Skipped out on Purlescence tonight due to a sore throat–a mild one, but why share. Took it easy today.

Re the free range plum, I’m amazed it’s still there, given that I didn’t have enough clamshells to cover them all. (And that clamshelled one might need same tape for when the raccoons show up.)

Things are coming along.

Oh and: this school of rays photographed by National Geographic is amazingly beautiful. But the background music–I’m debating whether it should be nananananananananananananananana BATMAN!!!

Or Jumping Jacks Flash.

Seven. If I put the blog down and race back to the needles (having iced my hands for the third time today, the eyes being enthralled but the wrists and fingers not so much) I can get an eighth row done today and that will be a record with this project.

It ain’t heavy, it’s my bother. Re the joints. But worth it.

(Edited to add the picture and to say, nine! I wanted to see if I could get one more full row out of that cone before I splice in the next one at the side, and I did! Icepack again and call it a night.)

I once read a Dave Barry essay on how women are far braver than men: as proof he offered the fact of his wife sticking her hand down into the kitchen disposal to get something out that was gumming up the works. *He* would never put *his* hand down in that smelly thing, he said; she was his hero.

Totally topping that tonight.

Note to the resident ileostomy patient: you never, never, ever hit that thing before you’ve finished closing the clip. Ever. (I knew that.)

But I did. I’ve been dropping things a lot lately, and that 3.5″-each-way hinged piece of plastic was suddenly the latest, and yelling NOOoooOOO! at it did nothing to dissuade it from washing out of sight.

I don’t even want to touch that horrid snake thing in the garage, but he was willing to. And so we don’t have to spend $150+ on a plumber after all. (It worked. Phew.) And not once did he say the slightest negative thing to me over any of it.

The Barrys ain’t got nuthin’ on my guy.

The sun was almost gone. I stepped out the door to go water my tomatoes and blueberries.

A young dove was at the edge of the patio maybe six feet from me quietly pecking away below the feeder, but at my movement jumped off and waddled a few steps away in the yard, and then, with a better trajectory to the safety of the skies should it be needed, turned back to see. Feederfiller?

I played the blinking game. Predators are the ones who stare.

It went Oh okay, then, and did a little hop back up onto the patio towards me and resumed eating.

A finch flew in but flinched when I moved–and I heard the metal perch groan softly as the little bird’s weight left it. That has a sound? Who knew? The finch chirped a small scold as it left, and I heard that, too.  I wanted to hear it all.

A chickadee darted in briefly to the suet cage above my head as I continued to hold still, and then I carefully walked in a wide, slow path around the dove so as not to startle it away. Having begun to make friends from the same side of the glass at last, it seemed to me that the next time I might want to pull up a chair at my zero-UV hour with some sunflower seeds in my hand. Maybe, just maybe.

But for now I had to take care of my plants, too, before it got too dark to see that beautiful first blush of red on that plum out there.

For all the studying and all the tests, they did not know for certain that they would survive the flight. It had never been done before. But the invasion of Japan was planned next and, for all the destruction this would wreak (and they did not yet know nor anticipate acute radiation syndrome), many more millions of people would surely die if the men in that plane did not take on this burden.

I mentioned once about my uncle’s role in WWII.

A fellow officer greeted my dad’s older brother in the mess hall that night with, “And what did you do today, soldier?”

“I think I just ended the war.”

I mentioned last month my cousin admitting to secretly fervently wishing for a purple hat and scarf from me and I’ve been keeping an eye out ever since for just the right yarn.

And not finding it. Nope, not in my stash. Not that variegated. Purlescence had one that was tempting but was split into two dye lots, no–but I had these other projects that had to get done first anyway and that silk still has easily another week on it, so, no hurry.

But having finished a hat for someone else I no longer had a carry-around project. Just the silk. I was driving friends to San Francisco Airport this afternoon, and just before we got there I finally mused out loud to them that Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco was a whole lot closer right now than it would ever be from home and they carry the Malabrigo that would likely include exactly what I wanted that purple to be: the shade, the superwash, the softness; the wow factor, basically.

(Making that link it just finally dawned on me after all these years that the background is pale orange because they’re on Orange Avenue. My, I’m quick.)

Would the owner recognize you? Lee wondered out loud. (I guess because of the distance from home.)

Phyllis and I guffawed at her husband and I told him, Even Kathryn’s husband knows me!

And so. The Borraja. When I said no, that Rios Purpuras was just a little too gray, Kathryn pulled out exactly the right purple in the Arroyo–and thank you, Malabrigo, too, it’s perfect.

At the wheel again, I tossed various pattern thoughts around as to what I would do next with my time.

One stooped, elderly man stood alone with his memories at the foot of the Army-built Golden Gate Cemetery, a world away from the seven lanes of cars streaming past on the other side of the fence. The light turned and he didn’t see me stopped alongside him, wishing suddenly I could get out of my car so that he wouldn’t have to stay alone. I turned onto a quieter street and up the hill running alongside the place as I continued towards the freeway.  A small American flag had been planted at each grave marker, with large flags flapping vigorously in the Bay breeze around the small steep hill overlooking them all. Families were getting out of their cars near the entryway for the the Memorial Day weekend, and I silently wished the old man way down the hill company and camaraderie, too.

And I wanted to ask them, too, to tell me their stories. To see their loved ones come back to life in their eyes.

But I did not interrupt what was so intensely personal but continued on to my own place, knowing I would never forget the sight.

I picked up my project wrong somehow at knit night last night and dropped about twenty stitches of fine slithery silk off the end and didn’t know it and didn’t see it till I’d made it worse.

I suddenly rued not having filled my new glasses prescription yet. I tried. I stopped things from running any further (it was a fairly complicated lace pattern) and then stuffed the mess back in its ziploc in my knitting bag and hoped that the friend who was showing off her new scarf over there wouldn’t see the angst in my face. Hat project, good thing I’d brought that too, okay, it’s definitely going to be a long slouch hat now (glancing at the clock). Just. Knit. (Deep breath.)

She came over and showed me the pattern she was working from and we laughed together in surprised recognition that the stitch pattern I was making that hat in was the same as for the main part of her shawl. Harmonic convergence. (She helped me right back in that moment and she had no idea.)

It took me till this afternoon to face it. There was no way I was going to tink for two or three hours and the liveliness of the silk was just unfroggable.

I hashed it out. Smoothed out all those snagged separated strands complicating finding where the yarn was supposed to go, worked out what went where, picked up, reknit, nope, re-dropped, tried again… And looked up, done, surprised to see that it had only taken me about twenty minutes. See? All those previous times, they came in handy.

This was a project I had worked so hard to have perfect for publication. Anything less than, I would have had to start all over.

Knitting the next row never felt so good as the pattern continued to settle nicely into place. I knew it was back to being just right but there’s nothing quite like proving it so to myself.

Phew.

(Let’s see if I can sneak another row in before bedtime.)

Suddenly realizing I don’t have a picture of it. Which is fine, I certainly have the pattern.

She admired that scarf the couple of times I wore it to knit night–a lot. Really liked it. As in, told me to finish that book, willya, because she wanted to make that one, and ooh, that colorway!

I knew her dad was sick and with a mental nod in her direction, I put on a dark-coral sweater tonight because she passionately loves orange and that was the closest I had to it to wear in solidarity. (Stephanie, I thought of your post, too, and thought how much the two of you could swap orange stories if you ever met.)

That scarf went okay with it so on impulse I put that on too just before I walked out the door.

She admired it again, a welcome diversion to the news that her dad had just been found to have not only cancer but he’s Stage Four. All the family had been asked to come and she will be flying overseas in the morning to be by his side.

And as she was telling me the news, she turned her head to catch something someone behind her said, giving me a moment when she wasn’t looking.

Wait, what?! She was stunned to feel that scarf going around her.

Honey. Even if I didn’t know it at the time, what else on earth did I make it for?

There’s an old family tease as the siblings in both our families moved around early in their careers of, “I don’t see how you can live in such a dangerous place…”

Drab dry California-summer hills nearby, birds that blend into them… and every now and then something with color pops up. The chest on this one is bright orange in the sun.

I only get to see black headed grosbeaks a few times a year and it’s been a treat to have this one hanging around under the olive tree the last three days.

The plums and Yellow Transparent apples are growing fast with harvest next month. Then come the peaches, more apples, and the blueberries seem to just be nonstop…

Meantime, I stumbled across a pair of photos someone took today near where my brother lives–I was checking the Denver weather reports after his county had a tornado warning. Click on the one on the left to get the full effect of those tennis-ball-sized hailstones. Yow.

I’d smirk, because, you know, little sisters do that sort of thing, but you know I’d get thwacked with an earthquake if I did.

Another Mother’s Day photo to show off.

In peregrine news: last week the two San Jose females accidentally bumped their brothers off the ledge early. Both got an elevator ride to the roof for a do-over and both are flying well now and getting past the stage of trying to grab the side of the building with their feet on the way down.

Today, the first female took a good flight herself and landed on an outside stairway. Then, as if she’d forgotten she’d just used these flappy flappy things attached to her and they’d actually worked, she walked–!–up five flights of stairs. Just like any baby can go up them before they can go down, but, still.

Later the last eyas finally flew, too. And she hiked up the stairs like her sister.

So far it looks like we will have all four survive this year.

The San Francisco trio (their fourth died early) are about a week behind ours.

And then an old friend shared a link to a peregrine cam in Salt Lake City today. Wait–this one’s in color and the image is sharper. And it has audio! More firsts on the list of things newly heard: babies screeching and parents soothing and I’d had no idea they sounded like the sounds that keep coming out of my speakers, I’d only ever heard the parents’ strident defending of their young mid-air. This is so different. Almost like a cat purring, at times.

It is amazing how many of the city sounds below the cam picks up, too, including, at one point, a siren going by.

Given where that cam is, if anybody calls for an ambulance in the building my parents now live in, if that cam’s running and that tab is open on my computer I’ll be able to hear it.

Who knew a peregrine falcon cam could play kind of a backup Life Alert for senior parents. Mind. Blown. (Oh hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!)

I had tomato seedlings disappearing. Poof.

The clue fairy finally struck. And so last night I shook out a little Sluggo, organic-gardening-friendly anti-slug pellets that promise to poison only snails and slugs and simply be iron to fertilize your trees. No harm to animals or birds.

One more seedling disappeared last night and one more looked like it had lost one and a half of its two leaves, a sad little sight I had seen again and again. But it was a whole lot better than having half a dozen plants gone in a night.

But the others! These things have just been sitting there not growing for two weeks despite water, sun, soil, even a record-breaking heat wave, just holding still staying the sprouts Janice had gifted me with. It was bizarre.

But this evening when I checked they had a second pair of leaves and of a good size, even–all in one day! As if they were completely different plants, twice the size, twice the leaves, even the stalks were thicker.  And yet it had been a fairly cool day.

All they’d needed was a good night’s sleep and a good day’s work.

It had been the snails all along eating the new growth each night on every single one–of the ones that had survived their destruction. Wow. And gee thanks to whoever released his French escargot to the wild in the 1800s that then took over the whole of California, I mean, gosh, gee, who could resist such tasty land lobsters, there must have been such a market.

Not.

I had an older store-bought plant ripening its first tomato yesterday and last night a raccoon or possum reached right under the NuVue pop up tent and stole it. (Hah! Amazon has stopped selling this one because of complaints.) I had worried ever since mine had arrived that they could.

For the record, mine came broken like some of the reviewers there complained about (wish I’d read those earlier) but it was usable, if lopsided, so I set it up anyway. I rather wish I had not.  I now have an ad hoc collection of whatevers on it trying to hold down those edges to protect the rest.

My blueberries, on the other hand, are under a Gardman Fruit Cage, which has a pipe across the bottom holding the netting down via the entire structure of the thing, and the worst that’s happened was one cane poked through the netting and an animal pulled it farther and snarfed all the berries and leaves thereon. I tucked it back in.

Time to use up a gift certificate and order another Gardman.

Church was different today.

Jim’s friend Craig Jessop was in town, and Jim (my son’s old organ teacher) introduced him to the congregation.

Brother Jessop is the former conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and I wrote about him once here, a great story, don’t miss it if you haven’t seen it yet. (And I’m sorry to add that this time Richard was the one who was home sick with a fever and had to miss out on the experience.)

He sang a solo with just the most glorious voice and then he had us all sing a few hymns.

Just the first verse of Now Let Us Rejoice–and suddenly I had tears streaming freely. One friend had no idea why but she reached an arm around me. It’s okay, it’s cool.

Brother Jessop talked some more about the power of music in connecting us with God, and then said, I’m going to ask you: if you have a favorite hymn, if one has a particular meaning to you, would you come up here, maybe 30 seconds (and then he smiled and kind of laughed and said, okay, a minute) and tell us why it’s important to you.

Collette talked about the schizophrenia that had betrayed her grandson, (the answer to the last line on that post? It was true. None of our children has been lost since that day) and at his funeral we had sung Lead Kindly Light. It had brought her so much comfort.

We sang Lead Kindly Light for her, for Brian, for God.

Others spoke too and we learned things about each other we had never known. Music is an intimate art.

I had a sister-in-law who was diagnosed with cancer when her youngest was in middle school. Her husband…acted out his pain in ways unfathomable to those who loved them. Their marriage ended and still he wrought destruction. He threw away so much that he could have been.

Eight years after her diagnosis, our phone rang very early one morning when we knew what that would mean.

It was a Sunday morning. There was certainly no going back to sleep and I walked quietly towards the kitchen to start the day with a moment to myself to take it in before the kids would wake up and be told.

And as I walked down that hallway I had this growing sense of music being sung, as if a whole crowd of happy people were giving praise to God in every note shared together.

Now let us rejoice in the day of salvation.  Just the first two phrases. I was in the kitchen by this point; the last note seemed to shine with light in the still air.

And with that, at long last after such a struggle she’d endured, peace was given to me.

And on a lighter note: squirrels? Or the loud, marauding ravens that took over the neighbors’ garden during their two-week vacation?  (They just got back.)

I went to fill the birdfeeder first thing yesterday morning when I found this just outside the door.

Oleander does not grow in my yard nor on my block that I know of and I have no idea where it came from. It’s highly poisonous, and we have young families around. I know we ripped ours out when we bought this place when our kids were small.

But there it was, backdoorstep delivery. A flower. I was charmed. (Watch that suet cage, they’re venturing into hawk territory now, you know they’re going to try for it.)

A modest proposal ahead:

We as a society provide childhood vaccinations to rich and poor alike, without charge when need be for the good of everyone simply because it’s the right thing to do. Our grandparents suffered greatly but by the grace of God, our children don’t need to.

The old DPT shot is now the DTaP: diptheria, tetanus and acellular rather than whole-virus pertussis, just as effective but with no side effects, whereas the pertussis part was the biggest source of fevers and aches in the old version.

I chose to be a part of that change. My son was a newborn at Stanford when a researcher came to my bedside and told me that two million Japanese two-year-olds had been given a new DTaP vaccine with not. one. single. case. of reaction, and they hoped to be able to replace the old DPT entirely with this improved version that was so much easier on the children but that still clearly worked. It might require an extra booster later; they did not know yet. She offered me access to any information I might want about her team’s work.

But to be able to get that version in the US at any age would require finding parents willing to have their babies given this shot while it was still in study, Level III, if I remember right. It had not been given to anyone younger than those two-year-0lds. She explained the level of monitoring they would do and the care they would take to make sure my baby was okay and they would immediately discontinue it across the board if any problems surfaced whatsoever among the infants.

Of which there would be none. And so the FDA would later approve it and it would become the standard.

My oldest is allergic to the old DPT and, having reacted, cannot be fully immunized even with the new shot for all the wishing in the world.

So there was that, and, I pictured possibly millions of people spared a long night awake with a crying, unhappy baby in pain–my husband and I signed those papers. Which is why our youngest is part of why your children and my grandchildren have a safer, easier version of their shots now. There’s definitely an amount of pride in that.

Some don’t want vaccines for their kids. They haven’t seen their baby struggling for breath from pertussis or deaf from measles or paralyzed by tetanus so they don’t believe it could ever happen, and they put every immunocompromised person at risk too and don’t see it and don’t think it matters. They don’t know or they don’t want to know that the man who started the anti-vaccination fad had, by very many accounts, a huge financial stake in doing so.

I have an elegant, simple solution. A conservative solution, even.

Pass a law.  Aim it at any parent whose child does not have a valid medical reason and yet who knowingly outright refuses to immunize their child with the DTaP and MMR shots–the basic childhood shots, I’m not talking about Gardasil–any parent who cannot empathize with nor want to protect their own child from the harm these diseases could do to them, well, okay then, that’s their choice, even if I would want to argue with them that my real-world worst-case scenario, that their child dies, beats their imagined worst-case scenario, that their child becomes autistic.

But they should then be on the hook financially for the outcome of that choice. Hospitalizations, medications, therapies, hearing aids, doctors, nursing care, we can’t make them not risk their children’s suffering life-threatening or simply life-crummying illnesses but we can choose not to take the burden off those parents of the financial costs they expect to impose across the rest of us for it. Society already offered, they refused, they need to own it.

All we have to do to make this happen is to say that the insurance companies are, as of some date in the near future, not required to cover any costs incurred by a child’s illness of these specific and preventable types if this is why they were left susceptible and got sick.

The insurance companies will quite gleefully do the rest.

(Edited 5/18 to add: No, I certainly don’t think children should go without medical care. I do think we must speak out more about the costs, of every kind, of this terrible fad. See my comment below about friends of mine who dealt with a major medical debt and how it got worked out; another thought might be to, rather than withhold all coverage, impose a huge co-pay with, if needed, long payoff terms.)

Hey, tell Parker: there’s a new kind of digger!

There were a few tomato pots where the seedlings simply vanished.

And then… I found a tomato seedling, couldn’t be anything but, planted quite nicely in an amaryllis pot  a few feet away.

Can squirrels really carry such a tender thing gently enough? Their digging ability can never be doubted, I mean, there’s a lizard species that depends on them to get past the hardpack. Look Ma, no teeth! Who knew. The thing looked quite happy there.

I scooped it out anyway and put it back where it wouldn’t compete with my bulb.

And there was a safflower sprout via my birdfeeder a dozen feet away growing in another tomato pot, the little farmer. Okay, out you go.

On the peregrine falcon front: it’s supposed to be a few more days before fledging, but one of the females turned and bumped her brother off the low ledge today when he hadn’t even made the hop-and-flight yet to the upper one to see the world in that direction for the first time. (Here’s his more antsy brother in a video from sunrise this morning.) He didn’t fly really but gently coasted, landing straight below the 18th floor nestbox. Safe!

And so Glenn Stewart, the biologist in charge, drove an hour from UC Santa Cruz, got the baby-in-the-box from wildlife services, went up on the roof and put the little guy up there where his parents would keep feeding him as he got the hang of this flying thing. Glenn wasn’t about to rappell a floor down City Hall to the box with the parents going for his head like he does during banding, the eyas just needed a little more time where humans couldn’t reach it.

Clara and Fernando didn’t even react with more than a glance to the familiar face that stayed further away this time. Oh, it’s you. Carry on.

(p.s. And on a happy for her, sad for us note, Nathania is devoting herself fulltime to her yoga business and letting the others carry on at Purlescence.  She will be much missed.)