If you heard that squeal just now, I came around the corner to explain to him, I went to smash an ant on the wall, it fell, I didn’t see where it went but I felt it land on my foot and suddenly found myself kicking real hard and jumping back and, yeah, it got noisy there for a second.

His face! He was still back at the wait wait wait WHAT?! He exclaimed, You can’t. Feel. An ANT! Land on your FOOT!

I laughed because I had–and I knew exactly where he was coming from. What the nerves no longer transmit, you gradually forget they used to be able to do. I studied harmonics in a physics of acoustics class in college so I know what they are in theory and they must sound divine, the pure math of sound and all that (anyone else remember the Harmonic Convergence group in the news? Was that related to the start of Burning Man? I digress.) But asking me to report on hearing them in our experiments in the lab? It was already ten years too late for that.

That is the one specific class grade I remember from university.  A-. Never was quite sure about that one.

Don’t use phone apps for directions, she told me, they’re a mess, use this other one.

Sure! I even printed it out.

I have idly wondered from time to time how, when you’re driving on the freeway and you look up at those steep hills to the west covered in houses, you can’t even see any roads except the biggest ones, but the views from up there must be amazing.

They are.

And I learned today that if you look down at them from your car for longer than a fast blink you will land on someone’s roof.

Years ago I learned how to be comfortable driving the narrow switchbacks in the mountains to Richard’s aunt’s house. I figured I was only good for the one total freak-out where I gave up and walked back to her door and asked her to drive my car to the top of her drive because I just just couldn’t. (Someone else later tumbled his car on a switchback there. New driver. He was fine.)

I came home and said, Your aunt’s road is a piece of cake. This one seemed to be less than a single lane wide, a little rough and the edges a little frayed at times, no barrier, and it was straight down from there. Tight, tight, constant turns. At one switchback it looked like recent construction above and there was just loose dirt going close to straight up, a landslide waiting to be come Friday’s rain.

She wasn’t going to be home, so I was to take them out of her mailbox and leave my own box by it.

The whole time I was thinking, What if someone comes around the next bend? You can’t back up around the bend behind you. You don’t have an inch to go around. What if this road just dead-ends? How do people pull into those driveways without disemboweling their cars? How did this county approve building up here where no fire truck could ever possibly go, heck, not even an Amazon box truck? And for the love of geography, why aren’t the house numbers visible?

I finally simply put the car in park in the roadway to go looking for one. Wave hi towards the concept if not actuality of a Ring camera?

The road–it needs a better description–continued forward and no other traffic happened (I mean, why would it) and at last it let out onto another that was steep and curvy but not so much on the terrifying.

So it was a loop and I could loop around again and get a better look for that house number, now that I knew what to expect. But you’d have to come to a full stop at every house to look.

I tried to talk myself into it.

Nopenopenopenopenope.

So the lady who bought a lot of the wrong size hearing aid batteries–my size–and whom I was bringing homegrown Meyer lemons to will get together with me next week at a store safely downhill from there. The post office won’t let her mail them and it won’t let me mail my produce. So we’ll just have to do it ourselves.

Since I’m making her make all that extra effort it seems like I should do extra, too.

Gee. I wonder what else I could possibly offer. Right? (And if she googles my name and finds this, I hope she tells me her favorite color.)

Friends dropped by this afternoon and surprised us with roses to wish us a happy Easter. Made me wish all the more that I’d remembered in my quick note last night to wish one for all of you who celebrate, and I hope all who do–and who don’t–had a wonderful day today.

There was a walk around the church tonight with each of us holding a mini light. There were readings at intervals along our Road to Emmaus and a gathering together on chairs set out on the lawn for the final triumphant reading of our risen Lord.

There were more people than chairs, though, and I saw a couple I didn’t recognize standing a little behind us so I motioned them to come sit by us where there was room.

Turns out they’re in the middle of moving here and are house hunting.

When she said where they were moving from, I asked if they knew Grant and Colleen?

Absolutely! Love them!

He’s my cousin.

She couldn’t wait to tell him she’d met us. And then she told us her husband was the brother of…

Camille?! I love her!

So now I get to hope they find something right around here where they have instant friends.

The ones who dropped the roses by?

The husband said tonight, I didn’t know you lived there! We almost bought the house next door to you when we moved out here.

I said to Richard on the way home, and he thoroughly agreed, That would have been so cool. But then we would never have met the family that did.

How often, when you ask a man what his wife’s favorite color is, can he tell you right away without squirming because he feels like he should be able to tell you but he suddenly realizes he has no idea.

But he did know, with certainty. Cool. I went stash diving and–oh, yes, that one exactly.

So. Doctor’s waiting room for a routine check. I pulled out the just-begun carry-around project and marveled at how finely spun baby alpaca yarn can be as jumpy on the needles as a happy toddler in an ice cream shop, especially old stash from when some mills were new at working with the stuff. But it makes such a soft fabric. (Why did I put needles that big in the bag? Stuck with them now.)

A woman was checking in and as she walked past me, she stopped and introduced herself as a fellow knitter.

Cool! Loved her scarf! I asked her about how she’d gotten started.

Her mom and grandmother were knitters; How about you?

I told her my family had traveled coast to coast and back when I was a kid and my mom had taught me how to knit to keep me from killing my little sister in the back seat. She laughed and asked if it had worked and I said yes, while thinking in my mom’s direction, I think so–I don’t remember any arguments after that. Mom, if you want to chime in?

I told her, Six kids and a camping trailer and she winced a little and yeah I don’t know how my folks did it either but they did it. Mom was knitting my sister an Aran sweater I seriously coveted so I wanted to learn to make my own.

We didn’t have a lot of time to delve in deep but we both would have loved to and I told her the name of my blog. So to her, if you’re reading this, welcome! And hi!

Palm Sunday: beautiful music, scripture, reverence for the Sacrifice made for us all so that we could find our way back to the Love that unites us all. His being willing to feel every person’s pain, to befriend us personally, compels us to be willing to share each other’s burdens in kind.

I caught tidbits of quiet conversations between friends trying not to talk politics there, but: Saturday’s protests. Where they were. How it united so many, so everywhere, so good.

There was Hope in the services.

And in those conversations. A lightness felt, a burden lifting: we will get where we intend to go.

Love for love.

The next door neighbor showed up offering oranges from her tree.

She found herself going home with a baby blanket.

Meantime, the mystery at Grand Central Station is solved. NYC now knows where the five foot heart balloon on the ceiling came from: the elderly couple and their daughter were heading to a Valentine’s party and lots of random people wanted to play with it. Cute video.

I remember the big (to my childhood eyes) field between the church and the Safeway on the Maryland side of beautiful, woodsy Western Avenue in DC and the clovers that dotted the grass and spread down that field. We would pick them and make a slit near the bottom of a stem with our fingernails and slide the stem of another through it, chaining them into flower necklaces that celebrated with us for the rest of the afternoon and then quietly gave way to nature.

White clovers had some of this yarn’s color at the center, with all those curled white petals above. A few were purple.

I’m sure the older girls taught the younger ones how to do this, though I mostly simply remember making them with my best friend Kathy. Those older girls would have included my older sisters–and Richard’s.

Whose cancer finally took her when her youngest was in college.

I remember, when our kids were growing up, her backyard sewn in meadow flower packets that had beautiful wildflowers blooming all summer. Cold, cold water from the mountains ran past it all in a tight stream hemmed in by squared stones set in place just so by pioneers at the beginning of the western water rights era so that their children’s children’s children could help things grow.

Her youngest will soon have a baby girl of her own.

Clover flowers in a meadow. With hopes of making chains of necklaces with the little one someday in memory of her grandmother.

(Photo from yesterday, didn’t take one today.)

Eight and a quarter repeats now after doing 21 166-stitch rows today. I haven’t worked this hard nonstop on an afghan since my grandkids’ cousin was born with a wrapped cord and not breathing on his own for his first fifteen minutes while the hospital scrambled to replace his blood and cool his body in a protocol Stanford had pioneered not long before.

I typed the above thinking a fervent oh, if only, wanting to hug my friend Jody whose granddaughter did not survive that complication.

That baby’s mom and dad needed a tangible symbol of all the hope and prayers sent by everybody.  I didn’t have the stash nor funds for more superwash merino to do it in one color, it was stripes the length of each skein and friends chipped in with more skeins of their own to be a part of the cause. Ten days start to finish.

I was told afterwards that that baby emphatically did NOT like to be cold. (Gee, I wonder why.) That made me all the more glad we had sent him our warmth.

He is turning 13 this year and doing fine.

Do you ever get yourself to keep at it by telling yourself that if you do this one row, you’ll never have to do it again? That that one row at least will forever be finished?

And then the next and the next and the next and the next.

This blog post brought to you with thanks to the makers of blue ice therapy gel packs.

Three weeks ago: hospital.

Two weeks ago: under strict orders not to be on his feet. Church for him by Zoom.

One week ago: still not up to going to church anyway, and that foot stayed propped up under continuing doctor’s orders. Church for him by Zoom.

Today.

Our friend Russ was holding the door open for us as we passed through at the end of the services.

I turned back to appreciate what I’d just seen: the joy in his face at Richard’s not only being there but looking so intensely normal. You wouldn’t have known at all that anything had happened to him. Russ had visited him in the hospital; he knew. Our eyes met.

His “He looks great!” was from the heart and the light in his eyes said it all.

Six-month retina post-op for me.

The clinic has a white board in every department listing the doctors and how many minutes behind they are, if any. Usually they’re not by much.

But this was a first: someone came through the waiting area announcing that Dr. R was 37 minutes behind–and while holding a large tray full of goodies and asking, Did anyone need water or a snack?

I had never seen this before. I don’t know if those were crackers, cookies, peanuts, or what, but I had just sipped from my own water bottle (I love my five-year-old one) so I smiled a thank you and passed up the chance. But I loved loved loved that Dr. R was making sure those patients out there were okay. That is so him.I looked around the room and remembered the days of gestational diabetes and hypoglycemia and having to carefully monitor intervals and intakes to keep my blood pressure and blood sugar up.

Our president is illegally throwing bombs at the country his grandparents grew up in. He is responding with, in the words of Alex Pretti, Are you okay? While actively making sure we were.

An old favorite deserves a re-mention on this date. Per the late, great comic artist Richard Thompson:

March comes in on clumsy feet

Kicks the trashcans down the street

Spills some garbage on the lawn

Blows the rest to hellandgone

Knocks the branches off the trees

Gives the power lines a squeeze,

And then March leaves and as it goes

The sun comes out. Then it snows.

Well, that was hellacious news to wake up to. Felon47 wanted a war of his own? Those Epstein files are cutting awfully close.

Writing the rest of this in hopes that someone finds it who’s facing doing this process and hasn’t ever yet: if I can, you can.

After he spent nine days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, it’s been a week of two and a half hour at-home infusions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a different one at 2:30 p.m. that takes five minutes per stopwatch to slowly go in but then it’s in, all three requiring I take the med out of the fridge an hour beforehand. Timers are our friend. We both got taught how to do this so that between us we wouldn’t forget any steps on what was at first a highly unfamiliar and uncomfortable process.

Don’t touch the blue part! (He was carefully holding only the bottom of it.)

I am so you won’t pull on it. (There being a needle at the far end for him.)

So, with some hovering mid-air between us, I screwed the other piece on without touching the blue it was screwing onto. It worked. Alcohol wipe, saline infusion, alcohol wipe, med, then alcohol wipe, saline, plastic cap. Oh yeah and the open/close the valves part: if it’s not going in, that’s where it went wrong. The number of valves varied. If it’s only almost not going in, that’s the stopwatch med, it wants to make you go as slow as you’re supposed to with a full minute between partial pushes and that timer is absolutely necessary.

The one thing I don’t get, though, is going through all the steps to completely disinfect my hands and then grabbing a paper towel to dry them. In college I had a job on an assembly line for *plastic medical goods and I saw how that place was run, FDA cleanliness regulations or no. (I would have reported them, had I been able to figure out how back then when a simple phone call to the East Coast could cost you a day’s wages, or figure out how to even get that number. Today’s generations have no idea how much better their world is because my parents’ peers broke up the monopoly of Ma Bell.)

So. A paper towel as a germ-secure tool? Seriously? But then after the antiseptic and the towel they have you Purell and shake, no towel. Well alright then.

The last IV is about done and the fridge has officially reclaimed its space for food. Unscrew, alcohol wipe, cap it off and we’re done. The PCC line allegedly comes out Monday morning, but we’ll know for sure after the doctor sees that foot.

Baby steps.

* Let me hasten back to add that those were not items along the lines of these syringes, they were larger plastic items used in hospitals, like barf bowls. Still.

Part of me is quite sorry–any tree gone is a loss. Most of me is relieved. It was an invasive planted who knows by whom in the wrong spot. The deed is done.

Turns out the core of the trunk was in very bad shape, crumbling to nothing, with the damage radiating out to the edges in a few places. We may well have dodged more than we knew.

The baby peach tree is going to do great there.

Still randomly laughing. He didn’t say, but I bet his wife had thoughts on the subject…

Last week I offered the surgeon his choice of a few hats. Another one was on my needles just then–he knew I’d made them.

He hesitated and his face looked as if I’d put him on the spot so I assured him, You don’t have to. It took him a moment but okay, he found a shades-of-brown Rios one and let me give it to him.

And I thought to myself, You’re thinking skiing and Tahoe and adequate warmth and I’m sure you do have some synthetic thing more windproof than these. No sweat. The irony is that the one he did take was the least warm of them–although, the easiest to tuck away.

Today was a post-op follow-up and I’m the one driving at the moment.

I almost laughed (don’t, don’t, I didn’t) when the guy near the end stopped and turned away from inspecting stitches to me and asked me about his new hat. With quite a bit of enthusiasm. He told me how much he loved it. How he keeps it in his pocket (which he patted.) It was so soft! Was it wool? ..Merino? (Said hesitatingly, apparently unsure that I would know what merino meant. Oh you sweet summer child.)

I told him yes, merino, that it was super wash treated so you could run it through the laundry but it would fuzz out so if you don’t want that then hand wash, and that it was hand dyed (let’s not get into the granularity of kettle dyeing descriptions.)

He very much appreciated it.

And I so wanted to tell his wife thank you. Still laughing. He’s a quick and willing study, for sure.

Years ago, I was doing Stitches West via wheelchair.

I had inherited a wheelchair pressure cushion (something like this only I think heavier duty) from a late friend and it was so comfortable that I ended up commandeering it for my knitting perch. I’ve had it about 25 years now. It has lasted.

So. Friends drove, we carpooled, and at the end of the day putting all that back into their car I heard something.

What. Is. That. Sound.

Oh, we heard that ever since this morning, they said, we just didn’t know what or where it was.

Turns out the nozzle had somehow come slightly open: the entire joyous day of running into old knitting friends and fondling new yarns, my seat had been playing whoopee cushion.

It flattened out about a month ago and Richard could use it right now so a friend came by with a bicycle pump today and we got it nice and full and it seems to be holding just fine and I guess I just knocked it loose again while rummaging around for something. Yay. But it takes me straight back to that bemused, feigned-nonchalance answer from my friend. Just before my disbelief and then our all cracking up.

But my story has been completely outdone.

Richard’s first night in the hospital, they looked at this 6’8″ guy with the operated-on foot in this normal-person bed and went, nope, and moved him down the hall to a bigger one. Still a tad short but better.

Friday, someone decided this just wouldn’t do when they did in fact have one longer than that, so while he was walking the hall with the nurse they moved that one into his room. Great.

Except.

By the next morning, after I’d started timing the (insert definitive expletive of one’s choice) thing, he’d figured it out: it was an air mattress. There had to be some small leak somewhere. That steady jackhammer-loud blast that went off for 50 seconds out of every five minutes round the clock?

So. Loud.

That was the sound of its compressor helpfully pumping it back up.