My photos haven’t been embiggening since a recent WordPress update.    I’ll ask my blogmeister about it, but I want to give her a little time: she and her family bought a house last week.  Meantime, my flowering pear, the one we once thought we were losing, has burst into bloom in the last few days, throwing up its arms to the heavens in celebration of spring, and fuller and healthier than ever.

Anybody know what the name of this is?  And what wildlife might particularly like it?  The bare branches in front of it are my Fuji apple tree, ready for a little springtime too.

Meantime, here’s an amaryllis’s equivalent of gray hair, the color of the flowers in the older stalk (two weeks old!) a lighter pink at the back, and in the second stalk, newly opened, bursting out in color.  Same plant.

Here, this shows the contrast a little better.

Thank you everybody for the support over yesterday’s post.

Meantime, Purlescence sent out an email today: three boxes of Casbah yarn had just arrived from Handmaiden.  A flurry of emails came in almost immediately via their Yahoo group: save me some in Forest! Don’t sell it all before my meetings are over! I wish I could get there! And the like.

Sam and I went over there, and then I added to the messages my, Hey, Jasmin, I left you a little; she responded that she got some already, her preciousssssss…

Actually, I just bought one skein.  Kevin wound it up for me as I explained to him that if I bought two, I’d have to save it for a shawl, but just one, it would get knitted up quickly into a scarf without fretting over too much planning. He laughed.  But you see, it’s also that I was being nice and not depleting the stock in the first two hours.

Meantime, with Sam leaving tonight, I had to get a picture to show off the baby plum tree that she thought of and instigated from afar and got her brother and sister to plant for me for Mother’s Day last year.  It’s just starting to bloom, and look at all those flowers already!  And the snails didn’t eat the blossoms, like they like to do on my Fuji apple; I’m assuming that’s because I put a copper wire on the ground loosely around the trunk last summer.

The Fuji’s still dormant for just a little longer and I think I’d better go get me more copper wire.

(Oh, and by the way, in case anybody’s curious, this is the only day of the year that is a command.)

Anybody else do this? I find I tend to go through bursts of playing with my dye pot, where creating colors in my wool or baby alpaca is what I find myself focused on day after day. Or winding up balls of yarn for the sheer sake of winding and the sense of anticipation it brings–and that it lets me be engaged with a particular texture or shade or colorway for just a short time and then lets me go right on to the next.  Or times when, enough of all that, I need to sit down and knit and see something actually materializing and getting done!  But each phase tends to go in spurts.

It bugged me lately that I hadn’t been able to ball up yarn hanks all these months.  That I couldn’t expand my project possibilities into my whole stash; I was limited to the ready-to-knits.

Last week, I found the black cashmere (yay!) and got the first hank of it ready to go; I did it, but I had to take a good long rest afterwards.  This evening, I finished winding Amanda‘s Huarache yarn she gave me in Vermont last November, and I’m wondering which yarn to wind next after I finish typing this.  My arms and standing-up time are getting better at this.

But the groove in the record that my diamond needle keeps jumping back to?  (That’s an anachronism, kids, go ask your folks. Heh.)  Taking pictures of everything blooming, celebrating spring giving birth to life.

After writing a year and a half ago that we hadn’t had any gopher plants come up in years, this summer a seedling somehow popped up, so now I can show you what they look like.

Next, these cheerfully declare each year that December is for green and yellow in California.  They’re just starting to bloom, and they open up in the light each morning and then pull the blankets over their eyes at night. They totally charm me.  And if there should be a freeze, the plants look for awhile like all is lost–and then they grow right back up and bloom all over again, declaring the season theirs and not to be wasted.

My kind of plant.

I was on my way to the post office today and pulled over to snap what picture I could get, curious that one pond in the marshlands here was full of birds (enbiggen to see them) and the other had none in sight.  For whatever it’s worth, the one big fire we had in town last summer was at the city compost heap, that long low mound in the upper right.

I have a fondness for gophers, and I love how this last picture resembles the fur on one.   On the other side of the street and down a bit from where I pulled over to snap the baylands, there was a gopher mound.  One that made me laugh, albeit a tad ruefully, for its sheer ambitiousness: there was a paved bike path.  Then a grassy strip, then the two-lane access road I was on, then a busy freeway with eight lanes’ worth of pavement, and the mound was between the access road and that freeway.

I wondered how many times, tunneling under the path and then the two lanes, the gopher had tried to come up for air or to see if it could finish its tunnel yet and had hit hard pavement with its paws or head.  Nope, that doesn’t work. Keep going.  It had finally made it all the way to where there was soft dirt on top and green growing things and new flavors of roots to chew on.

Good thing it could go back to where it had come from.

I got a message out of the blue yesterday from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school graduation.  Turns out she’d been looking for how to contact a classmate I’m in touch with who’s been quite ill and who I’m sure was thrilled at being offered pictures of them in first grade together.  Then today, another long-lost classmate sent me a hello too.  I tell you, in great delight: you CAN go back where you came from!

Beautiful pictures of a beautiful soul here.  I waited for permission to link.

A few minutes ago, my daughter, rushing to get ready, asked me to find and print out directions to the wedding she’s going to of a college friend of hers; it was being held 60 miles away through the worst of Bay Area traffic.  I glanced at the wedding invitation, and…

…”MICHELLE!!!!”

It said the parents of the groom were holding a second reception later at their home in Indiana.

The father of the groom was our Mormon bishop when we lived in West Lafayette 25+ years ago while my husband was in a PhD program at Purdue.  I taught a Sunday School class of ten-year-olds and they adored me and I them enough that one even sent me a wedding announcement a few years ago, but I’d gradually lost touch with them all.

And now I have the address of the parents of one of them to go and say hi, both to their daughter and to them.

Very, very cool.

Someone just introduced herself over at KnitTalk, mentioning her career in a neonatal ICU, and I wrote her a note hoping that the parents of some of her patients had brought their kids back for her to get to see.

Which reminded me of Beth, one of my favorite nurses during my 10-day stay at Stanford, who, when I was about to be discharged after having been in critical condition, I promised I would come back to visit.  The intensity in her reaction surprised me: she exclaimed, “The patients always say that. But they never do!”

Well, hey.  I could do something about at least one patient.  It took me a few months and several trips to find everybody, but I knitted for sixteen people–doctors, interns, nurses, nursing assistants.  Beth got a Rabbit Tracks scarf in a soft merino.  Brian got socks as a thank you for walking in his patients’ shoes. Franklin and Noel got hats.  Robin got a lace cashmere/cotton scarf to match her scrubs.  And on and on.

One nursing assistant had been terrible to me, had hated being assigned to a GI patient and had let me know it.  I was there long enough to go from, why on earth do I have to be stuck with her, to coming to realize, how much pain must she be in, greater than any physical pain of mine, to be treating people like that?  There is more to her story, but this is not the place for it.  But I decided the only way I could handle her and hold onto who I am was to pray for her: to recognize her need to be cared about by somebody, anybody.

When I did go back to Stanford to visit, I came bearing those knitted gifts to convey the depth of my appreciation for everybody’s work and for their caring.  But in their faces, I got to see the great joy for them in simply getting to see me walking back in there, on my own two feet, no IV pole, no longer so gaunt and definitely strong again.  I was coming to thank them in person. That was all they needed.  The knitting was just the icing on the celebratory cake.

And on the visit that I found that one nursing assistant, who knew nothing of the knitting, she saw me first and RAN to me and threw her arms around me and wept.  I held her, too, and then pulled out the bag that was for her…  Knitting is time and love made tangible and undeniable, and of all the people there, she’d most needed that.  And that I could do.

When we care and are cared about, all things that matter can be healed.

I stepped outside just now to snap some shots of the glads that have started to bloom, and the honeysuckle plant next to them caught my eye: a honeybee was buzzing in and out.  It’s a little overgrown, but if the plant is helping the honeybee population, I’m all for it.

I grew up on a street called Honeybee Lane, where honeysuckles grew wild and abundantly at the edges of the woods; we kids used to pull the stamens slowly to the base of the tiny flowers to taste that little bit of nectar in them.

The hummingbirds like the glads, and I can see them from our kitchen, their green flashing in and out amongst the bright pink.

More on the knitting later; I’m trying to keep it a surprise.  But the latest project, which I expect to finish this afternoon, is canna lilies translated into lace.  Although, looking at my glads, I realize it’s not too far off from being individual glad blossoms among their siblings on the stalk.

My daughter in Vermont wanted to see pictures of the plum tree she’d instigated, and the emailed picture didn’t go through, so I’m putting up shots here of the day it was planted and what it looks like today, two months later.  Sprouting like a teenager–it’s already taller than me.

My children gave me a new summer tradition, and they didn’t even know it.  About 8pm each Wednesday, I figure it’s late enough in the day that the UV levels are probably not a problem.  And I go out in the back yard–such a simple grace to be granted to one’s soul–and I water my trees.

The most amazing thing happened when I did last night: it was quiet as I walked out the door.  No counting to see how long it would take before I got squawked at (two steps, on average), no bluejays flitting noisily just above my head.  I’d seen two out there earlier in the day, but territory-wise, the back yard was all mine now.  Double-check those hearing aid batteries…but no. All was quiet on the western front. The little ones must have fledged.

And I feel like the proud momma as if I’d raised them myself.

Nice idea.  Spent a lot of time on it today.  Good thing I swatched before I launched into it on a grand scale.  Watch me frog.  Watch me hit the delete button. ‘Bye.

Nice idea #2.  Spent a lot of time on it this evening.  Realized it won’t work well with the idiosyncracies not to mention the quantities of the yarn I’m wanting to use.  Nope. Try again.

Nice idea #3. Hey. I like this one!  Careful consideration of yarn qualities and quantities taken into account. I think I got it this time.  Nope, haven’t swatched–I ran out of day.

I guess it’s the squirrels on this one?  A few days ago, I found a redwood seedling popped up among the azaleas.  Which is all well and good, but, give it a few years and in the coming argument between the eaves of the house and the redwood, the house loses.  So I pulled it out.

And roots came with it.  I looked at it a moment and thought, well hey.  To paraphrase the old saying, Give trees a chance.  I imagine I damaged it too much for it to recover, but I plunked it in an empty pot outside the kitchen for the time being with some water, where I can wonder how I’ll get it out the next time if need be.  You never know.  Some things recover that you’d never expect.

Or, ask and ye shall receive. I can’t believe it. Now to figure out if I can somehow help straighten out the stalk-that-will-be-a-trunk so it doesn’t take out the fence–it kind of leaned against it while trying to reach some sunlight amongst the plants in the box there. See those big leaves on the left?

I’ve wanted a fig tree for years. Not a completely practical thing to want. It doesn’t get hot enough here long enough for them to get terribly sweet in our microclimate–same with oranges, which can come out tasting sourer than lemons unless you’ve got the right exposure, and maybe heat reflecting off the side of a house or fence. Still. My friend Marlene used to live down the street, and she had a fig tree leaning over the fence from her neighbor’s yard: she loved it. She loved the shade and being able to reach right up and eat a fig anytime, and she was terribly upset when the neighbor declared it had to go, that they were cutting it down.

Those figs were good enough to make Marlene delighted with them–hey. So I wanted a fig tree myself. Look at those leaves, and you can see why, when they’re toweringly tall, they tend to dominate the postage-stamp yards around here. I grew up in a house in the woods, and those huge leaves, so different from what you see in California in general, really appealed to my inner forest.

I went outside just now to photograph the lemon tree, laughing over the silly bluejay that tried to argue with my father-in-law that he was trespassing in her yard and to get away. I was going to share a good laugh over the bird.

And I saw the fig tree up above the six-foot-tall fence. None of us had any clue it was growing back there. We certainly didn’t plant it. The bird, instead, got the last laugh, and I am delighted.

“We need to bake a cake! An angel food, maybe.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“We need to bake a cake!”

“Okay, Mom, I am *not* quite following what you’re saying here.”

I explained that slugs and snails can’t climb over broken eggshell jags, and since that was way better than poisons, we needed to put some around the new base of our tree he’d just planted for me.

He allowed as how he could handle that type of tree treatment. Bake a cake. Right on.

Later, thinking I ought to use the tree I’ve got going already, I looked at the Meyer, picked some lemons, and pulled a lemon sponge cake out of the oven a few minutes ago instead; that’s the way the eggshells crumble sometimes. (I took the picture first while it was still semi-light out.)

Back to the shawl on the needles for his wedding.

I just spent five minutes outside at 10:30 am, talking to the guy working on my roof, and my left eye sight was starting to get wonky. It’s a very good thing we didn’t try that walk to the Faire, however badly I wanted to.

This faster-version Julia shawl took about eight hours to do, and it’s a good pattern for when I only had a single skein of Casbah merino/cashmere/nylon 80/10/10, because it repeats every right-side row: so you can stop at whatever row you need to and still have it look right. Since it’s a superwash-treated yarn, I’m thinking of it as the Eight Hour Mom Surprise (I’m suddenly picturing Elizabeth Zimmerman fans pelting me with small leftover balls of yarn.) Celebrate the mom as well as the baby, with something that won’t get outgrown. I do feel every new human that enters the world ought to have something created just for them, but I also know how much it can lift a mom’s spirits to have something pretty but that doesn’t require babying–she’s got enough on her hands. Although I would put it in a pillowcase before throwing it in the wash, definitely, and no dryer.

Meantime, yonder elder son is flying home shortly, but the letter just beat him to it. I was shaking my head, going, how can they summon a kid at university in the middle of their studies, when they’re a thousand miles away? How can they require the kid fork over for the plane ticket? He told me the real reason he was flying home now was, he was coming home to play with his mom for the little time we could have together and to “drive you to your little yarn stores and take you to see your little knitting friends.” Kid. 6’9″ you may be, but, I used to be bigger than you…

The letter came. He had me open it and read it over the phone as he waited. Dear… You are hereby excused from jury duty.

I guess they agreed that sequestering him during his honeymoon was going to be a bad idea.

When we bought our house in ’87, it had this red climbing rose that resembled the ones lining the fence at the edge of Stanford campus. I had always thought of roses as the most fragile of flowers, and yet theirs grew in the middle of a dried-out area and climbed and bloomed happily and freely. My red one, on the other hand, was in terrible shape with black spots and I didn’t expect it to last a year.

Which shows you what I knew about them. It’s grown into a magnificent plant.

Meantime, the Picotee has opened up, and I moved it to where I could see it better looking out my window here.

Every good family photo album has to have a set of bunny ears in it. This amaryllis is coming up next.