Yesterday was such a sudden and steep dive downwards healthwise that it threw me; there’s always this fear of the Next Big Flare, which might not be treatable the next time, and I was living it. Michelle texted me every 15 minutes: drink! Two sips! She got me through the day.

And then I woke up this morning and I did not barf. My belly ached, but it wasn’t childbirthy now.  I managed eventually to eat something. It helped, and hope breathed a grateful relief. Thank you all for your prayers and for Thinking Good Thoughts.

And then I got up, I could actually get up! and I read my emails.

Don is gone. Home to be with his beloved Amalie again, five years after losing her. But–Don is gone from us.

Our elderly friend ran into me at the grocery store shortly after she passed, fifteen years after I’d last seen him. Their son Cliff had not yet moved back in to take care of him and Don was alone. I gave him my blog address, he became a regular here, and I encouraged him to start his own blog and some of you kept him in good company with your comments and caring, and I will forever be grateful for that.

He passed two days after coming home from the hospital, and the day in between, I called to see how he was doing. Cliff told him who was on the phone and asked if he was up to speaking with me, and Don didn’t hear; “Who?”

I heard that one word and I heard the effort that went into saying it and knew in my bones it was the last thing I would hear from him. It was. Cliff apologized, but I have been at that edge where simply breathing is all you can do–but I had Crohn’s, not cancer.

Goodbye, dear friend, and the rest of you? We’re all going to have to step up on the bad puns to wish him well on his way forward. I’m, I’m, just not coming up with any quite yet. I’m sure I’ll make up for it later.

A fever last night, the Crohn’s flaring today. It’s brutal. This is the first time I’ve been able to sit up all day. Okay, that’s it, done for now. Hopefully tomorrow will be much better.

Last month, as I mentioned, it crossed the driveway I was about to turn into at the office. More people have seen it now: Richard’s boss, who took this picture, has happily proclaimed it his guard dog.

The ground squirrels are no longer sauntering around the parking lot.

I took Michelle to a physical therapy appointment today. Her car is not finished being fixed even yet, and she herself is far from it, although there has been some progress and that is a very good thing. (The speeder was doing over a hundred, the second car saw what was coming and swerved into where Michelle was, Michelle did 360s at 65 mph and while doing so was hit head-on by one of those two as they flipped down the freeway, landing upside down. The driver of the second car is a survivor, too.)

I pulled out my knitting. It was going to be awhile.

An older woman arrived to check in. The room was spacious and grandly lit by two-story windows behind where I sat, the waiting room an atrium. It gave me a chance to observe quietly at a bit of a distance: I loved her long braid that she could almost sit on; my father’s mother’s hair was like that, I’m told. I loved the patience and the wisdom in her face–I wanted to be like that when I grew up, and I imagined her as being one of those argyle-sock knitters of the ’50’s who never stopped loving working with yarn. The ones the hippies learned from.

She glanced my way when she was done at the desk, started to sit down, and I looked up again with a smile as she gave it up and got back up and approached me, just too curious. What WAS I making? (She didn’t quite say, too big for a sleeve, too small for a sweater in the round unless it was baby size, too big even for a hat.)

A cowl, says I, popping it over my head to show her, suddenly glad that I’d used circs that were a bit big for the number of stitches I’d started with–couldn’t have given that little demo with a sixteen-incher, that’s for sure.

Ah yes, of course. And she told me of the senior knitting group she’d gotten started. Most there only wanted to do squares, she said wistfully for what they were missing out on, but, she smiled, you could do a lot with squares.

Yes! I mentioned the Linus Project blanket that had been gifted to my friend’s son after he fell 30 feet from a ski lift–he’s fine now, I hastened to add–and how gobsmacked I was that some knitter somewhere had knitted the very pattern and colorway that I had wanted to knit that family an afghan in. When they needed that comfort, it was there for them.

She took a long breath of deep satisfaction from that. Every stitch matters, she said.

Every stitch is love, I added.

Yes! said she.

And with that she sat down and picked up a magazine. (And I thought, ah, so you’ll be using the pool therapy. I wouldn’t risk  good wool anywhere near chlorine either, yes.)

More important than anything I could say tonight, I would ask that you go read this article in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Nina’s birthday party. She loved her new silk cowl. We met new and old friends, had a great time…

And coming up our front walkway, Richard heard the beeping of the freezer alarm I made from a Heathkit kit for a college class my senior year at BYU.

Actually, he reminds me, ours was the second one I made, the class assignment one I gave to my folks. Oh right. It had seemed like a good thing to have, and all these years later ours is still working and I imagine theirs is too. He dashed into the garage from the house. (Hey, nobody uses garages to put cars in in California.)

Six hours bounced wide open.

But it actually didn’t appear too terrible. The chicken is now thawing the rest of the way in the fridge and the other things towards the front were berries and the like that could refreeze safely.

But Nina loved her cowl. Which balanced things nicely.

Build your dream house in Morro Bay, overlooking the huge Morro Rock out in the water, where you can watch the peregrine falcons fishing in the ocean every day, where there’s an incredible weaver’s guild in town pooling resources and knowledge to create college-level coursework towards bettering one’s craft together and you’re an avid weaver (and friend!), enjoying the perfect retirement…

That’s what my friend Nancy and her husband did.  She was in town for a visit and stopped by for a little while this morning, bringing zucchini bread made from zucchinis from her garden. So help me, she looks younger every year. The sea air (couldn’t resist the Sheldon reference) is doing her good. It was great to see her.

(I forgot to ask if I could take her picture. I didn’t get one at all. I was having too much fun talking with her and her mom.)

When we kids were young and our family traveled all around the country one summer with a camping van, I remember how fascinated we were by the vastness of the western sky, how bright the stars. How many! (And how strange it was to see multiple lightning strikes going on way over thataway in the middle of the desert in New Mexico. Lightning. With no rain. The sky playing solitaire.)

My younger brother eventually enlisted Dad’s help and built himself a telescope, a pretty big one, too, and I remember him showing me part of the sky through it and what that was and that was–and me being a teensy bit jealous that my little brother knew more and cared more about it than I did. Loving what you’re learning is a powerful thing. That’s one of the pulls of knitting, too–you can never learn it all, it keeps you going.

I was remembering all that fondly tonight as I looked at the shawls, just gobsmacked, wondering how she kept so many minute details so perfect, verified too by a delighted astronomy enthusiast who happened to be there tonight.

Audry Nicklin and her mom were at Purlescence with copies of Audry’s book and her knitting spread out across a table. The secret garden socks are worth the price alone. (But I had to let it pass for now–still catching up after those house repairs.)

What is on Ravelry but not in the book, though, were the two bright blue Madeline Tosh-yarn shawls. (And one in gray, knitted a second time.) Celestarium and Southern Skies: the night sky as seen from the northern and the southern hemispheres, with yarnovers and bright silver beads marking the stars making up the constellations. There’s Orion. Tauris. Polaris at the center here, working outward to… Wow. Just, wow!

Audry will be at Stitches Friday Feb 21st at Purlescence’s booth. Go, go see those shawls if you get a chance. And Audry, too; she’s a peach.

A Bacon avocado. The actual name of the variety, a BLT gone askew.

So I had to go look online after buying one, and of course Jim Bacon was the grower who developed it, it comes by the name honestly (pretty much).

But wait, it gets interesting: there’s a plain old Bacon avocado and a Jim Bacon avocado. The guy was on a roll here.

Couldn’t he have called them something like, maybe, Jim’s Best and Jim’s Almost As Good Hey I Tried or something? Looking at a bin of these is now going to be like trying to figure out whether you’re about to buy a merino yarn or a merino merino yarn.

But somehow the one avocado I bought, whichever of the two types it is, badly wants to live up to the power of its suggestiveness and at least be sprinkled with some bacon bits tomorrow. Milk Pail really should have a little mini-fridge set up next to the vegetable bins with a pound of sliced ready-to-fry to go with. Pork belly futures, there you go.

According to the Washington Post, the drug companies average a 19.9% return on revenue, and the problem isn’t the strength of the insurers (who make 2.2%), it’s that they’re weak: they can’t band together to negotiate lower prices. So.

Another year, another first time in January at the pharmacy. Same guy. He’s the manager now.

He looked at me with a wry smile after entering my insurance info and the amount rang up. “You want to know what it’s going to be this time?”

“Like last year when we met the year’s deductible in one day here?”

He handed me the slip and let me see for myself. Not quite three thousand. Fun times. Having no choice, I handed him my credit card.

I now know what a zip gun is, and yes the kid who brought two weapons to school is in custody. I’ll let my teenage niece tell it, and I quote:

“2 incredibly ironic things about today:
1. after living in the middle east for four years, my high school in the US is where they find a “potential explosive device”
2. the most traumatic part of today was not the bomb threat at my high school but watching downton abbey”

Kid’s got spunk, that’s for sure.

And we all lived happily after.

(Blood test results so far: normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. Whoops, not that one, that one, nor that one, and we still have the Stanford test to go, but I think the things they were most worried about they aren’t now. I think.)

Hudson and Parker discover the idea of trampolines.

And a good time was had by all.

(Oh and: I got a message from Steve. He saw that sign I mentioned yesterday in a shop that sells fake ones relating to various eras and got a good laugh over it and put it high on the wall at Milk Pail just for fun.)

Me: What should I write about today?

Him: (after spending hours updating the blog.) “Knitting.” (Accompanied by vigorous head nodding.)

Me to you all: I knitted today.

And I tried to figure out why on earth I never saw that upper sign before. The owner bought this shop in 1974.

There’s a story in here somewhere and I’m dying to know.

Feathers fluffed against the chill, relaxed.

Yet again debating whether to say anything quite yet. It was December 16th that I was given the first heads-up that something was off–but possibly not much. You’d better go. (Make up your mind.)

I waited this afternoon for the time to hurry up and finally finally get here, trying to knit my way to calm, finding the last hours to be the longest.

I glanced up and to my surprise, there just outside was Coopernicus perched on the big pot my extra-dwarf cherry tree is planted in, facing me.

I finished a 400+ stitch row, a small bright growing bird’s nest in my hands in the cheering color (thank you Lisa Souza) of a bright summer sky, and looked up again.

There he remained, steady and firm, watching over me. It was very moving. He didn’t mind my taking his picture, whereas in years earlier he would have objected to a black object being raised near my head and pointing at him. I moved around the room, trying to get past the effects of the double-paned glass. His face turned to follow my gaze.

I smiled and went back to my project, determined to make visible progress.

Another row. More photos.

Another row. And at that I let him be. I emailed a friend to say how grateful I was that he’d been there easily an hour now in raptor attentiveness–and hitting send, I looked up, and at the suddenly empty space wished I’d seen him go but was glad for what was.

And with that I went off to meet the doctor who did a bone marrow biopsy on my daughter ten or twelve years ago.

He asked after her. He was thrilled at being handed that printout of her dissertation. I was thrilled at seeing the Johns Hopkins plaque on his wall–how perfect was that?

He was a dear. Did this have anything to do with the Graves’ diagnosis last week, I asked him? No. But so this is probably nothing, right?

He looked me steadily and gently with a long-practiced eye at this sort of thing and answered, We do not know that yet.

More tests were done. Another will have to be done at the hospital. And soon we will have answers.

And then, coming out of there, I ran into a favorite teacher all my kids had in high school and seeing each other in that department, there was no need to dance around reality. I was in the testing phase. She, not so much. It was a relief to her to be able to ask after each of my kids, to celebrate with me where they’ve gone on in their lives since she’s seen them, to hear me brag to the nurse who showed to take her back to her appointment that my kids got to have her as their teacher. Just the best.

She got a break from it all in those moments. And I knew the words to come for me might be much gentler than the ones familiar to her by now. But we shall see.

I have an appointment with a new doctor tomorrow. He had my oldest as a patient when she was in her late teens/early twenties.

Which is why (being a mom and all) I now have a printout tucked away in my bag waiting to show off with: her doctoral thesis in molecular immunology, with my thanks for his efforts towards her good health.