The last thing in yesterday’s busy day was an email.

When I got nowhere with Speed Queen after the first repairman was–no need to rehash–I sent a message to the dealer, figuring they would have more clout than I ever could.

There’s that three thousand dollar electrician repair bill to make clear why this matters to me, but I just want a working dryer for my warranty.

Always buy from an independent if you can. The guy wrote back, Let me talk to my SQ sales rep.

A few days later I had a referral to a new repair company and was told to tell them our dryer has a short.

Their guy is coming tomorrow.

Putting wet clothes in a metal box and pulling them out dry less than an hour later sounds insanely luxurious right now. I can’t wait. I feel like singing along with this grounds crew guy outside the elementary school. (Did the windows in yours open like that, back in the day? Mine did.)

Doorbell.

First, the plumber, who looked at the installation below the wretched refuse of the teeming tides of the kitchen sink and shook his head at whoever had set it up like that.

Yeah, I told him, we spent $40k on repairing the mistakes the remodeler left behind (like the rain that had come into overhead light fixtures here and poured out an electric socket there, for starters. That was fun) but that we didn’t know about that one.

He shopvac’ed our attempt at Drano-ing the darn thing, poured it out at the toilet, and got to work on the rest. Those pipes had to go.

While he was under there making noise…

Doorbell.

Hi! I said brightly, Are you Dotty?

She looked at me like what the ??? No, I’m Sue, as she walked in, while I was like, ??? I moved the bin of yarn over to her. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to please get it out of her way.

Ohhhh. The home nurse who comes every two weeks to inspect the wound on his foot? (It wasn’t the nurse I remembered and they always came on Friday and this is Wednesday) so okay then sorry about that.

Because she had come sixteen minutes after Dotty had texted that she would be here in fifteen to twenty.

Right on cue:

Doorbell.

This time it WAS Dotty, and we introduced ourselves to each other. I’d been sure she couldn’t possibly want all those pounds of 2/28 merino (ie 1400 yards per meter) on cones, but she very much did and was thrilled with all of it. Alright then!

She’s a weaver but this was to be a gift for her cousin, who had looked at my photo and said, Yes please!

We got a good laugh out of each other when I tried to offer her the bin to take it home in and she groaned, I have..so..MANY, and I laughed that I did, too, that’s why I was trying to get rid of it. Fellow fiber enthusiasts: we were friends on the spot. We compromised on a trash bag and dumped it all in. She was walking down the street to her car (it was a little crowded around our driveway) and I started to run after her with one more lace weight left behind, she didn’t see me and it hadn’t been in the photo nor the list I’d sent her; I went, nah, she’s good, and went back inside.

The nurse needed cheering up.

I went out back and clipped two pomegranates off the tree. They do not give them up willingly–you have to show them who’s boss. I put a bright pink-red fruit by her, saying, That’s for you; she looked up in surprise and smiled for the first time.

The other one went to the plumber.

He finished up after several hours’ work and I asked, having waited for two days for when I could finally do this, if I could turn the dishwasher on now.

I already did, he smiled.

Good man.

Oooh. I replaced a hearing aid battery. They give a loud little tune at death but his machinery must have been louder.

The nurse stopped to say thank you for the pomegranate on her way out. I mentioned the face blindness and you could see her going, Ahh, now I get it. (It was her second time here.)

Meantime, while she and the plumber had been working, I finished the scarf rescue of the UFO. No side ribbing; my fashion consultant liked it with just the top and bottom done. Stop now.

Twist my arm.

I’ve been quietly thinking how glad I am that I dumped a large number of cinnamon sticks out by the pomegranate tree when the squirrels started showing up. It actually did keep them from stripping the fruit this year, or at least, so far. The plumber was happy for his but the nurse was the one it really made a difference to. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before Dotty left.

It feels so good to be able to run water in the kitchen again.

There was a glacier at the bottom of the freezer where the water dispenser had leaked; it’s been there for some time because you couldn’t get at it without going without a fridge. We’d tried previously, with two hair dryers on it full blast nonstop but it just didn’t dent that block.

I’m still on take it pretty easy mode but her time here is winding down.

And so we ate down the stuff in the fridge over several days, she moved stuff into the big freezer and then put ice packs around the little bit still in the fridge, opened the freezer door, and left it to sit overnight.

She had emptied the ice maker. I scooped the cubes up into a quart container for one last try at keeping the fridge side cold.

Then I tried putting a pan of hot water on top of the ice block. Five times. I taped the open door button closed so the light could go off. We’d slid the “Colder_____Off” to Off already. Huh. Couldn’t unplug the thing without moving the whole fridge and nobody’s back here was going to be able to do that.

There was still impressively solid ice in the morning. But surely underneath it was quietly giving way.

But the towels arranged against and below it were not soaked. At least the one on top was damp.

I tapped at the block. Nope! Wow.

At 11:03 a.m.–she laughed when I told her what time it was–I smashed at that ice once more and then gave a mighty yank to the wire drawer and it came! Freed at last! I knocked the ice out of it into the sink.

About four hours later she dumped some hot water on it to make that clump finally finally go away for good and that was that. (I was thinking, No wonder it takes a week to thaw a turkey in a fridge!)

Now we can fit dairy and dairy free ice creams in there without the twain ever meeting. Look at all that space! Organized, too!

But the real incentive was, that fridge was bought in 1994 and this was either going to prove once and for all that it and its broken shelf support here and missing cover there had to go because the fridge side just wasn’t staying cold enough–

–or it would fix that problem.

It’s been 24 hours since I put the ice cubes in to help the fridge side stay cold overnight. There was just that quart container.

I typed the above and out of sudden curiosity walked back in there and dipped my hand into it.

There was one last ice chip still floating at the top there.

They used to make them like they don’t now, didn’t they?

A potluck tonight, and the speaker afterwards was an old college classmate of mine in town for his high school reunion.

He’d built a house near his folks and his kids had grown up with ours until they’d moved away for his job. It was great to see him.

So.

Tom did a trip around the world in 72 days, ending in September, joined at different times and places by adult members of his family and extended family.

I knew I’d heard of Svalbard somehow but I had to look it up afterwards: it’s between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole, and he described a warning sign saying Do Not Go Past This Point Unarmed.

Very few people live in that large area, it’s mostly tourism, mining, and research.

One resident told him, the polar bears ate a guy two years ago. And four years ago.

(So by that, we’re about due, right…) So he asked the guy, Have you ever seen a polar bear?

No! And I don’t want to!

It was noted that they do outnumber the human population there and that they, along with tigers and crocodiles, are the only apex predators who actively hunt humans, and that if you see a low-lying rock there might be one behind it hoping you walk by. They’re willing to wait. Take your time.

He and his nephews climbed an icy mountain there in a storm. Tom’s advice afterwards was, Don’t.

Turns out Svalbard is where the famous Norwegian Seed Vault is. Ah, that’s why I knew the name.

There are shelves to either side and there used to be a high stack of bins up the center blocking one’s access to right or left or any of the yarn without wrangling each bin sideways one by one to get it entirely out the door there and over the furniture and into the room. And then the next. And the next.

Now you can just pull the one you want straight onto or above the middle of the open closet floor.

She did the lifting, I did the sorting, and two friends have made initial claims on the better of the old yarns.

So much space had been taken up by half-empty ziplock bags inside the bins. On the other hand, the only sign of moth damage after all these years was to two skeins that inexplicably were not in one; they went straight to the trash outside.

I found that I did in fact have leftovers of possibly all the colors from making a llama/wool (remember Classic Elite?) baby-cabled sweater in the 90’s in which each half of each cable was a different color, a la Kaffe Fassette. I’d long wished I’d made it a cardigan. There is one untouched skein in the background color and all those accents; I could actually cut it open and do that now.

Naaahhhh… It’s not soft enough to put in the time, but it’s good to know I could.

I found the front of a more elaborately cabled handspun sweater in two colors (should have taken that picture) from my very earliest spinning and dyeing days. It’s fabulous. But I knew halfway through that it would never be finished: the teacher I was taking classes from had us try dyeing with unsweetened Koolaid, more or less on a lark and because she knew we would hear of other people doing that.

I got some pretty nice colors! And I used them in that sweater.

So then I tried dyeing small batches in lots of flavors to see what range I could get.

Which led to my calling my neighbor and apologizing if she found any pink hairs on her cat because it kept insisting on lying on my wet wool–and I knew my teacher’s light gray cat had dyed itself green by climbing into the actual dyepot she’d set out on her porch to cool.

I have long chuckled at the idea of the neighbors doing the dishes and looking out the window to see a green cat waiting for its hair to grow out!

Next, I wanted to see how colorfast this stuff was. Using commercial dyes that are meant to be dyes made more sense to me, but on the other hand, any summer grocery run will net you some of this when you need it. So I left little bits of it outside in direct sun for two weeks, the neighbor’s cat notwithstanding.

Three things happened: some of it changed very little or not at all. One color blanched at the thought and faded fast into the palest of grays before the time was up.

And the rest (or what I could find of it)?

Our kindergarten teacher found the nest when it blew off the roof of the school: it was made of bright pink koolaided wool woven with twigs and leaves and a downy feather or two. But the pink! The wool! She knew I’d be interested and waited to show it to me and I instantly knew exactly where that had come from–and we’re a quarter mile away!

I wondered how many others there were out there. Clearly it wasn’t just the wind picking the stuff up.

So, yeah. All that colored cabling work, cherry I think was the darker one, that one… Well, at least it held up in a dark closet for 31 years.

But I’ve had an inherited half of a cotton sweater front serving time as my favorite dish towel for a long time. I can rip this thing back to the start of the armscye (or just leave it as is) and shrink it into a trivet. Or a dust mitt. Or a dishtowel. It deserves to be used and enjoyed; it’s waited long enough.

Let me go read the new inscriptions on those bins so I can figure out which one it went back into.

Out of the eleven, there are four empty bins now.

When I was a kid there were some shows on TV that had, across the bottom of the screen, the lyrics to the music being played, with a dark little ball bouncing off each word as it conveyer-belted away off the screen in a single line with the next ones incoming. As an adult I assume that was to help kids learn to associate the sounds with the letters and help them start to read.

I’ve got the little (smaller than yesterday!) bouncing–well, more like wobbling–dark ball at the bottom. But my eyeball just doesn’t have the built-in captions to match. Someone ought to get on that. I mean, this is Silicon Valley and all that, right?

Saw the cataract surgeon today; he took a good look around and was quite pleased with how well all of it was healing.

I had one last burning question: when was I going to be able to wash my hair.

Don’t let any soap in your eye whatsoever and then the answer is whenever you want to.

You know those times when you can’t shout YAYYY!!! at the top of your voice while jumping up and down like a maniac because you’re expected to act like a grownup?

The rolled-up towel against my back to keep me from rolling over at night, the little bit of eye pain, the no exercise/no bending over/no lifting over five pounds, the waiting for my vision as it sneaks back into view slowly–I think emotionally it all kind of summed itself up simply in Man, I just badly want to be able to clean my hair.

It actually pulled off a surprisingly not bad job of faking it in the meantime. I was surprised.

It’s the weekend of the World Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with three two-hour sessions today and two tomorrow. Look for the tallest man (I think) in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and wave hi at my cousin Jim with me.

Last year, a month before the election, one of the songs the leadership chose had the line “The scepter will fall from the despot’s grasp when with winds of stern justice he copes…” Loved it.

The opening segment today began with a heartfelt plea to choose to be a peacemaker. To follow the teachings of Christ, *the* Peacemaker, who tended to all, women, children, occupier centurions, the much-married and now not bothering with that part Samaritan woman at the well whom he did not judge but simply told her, now that she had felt the immense love and acceptance of his presence, to go and sin–to separate herself from that Love–no more.

The next speaker was a Black woman. The next, Hispanic. There was this unspoken, Do you get the message yet. We are all children of our Heavenly Father and all deserve to be treated with respect and honored as beings created by G_d no matter our faith or our background.

And that last talk of the day! Where a man blamed himself, he was sure it had to have been his fault, that clearly he had not done a good enough job of fully checking out the small plane that his pilot wife and her friends had crashed in. He was in agony.

If someone has wronged you, was the message, forgive. If you have wronged someone, take responsibility for it, fully repent to G_d for having done it, do all that you can to make amends to any who have suffered because of your mistakes.

And then honor the Divine by accepting what the Divine has offered to you: forgive yourself.

A year later, all at once and unexpected and yet in response to fervent prayer in deeply missing his wife, that gift washed over him. He felt her near, felt G_d near, saying it was okay.

And it healed him.

When my kids were teens there was a shop at the mall that made me wonder why a place that sold bath salts and the like smelled like a cookie as you walked past.

Turns out vanilla was their most popular scent.

I like vanilla too but I don’t want to bathe in it. (Man, can you imagine what that would cost now? With shortages and crop failures, vanilla was the most expensive spice in the world last I checked.)

Fast forward: Trying to come up with a solution for me, Michelle was talking about dry shampoos.

Me: Yeah, I tried one of those–about 40 years ago; I wasn’t impressed.

Well, she said, they’re basically just starch.

Me: I know! The potato starch in the pantry!

You should have seen the look of horror on her face. I had to assure her quickly that I was totally joking.

But I was thinking of that shop as I said it: Man, *sniff* isn’t it a little early for Thanksgiving? If I walked around smelling like mashed potatoes because I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet, how would you even be able to wash it out at the regret of it.

If you’re going to be weird, yeah, I’d go with the vanilla first.

Day four: without thinking about it, I had both eyes open while knitting, whereas yesterday I kept the one closed without even thinking about it.

It made me think about it: I suddenly realized what was bugging me so much. The visual image at center, such as it was on the right, didn’t quite entirely come together properly with the left. Like one hand was off by an inch or so towards and away from me from each other, like trying to put a torn page back in the book and getting it wrong. It was so strange. I had to force myself to keep going. But Aftober, the annual finish your UFO by the end of the month race, is on and I want this afghan finally done. By the third long row I let go and just went with it and let it amuse me.

One more week till I can wash my hair. That eye cannot get wet.

One more week till I can take the hospital warning bracelet off announcing I have a gas bubble in my eye.

I was told I could not go above 1000′ elevation. If I wanted to go to Santa Cruz, I absolutely was to take the long way around across the valley and not over the mountains, and the doctor said with more emotion than he probably intended, Don’t! Go! to Tahoe!!

I wondered which one of his patients had decided to use his medical time off to go skiing with an eye mask on and what had possessed him, but apparently someone did and it was a notable enough case that all such patients at that clinic are now specifically forbidden Tahoe. High elevation changes the gas. You do not want to mess with what that gas bubble was put there to do.

I wondered what on earth people who live in Denver do.

Poking around, I found a story of an elderly woman who’d come to NIH because she’d had retina surgery and then a cardiac event. The ER saved her life but didn’t know about her surgery and so didn’t contact the surgeon, and the treatment they used forced her gas bubble into her brain. It recovered. But her eye was blinded.

The bracelet says, Contact opthalmologist on reverse side before treatment.

I took a peek at the inside edge.

Nobody had filled it out.

I was amused. (The doctor probably wouldn’t be.)

Day two at the post-op appointment: the nurse covered my left eye and asked how many fingers he was holding up.

All I could guess at was that he was standing in front of me. Pretty sure. I mean, his voice was, so…

Day three, at lunch today I took the patch off to put drops in. I looked at the mirror. Hey! I could tell where the mirror was and where my reflection was, even if I couldn’t have told you for sure it was mine or even a person except that, well, duh, context and all that. But still. What a difference! We’re up to lava lamp vision.

Three hours later I was sitting knitting. Mostly with my right eye closed because it was such a distraction.

Something caught my attention and I stopped. Closed my left eye. Looked at the afghan in my lap through all the little holes in the eye patch, and I imagine that helped with the focus?

But I did: I saw the brown trunk of the tree. Where it split off into three parts, the limbs climbing up from there–it wasn’t sharp but I saw it! With my operated on eye! I couldn’t make out the peach stitches nor the leaves at all, just that I could see the darker-ness of the limbs against–whatever was where.

I had to go back after dinner to do it again to convince myself I really had seen the form of the tree.

And because, having gotten this short small taste of what real blindness can be like, I wanted to celebrate all over again that it had changed so much so fast.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

What I remember of the two surgeries while coming under the knife: the comfort of the unseen voice saying, This is Dr. M, right before he got to work on the cataract.

And then the comfort of the unseen voice, This is Dr. R, just before he started to work on the retina.

I was drugged out enough at that point that nothing else really entered in, but those two moments, those two decisions to connect with their patient, felt, when they did it, like it made all the difference, and that stayed with me.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

Last week I went in with Richard to his appointment with the wound care specialist.

The doctor barely made eye contact with him, and me not at all. He dealt with the problem at foot, competently so. All business, all seriousness.

He had a follow-up Tuesday this week and again I came in in case there was anything the doctor wanted to teach me about taking care of those injured toes, since he had changed the protocol a little and who knows if he might again.

This time, I was wearing Galina’s gerdan with the small beaded bird perched on a Ukrainian bandura, singing its heart out. (Wow, that article: there was a time when you could be shot by the Bolshevik Russians for being a Ukrainian playing one. No wonder Galina used that imagery!)

The doctor came in, nodded hello, and did a slight double take as he seemed to be taking in the heart of that bird for a moment. Something in him seemed to let go of I could only guess what, and he exhaled.

He talked to us. He made eye contact this time. He took off the bandaging. He saw that all the open wounds but one were now healed and that that one was making progress, and that was very gratifying to him: last week he had said this could still go either way (meaning he could still lose those toes), but now, six weeks in, he said with clear relief that we were finally getting there.