The hospital project is done and blocking.

The Mooi got worked on at Purlescence tonight, where Nathania instantly knew what that yarn was just to look at it. I told her it had been a great comfort. She looked in my eyes and answered, “We take care of our people.”

And they do there. And everybody is their people.

Background shawl with thanks to Mary, who so earned it.

Every time I think I never have to take the squirrel-on-crack-effect prednisone steroid again in my life, they think up some new excuse. Short term but massive, they want now.

I argued with the nurse. *I’d had a doctor give me a bedside lecture last year that despite my reaction to topical iodine, iodine is an inert mineral that, he said, it is impossible to be allergic to. A medical myth.  The stuff they mix it with? Sure. Iodine? No.

And so (just like last year just the same) they want me to take Pred and Benedryl for a CT scan so I won’t react to this iodine I can’t be allergic to.

I got nowhere. The nurse who called me to tell me had no idea. This is just how we do it, sorry.

Yes, and walking around with 80/40 bp and the like is how I do it, do you know how I react to Benedryl? Is it in my records?  Do you really want to depress that?

You know?  I think I’ve been more stressed about this than I thought I was.

Just before my first Stanford stay last year, when I was too sick to sit up, much less knit, the community at Purlescence filled a large basket for me of newly-picked oranges from Jasmin‘s trees and yarn and handknits to cheer me on and to give me something to keep me looking forward.

One of those things was two skeins of Mooi from Nathania, Sandi, and Kaye–a blend with buffalo and cashmere that was probably one of if not the most expensive yarn in their shop. I was alive enough to realize and hang onto the idea of what a treasure they were offering me: in my intense pain and weakness, being able to anticipate specific moments of joy in an as-yet uncertain future.

How do you live up to that intensity when you’re puttering around happily back in normal life? It has been bothering me that I haven’t done that great gift justice. It kept waving other skeins ahead of it, going, no, no, you go on, wool, you’re fine, no problem.

It’s time.  I guess I can’t say I refuse to let this ongoing post-ops stuff buffalo me now.  This is lovely stuff, with a brightness to it that I didn’t see in the ball and didn’t expect as it weaves around my needles, and it didn’t even hit me till I started playing with it that those women had picked the color in their stock that matched my favorite teal-blue skirt they’d seen me in a million times.  Man am I slow on the uptake.

And now I can begin to really tell them thank you for that Mooi. At last.  It’s gorgeous stuff and it is a great comfort. Again. A CT scan? I was worried about a stinking *CT* scan, fer cryin’ out loud?! What was I *thinking*!

(Edited to add five weeks later: I talked to my radiologist brother-in-law, and he said that while one might not technically be allergic to iodine, it is very common for iodine to bind with various cells that one then makes antibodies against–causing a potentially dangerous and yes, allergic reaction.)

So it was knitting group night at Purlescence, and some people I hadn’t seen in awhile were there along with the regulars.  Having talked on end there about the antics of the falcons over at City Hall, I brought Hilary’s falcon carefully tucked away in a box for safety–not even thinking till just now as I write this that wow, just like the elevator rides for the misfledged fledglings!

A woman walked in wearing a “Not that kind of doctor” t-shirt; another stood up and they threw their arms around each other.  Something was mentioned about not having had a good conversation since 1994; they were old buddies.

I wasn’t following their conversation, not wanting to be in the way, but the one I didn’t know was working on the most incredible beaded glove in a deep sapphire blue with beads, both sparkly and plainer, and just the slightest brush of lighter shades mixed into the blue. The Milky Way?  There was fine embroidery and I thought, the Big Dipper!

Turns out I got that one right. She was an astrophysicist PhD and she was knitting the galaxies into her gloves.  Wow.  I wanted to stare at the one in her hands and study its emerging skies.  For me, the daughter of a contemporary art dealer, if I were doing a starry starry night, it would look like a Vincent Van Gogh–backgrounds are funny things.

She was visiting from Boston, if I heard right; as their conversation went on, there was a fellow, one of the regulars, who was spinning away at his wheel next to the pair.  He’s been quietly working away at that green wool roving for a goodly number of weeks.

And at some point that I missed but got told about afterwards, he interjected, Oh, you must know my mother!

His mother, it turns out, had been the woman’s thesis advisor.

Look at all those stars. Ours IS a small world!

The peregrine fledge watch officially ends tomorrow and there’s a touch of empty nest syndrome already.

Meantime, at Green Planet Yarns, I found more of the Joseph Galler baby alpaca that I didn’t buy at Imagiknit and had regretted ever since: undyed brown plied around white, the colors of a young peregrine’s chest till their adult feathers grow in. (This is for their safety; it keeps strange adults from thinking they’re looking to take their territory while they meander around exploring their new world.)  This time I bought a skein.

When I saw it across the room last month, I almost didn’t bother to check it out: oh, yeah, that brand, they’re old-school alpaca, sharp guard hairs ruining the good stuff mixed in.

Yeah well. Shows you how long it had been since I’d seen or felt any.  What Peruvian Tweed is now is what I’d always wanted it to be, something you can put up against your face and still think it soft. (Note that I did that to pick out the softest skein, though, and there was a slight variance. Worth checking out in person if you can.)

I think I know what it wants to be–I had plans, all this time I wished I’d bought it earlier. But once I actually sat down with it, they just weren’t quite it.  I think I’ll have to give it a night’s rest and see what my brain comes up with by morning.

Two days ago, Clara flew into the nest and her children waited for her to come bring them dinner in their corner. She just stood there in the center. The message was clear: I don’t care if you do beakplants, you are old enough now to come over here and get it.

They grow and change so fast.  Today, she flew in with Pigeon Deplume’ and an eyas bounded over, grabbed it from her, and twirled away. Clara went right after it: gimme that! No! Yes! No! Yes! The two of them danced in circles three times, and on the fourth time ’round Clara succeeded in grabbing it back.

Now children. You will take turns being properly fed by me!

ME dooz it!

CHILDREN.

As one peregrine watcher put it a few days ago, (and I wish I could remember who so I could give them credit) “Mo-o-o-om, I ate all my pigeon; can I have some songbird for dessert?”

Their new dark feathers are growing in by the day.  Before you know it they’ll be ready for the Jerry Flew-us Fledge-a-thon.

(p.s. I took the qiviut scarf to Purlescence tonight. Universal swooning did happily occur. And today, for the first time, a spotted towhee showed up, identified after emailing with Sally, my expert.  It took a red-eye flight to get here.  Gorgeous!)

Kurt at Imagiknit asked Saturday what a peregrine is, after I exclaimed that that soft handspun Peruvian Tweed alpaca in shades of gray would make a great peregrine. (Are peregrines soft? But then, how could feathers not be?)

I so much wanted to show him Evet’s gorgeous Earth Day photos in response. I think they could answer his question better than I ever could.  And man, ya gotta love those last two: someone had slammed a door loudly behind Evet, and Mama Clara announced, Okay, that’s it, you’re done. Bye.

And that was what I’d planned to blog about today.  And then I got an email.

That shawl that I mailed off that had so bugged me that it had taken me three weeks, what with taxes and all, to finish and get done: it arrived today where it was going.  On the most right day, and the delays that had seemed such a problem to me suddenly made sense.  The person I sent it to took the time to thank me right away, which amazes me after all the things she had to deal with and do today–including attending a service for a fourth-grader from her school who had passed on Saturday.

I am so glad I didn’t ignore the impulse to go knit that.  I am so grateful that my hug arrived around her shoulders the first day possible after the loss of that little girl she knew. This is what knitting is all about: sending love forward.

I forgot to tell her one thing, though, which is that if it should ever snag or tear, there is a spare length of yarn worked a good ways across the bottom row.  Anywhere else, surely it would get lost or tossed, but there it is.  Invisible but right there at hand, ready to reloop a broken loop, ready to hold it back together for her, at the ready, any time.

Which is as close as I could do to doing that in person for her from several thousand miles away.

It had been two years since Nina and I had done a yarn crawl.  Last year’s medicalnoise simply, neverendingly got in the way.  We were long overdue for some time together, so today we threw our things in her car and headed north.

I introduced her to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco and snagged the last hank of Malabrigo Sock Botticelli Red in that dyelot, just to make absolute sure I had enough for my project–you know, the one I ripped out four times in my perfectionism before I got it right.  Having a lot of yarn left over, just in case, so much beats the alternative, and  I want to be able to be more generous on that shawl’s length that I would be for me, personally, if that’s what feels right when I get to that point. (I will add, the yarn held up just fine to all that ripping. Makes me more willing to buy more.)

The owner grinned to see me right back and right back in that Malabrigo basket, and she welcomed us warmly.

And then we went to Imagiknit in San Francisco, a marvelous shop full of light, both in the people and in the shop itself.  As we drove closer to it, looking around and at our map, (hey, I know that park!) I mentioned to Nina that my cousin Dan lived in this general neighborhood.

She dropped me off and went hunting for that most endangered species, a parking spot in The City.

I had only seen Imagiknit in the wild, at Stitches.  The store itself has two big rooms: the animal fibers in here as you walk in, the plant fibers over there in that one.  I imagine that would make it easy for the vegans or for the allergic. (I appreciated that the angora rabbit yarn was on a table by itself in the center, thereby far less likely to accidentally intermingle fibers with the wools.)

I bought a little Malabrigo here, too, some laceweight in exactly THE shades of rosy reds, and the gorgeous many-shaded skein less than perfectly pictured here, a colorway not quite like anything else around; it had a tag that said “test” on it.

Test? I asked. Am I allowed to buy this?  Did you dye this? Did Malabrigo?

The lady laughed and said yes, Malabrigo dyed it, and then explained it was a line that wasn’t out on the general market yet.

It’s a two-ply superwash merino worsted, super-soft.  They’d put in just the right amount of twist–not too tight, that would add too much friction to the hand, not too loose, that would let the fiber ends pop out. They’d done this exactly perfectly right.  Bravo! (Okay, Malabrigo, so let me buy more, okay?  Could you like, maybe, shear your sheep a little faster or something down there in Uruguay?  While those little lambs are just, you know, milling around like that, waiting impatiently for my needles. Whatever it takes.)

I told them I hadn’t been much of a hat knitter, but there was a family that had lost a child whom I’d knitted hats for and their little boy still doesn’t want to take his off ever.  His attachment to that hat had sold me on knitting them, so this worsted skein would be the next one I make, for…whomever.

I now know what I want to make the next piano hat out of, too, once there is more than the one skein in my world.  Can you Imagiknit?

The kicker? As I waited for Nina to swing back afterwards to pick me up, the guy who stopped at the stop sign across the street from the shop as I opened the door:  I could not believe it.  “DAN!” I mean, c’mon, what are the chances?! But it was him.  He looked slightly around but not all the way to where I was standing, shrugged ever so slightly, must be just city background noise, and drove off and away.

Leading me to thinking, you know?  There are others I love that I also need to go spend more time with, now that I can.  I’m so glad Nina got me to stretch my boundaries and go farther than my usual path and to see that I could. I’d needed that.

Wandering about ten years in the wilderness, driving up 101 as it got closer to the City, (I took the much more scenic 280 home), I was stunned when I found the place.

“How long have you been here?”

The woman answered with the owner’s name which I didn’t catch, “…’s been here 34 years.”

“I’ve been here 23. How did I miss you?!”

A search for in-person Malabrigo Sock had gotten me here.  Jade, this is all your fault–you gave me some as a very lovely, extremely soft Sock Summit souvenir and I’ve been wanting more ever since.

But in all my years of knitting here, I had never heard of this place.  I couldn’t believe it.  The entrance was at the side of a building that had the names of its other businesses facing the street–and the Cottage Yarns sign was pretty and big, true,  (not the one pictured on the site, which I was looking for) but it was sideways to the road and if you missed it on approach, looking for something else, and went past, you missed it.  You could not see the store itself till you walked past the gate.

I pulled over anyway, figuring that had to be it, looked back to the sign, and went, well, duh, Alison. I walked down the sidewalk and there you go.

The ironic thing is I had had lunch once at the cafe kitty-corner from there–with the employees of a competing yarn store, no less, a LYS now gone.  I was right there.  And I did not see this place.

Advertising is a good thing.  Meantime, now I know who stocks a lot of Malabrigo!

“Give me your phone number and I’ll ball it up for you and call and tell you when to pick it up.”

That was very kind of her, I told her, but no, thanks; by way of explanation, I told her what town I’d driven from.

Oh.  She chuckled.

But the best part? Besides getting really nice yarn and being able to check the shades and match up the handpaint skeins in person?  I tell you.  I asked her with a twinge of shyness as she checked me out if she were familiar with the book “Wrapped in Comfort,” (note that Amazon has now dropped that last, three-cent discount–their stock on hand must be really low, and when they’re gone, they’re gone) and she smiled and said, “Oh, yes! We’ve got it right here.”

“That’s my book.”

The oh cool! look on her face made it worth every mile.  Every. Single. Mile.  Thank you, whoever you were.  I will be back.

It just wasn’t it. I only got a few rows into it but frogged it.  Not soft enough. Didn’t please me.   Colors wrong.  No.

Well, huh.  I grabbed that Blue Moon Silkie Lagoon and began another one for one of the boys instead: one skein of teal-blue Manos Silk with it this time.

Brian’s family shared so many pictures of their older boys and ours camping in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe with the Scouts, and each one of these hats captures the colors in those photos.

I finished the third one, then, tonight at Purlescence, hanging out with my friends while my yarn had a ball.  Mary retrieved the Silkie for me once, but after that I declared it free range yarn and, as long as it wasn’t going to trip anyone up, let it roll with the punches.

It wandered a little down the aisle to my side. A sweet young merino hung a strand down from its perch, Rapunzel style, and they kind of got wrapped up in each other. Hat’s off to the two–I cast off and unleashed the strands.

I’d brought with me some more Silkie, this time in a colorway Blue Moon calls “Love.” (Or called; I don’t see it on their site at the moment.)  I picked out some superwash to match it tonight for Brian’s sisters, some red, some pink, all very soft.

I was almost to my car when Sandi came running after me.  Wait!  I hadn’t gotten a discount!

They insisted. They knew who it was to be knit for.  They asked me to send Brian‘s family their love, too.

I walked back inside; they fiddled with the register and counted out the difference. I looked at it and grinned, “I’ve never been paid for leaving a yarn store before.”

They are such good souls there.  Sandi, Nathania, and Kaye: thank you.

I know, it sounds like having Amazon put paper and ribbon to your Christmas presents.  I can’t believe it–it took me how long to figure this out?!

Purlescence was having a don’t-make-us-count-inventory sale New Year’s Eve, and Sam and I did that errand, too, before she left.  We walked in and people jumped up and offered us seats; have I ever mentioned it’s a nice place? (Oh, never…) Thanks, but I was there with a specific purpose in mind.

I wanted fingering weight, but color and feel rated highest. Sam picked out this one.

Venezia merino and silk, in a shade of green she pointed out just about anybody with any coloring could wear, with a nice sheen to it.  Spun quite finely into many plies then cabled together–Cascade did a very nice job with the spinning. This one shouldn’t pill.  This one kept its softness despite the rate of twist. Well done!

Worsted weight. (Oh well, can’t win’em all.)  The Rooster Rock shawl proved to me I could work with that, so, okay.

I started to knit a variation on my Water Turtles shawl, and the slip knot at the beginning of my traditional long-tail cast-on stopped me right there.  In that yarn, it was just too thick.  I didn’t like it.  I started again.

No.

Huh.

Hey.  What if…

Now, I once explained to someone that there is almost never a good use in knitting for an e-wrap.  If you cast on via e-wraps, ie simply twisting the yarn into a loop like the cursive letter e and putting that loop straight onto the needle, when you go to knit the first row, there will be a length of yarn hanging down between those e-wraps that will get longer and looonger and looooonger as you go across the row, like a dog on a retractable leash running after a squirrel.

And yet.  I tried it. One e-wrap, just on that first stitch only, just there at the start, just that very first stitch.

I had to do several rows to see how it would really play out in context.  And when I did, it was, WOW.

I have knitted over a hundred of these top-down shawls by now.  Not so many on the heavier weight ones, so I guess I didn’t have quite the motivation to go looking before, but still–a hundred shawls! And I only just now get it.  This is how they all should have started. This is how all the ones I’ll do after this will.

I guess my surprise New Year’s present to myself and the whole wide world arrived e-wrapped after all.

Last night at Purlescence, I got to the end of a long row on the shawl I was working on and didn’t want to start another before quitting time; a good excuse to browse the shop a bit.

There was some Blue Moon Peru I’d seen before that I’d never really paid much attention to.  I was going to buy laceweight, and at 500 yards/8 oz, this was anything but.  Yeah, I did like that blues skein at the front, but that Rooster Rock–what was it about it?  It kept leaping into my hands–cautiously, because there were little things right there to snag that one skein in its spot if I weren’t careful.

Maybe being protective of the yarn contributed to the feeling. Dunno. Three times I picked it up, unsnagging it gently from the display case; twice I put it back.  That heavier stuff was just not what I had come for.  The blue one, I held it out in the light just once, eh, nah, even though I quite liked its denimness.  There–I put them both behind me and went and found the completely different yarn I thought I wanted, a buffalo blend in purple, around the corner. And that was that.

And yet.

I went back.

Huh.

I finally held one skein in each hand, the purple this and the Rooster Rock that. And thought, I quite like this (glancing at the left hand.)   And it’s in a color I love.  But *this* makes me feel deliciously, wonderfully happy (glancing at the Rooster Rock.)  I looked at the colors, trying to figure out how that could possibly be so.

It’s not the gauge I wanted to work with.  That bit of graygreen in one area I would never have chosen, although I like the rusts and the earthy purples.  It IS deliciously soft; but ohmygoodness, so was that buffalo, most emphatically.

All I know is, that skein has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with…I have not a clue who yet.  But it wanted to dance for joy in my hands in sheer anticipation, enough to part me from the price of it, and I thought of Marguerite’s cashmere.  (She is doing well now, thanks.)

And now I want to run go knit it up so I will be ready–again–to find out why at the right moment.

Just let me go quick finish up this last bit of Casbah Topaz first….

Driving to Purlescence tonight, I caught something on the radio that surprised me and I thought I’d come home and blog about it: a Beethoven piece that I’d always heard as a very solemn piece, very introspective, even slightly mournful.

But here, instead of an orchestra, it was a single piano playing, and the pianist was–playing. He was having a good time. Matter of fact, that left hand started getting jumpy, progressing to a full-blown pogo-stick effect. Let’s dance!

It took me a moment to get past my “that’s not how you play that!” response and sit back and just listen to what the guy was doing.  And you know? It was really cool!  It was very creative. I found I liked that.

So that’s what I thought I’d be talking about, about being open to a new take on things.

Well.

At the shop.  Somehow the subject of blood donations came up; how, exactly, I didn’t hear. One woman said, Oh, I’ve been a platelet donor for some time. Then another chimed in, I do that too.

I had no idea you did that! I was exclaiming, Platelet donors saved my daughter’s life!

It was their turn to be surprised.  It all suddenly became very personal.

And then, to the one who didn’t know, I told her, And blood donors saved MY life last January, and I told her the story of the man in the hardware store. (Looking back over the January posts, I see that I didn’t mention at the time that I’d lost half my blood volume before the surgery, and they had to replace it then as well as what was used during the colectomy itself.)

Every now and then I get another chance to tell a donor thank you.  It was so cool.  SO cool.

So yeah, I had this blog post I was going to write. But life opened it up into a whole ‘nother direction. And it left me wanting to just dance for joy.

At Purlescence I reached back towards some of the baby alpaca on the sale table behind me and got caught wincing. I admitted I’d had a recent near fall and someone had grabbed me on my way over and had saved me. I’m glad they did, but my shoulder’s been begrudging it.

“You need to come with airbags,” one knitter opined about my balance issues.

I hesitated just long enough to almost have some sense of propriety before I opened my mouth and went straight for it and answered her, “I do, now.”

So.  ‘Hem.  Meantime.  I read somewhere that a Slinky toy on a birdfeeder pole will send the squirrels and their ex-seed-ing greed back down to earth.  Curious.  That could be entertaining, along the lines of the kid I saw trying to run up the then-World’s Longest Escalator (the downward side, of course) at the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo ’67.  I was in third grade at the time and stunned, stuck between being awed at his having gotten halfway up–IF he’d started running at the bottom, good and honest–and the idiocy of the idea. I remember looking up at whichever parent was closest and half-asking if I could try that or was it as dumb as it looked.

They quickly affirmed it would be stupid.  And don’t.  I think they could just picture all six of their offspring suddenly taking off trying to beat each other going the wrong way through a crowd unhappy at being pushed at long narrow heights, and somehow that idea just didn’t appeal.

Dunno if they make Slinkys wide enough for my awning poles, but, hey.  I thought it would be worth checking out; we were going to Target anyway.

Ever try to find a low-tech toy these days?

Online later, I did find them. And variations, including–now wait a moment.  I’m assuming someone placed a special order and that they had to make so many and now they’re just trying to sell off the rest of the stock.  (Tell me this isn’t in their normal line!)  How about: 14k gold-plated. Slinkys!

This is so begging for CEO jokes.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around and around and around and…but I think it’s flipping out.  Can you just picture it? A golden pawshake for the high-fliers.

The good news is, the shawl came out worth every second of the ripping back and of the not knowing; I am very, very happy with it. It’s hard to believe I got that kind of length and width out of 82g worth of laceweight. (Anybody need a little extra white Fino for theirs?…)

The bad part, of course, is that I can’t show it yet.  All in good time.

And now that the lacy days of summer are over, I went looking for what to do next. After all, what’s the worsted thing that could happen, right?

I had a project in mind, and found, as I looked through my stash today, that I’ve been knitting so much lace for so long that I hadn’t noticed I was virtually out of any heavier weights.  It’s not that the wool had DK’d… It just got a little loopy.

Shepherd’s Wool puts out a new-to-me merino so soft one could go in-skein, and Purlescence tonight helped get me all wound up about it.

Nice stuff.  I am going to have a ball with it.

Two things today. The first: I realized just as I hit the freeway that I’d forgotten my camera. I nearly took the next exit home to get it, but I didn’t have time and I didn’t know if it would be allowed anyway.

Glenn Stewart of SCPBRG gave a talk in the downtown San Jose library about the rescuing and recovering of the peregrine falcon population. I knew there’d only been two nesting pairs left in California in the 70’s; I had not realized they were extinct by then on the East Coast.

DDT accumulations had decimated the populations by thinning the shells, he said; that, I already knew. I didn’t know they were shot on sight in Europe during WWII so they wouldn’t intercept the carrier pigeons delivering wartime messages.

When he and his group started their efforts to rescue the peregrines, they were told it could not be done, it was a waste of time and resources–those birds were simply gone.

But how could they not try?  I got to watch a man showing the story of his life as well as theirs, the passion that had changed everything.  He showed slides of rappelling down cliffsides to retrieve falcon eggs to replace them with dummy ones in the nest. The living eggs were taken back to UC Santa Cruz, hatched where momma wouldn’t sit on them and break the shells, fed for a short while via injured/recuperating falcons on hand that were willing to adopt them, then the rappelling was done again, the babies put back in the nest, and the dummy eggs were taken away.

There are now about 250 breeding pairs in California, and the peregrines are making a comeback elsewhere as well.

Because a few people decided that if a difference could be made, if it were at all possible, it was imperative that they try to bring those birds back into life.

And they did it.

While he spoke, he had a marvelous distraction going on to his left: on a portable perch with a drop cloth of about four feet around it stood Sophie.

When there is a peregrine too ill or injured to be released into the wild, Glenn takes care of it: Sophie was certainly well enough to travel now. She would allow Glenn to hold her and take care of her, I was told, but no one else.

Well, yes.  I would definitely expect that.

But Sophie didn’t mind having about 15 strangers nearby as she preened, stretched, scratched herself with that enormous yellow foot, napped, stood on the other foot to show how relaxed she was, and generally kept us entertained very thoroughly.  Glenn reached into her space at the end, picked a downy underfeather off the drop cloth, and handed it to a thoroughly pleased listener.

What I hadn’t expected was what followed: he pulled out the most curious contraption and I was trying to figure out what it was. First he put it on his ear, and I thought, okay, to protect his ear, as he put on his leather gauntlet–but it was on the wrong side.  He got her set up on the gauntlet, then he reached for that–thing.  And then he put it over her head.

It looked like she was wearing a WWII ace fighter pilot leather helmet, except that it covered her eyes (which I’m sure was the point.) But: it had black rubber deely-boppers, two each to each side, going out far from her head.

I tried to wrap my brain around that one. I guess it’s for a visual announcement of her personal space so people won’t try to pet her as he walks by?

It was 1:00 pm, and with San Jose State University in the same city block and school in session, the library was jammed with people.  Walking behind Glenn and one  of the moderators of the peregrine group as they left, I got to watch heads turn and feet stop, over and over and over.

There was an inner set of doors, an atrium, and then the outer doors; in the atrium stood three young men suddenly stunned at a falcon with deelyboppers going right past them. They started asking each other, and of course none of them knew a thing, so I stopped and told them that Glenn Stewart of the peregrine rescue and recovery group had just given a lecture.

“Will he give another one!?”

Google his name and UCSC. Okay; they asked about the lecture, and when I talked about those slides of rappelling down the cliffs to save the species, their eyes got big and clearly, this was something that appealed to 20-something young men.

Maybe Glenn will find his next set of helpers soon.

Now, thing the second today.

I was at Purlescence Knit Night tonight when their phone rang (and if the woman wants to add anything here, I would love it, but till then I’m keeping her name private.)  A few minutes later Nathania came over to me and quietly told me who had called: one of my readers had gone over to deliver a shawl to a friend who had Stage 3 breast cancer. It was what she could do about it.

Nathania knew and I knew as she relayed this message that when a person has been made suddenly acutely aware of how finite the minutes of one’s life are, having someone bring them hours and hours of their time, a gift of life as well as any stitches or fiber involved…there are no words.  But the caller wanted us to know the depth of the joy she had found in that giving.

She had welcomed her friend back into life in that moment.  How could she not try.  For every minute there might be of it, for however long, she was wrapping her friend in love.

Glenn would understand, too.