I’ve been debating how to describe this without going on at great length about the neurological effects of having been rear-ended in ’00. Eh. Those who’ve seen me walking know what I’m talking about.

Last night I was at Trader Joe’s, i.e. a not very big grocery store.

Three tall 20-something men in bright red t-shirts were laughing and joking and enjoying each other’s company and taking up a fair bit of the aisle while me with my cane in my left hand and pulling a cart with my right did too. We had to each let the other(s) go by a few times.

What passes for balance for me is all tactile and visual feedback confirming the direction of up. Bright orangey-red close to my face provokes extra wobble.

I was looking at some new vegan product in the refrigerator section thinking, Hey, dairy-free for my allergic kid! when they caught my peripheral vision and I turned in time and saw.

They were mimicking how I’d looked trying to go past them in those shirts (which they of course couldn’t have known anything about) in those narrow spaces.

I looked at them with a slow-motion grin and an appraising look and pronounced, You guys dance like I walk.

They burst out laughing–just a little too hard, meaning they knew they’d been caught and were relieved to find out that the little old lady had a sense of humor.

Sometimes having been a mother of teenagers in a past life pays off.

And who knows if, thirty years from now, they might need to remember that one can be damaged and still be able to laugh over the whole thing.

So the answer is…

Start over on bigger needles with 60 fewer stitches and in a lace pattern which of course will relax outward once water hits it.

Today’s afghan is in the multi-color “Anniversario,” celebrating Malabrigo’s 10th year, of which I bought the bag of ten. Maybe add an edging later once I see how all the variations between all the skeins play out. (I’ve learned.) Note that I’m starting with the skein that most closely matched yesterday’s “Paysandu” purple.

But I’m not ripping yesterday’s out. I had the first of those three skeins of Mecha knit up quite tightly on 4.5mm needles, deliberately so and in a pattern that tends to collapse in on itself for the increased warmth of that, too–but that means that for a 56-60″ wide blanket by golly I was getting three and a quarter inches’ length per skein. I dare the wind to try to blow through those stitches.

But to get it to the length I wanted would require 19 more skeins. Blink. Yow. As I type this I realize that it means twice the wool in not much more than the same space as what I’m making now, and hey, if you want warmth and cushiness….

So I have to do that other one, too. Eventually. It helps that I love it. I think the thing to do is from time to time go find a few more skeins, and then more skeins, and then more skeins, in colors that I think will go well with the start of it and just play with it from there. No hurry.

I even found a fourth Paysandu skein from my Stitches stash and it matches as well as any of them (pretty much).

I had a serious dearth of superwash merino around here.

In the store the purple looked like it would make a good foil to the multi-color, and so I got them home and dove in.

In swatching, the two-yarn lattice pattern I was going to do went out the window: Mecha seemed too thick to pull that off well. How about framed in purple on four outer edges.

I’ve knitted nearly the entire first skein already.

Now that the lower border is done and it’s time to switch to the brighter yarn, I’m not as confident about the mashup. I stopped midrow, grabbed the second yarn, and simply stockinetted till I’d gone through several quick color repeats.

In the right light it’s good, even if that bright fuchsia does scream Look at me!

I’m still not sure. I think Kathryn hadn’t been entirely either, although she wasn’t going to talk me out of it if I wanted it.

My husband says that me not being sure of a color combination is not a good sign for that color combination.

And of course colors influence each other, and in the original plan they would have been all over each other, interacting constantly, but now they’re going to be off in their separate corners.

Like two-year-olds in parallel play?

Hmm.

Okay, these are (the most flattering, frankly, of the) nighttime photos but then the finished thing will be used day and night. So there’s that.

The real answer is to just go buy more purple and not fuss any more about it.

The real question is, do they have more. At the rate this Pythagorean pattern is eating yardage I’d need (yow) the whole rest of the bag.

It’s surprising sometimes what someone else really really wants when you really really don’t.

And then another person. And another. And another, who said it looked cute. But then the first two responders to my Freecycle.org post suddenly realized that the wife had beaten the husband to the request but hey, they assured me they could work this one out, truly.

Well then, there’s no wondering whether one spouse will be annoyed at the other for lugging such a thing home.

I made sure they knew it looked like it needed an orthodontist. They laughed.

So our Smith Corona Super-Silent manual really is going to a good home!

So many things to learn there.

Friday 6/10. The mountain goats as seen from the boat. Barely. But when they lifted their heads you could tell they really were what the captain said they were.

And Monday 6/13…

Reindeer’s antlers, while they’re growing in, are full of not only the blood that nourishes that growth but nerve endings, and we were told it would be painful to the animals if we were to touch those. So we didn’t. Instead, they passed around a single antler that had been shed at this same velvet stage to satisfy our curiosity, and it was very much as soft as it looked.

(I did not ask if a bear had gotten the little guy for that to have happened. There were children around. And a sleigh for them to climb on and think that Santa knew this place well.)

They told us that elk, unlike reindeer who use their flat upper jaws for hammering against, do have upper teeth and they can bite you. Watch that little guy with the dandelions, those are their favorite. (His mom was right behind him.)

Saturday 6/ 11. A river, whose name escapes me, and one of the trees on our son-in-law’s mom’s property. That water was melting glacier, cold and moving fast. I splashed my hand a bit at the edge in its honor, like I traditionally do at the Potomac River any time I go home: to make this one a part of me, too, now–and I think to claim all his family as our own in the gesture. We met some of them Sunday and I got to thank his mom for raising such a fine man.

Devin pointed out the cowslip and the devil’s club, two plants whose leaves looked very much alike and yet one was welcome but the other was infested with poisoned spikes. You do not want to walk through that one.

We stayed on the trail.

Here, this one over here is cowslip. See that stalk that looks like it has an upside-down fig at the top? There are no spikes on its leaves. It’s safe to go near. But see, this is devil’s club right next to it. It will stab you right through a pair of jeans.

I discovered this evening that, actually, it’s being studied as a treatment for TB.

Wishing good thick gloves to the ones doing the studying.

One last photo, sent to us tonight: Maddy is eighteen months old this week. Already. Somehow.

Someday she and her brothers will go visit their aunt and uncle and learn to look carefully at big pretty leaves.

And then go feed the reindeer.

(Surprise Glacier, a closeup during its calving, and the ice floes in front of it after we pulled up to them.)

The two and a half mile WWII-era tunnel under the mountain is one narrow but tall lane. It is also an active railroad line. Each side each way each type, train or car, has designated hours when they are allowed to proceed, with strict warnings that there are cameras and that the 30 foot distance between cars will be enforced.

Yeah, you don’t want an accident under there. Nor for a straggler car to find a train coming at it. Yow. So yes, that tunnel is carefully monitored at both ends.

But when you get to the other side!

We took the five-hour Klondike Express tour of the Chugach National Forest via Prince William Sound. I kept looking at all that vast, vast space and being agog at the idea of cleaning all of that up post-Exxon Valdez. How on earth had they done it? The Chugach, they said, was bigger than the state of New Jersey. The captain pointed out one part of the shore a goodly ways off and mentioned that it was 30 miles away at that spot.

And here’s the surprise: Chugach is also a rainforest. Yes, a lot of it falls as snow, but 80-100″ worth of precipitation a year, and it being summertime, there was a dense, lush green between the water line and the tree line towering above.

Icebergs, glaciers, sea otters, harbor seals on the dense field of ice chunks where the orcas did not want to go, a humpback whale breaching, a much larger black whale tail (Minke? Orca?) slapping the water in front of us, blowholes blowing, mountain goats, the tiny white dots on the rocks pointed out to us by the captain. Surprise Glacier in the very act of calving. The captain pulled up close to it and a member of the crew dipped a fishing net into the water. Not for salmon: he wanted us to be able to touch a piece of glacier.

Then one large one was broken up onboard and a glass of glacier was offered to all, a little water on top.

It took a long, long time to melt.

We drank the glacier.

One tall mountainside, hemmed in by all that white ice, was itself a sheer gray rock face top to bottom. In 2003, we were told, that was all glacier, too–but it is no more. Trees would start growing out of the crevices soon.

(Pointing around the bay) See those sharply pointed peaks? they asked us. Now, see the ones that are smoothed over at the top? The smoothed ones had glaciers grinding them down.

The brochure for our catamaran said we would go past rookeries, and we did see a seagull one at a distance, but overall they seemed sparse just then and the captain opted to spend enough time trying to give us a good view of the whales that he knew he had to get us back in time to make our tunnel time.

(Iceberg photo because hey, you have to have an iceberg photo after they made sure we knew that was one.)

As we finally disembarked after a little over five hours I was quietly just a little disappointed that I hadn’t been one of the ones who’d seen a bald eagle overhead. Wrong side of the boat at the wrong time.

Just then an adult bald eagle in full striking black and white flew low over our heads right there.

And was promptly dive-bombed from behind by the only crow I saw in all of Alaska. The eagle utterly dwarfed it but was willing to mosey on out in nice, slow motion, letting us tourists get that good view first.

We would later see more eagles soaring overhead, twice, on other days. But that was the one that welcomed us to Alaska on our first full day there.

(And to Sam, who drove through that tunnel, occasionally having to flip her windshield wipers on as the mountain spilled its drink on us: I am in awe. Nerves of steel. Thank you for opening this whole world to us.)

Dani, the instigator of my mango tree, came over with his love Svetlana with a special gift from his mother in India: actual fresh Alphonsos, sent from the tree he’d grown up with so that we could know what we had growing out there.

He took them out of the jar of rice he’d carried them here in, showing us the traditional storing method. “Here, smell this!”

A deep, wondering (will it smell like last year’s blossoms?) satisfying whiff… I am in awe that he was willing to part with them.

He told us his mom was as enthused as he and I both are that my tree is growing here and doing well. Even if the weather’s been too cool and the tree too young this year for it to produce yet, it did bloom last year. So next year. Now that I know that warmth makes a difference in inducing flowering from the buds, not just in protecting them from harm, I may buy a plastic greenhouse cover for it. There’s one with a zip-down window to keep it from overheating.

We took them outside and showed them the tree and Dani took video, I think to introduce us to his mom, although in the few seconds he had it going I didn’t figure that out fast enough to tell her thank you. To Dani’s mom, if you see this: Thank you so much! And to Dani and Svetlana, Thank you to you, too!

I reiterated my promise that they will get one of our very first mangoes. I can’t wait to share back.

A little more on Alaska: I’d been disappointed I hadn’t seen the twelve-foot grizzly we’d been told was on display at the airport; the kids had said it’s to warn the tourists not to be stupid.

While we were waiting for departure, our last chance, there it was after all. Look closely: past its glass display case there’s a row of seats and at the end closest there’s a man sitting hunched over his cellphone, not knowing he’s being used for scale.

Other than that we did not, to our knowledge, go near a bear. We did, however, see one single crow: at the edge of a bay, fearlessly divebombing the backside of a retreating bald eagle that had flown low over the boat we were disembarking from.

Nope, not a fishing boat, guys, sorry.

More on that tomorrow.

We interrupt this travelogue to bring you a special announcement:

The giant fig. Our very first Black Jack fig. (Tadaah!) Maybe the biggest fig I have ever seen–it was huge.

When I planted the tree last year I had no real idea what I would get, just that Ruth via Purlescence grew three kinds and that that was her favorite. How big they would get, how they would taste, how much the strawberry color would fill up the inside vs the probably-blah plain interior edges (or if it would even be strawberry colored) I had no idea.

Widely strawberried it was, and I’d show it to you but that after the thing was split top to bottom and shared it didn’t last long enough for that.

Black Jacks set two crops, the main, and the breba figs that set at the end of the season and ripen in spring. Brebas are supposed to have less flavor, not having gone through the full heat of the summer. And we’ve had a fairly cool year so far.

This was our only breba that made it through the winter and past the squirrel gnawing of spring. I guarded the last of the ten jealously with a plastic clamshell and tape and cinnamon on top and nylon mesh fabric around the trunk that the raccoons didn’t like stepping on and this was the long-awaited payoff.

Now THAT’S a fig! Are the main ones really supposed to be better than that? Wow. Just, wow. Thank you, Ruth!

I am finally motivated to set up the tall heavy (I can’t even move its box by myself) crop cage over that dwarf tree. Definitely. There are a whole lot of small green summer figs growing fast and just since last night the birds started taking small peck marks out of a few of them.

Probably because they couldn’t get to that one.

Every single one of those figs is worth whatever hassle it takes to protect them. I didn’t really know that before.

We visited the Anchorage Museum, which is partly sponsored by the Smithsonian: the place was gorgeous (those long vertical strips of wood around the stairwell–so, so pretty) and a lot bigger than I expected.

There were native artifacts and history. There was a piece of oil pipeline. There were representations of native and settler homes and boats from various times. There was the obligatory taxidermied musk ox, “lovingly donated” by the family of the late hunter who had taken the trophy.

I read that and quietly guffawed at the mental image of his family dividing his estate, everyone groaning at all the living room space it would take up, the fact that shooting one was for a time highly illegal (relative to theirs I do not know, I saw no date), and trying to foist the thing on each other with someone finally going, I know! The museum!

Maybe that’s not fair of me, but it amused me.

Almost white, almost plastic-looking waterproof traditional jackets made from tanned Arctic animal intestines for easier weather days out fishing. Coats with fur turned inwards for colder ones, and sometimes, they said, a second coat would be placed over the first. Brrr.

I had resisted pulling out the iPhone, not having seen any pronouncement on cameras being used but knowing they’re usually frowned on, while feeling that my quilter mom just absolutely had to see this gorgeous quilt: it was done in the tiniest pieces of the thinnest hides–I knew she would know just how much work went into that thing. (And Bev, I thought of you, too.) It showed the influence of the Russians who had come for sealskins and converts, mixed with the natives’ own patterns.

I let a certain taller one talk me into their going back upstairs and snapping a photo of it for me.

Then there was the woolly mammoth tusk. We are talking some serious ivory here.

And there was Donna Druchunas‘s Arctic Lace book in the gift shop. I bet it flies off the shelves there, too.

Sam, a knitter herself these days, asked us if we wanted to see the musk ox while we were there? She’d never been.

Hey, couldn’t keep her from having that experience, right? And so Saturday we went to the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer and took their walking tour of the grounds.

Domesticating a species takes 250 years, they told us, and we’ve had 50 so we’re on our way but we’re not there yet–so please don’t put your hands past the fences.

(A few days later at a different farm we would be told, as reindeer walked freely among us and looked us in the eye while licking alfalfa from our hands, that the difference between caribou and reindeer was that the reindeer had been domesticated for about 250 years. Alright, I see where that number maybe came from.)

Parents were asked to keep small children close so as not to spook the animals into thinking small creature=wolf. On the flip side, when the man who set up the farm with its first set of animals 50 years ago was approached by a small dog, the musk ox had taken their human’s small size relative to their own as meaning he was defenseless and they closed ranks in a circle around him as they do to protect their young, horns pointing outwards and ready to charge the threat on his behalf.

Cool.

The white along the tops of the spines of many of them: the guide said they weren’t sure but they think that’s to reflect the sun away during the summers so they don’t overheat.

The curves in their horns? Those tell you about how old the animal is. Short and stubby, you’ve got a young’un; the next year they start to turn forward, and at I think she said four you get those iconic half loops in front. Most of theirs have their horns trimmed to protect the humans but she pointed out this one old guy over there that had the full set.

Back in the museum/gift shop, my sweet husband was the one who picked up the musk ox-topped knitting needles and asked me if I didn’t need these? Then the grampa in him wanted me to take a soft little stuffed one home. And we couldn’t come all this way without some qiviut. We just couldn’t.

We’d just been told about the musk ox playing with a fifty-pound ball given to the farm after the oil pipeline had been built, y’know, something for the animals to play with or rub their backs on or something.

They’d managed to get it rolling down the hill, and bam! Right through the fence! Oops.

So for now, mine is playing with a ball. It’s a deep red. It’s a mere ounce, because I just could not bring myself to spend that much more money on yarn when a single ounce would make me just as ecstatic.

The book? While we were out in the fields (yay sunblock and hats and I’ve been holding my breath but no major flare yet) I’d asked them if they had it and explained that Donna Druchunas, the author, had been the text editor for my own knitted lace book.

They were delighted at the connection and told me enthusiastically, Oh yes! It flies off our shelves!

I had previously wondered what on earth was holding me up that I hadn’t already bought it. Now I know. It was waiting for me to support the husbandry of the very animals Donna had written about as well as Donna herself with that purchase. It was worth the wait.

Yes. Yes that happened Monday. Fingerless gloves are a good and useful thing as an extra layer of sun and cold block but for feeding reindeer alfalfa pellets, maybe not so much. But we just stepped in the door and I’m only still up because one load of laundry must be done before the morning–I’ll handwash those later.

This is the one I got to feed.

I asked the guy, Don’t they have a thick undercoat to keep them warm in the winter? Is it soft? What do you do with it?

Oh they’ve lost all that right now. It is soft. We don’t do anything with it. It’s hollow so you can’t, like, do anything with the stuff so we don’t.

(The fiber artist’s mind. It boggles.)

I tried to explain that qiviut is hollow too and highly desirable stuff. (Thinking of the musk ox farm up the road we’d just gone to on Saturday–more on that later.)

He thought he was having to explain to someone who wasn’t getting it.

I told him I’m a handspinner with a spinning wheel and I assured him I could put next year’s undercoat to very good use.

You could see the realization dawning in his eyes…

Yeah. Yeah I’m getting back to those guys. When I mail them back, by way of re-introduction, the two little alfalfa pellets their little guy tossed into my sagging sweater pocket while slobbering eagerly all over my fingers. My sweater smells a bit like reindeer too.

I kinda like it.

(Christmas light bulbs in the background.)

I’m told there was heat while we were gone last weekend. The mango thought so–after sitting there since February, this bud tip finally started remembering what it was there for.

And that’s that for now. The house will be sat and we are off to Alaska in the morning to see Sam and her husband. If I don’t get to the blog while we’re gone, know that we are glacier watching and moose dodging and I’m told there’s a stuffed 12 foot grizzly in the airport to show tourists what not to mess with. I will need to verify this for myself.

And this time I’ll remember my phone.

Found the bottom half of one of our apples in the driveway, welcoming us back. The Yellow Transparents must be getting sweeter now.

Doing All The Laundry…

Ate five plums off the tree and the first peach of the year.

Two more days and we get to do it all again. This time I won’t forget my phone.

I got to meet Sherry in Idaho today! Except she wasn’t in Idaho, she came here and we got to swap family history stories. She’s a hoot.

At one point there was a bored toddler being watched over by his parents in the lobby we were meeting up in and he started whining.

I looked at her and over to him and back to her and asked: Finger puppet time?

She chuckled. I think so!

Which one of us is more spry?

She laughed. I grabbed one out of my purse, asked the mom and then gave it to her, got to watch her face light up and then his and went back over to Sherry.

Who told me a little of some of her own finger puppet-giving experiences. I’d forgotten she’d taken up the sport. It was great.

Grabbing a quick moment on the run to say thank you everybody and the head is reasonably okay, all things considered. I was afraid of it being dangerous and it’s not. I do actually have a padded leather helmet these days, I just wasn’t wearing it at the right moment.

Meantime. One person here on dietary restrictions can eat raspberries as a particular treat and the raspberries got eaten.

Oh.

My youngest walked in the door from the grocery store not too many moments after with 24 oz of fresh raspberries: it had been anticipated. There’s plenty out there, no problem.

Looking out for each other. It’s what the day is for.