallway that they decided to do first, before any more rain might happen to it.

It was a mess. The guy who put it in (we found out later) had only nailed things in on three sides. After a tree fell on our house, a roofing crew sent out to repair that damage happened to notice that right behind them was this spot where it was funny when you step–and one of them started playing see-saw with our skylight while the others laughed, not seeing me standing below shouting upwards, STOP IT!!! at them. I was so mad.

That contractor refused to pay the $600 it cost to repair that, blaming the guy who’d done it wrong in the first place. The guy who tried to fix it repainted below with whatever shade he thought would match. It didn’t.

So of course that’s the skylight that leaked after that. The boards it was resting on rotted out.

We knew it was bad, but…

It took the men quite awhile to get all that out of there today, complicated by being sealed to the foam roof and the fact that there was a fluorescent tube light on top of the beam that ran down the center below the skylight that had to be rewired and reinstalled.

And so for several hours today there was no skylight down the hall, just a face or two nodding hello against the open sky if you came past.

Karo, check. Butter, check. Cranberries? Toss the first bag, the second thankfully was fine.

I started baking cranberry pie bars.

As the oven started smelling wonderful as the cookie crust stage baked, I suddenly noticed the change.

Someone was a little hungry and probably a little tired and all this wonderfulness that certainly wasn’t going to be for him–all he was going to get to do was wish and be tormented. He started sounding grumpy again.

He didn’t know me very well, did he?

He caught himself and cheered up a bit while I was silently telling that pan to hurry up.

You’re supposed to let them cool all the way and even chill if possible before cutting them. I had the kitchen slider open to the 61F out there and after half an hour put the pan on a metal cookie sheet to help with the hurry; their day was winding down and I didn’t want to miss them after all that. Finally at about the hour mark I pronounced it good enough, sliced, mushed the topping a little–eh–and set half a dozen very crisp-bottomed cookies on each of two sturdy paper plates till there was no room for more, covered them with a little plastic wrap so the men could take them home, and went outside to make sure both their vehicles were still there.

The first guy’s face lit up.

He walked halfway down the outside of the house and called up towards the roof and the second guy, the one who’d sounded grumpy at smelling those wonderful smells, suddenly hoisted himself over the edge and down the ladder with his face all but shouting YESSSS!!!!! after seeing the outstretched plate in the other guy’s hands. He was almost giddy.

“These are so good. SO good!”

They are, and that’s why I so seldom make them. I need to have someone around to protect us from them.

I don’t think any of theirs made it past our driveway.

(On a side note: pouring liquid into an oven-hot glass pan is how you shatter such pans. I realized a moment late that I’d chosen the wrong type, so I pushed the crust high up the sides so that no egg mixture would directly touch the glass when I poured it onto the hot crust. It was still probably a near thing. Just mentioning.)

I am not good at stopping a project to dive into a distractive one: I like to slog through till it’s good and done first.

That said.

I realized that this is the third week of what was originally going to be a two-week house repair and those guys have been working hard. While I knit stitch after stitch they’re doing hammer lift after hammer lift. There was so much to do, and as they ripped out damaged wood they found more.

I wasn’t sure if I should knit them each a hat–but I knew I wanted at least to be able to should the moment present itself.

The feeling grew until I found myself actually putting the afghan down yesterday, promising it it would only be a few days, and diving into a gray-blue skein of Polar Morn. Finished it noon today and started on the next. Jupiter. A skein with flecks of dark pink so it didn’t make it into the redwood trunk.

So now that’s 2/3 done and the pink stitches are pretty much drowned out by the browns around it and maybe it will do and maybe it won’t, but I like it.

Chris stopped by to check on things and looked at what they’d found. I signed another change order a few hours later.

We knew that with double-paned windows, you can’t replace them without repainting the whole house afterwards. What I did not know is you can’t just buy a new window. Someone who knows what they’re doing has to come out and assess how green a tint my supposedly clear glass has so that it will match the other windows, because that’s just how it is and mine are old.

Me: I’m an art dealer’s daughter and I did not know that?! Glass has green?!

I wonder if my sister’s twins remember cracking that one while rough housing. It’s been sitting there behind the curtain that way for way too long.

That roof plank has to go. And that one over there.

Seventeen grand again and it turns out I had more time after all to decide whether his workers were knit-worthy.

And the afghan says, Told you so.

If this kid puts this on her college admission, then I imagine anywhere she wants to go, she’s in: at 17, she got her essay published as an op-ed in the Washington Post. She’s polished, she’s to the point, and she’s very funny about what it’s like to be a front-line server at a restaurant.

Some of the comments completely make her point: one guy said he had to pay a percentage of sales to the owners to pay the other staff, so that when someone stiffed him of any tip on a $2500 catering job he had to pay $75 out of pocket to his fellow workers from pay he did not get for eight hours’ work. Wow. Straight-out wage theft. No wonder people are quitting in droves. Yes of course such people should be included under the same minimum wage laws as everyone else.

When I was nineteen, I got a summer job at a Farrell’s Ice Cream shop. This was considered among my peers as way cooler than, say, a MickeyDee’s. Farrell’s was a popular spot.

A few weeks later, a high schooler got hired. He was treated far better than anyone else on staff, though I’m not sure he knew it. The manager went out of his way to be nice to him and then in one memorable moment turned right around and snapped his fingers and barked at me for leaning against the wall in weariness in the kitchen for just the blink of an eye. “None of that!”

His instructions (I was told privately at one point) were to have the new kid do some of every job there, from preparing food to cleaning to closing up to you name it. He didn’t know I knew who the kid was, but I did–his older brother was my age and I’d grown up going to church with him.

His father wanted his youngest to learn the business from the ground up. It left me hoping he did see what it was like for the other workers.

His father was the owner, and not just of Farrell’s.

Marriott headquarters was just a bit down the street from there at the time, and I imagine it made it easy for the dad to happen to stop by, although I hurt my back on the job not long after the kid came on and I quit, since it was my second job anyway and I could move to full-time typing punchcards by that point. The olden days of computers.

That manager could see a whole career both ahead of him and on the line while that kid was there. I have no idea how it turned out for him, nor do I remember his name. But I’ll never forget that solicitousness and then those snapped fingers at me.

Memories like that make me want to be the best customer a restaurant worker has any day I ever come in. (Even if it’s still just pick-up these days.)

There’s nothing like a new baby in the family to make the world feel like a beautiful place. Our niece’s new daughter Emma made Richard’s sister and her husband first-time grandparents on Wednesday.

At Emma’s parents’ wedding, the groom’s father told the tale of arriving at BYU as a freshman from Sweden with no plans for where he was going to live or what he was going to do. A man who had been a Mormon missionary in Sweden years before and knew his family from then happened to live near that campus now and invited him to come stay with his family.

Where he was taken in as if he were their own, to the point that when he eventually married, his benefactors helped him and his bride with the down payment on their first house. Everything, everything he had in his life now, he felt, had all grown from that good man’s generosity, and if only his friend had lived to see this day, how happy it would have made him. He’d recently passed, and the groom’s dad was both overwhelmed with joy for his son and grieving his friend.

He and I had already met by that point, but after hearing that I had to circle back.

“Let me re-introduce myself,” I said, and told him my unusual maiden name.

Which was Swedish.

And the same as his late friend, who was a second cousin to my dad.

He was stunned. He was thrilled. His son had just married into the family that included–!

Welcome to the whole world waiting for your discoveries, little Emma. You are greatly loved here.

One mixing bowl, two soup bowls to try out their gorgeous new blue glaze and because the new-to-me solid handles would be easier for a few people I know to hold onto, and two of their regular soup bowls with regular handles  because we’ve had two but there’s a third person here often enough. And friends drop by and I drop things so you never know. Thank you Mel and Kris!

Meantime, Zillow noticed that I’d looked at my folks’ old house and sent me a listing they thought I’d be interested in.

I was, very much, but not for any reason they’d have thought of: I found the name of the builder of my childhood house! “Designed by Ernest Cooke (a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright), this home was thoughtfully designed to fit within the natural setting, allowing a connection with nature from every room in the house. Walls of glass, vaulted ceilings and large skylights bathe the interior spaces in natural light throughout the seasons.”

And there you go.

You need the sheer walls for earthquake safety and the rotted one was replaced. Metal bracing of about 12″ high was put along the bottom edge to keep the water out. Tyvek was put over that to further keep the water out. The bottom of the siding as well as the front-facing part of it were painted to help keep the water out.

Because it turns out that when the previous contractor expanded that tiny bedroom during our remodel and poured concrete for the new patio outside it, he put it flush against the wood so that when it rained the water had nowhere to go. That was our problem. Right there.

Had he pointed out that flaw in the architect’s plans (or was there one? Was it actually supposed to be up against the house?) we would have said well then skip the patio thing, we don’t need it, but he didn’t and here we are.

Chris’s guy knocked on the door: the tape under one of the skylights had come loose and he needed to fix that. (You do not keep leaky ones when you’re about to replace the roof.)

And here I’d been wondering if I needed to bother him with that. Yes please.

He asked me what color skylights I wanted.

Skylights come in colors?

Yes, they can be white to match the foam roof or they can be–here, let me show you, you’ve got brass colored ones. I like those.

Me: I don’t care. Whatever’s cheapest I guess. What matters to me is, I have lupus, and UV light triggers the disease; can it block the UV?

He talked to Chris and that is why we have glass skylights coming. He started to explain to me and I said Oh yes, glass cuts out 96-97% of UV, that’s GREAT! (Suddenly realizing as I type this that I don’t know the color of their frames. I don’t care, but I am curious now.)

The old plastic ones were full of cracks. Glass sounds so much better.

I told him, There’s one other thing… I took him inside the bedroom they’d been working on the other side of, told him to look at the ceiling in the closet and asked him if that was something we needed to worry about.

Hoo boy. He took pictures, texted them to Chris so he’d know, and as I thought okay there goes another five grand he asked me, Is there anything else?

I took him in Sam’s old bedroom. Up there, they did some termite work in the corner but I haven’t seen any damage. But on this side, the neighbor’s tree fell on the house years ago and punctured it. The roofers fixed it but part of it’s behind the floor to ceiling bookcase and I can’t move that to look.

The paint was sheeted away from the wall slightly up there but he pointed out the lack of water damage and how I would know if there had been some; it looked fine. Phew.

I asked him if there was anything else they needed from me today and that Richard was here, so he told me, no problem.

And with that I was off at last to San Mateo to see Mel and his son Corey. Turns out they were set up facing the door right as you walk in so I didn’t risk any other exposure, I just saw them. Kris didn’t make it this trip so I sent her my best and had a great chat with her loved ones.

I’m chuckling that my house photos came through and my pottery ones haven’t yet, but they’re there. Mel and Kris and sons do beautiful work.

And now I need Chris to replace the cheap original contractor’s shelves in my kitchen cabinets so that that weight doesn’t finally, after all these years, get to them.

Given that it hasn’t happened since the year I had my colorectomy surgeries, ie twelve years of carefully doing this ten-minute procedure right after one long slog of misery teaching me why I’d better, I thought I would write it here (sorry) so that I can find it to reference the date later.

I ended up at the dermatologist’s as an emergency appointment.

She looked up what the other dermatologist in ’09 had prescribed for such an infection under the dressing, just to be sure, because there are so many ways it could go wrong. At first she started to say apply it three times a day, till I laughed, and then, yeah, because you seriously shred the skin if you take that thing off before it’s ready to, no matter what. It is designed to stay on. As one would hope.

Every third day, I told her. That’s when I can get to it. Except that the infection itself is messing with that part of the adhesive, so, yeah. The partial antidote to that is the 4″ Eakins the Stanford nurses gave me, but you cannot just walk into a drugstore and pick up a box. I ordered, as someone with a permanent prescription for all such, but it’s a holiday and it’ll be Monday if I’m really really lucky. Could be–who knows.

We worked out a compromise. And then we laughed ruefully together at the randomness of it all: heart, eyes, skin, that should be enough for awhile, don’t you think?

She’d almost given me an oral antibiotic and said it might yet need one. If I start running a fever over the weekend she wants me in to Urgent Care for that and to for sure call her Monday and tell her how I’m doing.

I promised I would.

Tomorrow is the start of Mel and Kris‘s last Harvest Festival show ever. Mel’s past 70 and Oregon is a long hard drive with so much physical work at either end. After thirty years of friendship and pottery, I want so badly to see them. No stupid stoma tricks getting in my way. Okay? Is it a deal?

Turns out it wasn’t just that little spot under the left side of the window. (Saw that coming a mile off.) And so I signed the change order, the entire wall that goes between the wallboard and the siding was replaced with termite-proofed wood outside that bedroom, the window was taken out and put back in, the new siding was given an undercoat of paint, and tomorrow the siding goes up.

And on a different note, I woke up at 5 a.m. and reached over for my phone on the side table to see what time it was.

I SAW the phone. From the bit of moon and the city light reflected downward from the fog through the upper windows I was able to see where it was, and realized with a shock that completely woke me up that I had not been able to at night for some time now and hadn’t consciously realized it because I’d always fallen back to sleep and the blind searching to find it by feel had been forgotten by daybreak.

How many times had that happened? I could only guess.

I clicked the button on my old 6S–and saw the time bright and clear just like how it always used to be, and you know, I could get used to that.

Two single-drop doses of steroids for my Fuchs. That’s all I’d had. And I could see again.

The left eye pain got worse and the night ointment only helped some and I was back in to Dr. S. today. He happened to be wearing all blue, the shade of blue of the soft wool hat that he did not know was waiting for him. He was thrilled and turned it over in his hands, admiring the stitching and the pattern of the decreasing at the top and the color and exclaiming how much he was going to use this and he wished he’d had it last week.

(My bad. I hadn’t yet run the ends in two weeks ago--the day I knew he’d so earned one. This is an old picture.)

He’s actually an optometrist, although he runs a lot of the tests for most of the doctors, and of the two ophthalmologists I’ve seen over the years, one recently retired and one is on leave and I was at a loss to know where to start anyway, so I figured he could direct me.

He noted that things did look worse than two weeks ago, and the right eye was affected somewhat, too. No it wasn’t just dry eyes like he’d hoped. He pulled one of the new doctors into the room, who did a quick look and confirmed what Dr. S. thought: I needed to see the cornea specialist–today.

He told me quietly afterward that having the two of them calling meant I would get that appointment.

Dr. M’s office called before I even pulled out of the parking lot and I had to explain that I was at the satellite clinic in a different city. I was told to come straight there, pronto. I knew his schedule was crazy busy.

And that is how I met the doctor who did cornea surgery on a member of my family. He brightened up at her name and asked after her with enthusiasm, and I thought, I like this guy. I can see why she did. He took all the time I needed. He listened. He asked questions.

So now I know why I can’t read my phone first thing in the morning but I can later and why I can’t read the clock in the car–and only the clock, everything else is okay–in the daytime. I’ve learned somewhat of what lies ahead with the Fuchs Dystrophy. I’ve had a very mild case simmering for some time; I had toddlers when one doctor told me some descendant of mine was going to have to have cornea transplants, and actually, my mom now has.

But it was time to learn more about this, because it suddenly said so.

Fifteen to twenty-five percent of cornea transplants fail, according to one major medical site. Okay, that’s it. Not moving away from Stanford. The upside of living in a crowded metro area is that there are a lot of patients and experience to keep the surgeons at their best.

He gave me steroid drops. I told him that massive IV steroids had had zero effect on my lupus or Crohn’s and that an optometric steroid solution was given me by an ENT for infected ear canals and it was, like the regular steroid drops, massively itchy.

But we had to try. Untreated lets it get worse much faster.

I got the prescription, got home, and put the first drop in my left eye. And saline drops in the other because it needed it, and because, hey, science.

Walking back across the house I felt an intense relief in the left eye, that fast. To my great surprise, it suddenly felt better than the right.

We have a friend who lived here for a few years while doing very expensive work on a very rich man’s house in the hills, carefully never named (but at one point one mutual friend was pretty sure he’d figured it out); Troy’s a seventh-generation stone mason in the age-old European tradition of such. He does very careful, very exacting work. You want your 11th century castle restored? You call someone like him for that part.

He has since moved home to Montana.

But I instantly thought of him when my cousin pointed out this listing. Or at least at first.

Thirty-five million (down ten!) and they couldn’t keep the cats from playing a game of chase under the quilt on the badly made bed. Unless that’s a teenager who overslept going oh (bleep)! that the cameraman had arrived and pulling the pillow down over his face. Gotta love how the blanket beneath is throwing a wrench at the system.

Something about that wood floor entry makes me want to go bake a hazelnut torte.

The kitchen: as my cousin put it, Why is there a giant pepper mill holding it up?

Googling the Latin phrase built into the floor, it comes to “Ferocity in Heaven”–huh?–with–what are those? Sheep in wolves’ clothing?

Does Tutankhamen stay?

And was the whole thing supposed to be a set for a Monty Python reunion?

Chris got back to me right away this morning, then again this afternoon after the manufacturer answered his questions.

That product didn’t have amyl nitrite exactly–but it had (and he named various substances) and it appears I’d had a cross-reaction. No problem, there was an alternative. The original takes 24 hours to off-gas, this would be faster anyway.

Remembering the amyl nitrite in the new carpeting at church that lingered hellishly, affecting two of us for months despite many efforts to air it out, 24 hours sounded like the best possible news except for the even better part.

I went outside to see the day’s work about 4:30 again and was quite relieved to be okay. I had ditched the errands I’d planned on for the day because I wanted to be quite sure I’d be safe to drive after walking out my own door.

And look at that–they’d told me multiple times just to make sure I had no objections that they were using 8″ board, not 6″ like the original. To my surprise, I liked it much better. And not just because it’s pretty and new.

Just before I stepped back in the door there was the faintest brief whiff, right there, same spot, yup, and I hurried past it. By tomorrow it’ll be gone entirely.

The funny part of all this was yesterday when Chris stopped by the site and the workers came off the roof to talk to him–as a van pulled up, searching for where on earth to park. The next-door neighbor has a contractor working at their place, too.

And so the dishwasher repairman with his bag of tools in hand found himself walking a bit of a gauntlet there down my walkway while Chris and his guys were wondering silently, Wait, who is this??

Because yes, Sunday morning we found an error 24 code on the machine and it was stopped up like a washing machine in a household with disappearing baby socks. The disposal was clear. I finally found someone who does Bosches.

Five minutes and $238 later, rounding out to a half hour for his standing there punching buttons making the thing go through its paces to make sure it stayed working, and I figured, well, if you want a repairman to be where he has to pay Silicon Valley rent, then that’s what you do. And you smile and you thank him for coming while he was clearly waiting for an argument that was not coming and you thank him for making it so you didn’t have to wait three, four months for a replacement machine like how it is these days and then you send him off with a pomegranate you tell him you’d picked that morning and you get to see the surprise and growing wonder in his face and the delight as he admired this piece of beautiful, deeply-hued fresh fruit in his hands that he was so not expecting.

I’d found a third of the shell of one on the ground a few hours earlier, the rest completely cleaned out, and had picked a few that were still in reach of those wild rabbits. My line of bird netting tents wasn’t going to block their way forever (clearly).

They may be pretty animals.

But they don’t smile back and walk a little lighter for it on their way back to their van way over yonder.

I have a working dishwasher again!

(Photo of the new in, not yet trimmed, while the old has been pulled away from the exposed yellowy part.)

Carpeting, chemical, reaction, cardiologist, nitroglycerin. Those are some of the searches I used before I finally found the old blog post wherein said doctor diagnosed my inexplicable, to me, intense reaction walking in the door at church after they replaced the carpeting. It happened again, every single week, gradually lessened by their propping the door open near us and repeatedly trying to air out the building during the week with fans for me and for an older woman having a milder case of the same problem. She felt a lot better talking about it after finding out she wasn’t alone.

So I’m typing all those searched words so that next time I’ll find the name faster.

Amyl nitrite. That was it. He said it gets into the blood stream when you breathe it in and duplicates the effects of nitroglycerin for those who are sensitive to it–and the fact that it recurred the moment I walked in those doors, every single time, later clinched it for him.

Rapidly collapsing blood pressure and heart rate alarms sounding people running to my hospital room talking rapidly to each other thinking I couldn’t hear them they stopped the tilt table test at 63/21 bp I appeared blacked out utterly unable to respond–but I could still hear.

One young doctor was blatantly rude.

They assigned him to watch over me during recovery. I figured I was part of his unfinished medical training and repeated back to him, nicely, word for word what he’d said and watched him squirm. I wanted him to see his patients as both people and equal to himself and I knew he wouldn’t forget being told as diplomatically as possible to please not go to hell, okay, sir.

The first of the replacement fascia went on the house today and there was some of the damaged old propped up against the house as I went to get the mail and thank the guys for their hard work today.

I came back inside and kind of held my belly on the couch, thinking, man, where did that come from? Pain and nausea, thanks, Crohn’s.

A little later I went back out there before the light was gone to try to take some pictures, and a few steps from the door on the way back in it hit me: I smelled it and I felt it and I got inside and shut the door and went halfway down as my blood pressure swooned.

I went and looked for the name of the stuff here, and then searched for what it might be in out there.

Solvents. A whole lot of things, but that was one of them and whatever it was they used, they were going to be having to use a lot of it.

Nausea can be one of the first warnings. Thank you Dr. Google.

This is temporary and I want the job done right because it lasted 65 years the first time and I am highly reluctant to say a word to them.

And yet. If I were to collapse in front of them they’d need to know why.

They’ve only finished installing it on one side of the house so far, and they have to do it all the way around.

Edited Friday morning to add: thank you everybody; I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with it last night. I read your comments, sent Chris off a note, and within minutes his manager was at my door apologizing for that and saying they are substituting the problematical item out, no problem. Phew!

I started an afghan months ago that was three shades of earthy pink/claret/burgundy, from some 95/5 silk/lycra I’d bought at Colourmart seven years ago. My thought was, I’m finally going to use this up; I wanted something simple after finishing the incredibly finicky fish afghan; and it could go to anyone who might be allergic to animal fibers and they would be so thrilled. Because silk.

I knew from experience that the stuff shrinks by about a third so I’d started it on size 10.5s: big needles to use up my stash and create that yardage fast.

Silk likes to jump off needles, and three strands at once? It was not fun. Twelve plies per strand spun tightly together and yet each individual one just waiting to snag on your hands if you had any rough spots that day?

I wanted it done, I just didn’t want to do it.

So it sat there at about eight inches long and not useful for anything. For months. It didn’t help that I thought I only had one more threesome of those cones, which meant I would not be able to make it as long as I wanted.

In the middle of the summer I stumbled across more cones. I DID have more! That shawl I’d made hadn’t stopped me from having enough! I could actually do this. I got about five more inches done on it.

Malabrigo in the hands it is not. It sat forlornly in a second timeout.

The redwood blanket. Done. But what if Kat, if I were to ask directly, were to confess she loves the idea of it but not how it looks? What if she’s allergic to wool? Shouldn’t I be prepared to offer her options? This is about making her happy, not me. I started wondering towards that silk, was it really so bad? (Do they have a pet whose claws will shred the snot out of the stuff?)

And then the phone rang yesterday. It was an employee of the contractor who had originally planned to come in September along with the roofers to repair the termite damage, till life had thrown the boss a curveball; could he come by in an hour and go over the parts where the work needed to be done? It’s the fascia all around, right?

Blink.

And so he did that. Appraised the situation–yup, the woodpeckers went after the termites there, set up stuff for the morrow and left, telling me they’d be here between 8 and 9 a.m.

I dug out that silk afghan project. I’d stored those rediscovered extra cones with it. Phew!

I got up this morning and another employee was sitting in a truck out front waiting for it to be 8:00 so he could start.

And while that wooden fascia started coming off from all around the house, I knitted silk. I took breaks of course, but basically I tried to feel productive to live up to their example. I decided I was going to finish off that first set of 656-yard cones and at about ten p.m. I finally did.

Twenty-nine inches. Not bad. Not bad at all. And all this time it was just waiting for me to get a move-on, fer cryin’ out loud.

(Edited to add: First mango of the year. When it falls off the tree it’s telling you it’ll be ripe in about two days.)

My friend Heather from our old Purlescence days posts a query on Facebook every Monday: How’s your heart?

Yesterday I responded that I’d just read the summary of the two-week heart monitor and that it had instantly given me the earworm, Play That Funky Music Live, Boys. (Okay, I just looked it up. All these years it was white boy, not live, boy. ‘Live’ should work too given its origin story, except that it doesn’t at all. They would never have had their one-hit wonder my way.)

A little tachycardia, with my lightheadedness reports matching the tachy times. Which makes sense. Apparently if it constantly goes off before enough blood gets in there it’s not sending enough when it does.

My family practitioner asked me last week if I’d had any episodes while on the monitor like the one that had made them put me on it?

I said, Just one: much much much more minor. (Plus all those other little times that didn’t count, and they didn’t.)

Oh good! She was so glad that that at least would be documented.

One string of nineteen beats of tachycardia. Way, way better than an hours-long episode and the distinct certainty that I was not standing up and walking across the house and getting in the passenger side in the middle of the night, I couldn’t do it. I was just going to breathe deeply and hold on.

Whatever was setting all that off seems to have settled down now, and having only seen what he’s seen the cardiologist isn’t worried.

I need to gently remind him that I’ll take any soothing words and run with them–if he ever wants me in the ER if it does XYZ, he has to tell it to me straight.

Except that his nurse already did in no uncertain terms. When I left that note describing the night before. Good for her.

I got an email from my sister.

I would never have expected a real estate listing, of all things, to make me nearly burst into tears. Ohmygosh that hideous yellow on a house designed to disappear and become one with the woods a la Frank Lloyd Wright (who built his youngest son a house three streets away.) More than half the trees are gone. It’s for sale! It’s pending. It’s all but sold. Oh if only. Look how Dad’s fruit trees have grown!

My grandparents thought my folks were crazy: not only was it farther out in the sticks than anyone should have to commute, not only was River Road, now a main artery, reduced to gravel before it got to their turnoff (and it was outside the Beltway, which hadn’t been built yet) but there was a government missile silo protecting Washington DC built into a rock quarry that George Washington had known–at the end of their new street! With warnings and signs and DO NOT TRESPASS on the gate, and c’mon, what do you think curious kids are going to do? It was the height of the Cold War, and the grandparents worried that it and we were going to be blown up. The Soviets surely knew where those were.

And yet.

There was a ten-mile-long watershed preserve with a trail built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Originally that park came right up to the back of the homes on our street, but another builder sweet-talked the county into swapping land so that his neighborhood could have that as a selling point just like ours had had. They required of him the playground equipment in clearings in the park that I remember playing on as a kid; you had to hike that trail a bit to get to them.

I did not quite make it the day I stepped on some leaves and a hiding snake leaped out of there towards the creek as I leaped away in the opposite direction and didn’t stop till I got home.

It was very much a Calvin and Hobbes’ woods kind of a place and a treasure to explore.

After the folks sold our childhood home in ’07 to, they found out afterwards, a woman who wanted to convert it into an assisted living place, I happened to be in town while the remodeling was happening and my brother drove down from New Jersey to see me while I was closer than California.

We drove by the old place. The contractor’s truck was in the driveway. We talked ourselves into it, and then went and knocked on the door.

He was delighted to be able to show off his work to folks who appreciated and really knew what he’d been able to accomplish. Watch your step–the iron railing around the stairs was gone and the new one wasn’t in yet.

There were tire tracks everywhere across the woods in back: the next door neighbors had planted ivy when we were kids for erosion control and that non-native had taken over the world, smothering out the jack-in-the-pulpits, killing the box turtles they fed, strangling the trees. I marveled at the scarred but now bare trunks and ground and told the guy I’d tried to do that as much as humanly possible one Christmas home from college and had found out just how hard it is to pull ivy off a tree.

He’d done it. He’d done it. He’d cleared it all. Amazing. Thank you. I hoped the turtles could come back.

The house is once again a residence, albeit with laundry facilities upstairs and down.

The bomb shelter (it was a thing in 1962) had a toilet but no door nor wall just a don’t come around that corner, I guess in case all eight of us had to dash downstairs fast in the event of an attack and all try to squeeze in there. Or something. It was there so we could if we had to but we never did. Except, really really fast, just once on my part at about ten years old to prove to myself that it actually worked and I was scared of having to say anything if it didn’t, but thankfully it did. Phew!

But now it’s an actual bathroom (hey look a sink too!) and the ugly gray cinderblocks are nowhere to be seen. Yay. The family room has been expanded into where the shelter was and a closet has been made out of part of it. It’s quite nice.

I marveled at the square footage in the listing, and Richard said, It’s a big house! It always was!

It didn’t seem all that big when there were six kids running around making noise in it…

But so yes: this is the house I grew up in. It had natural redwood siding then and Eichler-style windows with floor to ceiling glass looking out on the woods and the bird feeder. It was a neighborhood where everybody knew and cared about everybody.

If you go to street view in the listing, go to the right of the house and down the hill to the first driveway across the street: that siding is what ours looked like and that steep driveway is where I saw Little Stevie with his proud mom right behind him as he was taking some of his very first steps.

That was (shameless name dropping) Stephen Colbert. They moved away when he was four.

Next door to them, the gray house with the deck and the long driveway, I was riding my bike one summer evening on a day we’d gone peach picking and a new family had just moved in but nobody had laid eyes on them yet.

The young mom was out there gardening next to the house and her four year old had wandered down towards the street to see who this new person might be. Her eyes were on the huge ripe peach in my hand and all that juice. (Not a great idea to eat one while riding a bike and I knew it but I was doing it.)

I asked her if she would like one. YES. I asked her to wait while I peddled back to my house and got another one for her. I was back to her in a flash but carefully instructed her, Now, you don’t know me yet so I’m still a stranger. Go ask your mommy first if you can have this.

She ran so fast!

Which is how I got to be their favorite babysitter on the spot.

That listing. I finally got to see the remodeling contractor’s finished work. It’s gorgeous.

And then I sent a note to the realtor, who called me and put me on the line with the buyer’s agent.

I told her, Looking at the pictures, there’s a new-to-me fence around the property. I don’t know if you know but that’s not the property line. We owned past the gully it’s looking down on and to a large tree on the other side in the backyard of the people on Cindy Lane who were behind us, and I have memories that my dad one day went rushing out there as they were pounding nails into it, demanding, Stop. That is MY tree, it’s not yours.

Oh.

The gully wasn’t the property line?

No.

The buyer’s agent listened to that with much interest and thanked me. I added, Now it could be an adverse taking thing, except that my parents didn’t leave until 2008, I believe it was, and Dad would never have let them. (2007, says the listing. Close.)

She thanked me–and I knew the person who’d connected us now had my email address (their site required it) if the buyer has any other questions. And Mom’s still alive to help out, for that matter.

Whoever out there has fallen in love with where we loved growing up, thank you for choosing our home and our neighborhood. You’re really going to love it there. Oh and: when Dad shoveled the driveway after a huge storm even though the roads were still closed and thought he was having a heart attack at 3 a.m. and the ambulance got there in four minutes? They’d put a snowplow blade on so they could get through.

Mom got to, for days, watch people thinking they could cut through the neighborhood by coming down that long steep hill, around the blind corner (where I once got hit by a car on my bike because we couldn’t see each other coming), find that it ended in their driveway and there was not so much as turn around space and they had to back up all the way up that steep snowy icy hill to the main road.

And then the teens next door, when they found out, forever after shoveled the folks’ driveway when it snowed, hoping not to get caught at it and refusing payment when they were.

Good times.