The box was sitting there on a little table outside the women’s meeting room. Enticing–but there was by no means enough for everybody in the congregation and people were being polite and not taking any and the things were just sitting there.

No note on who they were from.

There was a visitor sitting next to me at church and she remarked on how good those pomegranates looked.

Please, go take one! I urged her. That’s what they’re for!

Now, I had never seen pomegranates like this: if you remember the game from when we were kids where you fold a piece of paper just so so that you can put index fingers and thumbs into the four quarters of it and move them up-and-down or across, tightly shut or open, this way, that way, this way, till the big reveal as you open the paper up?

The pomegranates looked like that. Most were split clear open into segments, there were some random quarters, and Jean (it was Jean who’d brought them) had also placed small paper bags at the ready for people to put them into.

All it takes is one person going ahead to offer a sense of permission to others to do likewise–I mean, you just can’t disappoint the giver by making them cart it all sadly home, rejected.

Jean later apologized to me for having waited maybe a week too long, for having let them split like that, but they were her first crop and she’d wanted them good and ripe after her three years’ wait.

And she wanted to share.

I got one that was cracked nearly around its globe but it wasn’t wide open like the others–I figured, with my deep sense of klutz, probably best that I get one that couldn’t spill seeds around should I drop the bag.

When that last meeting was over and it was time to go home, Jean was explaining to someone who hadn’t seen them why she was carrying away this now-empty box.

And I reached into my bag and, knowing my hands couldn’t do this, said to the guy, Here, if you can split this for me?

He did, and Jean got to see her sharing growing into more sharing.

And so Richard and I took home a half of the best pomegranate we have ever tasted.

It was a revelation all around: if all the varieties grow like that one, that would mean you can never buy a truly ripe pomegranate because shipping split ones would be a nightmare.

Because here was the other thing new to us: the seeds just poured out. There was no effort to it. They just came. Wow. Cool!

At church I said something to Jean about growing mangos too and she exclaimed, “I tried three times! My brother sent me a Hayden.” Having grown up in Hawaii, she added wistfully, “I love Haydens.”

Turns out she had never heard of the Christmas lights trick for keeping the trees from freezing. (LEDs need not apply.) She was intrigued. She might need help with the planting but it looked to me like she was ready to go try again.

Jean is a Pearl Harbor survivor, a young adult coming out of church that day in time to look down the hillside to see the bombs falling below.

And she planted that pomegranate tree towards the future three years ago and she got to pick and to share that fruit.

I tell you, order her Hayden and my Alphonso, we will have mango-growing stories to swap, there’s no stopping her now.

Lots of living crammed into a single day.

I went to the funeral mass of the woman who had been my dad’s last surviving high school classmate, a beautiful service for a woman who’d lived her 88 years loving every person who’d crossed her path. Every time my folks had flown into town Marcelline and Bill had invited us all up for lunch and Dad and she had swapped stories in that beautiful home overlooking the Bay far below and we’d had a grand old time. Many fond memories.

Bill passed earlier this year and now he has his sweet wife back.

The family invited me on up to her house afterwards and I was glad to go. I’m going to link to a blog post about Marcelline and Bill here so that they can find it.

It did mean that I ended up spending twenty minutes out in the late-afternoon sun.

I came home and checked in with Richard. He’d wanted to go but his job had done the two-ended candle thing of late, a lot harder to do when you’re not in your 20s anymore, and he was simply wiped–he was sound asleep when I walked in.

An old friend of ours from back in his doctoral days at Stanford was in town to give a lecture tonight, one of several, and again, we wanted to go.

And again, Richard had to pass, and at the last second I called a friend nearby and asked if she were going? I’d done sun time so I wasn’t sure driving home after ten was going to be wise; could I bum a ride?

Sure! (She knows my lupus re the sun.)

And so I went, again offering Richard’s regrets but glad he was finally getting some rest.

I came home to find the phone had rung after he’d woken up: our niece was stranded and could we pick her up?

Because I’d caught that ride he had the car now and he could. He could always rest again afterwards, and did.

I can just see Marcelline, who so adored her nieces and nephews, making sure ours got taken care of too when she needed it. Looking out for others was the way she’d lived. Go call Phyllis. (I thought of it and didn’t do it and then I felt it more persistently.) Go call Phyllis. I called Phyllis.

Good friends make for, as Chan likes to say, no coincidences.

I love getting a bunch of these for Christmas but my supply was getting low a little early so I ordered a few. Not from my usual source, where I know pretty much what to expect–they were temporarily out.

Now, much as I love to knit, I’ll let someone else make the toys on the super-tiny needles. Let’s see, we got some funky ones in this batch–someone started with a penguin and finished with a horse’s face and what kind of bird can we pretend that is? Toucan play at this game. Up top, a fox’s face with a cat’s whiskers and a horse’s tail. Maybe someone had knit so many of these things that they decided to, y’know, mix it up a little bit. After all, it’s all about kids and their imaginations.

But one must never run out of handknit finger puppets for waiting rooms, lines at Costco, and once so far, the go-stick on an elderly man’s scooter. The women in Peru who have the patience to knit them must never run out of the means to put food on the table. And tired, hungry toddlers who need a hug most of all need the distraction of a cute little animal surprise (with their parents’ okay) hugging a finger and dancing with them and changing the world right there in that moment. Happy Birthday! Oh, today’s not yours? Well it’s someone’s–let’s celebrate! No, no, (as the parents try to get them to return them) that’s for you.

I was the mom of four kids with the oldest just shy of six. I know what it’s like.

Okay, world, ready when you are.

(p.s. Courtesy of Lynn in Texas: don’t miss the cabled-skull sweater picture.)

An old classmate from long ago now lives near where we used to in New Hampshire. I was reminiscing over a fruit stand on Old Route 3 back in the ’80’s and their Spencer apples–the best apples ever, and a variety I’d never found since we’d moved to California.

A box showed up on our doorstep today. …Betsy! Thank you!

Just look at those fingers barely showing around that Spencer.

There are a couple other types for us to taste test to see if the real thing matched the memories and how they compared to, say, Honeycrisps. Dunno–because I waited till Richard got home so that that first taste would be a shared experience and then we polished off a Spencer each.

Managed to get a little dinner in, too.

Purlescence recently got a new yarn in, as in brand new, only just released. And I bought a skein of it in Blueprint to try it out.

I had a person in mind, I had a deadline in mind, I had a project in mind.

But as I tried to get the thing going it did not seem to want to mind me.

I had not swatched–I mean, when you’re knitting a one-skein cowl with only so much yardage at hand the thing is the swatch since to me knitting is not some new thing: you can eyeball so many cast-on stitches and get a rough guess of what a certain pattern will come out to, size-wise, pretty much.

So (whistling) when was the last time I knitted a chainette construction in a dk weight? There are not a lot of those out there. This both compacts down into its stitch space because there’s so much air squishing out and yet it blooms out without going all angora on me. Curious. I like it.

And then I read Stephanie’s post and just laughed–okay, I’m not the only one here.

And so I was coming out with what would make a good hat. Assuming it didn’t stretch much once it hit water. Which I would not know till I finished but no, it would make a very pretty hat, definitely, yeah, that would work.

But did I have enough yarn? And I had not set out to make a hat. I live in a climate where people do not mess up their hair with hats, generally, since there is no great need to. Here the citrus trees wear more layers in freezing weather than some of the people do.

Did I want to buy another skein, then, and would the shop have the same dye lot still in stock? (Are you kidding me? Did you see that stuff going flying out the door after that much-anticipated box finally arrived?) It’s not that a hat takes a lot more yarn, it’s that a hat has to continue till it’s finished instead of at some random point that works for the knitter.

But even though it would certainly go over the head, or at least mine, it seemed a tad small for the top of a cowl for a larger person (which I am not), the yardage was disappearing fast, and I’m afraid of emphasizing the size of the person because of the smallness of the cowl–and so it stalemated on me and simply sat there most of today.

But it’s a gorgeous yarn and a soft yarn and ooh-fuzzy feeling without being fuzzy looking and it wanted to be knitted and finally I picked it up this evening and finished my pattern repeat–and then I did that increase and declared to myself, there: that settled it. It is to be a cowl.

(Well, it could still be a big poofy hat if I bought more yarn…)

She’s going to love it. Even if I have to find me a different she. But I don’t think I’ll have to. Either way, I’ll let her settle it for me.

Eyeing that gorgeous big skein from Abstract Fiber, because, y’know, I can always knit another cowl.

High-energy days are a wonderful thing.

Got up early this morning, voted first thing, (epic photobomb here. Look at that guy’s eyes!), was glad to see that the ballots were paper and verifiable and wore that little sticker proudly all day.

The cowl and my cousin’s hat and scarf are now in the mail.

I participated in a product testing trial, one of those quirks about living in Silicon Valley where there is always some new thing to prove the merits of and got paid just enough for my time to cover a mango tree with FedEx shipping from Florida. I like the idea of trading a little time for something solid and present and lasting that could grow and produce great fruit for a hundred years, with thanks to Dani from India for the guidance on what variety to get. (Yup, I still want my mango tree. So there you go.)

I headed from there to my audiologist to get the wax out that was blocking up the hearing aids–I once broke an earmold trying to do it myself. Um. Now they’re sending in for a new one. (It’s not just me!) There was a spare on hand that’s not a great fit from when I was very thin post-op but it’ll do fine for now.

There is, so far, a particularly bright spot in the election news here: the one-term Superior Court judge who repeatedly simply did not know the law, who did not understand why people were upset when she asked a criminal defendant before her–from the bench, in court–for a date–she seems to have lost. Her opponent, who by all accounts is very well qualified, spent almost nothing. That he is winning is a great justice. (Update: he did win. Good thing.)

And it is past bedtime and the local newspaper hasn’t updated any election totals in three hours. Time to give it a rest.

Prop 45 is too much power! to give to one man! in Sacramento!

Yeah, that he would be able to say no to Anthem raising its rates 40% without justification? We gave that same officeholder that same power over car insurance rate increases and now Californians have some of the lowest auto premiums in the nation.

The phone rang. Richard picked up the receiver and actually listened to the robocall.

Then he said the candidate’s name to me, questioningly, not sure he’d quite heard it right.

I had read every article over the past month about the various people running but that wasn’t enough: today I spent hours rereading them, sample ballot in hand, going for second sources, researching the propositions on the ballot some more and trying to feel like I would be using my voting to the best of my ability come the morning. It is a sacred responsibility.

Note to this election’s big spenders: I read every flier as it came in the door and only one single one gave me any actual and factual information. Thank you for keeping the Post Office solvent but every dime you spent on those was wasted.

He wrinkled his nose going, Tell me that wasn’t someone I wanted to vote for because I don’t now.

Yeah, I told him, that’s the one running against Tuck. Tuck is supposed to be competent, thoughtful, and honest, vs the guy you just heard who has vowed to waste more taxpayer money to appeal that teacher’s tenure case rather than fixing the problems in the system that got the case filed. Here, I can pull up the article and you can read for yourself.

We both agreed that teachers need to be protected from bad administrators and bad parents, very definitely. At the same time…

We had some of the best teachers you could ever hope for for our kids, but just a very few who…

Let me say it flat out, you have to be able to get rid of the terrible ones. (The one who accidentally blew up her classroom during a sixth-grade demo of science that she did not understand did get, and it is a very good word for it, fired on the spot. No injuries. Other than that, she was actually a strong improvement over a particular one I’m thinking of.)

Then there are the candidates who will be deciding what our new voting machines are going to be: a previous Secretary of State had approved Diebolds that could be hacked in 30 seconds; the one after, a career politician termed out of her previous office, had run on a campaign of fixing the mess but then had done nothing. She updated nothing. She left cities and counties with unusable machines and no means to get out from under and oh look, we have an election again, don’t we, well now didn’t see that coming.

Who we vote into just that one state office impacts all the others. If you’re in California, here’s what the Merc had to say. Vote Pete Peterson over Mr-where’s-my-next-campaign-contribution.

To my American readers, change millions of lives for the better including your own Tuesday. Vote!

She hesitated to say it at first today–it was not quite the typical uplifting experience one usually hears in a Mormon first-Sunday-of-the-month testimony meeting–but finally she did.

She and her husband had decided to take their little kids and go up to San Francisco to watch the parade for the Giants, victorious in their World Series win.

And I’m sure they had a great time doing so–but then they came back to their car.

Not one, not two, but three windows had been smashed in, probably in vengeance that all there had been for the thieves to steal was, if I heard right, a soccer ball and a My Little Pony.

THEIR car.  I mean, we’re talking a carseat and innocent little kids and broken glass and thinking of the drive home down the freeway hoping for no still-attached-but-unseen shards shaking loose at their children. (I don’t know how much the first responders were able to do about that.) I can’t even imagine what it was like to be trying to fix that enough and to reassure their kids while staying calm themselves.

And yet.  She is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up. She said that yes they called the police and the insurance company and all that, but first, they said a prayer together.

And their hearts went out to the person who, as she put it, was going through such a life that they thought that this was the best choice they could make now. They prayed for him or them, whoever they might be; they had to live with what they had done. “It’s so sad!” And she shook her head, wishing there were something she and her family could do to help them have  a happier life than that. She grieved that, should they ever successfully come back around to where they should be they wouldn’t even know whom to apologize to in order to see themselves being forgiven, to have a chance to accept the grace (that word being my description of who she is and what she lives by) waiting for them.

Cars and plastic ponies, fix them, get another, they’re just stuff. Her older children will remember that prayer and that thought and their mother’s example and their father’s steadiness in the face of such a scene of personal, deliberate destructiveness for the rest of their lives.

There is no way a criminal with a crowbar could have known he was helping raise young children to be more compassionate future adults. But with those parents in charge, he was.

Picture taken before I washed and blocked it so it’s still in free form here.

I had almost forgotten just how good worsted-weight baby alpaca feels running through the hands on comfortable-sized needles.

It won’t get there the same day as someone’s terrible-rotten-no-good-I-think-I’ll-move-to-Australia day that happened this past Wednesday, but it got started then and it’s blocking now.

For someone who didn’t know I was a knitter.

Man, that feels good.

LauraN’s handknit octopus boogie-boarding a witch’s hat across a beanbag pumpkin.

Costumes were never my strong suit.

I just looked. Point two four inches? How was all that rain only .24″? They were predicting twice that.

Not a single trick-or-treater.

That hapless raccoon. Here comes diabetes in a trash can, ready for the raiding.

The flu, the flu, the flu, (the autoimmune Crohn’s and lupus playing alongside), the cystitis.

And then today, after five weeks, I finally got to go off to knit night again. At last.

It is amazing how restorative it is to just sit and knit and catch up with good friends for awhile.

There was one summer evening at Purlescence probably two years ago where Sandi and Kaye had a big bowl of huge strawberries set out for the nibbling. They belonged to an organic farmshare and it was the peak of the season.

Those strawberries tasted like the ones my family drove an hour to a pick-your-own place near Camp David to get when I was growing up–and nothing like the grocery store’s. Wow. I went home and looked their supplier up and the demand was greater than the supply; new customers were not being accepted.

Saw something today and finally went looking again.

I’d wanted for a long time to know what a heritage-variety Spitzenberg apple tastes like; I’m not going to plant a tree that’s a question mark.

Our first Full Circle box comes next week. Spitzenbergs will be in it. I can’t wait.

p.s. Hat, finished, scarf, finished, baby dress, finished, baby blanket, finished. Happy Aftober!

TWO! I have *never* seen them hunt in tandem before.

The first hawk swooped down, appearing suddenly from above the awning and right back up above again in a half-circle to herd the prey. Then immediately after a panicked mourning dove bonked its head on the awning and staggered away out of there, the hawk’s mate burst out from among the elephant ears on the patio and after it.

Two! I had no idea the second one was there.

Maybe come spring I’ll finally get to see a Cooper’s fledgling toddling around my amaryllis pots again–it’s been a few years.

Meantime, the baby blanket: it is celebrating Aftober after all. I DID it!!

The pop-tent: one side on the ground, one side not quite and I can’t get it to fold flat anymore, so this is how we got yesterday’s story.

After swooping around the patio, today it was the hawk that landed on the edge of the square tomato cage. Wow, I really wasn’t expecting that.

What I couldn’t see was that he had flushed out a dove and it was now cowering somewhere at the bottom of that pop-tent–or somewhere right around there. The blueberries are in an identical cage next to it with room for me to walk between the two but not for his wide wingspan.

All I knew at first was that he hadn’t caught what he’d gone after and he was standing on that thing and looking at me. My iphone was a short stretch away and while I was debating reaching for the camera vs. scaring him away, he fluttered his wings and released his talons awkwardly from that thing, gripping again and shifting sideways a bit, giving me a good profile view: long and lean and nothing in his crop–he was hungry.

Suddenly he swooped in a very tight circle around that small cage and then again, reaching down into the canyon between with his feet till a flurry of gray suddenly exploded out of there at last in a panic. He was determined not to let it get away this time.

I had not noticed that during this, the neighbor’s very large white-faced black cat had entered the picture and was watching the show at the end of their fence at the T-intersection where it suddenly drops down a foot to mine.

And the mourning dove was going straight for that cat.

Wait, what? I mean, I know doves are hardly the smartest, but…!

Just as the three of them intersected visually from where I was sitting there was an explosion of small feathers and at first I wasn’t sure if the cat had taken a swipe or if the hawk had grabbed for it but from the trajectory as they poofed backwards not sideways, it had to have been the hawk. The dove still had its flight feathers and was using them for all it was worth but the hawk was right there closing the last of the gap.

And then they disappeared over the fenceline straight past the cat’s nose, so as usual, I got all the drama and none of the gore but thankfully the cat could only say the same.

The bottom photo here: note that there are two different sizes and thicknesses of birdnetting there. That’s where they meet.

The side of the house cuts off most of my view of the tomato cage (and cage it is) unless I get up from here and walk to the far side of the room to look across thataway.

But one small finch trying to perch on the near edge of it caught my peripheral vision and my attention: birds don’t usually land there. It shifted over to the metal pole bordering the thing where its feet could at least grip far more easily than directly on the netting but it would not leave.

Turned out (when I got to the window) there were three or four more–this was highly unusual–and they were on the pop-up, which has no such metal resting spots.

When I had the flu, the tomatoes got their second wind and started blooming and producing all over again: that one slug I’d killed must have been devouring every flower for over a month. But since I wasn’t paying much attention while I was sick in bed, the stalks grew outside the netting and there was no good way to scoot the flowers safely back inside without risking breaking them off.

I had that pop-up birdnetting tent that I had written off as a bad investment: the bottom edges could not be secured and the birds kept getting in down there and stuck. Pretty useless when the whole idea is to keep critters out.

But hey. If I leaned the thing all flattened out against those new tomatoes and their square cage, that would work.

And so I did.

Five nights into this a raccoon pulled the tent over on its head. Eating the plastic clamshell on the apple tree, falling as it broke 2/3 of the young peach tree off trying to climb it (and still not getting the peaches), pulling the tableful of clay pots down on its head–that raccoon’s had it rough here this season.

The tomatoes were left untouched. I put the tent back and the raccoon has now been leaving it alone.

But I couldn’t get it to go entirely flat again. Almost but not quite. I could only hope it wouldn’t trap anything.

House finches are a squabbly lot. They play king of the mountain, they attack and peck and keep their fellows away from the best perch or sometimes any perch on the feeder, guarding and owning it all unless a bigger bird lands. MINE! They will often chase each other around and around the base of the platform feeder despite there being plenty for all.

And yet. They flock.

This afternoon one small finch wandered in at ground level and got caught inside that unwanted sliver of space within that leaning birdnetted pop-up. She was desperate to fly out the top. Which she could not do.

Those other finches had felt compelled to leave the feeders to flock with her in her extremity. They were forsaking food at a time when the area was hawk-free to go over to where she would have the comfort of their presence close by, even when it was uncomfortable for their feet or at least difficult to hold onto after landing.

That first finch got my attention but the fact that there were others tipped me off. I went outside, sun or no sun, knowing it would just take me seconds, and I tipped that tent.

Her instinctive need to escape up was tempered by the fact that I was now towering over her and so down she went to get away from me–and at last discovered the opening at the bottom.

I have never heard finch wings so close nor so loud as she beat it out of there at the speed of predator evasion. I marveled at the sound. (I still do that. A year and a half later I’m still hearing new things with these better hearing aids and I love it.)

Of all the species of birds that come to my feeders, it is these that squabble the most over what seems such dumb stuff to me that are the ones that are the most steadfast in looking out for their peers in their moment of need.