I had her address. I didn’t have his. I dithered.

I finally simply asked him for it. Said I wanted to send them thank-you notes for all the work he and she had put into making the high school reunion happen for everybody who could go, and for sharing all those pictures afterwards for those of us who couldn’t. His response was vintage Paul, sweet and kind and thoughtful as he ever was.

So two Priority Mail envelopes were handed to a mail clerk yesterday. I love that they have no idea what’s really coming. I had planned on sending them sooner–but it required my asking that question first.

I finally did.

I drove away from that post office just floating: MAN, that felt good! SO good. (So why don’t I do more of that? C’mon, Alison, knit more, you know you want to!)

I asked after Alex (pseudonym). She’s a great favorite of mine, and I knew her foster family had hoped to have her permanently. Such a cheerful, nice kid.

The answer was, the extended family has stepped forward and are going to adopt her instead. My friend told me it was very good news for Alex, that she was going to be in very good hands, while yes, she was going to miss her badly and love her forever.

She didn’t see behind her that Alex was walking up just then. So now Alex absolutely knows her now-mom believes in her next-mom and puts her trust in her to do her best by her, as will they all. And that is a good thing for a kid who has gone through chaos to be able to pack and take with her across the years to come. She is loved and wanted, unconditionally, there and here both.

We will miss her fiercely.

Alex gave me a BIG hug and got as big a one back. She hoped to be able to come visit, she told me.

I so wish–but for me it is enough to know I can trust her to keep on being the kind of person she is. She will bring much good into this world that so needs her.

There is a little tag inside that hat, “created with pride by…” and her foster sister’s has one, too. One more little connection between them, along with the memory of them sharing crayons to show the colors they wanted while designing them for me, a connection between us, and I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that I got off my duff and knit those when it most mattered.

This happened yesterday but it took me awhile to be able to put it to words.

She was elderly, about 4’10”, just a tiny old woman with a cheerful smile and a lot of energy and spunk. And she was African-American. We crossed paths a couple of times in the aisles at Costco and struck up a brief conversation the second time and shared a laugh. The kind of person you instantly wish you could get to know better: the stories and the wisdom that must be inside her after all her years!

I wasn’t surprised when she chose my line to stand in. Right behind me. I felt quite honored.

In the next line over was a tall, middle-aged white woman, also with a ready smile, and a man who was clearly her dad. He was about 6’6″, tall and broad–and seemed a little unsure of himself at times. Early Alzheimer’s, I wondered? Or just distracted, trying to take in a place that was new to him?

Whatever.

He decided he wanted to stand in a line, too, I’m guessing so that he could motion his daughter over should his prove to be faster, even though both of us actually only had one person ahead of us.

He was going to stand behind me.

I smiled and explained the obvious, with a nod in the first woman’s direction, “She’s behind me.”

His head shifted a little but he saw no one.

He tried again, taking a step my way. I smiled, “That lady’s behind me in the line.”

He looked around a bit again but he did not see her and she simply did not exist to his eyes. I did; but then I’m white, I’m of average height, I fit into an archetype he’s known all his life. Again he stepped my way to try to cut in front of her.

I could tell he was elderly and confused but it still didn’t make it okay to do that to her. This time, still smiling, I took a small step into his path to stop him and to quietly stand up for a woman old enough to have known Jim Crow and a black woman’s place in it all too well, but before I could say more, his daughter spoke up and asked him to come back to her line with her.

A look of understanding passed between us:

A silent, You’re doing your best, and thank you.

You’re not judging us, and thank you.

I could see he was not someone who intended to do wrong or bully in any way, he simply couldn’t take in all the information around him. Costco can be sensory overload for all of us, one could only imagine.

Through all of this, the tiny old black woman looked the other way and pretended she wasn’t being dismissed as not even existing by the white man from her generation who could not comprehend that she was present in this space and had every right to it. It wasn’t maliciousness on his part. It was simply a blindness.

I could only guess how many times in her life she has gone through little daily slights, how many things much worse than this. No harm had been meant. But it had to echo a lifetime of experiences.

And it broke my heart.

That sweet sound of breaking yarn, the second day in a row: alright. They’re done. (Just run in those ends…)

I used to knit during lunchtime (and sometimes in the classroom) in high school. A lot. You’d never have guessed, right? I’m just a lot better at it now than I was then.

The year 40 was coming up and no one had noticed out loud. So Patty said something and Paul chimed in, but somehow it still kept being an SEP: a Somebody Else’s Problem.

They decided they were the somebodies, then, because you just can’t let a number like that go on by–this had to happen. No DJ, no big bash, no overkill, just a simple meet-and-greet and dinner together at a locally famous restaurant with room for a crowd on the lovely grounds in Old Potomac not far from our school.

I would dearly love to go but the invitation came just when I was recovering from the latest head injury. I just didn’t dare risk traveling alone, and my sweetie, bless him, had no particular desire to spend a whole lot of money and time off work during a project-release deadline to go to someone else’s high school reunion where he didn’t know a soul. All it would take is me tripping, falling, and losing some of my speech again in a busy airport, or or or.

So yeah. Not going.

One of our classmates, whose father was a diplomat when we were all growing up near DC, raised his own family back home. In Venezuela.

Patty posted a picture today that showed that he had had the same thought I had had: that even if he couldn’t go, he could send his heart to us all, and that Patty and Paul definitely needed to be thanked. And so his goddaughter showed up today on her doorstep with a beautiful orchid, and Paul got a check covering the cost of the restaurant meal so that someone else could go, whoever that might be.

Me, well, y’know, I do what I do.

The leftover white cashmere/silk is from Mathias’s blanket and the dark Teal Feather hat in Malabrigo Mecha (a little greener than this shows) worked up thick and soft and warm.

I know Patty’s address and I can work the rest out from here. Tomorrow they go out.

A soccer game and then a good book: when you’re in first grade you can read it all by yourself now.

Re the pumpkin hats: I ended up crocheting the stems on Parker’s and Hudson’s, simply because it was far simpler than knitting in the round on so few stitches; I left them as tubes rather than closing them off.

So I told the boys their hats had a secret compartment. That got me instant big grins: I was definitely speaking a little boy’s language. I told Parker, who’s in first grade, that he could write a note and fold it up really tiny and fit it in there if he wanted. (And I thought as I did so of the tiny pocket with a tiny note knitted into one of the squares in one of the get-well blankets made for me by a whole bunch of wonderful knitters in ’09. It’s still in there, and is taken out and read every now and then, amidst all that wonderful warmth.)

Maybe I could have/should have written my own note? But I didn’t want to make time capsules to be reverently set aside unused, I wanted them to play with their wooly pumpkinizings and their imaginations and maybe even prompt their own desires to learn how to say what they’re thinking in the most succinct way to fit into the smallest space. One that is bigger on the inside.

To become writers. Like the five generations before them.

“Ba-bye!” I waved at Maddy.

She instantly got it: we were leaving. “NO!!!” and she turned away as she wailed it, trying to make it not be so. (She is, for another few months yet, two.)

Me too, little one, me, too. But she definitely had me smiling all the way home.

After we landed, my phone buzzed an incoming text: photos, of two little boys who had fallen into bed after a fun, long day.

And both of them had their pumpkin hats on their heads as they snoozed.

I wondered why my favorite weather site, after a recent upgrade, no longer automatically reloads as the temperature changes–you have to hit refresh now. And it kind of bugged me.

Until a conversation between the resident geek and the non-resident geek about user interfaces accommodating the disabled. Turns out, that feature I liked so much would have been making it so that the blind couldn’t have their program read it to them out loud.

Well then. I’m glad someone took that into account and broke the site just enough.

I do really like this.

But…. I don’t know if T’s grandma has been allowed back in yet to see if her house is still there…

When I picked up this skein at Cottage Yarns, Kathryn commented that it looked like one dyelot from one side and another on the other; I said that’s why I wanted to know what it would look like. (That and I liked the colors).

I was expecting the bright and the dark to intersperse going across the rows, and for the most part they did. And yet somehow there became this stark division between the narrower darker top of the cowl at the beginning and there below the midpoint.

It’s drying right now and maybe that dampens the effect for the photo, but: it’s too easy to look at this and see bright fiery flames shooting up into the sky with the darkened ash and smoke rising up from them. Yow.

Um, maybe someone else should get this one and I should start over.

There was an emergency of some sort and the doctor was an hour late. When she finally popped her head in the door, apologizing, I held up my needles and went, Hey, no problem–if the person after me is antsy, go see him first, I can wait.

She came in chuckling and told me that actually, he was held over in the eye department and wasn’t even here yet.

Alright then.

Afterwards, I drove home through much thicker smoke than this morning–again, it was stinging the eyes and again, you could see the breezes move the air. I checked the local news.

Sausalito in the North Bay.

Dublin in the East Bay.

Bear Creek in the South Bay, about ten miles from Richard’s aunt’s house in the mountains, but at least we’re not having the 50 mph gusts that sent embers 15 miles out like in Sonoma.

Our hard-working crews were right on them, and with a shift in the winds the air right around here was tolerable again by sunset.

But I keep re-checking the news on the bigger fire in Bear Creek.

I had been blogging about a month when I posted this (scroll down halfway.) Robert’s Medicine Blanket is very much treasured and used here, and that mat, too.

Robert’s home was near the fire area last I heard from him. I’m sure he’s fine, but I’ll sure be glad when the fires are over.

A few days ago, the Mercury News ran a photo taken from the Mormon Temple up in the hills in Oakland, looking towards the San Francisco cityscape across the Bay. There was only the barest shadow of any of that visible in the smoke, and the nearby zoo said they could only see to the far end of their property.

Today, despite the fact that Santa Rosa had to expand its mandatory evacuation area and those fires are not yet out, we happened to stand about where that photo had been taken from. The Bay Bridge and the water were in the distance, the skyscrapers beyond, almost as they’re supposed to be. The water was a subdued blue. I’ll take it.

We returned home surprised/not surprised at how crowded the freeways were for a Saturday afternoon–southbound, anyway.

I wound yarn.

I knitted yarn.  Malabrigo’s celebratory Anniversario colorway in Arroyo, just a one-skein cowl to feel like I’m getting something done, and as my hands worked the softness I found myself looking forward to finding out who this one was for. So, so pretty. One cannot help but be cheered by it.

And typing that out, the strikingly obvious came to me: Duh. I have to knit for G’s daughter, who grew up with my kids. This cowl or another one and maybe I should wait to give it to her till she finds out if she still has a house, or, if not, maybe all the more quickly, but… Yeah. Her. Alright then, I’m on a mission here.

And finally I felt like I had found my footing again.

So, the annual women’s dinner at the church tonight: nobody knew, when we scheduled it, that it was going to be a week when we could all particularly use each other’s good company and the time to just talk mid-week and decompress a bit together.

Someone at my table asked another, How’s your daughter? Was she okay…? (And I thought, ohmygosh, I forgot she lives up there!)

And the response was, Her cousin called her in the night and insisted she had to evacuate. Now.

Why? (Looking out the window.) There’s nothing anywhere near us. Everything’s fine here.

Get out! You have to get out!

He was adamant, so they got ready to go–and opened the door to go to their car and the fire was right there.

They made it out. They don’t yet know if they have anything to come home to but they made it out.

This morning was worse and the eyes burned constantly. One could only wonder whose house one was inhaling.

The OSH hardware store sent most of its N95-rated masks to the counties that needed them most. (The sign was at the drugstore.)

And then, some time in the afternoon, (graphs at the bottom in the link) the wind must have shifted and gradually it became clearer out–even if Beijing still had better air than our town did.

I’m wondering if every bit of yarn, every blanket and pillow, every rug and stitch of clothing is going to need to have the smoke smell washed out.

Then, when it all just seemed a bit much, the phone pings.

And Mathias and his mommy save the day.

The light coming through the windows during the day was yellow with a tinge of orange. Outside looked like sunset at  2 pm. We got a reverse-911 call telling us just how bad the air quality was and to stay indoors if possible and where to find out details; the recording repeated the URL.

Your city or county probably has a reverse-911 warning system but it might only go to landlines; check, and sign up your cellphone if you can. There were people in Napa and Sonoma who didn’t get warned of the fire in the middle of the night because they had VOIP and their old landline phones didn’t work when the power company cut the electricity to keep a substation from blowing up.

My neighbor has a dead tree limb hanging off the power line just across the fence, and with the news that the fires apparently started with trees downed by the winds sparking the PG&E lines I am suddenly much more aware that yes, I do need to bother the city about that.

Meantime, the breeze made the air suddenly and startlingly visible: little swirls and twirls blowing southerly while I tried to process seeing open air moving (and did it settle downwards a bit at the end of the puff?) Later a larger swoop again paintbrushed the pointillist ash particles. And just like that, they disappeared back into the jaundiced background and held still again.

I left the door half open while filling the bird feeder and that was really dumb.

A scattering of dove wings as the hawk appeared out of nowhere and across the roof and away and wow did he move fast. The power of nature!

An evening commute thrown off by a bomb scare, to which the only rational response was an Oh come ON in the direction of the perpetrator.

Meantime, I got three pounds and 2500 yards of merino yarn wound, scoured, spun out, and drying for the morrow, and I am looking forward to working with simple wool and wood of my choosing: nature, domesticated.

We are about 75 miles south of the fires raging in California’s wine country, with San Pablo Bay as a large break of water between here and there.

But the firesky sunset was intense and the clear awning over the patio glowed a deep, unfamiliar bright yellow that was both novel and startling and I could only pray for the people who went to bed in a calm night and woke up to walls of flames coming right at them, neighborhood after neighborhood. Would I have the presence of mind to grab for my hearing aids and glasses before I ran?

It is smoky and thick and smells like burning plastic outside.

Yonder Cooper’s has a tail feather coming in in the center. Like its daddy, when I needed it, there it was and it let me enjoy its presence for several minutes. It is new at that, though, and I am mindful of its skitteriness. Then it lifted to the fence and stayed a bit longer but flinched that the camera had come out while its back was turned.

The second photo was taken trying to capture it taking off. Crouch, wings out, leap! Faster than a speeding iPhone 4S!

Re the Crohn’s, today was definitely going in the right direction. Grateful for that and hoping hard.

The candy-cane-plied red and faintest beige yarn came out looking more brown the further you get from it (and when it’s wet. Which it is here.)

And… The smoke alarm just went off. Oh fun. That doesn’t mean the air is that bad…?

Six smoke alarms and a bit of teamwork later, we have new batteries and we have peace and quiet and we have a definite appreciation for how good we have it that they were not actually telling us to grab whatever we could and run.