The light is returning and the birds know it and they have started to show up more, picking out nesting spots, the hormones just starting to kick in.

I knew better than to park directly under our street tree–it had three nests last year, it’s a popular spot even if the storms took one–but I did it anyway. Habit.

It is safe to say our old Prius is a mess. And it’s not just the birds; the tree drips this time of year. I kept waiting for the gas gauge to go down enough to fill it at the carwash place.

Finally!

You put in the credit card, the little prompt comes up, Do you want a carwash today? Yes/No.

Except that–it didn’t. Huh. Maybe they changed the program. I’m sure it’ll ask me if I want that added after it’s done filling then.

It didn’t.

I considered. I puzzled. How does a carwash place not let you pick to do the carwash? Did they move that function over to the screen where you punch in your code right before it starts up? But what code? There were no temporary signs posted, looks like you could drive right on in like always… I mean, my car may be old but it really really needs a good cleaning off. My neighbors would surely be ever so grateful.

Just then a big white utility van pulled in. It turned around. It backed up to the end of the carwash building. And on the side of it, in large print, were the words, CARWASH REPAIR.

Oh.

But, but… That carwash is just there, it has always just been there, it works, I’ve totally taken it for granted.

Who knew there were enough carwashes and enough of them breaking down in close enough proximity and close enough times to warrant a clearly successful but also clearly very limited-in-scope business with a nice truck like that? And logo, too?

Well, as the old GPSes used to say, Recalculating… I found the standard gas station squeegee and soapy water and washed my own silly car. Not the whole thing–it was way too much to do to whoever might encounter that bucket of water next–but at least the front and back windows and the worst of a side one. Took me three tries and some fingernailing to get the bird poop off the windshield but it felt great when it was gone. I could see clearly again in all directions!

All the way home I felt the poem of it: that truck was the good people of Minnesota and elsewhere coming out to repair and restore our democracy and our rule of law we had so taken for granted. Clarifying the view.

While I did the small things I knew how to do to remedy what I could while trying not to burden others.

I parked on the other side of our driveway when I got home so that the birds could create their homes and live their new-life lives of the coming Spring with only gratitude from me.

There have been two visiting nurses since last summer (plus two substitutes we never saw again) making sure Richard’s bone infection in his foot doesn’t get worse.

The one who comes most often got a hat last week.

The other, the head honcho, comes much less frequently so I was delighted today when it was her. She’s the one who read one of his doctors the riot act over the phone from our kitchen when he was refusing to acknowledge that the infection was still there and still needing to be treated–when in fact it was spreading.

Got that tamped back down just in time. Let’s not do the sepsis thing, okay?

While she worked, I was in the other room going through the the finished-hat stash, wondering why I hadn’t run in the ends on that blue one, and so that got done.

But the one in the Indiecita colorway: that was the one. I was so sure of it. I moved it to the top of the stack and then admired all those pretty colors in the sunlight, both the brights and the quiets in those hats, before getting back to the afghan at hand.

She finished up and the front door opened.

Wait! I ran to her. Teal Feather, Blue Jean, Volcan, Piedras, and the Indiecita, I held them out: Pick a color.

Oh there was no question that one on top it’s gorgeous! She laughed for surprise and joy and put it on her head and gave me a hug and about skipped down the walkway, so happy! She got to have something I made! She got to have colors she loved! It’s so soft and warm!

I tell you: she’d earned that. She had so much earned that.

Dannette stopped by today, one of my old Purlescence friends. That shop’s been gone about ten years now.

An Anya apricot seedling got us to finally reconnect in person. I had two up for grabs: a 42″ one in a big pot that was going to be a handful to transport and a 24″ one in a one gallon pot. Both were started last year and I’m sure the one will catch up quickly to the other once its roots have some space.

The big one had clearly sounded good beforehand because it’s a nice-sized tree but in person, the small one was so much easier to just pick up and put in her car that it was an easy call.

We caught up a bit. The cute baby that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee bounced in her arms after a book signing that we carpooled for to San Francisco is somehow 12 now, with her oldest in high school.

I reminisced about being at knit night at Purlescence when I excused myself and walked outside to take a call and then walked back in and announced to the crowd, This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged! The whole room roared congratulations and huzzahs as I held the phone out for him to be able to hear.

His oldest is in high school too, now.

Times change around us, we get older, but with friends you just pick up right where we left off.

She’s finally going to have her apricot tree!

Coming along. The gansey-stitch redwood trees on the right have begun.

It was reported that about a hundred of Alex Pretti’s neighbors joined in near his home last night in the bitterest cold to light candles and sing together, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” in tribute to the way he had lived his life.

It is not in our church’s songbook for children and there were so many choices they could have made–and yet this was the one that was picked and planned and practiced before his name was ever known to the world.

We had stake conference today, the gathering of five wards in one grand get-together. Not just our ward but most of the Peninsula. As part of the service they called all the little children ages three to about eight to come to the front and sing. Several of the youngest needed their mommies or daddies to walk them up there when they saw all those faces looking at them; some followed older siblings boldly, ready for this.

This Little Light of Mine.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one fighting back tears at that simplest of deliveries of a message that hit home.

G_d knew. He knew. The grief and the horror soon to come and how much we would need this very thing.

The message, through young children, that our one, own, inept, imperfect little light matters, that we must each hold it up against the darkness. Together we do create a brightness and it will prevail.

I don’t know how to cope with it other than to write it out. Feel free to skip if you need to for your own sake. It’s been so much.

I was not going to watch the video. Which quickly became videos, because so many Minnesotans have turned out in the bitterest cold to bear witness with their friends and their phones.

But my friends are there and they are experiencing this madness in person, and so in the end I did.

A woman found herself somehow a little too far away from others and the ICE predators went after her. They sprayed her in the face and as she bent over in agony, they pounced, pulling her downwards to beat her.

The white tall male ICU nurse from the VA had been recording but that quickly became not enough for him and he went to her aid, moving as if to first tend to her stricken face and then trying to pull them off her.

The last decision in his life was to defend the innocent from harm no matter what they might do to him for it.

ICE pulled them apart and pushed him to his knees, they bashed his head with tear gas canisters, then spotted what he had a permit for. One reached down into the scrum and walked away with it–how ’bout them jack-booted government thugs some claim their 2A rights are all about–and then, with him disarmed and on the ground and never having threatened them in any way other than with the truth-telling of his phone, they shot him in the back. And again. And again. And again. And again.

All this started with electing a man who rapes children who resurrected the South’s pre-Civil War Slave Patrols against all non-whites.

Now the dementors he’s let loose are fighting anyone who won’t surrender their every right as an American, especially against anyone who by showing compassion shows them who *they* are so they respond with murderous fury.

The state sued to have the scene be preserved for investigation. ICE defied them.

First they came for… goes the poem.

Maybe, said my sweet husband a few days ago, trying hard to find any way to make any sense of the ongoing horror of all this, maybe all this will be what finally gets America to turn away from her racism for good.

When spinning fibers into yarn, there’s always this tradeoff: how much twist vs how much softness do you want.

Twisting adds friction. Friction helps hold the fiber ends in place. It adds to the longevity of the garment you make the yarn into. Too much can make even pure rabbit hair feel like the roughest burlap. (I did that once just to prove it. I didn’t waste much, just enough.)

Now, I would never even aspire to buy a dress like this but I might daydream knitting something like it. At thousands of dollars and that brand name you would expect it to be of the softest baby cashmere, spun to hold onto that sweet feel. Scrumptious. (Although disappointing that they don’t show the model’s face. C’mon, Loro Piana, you’re using her coloring to stage your product well but skipping out on her humanity? Less than cool.)

But.

For me it would have to be dyed a color not associated with ICE uniforms.

Why I don’t think I would attempt to make one with potential mill ends of such yarns: picture sitting down in that thing.

Pilling is going to happen the most where the most contact does, especially with the addition of weight against it. Can you see walking around in an extremely expensive fuzzbutt alert?

I may just be fable-ing fox and grapes here, since you’d have to have far more money than I to even begin to consider buying such a thing.

What Aesop probably never knew is that the coveted grapes–as I think of how intense wealth has skewed the humanity of some of its more notorious owners these last few years–are poisonous to canines.

The look on his face when I told him that number!

Okay, there’s a plumber I like, Lee, good guy, a one-man show, been doing this a long time, knows his stuff, but he wasn’t available last time I needed one.

I thought about calling the company of the young guy who had come in order to ask him to, y’know, fix his mistake, if it was his mistake, but I just couldn’t. $850 and I’m still dealing with all this and my carpet’s been wrecked and the sunk-cost fallacy was becoming a little too literal.

It must have kept bugging Lee, because when he was done he felt compelled to talk about it.

I thought the other guy had said he’d replaced everything under the sink but the faucet. Turns out he had not. The two on-off switches were very old and they had failed.

I could attest to that–I’d tried one more time last night to see if I could get them to close and the result was that that five gallon pot couldn’t manage that much overnight. The floor of the cabinet was at last starting to dip heavily downwards and the edge of the carpet in the living room was wet again.

Yeah, he said, they forgot to put a washer in. That’s why it still leaked. That part? he said, pointing to the U-tube. Costs $16 and an hour of his time at most to put in. Then he explained, That company got sold about two years ago and the new owners are pushing their people hard for upsells.

Ah–so that’s why the guy waited for his friend to come over to get me a quote on how he was going to fix the damage to the cabinet floor and the wall behind it. (As I suddenly realized I was apparently paying the first plumber per hour for that, too.) I told Lee, I wasn’t feeling it. Didn’t agree to going forward with it.

He spelled out his own bill: $50 and $22 and $8 for these parts, $80/hour for his time, to say, And THAT is how it’s done.

Nothing drips.

Everything works.

The new faucet looks gorgeous. (Richard laughed when I said that to him. I said, It’s not what you would have picked? He said, No, but it makes you happy and that’s what I want. He is a sweetheart.)

The refrigerator line is hooked up again.

Next time Lee’s too busy I am absolutely going to wait till he’s not.

Went to the post office yesterday and was quietly admiring the sweater of the woman several people ahead of me. She had nothing in her hands.

The line did not move by a single customer in ten minutes and I was debating putting my boxes on the floor and pulling out the latest hat project. But didn’t. Finally it was her turn, and I couldn’t hear the conversation, I just got the faces and the tones of voice: sweater woman presenting what she thought was a reasonable request, clerk lady quickly turning to sounding like what I can only describe as almost triumphantly unhelpful.

Finally, the lady in the thick single-ply blue top-down hand knit gave up and turned to go in disgust.

I’m picturing myself back when they told me they could not pay out the insurance on a package that was a “this must never be lost” but was, and being blown off and being told it had to be missing for one more day than that before they could make good on it.

Five minutes after I got home I got the message that they had miraculously found it. Right there in that building after a month or two AWOL. I guess I’d put the fear of payout into them.

I hope they didn’t lose something she’d knit for someone.

Whether her issue gets resolved too or not, I wanted her day to go better than that, so as she went past me I asked her if she’d knit her sweater.

She had–but in her moment of trying not to voice how she felt at that clerk she took it out on the yarn: she grabbed a bit of fabric near her elbow and told me, Yeah, but it pills!

It’s beautiful! I said as she continued on by.

And it was.

And that’s the last thing she heard walking out of that post office.

I got the same clerk. She knew I’d seen all that. Maybe she even was glad I’d tried to make things better for the woman. Or maybe it was that because we were actually doing a transaction, her job required that she ask me at the end to click the pointer at the screen to mark whether I was smiley face or sad face at how I’d been helped.

Her face was such a funny mixture of pretty please!!! and this bared-teeth smile that was trying too hard that I fought back the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ impulse, the laugh-out-loud one, too, and gave her her hoped-for smile.

One for each of them. Fair’s fair.

Next year there will be no happy anticipation of the best ten days or so of the summer when the Kit Donnell peaches are ripe at Andy’s because there will be no Andy’s.

Raintree is a nursery my sister shopped at when she lived in Washington. Loved the place.

Nobody else seems to stock that variety this year, or if they did, people who know a good thing have snapped it up. I sure hope so. It worried me that a big wholesale grower has taken it off their list; it cannot be allowed to vanish when Andy’s goes. He and Kit created it. The peaches are too juicy and the skins too thin to hold up to commercial mass production. The flavor!

Today we finally decided and now Raintree’s stock is officially down by one.

When I put its roots into the ground we should have music to celebrate: how about, Another One Bites the Dust?

So I was doing my walking time last night and saying a prayer, telling G_d the obvious and that I needed to know what to do about that water coming up into the rug.

Suddenly I knew. I KNEW. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew!

So of course I ran to Richard to tell him that.

Well, go and look, then!

And there it was. The dishwasher was running and the water was streaming out underneath the sink to the ruined cabinet floor. Yes a $$$ major plumbing fix happened last month, but not that particular part. But that’s why I hadn’t thought of it, I thought everything under there was fixed.

I put my biggest dye pot underneath it. I didn’t know if it would run like that all night or just while the dishwasher emptied or what.

There were over four gallons in the morning. I couldn’t just empty it into that sink (actually I probably could have), I had to carry it outside. On second thought, I hope the detergent doesn’t kill the Chinese elm on that side of the house, I should have carried it down the hall to the bathroom but my back was distracting me.

A new faucet is on order.  The old one leaked a quart or two over the course of today, a whole lot less than I was afraid of, and I am not turning the dishwasher on again till the new Delta and its intact supply lines are in there.

Phew.

And now I can’t wait for Spring for my tree to show what it can be now.

Meantime, in Minnesota, in response to ICE beating US citizens on their own properties without provocation nor warrant nor legal right to trespass (“But you have an accent.” “You have an accent too!”) the people have figured out a new way to inform their neighbors when ICE is on their street: set off their car alarms via their key fobs.

This is after one of their agents threatened a young child that he’d put a bullet in her head for protesting with her mom. Putting a woman in her place: start’em young. And after one threw a flash-bang at a car with children, injuring a six month old. A baby.

Republicans have a chance to redeem a little of their names for history if they at long last impeach and convict the pedophile-in-chief and end this siege. Do it now.

Because anyone who doesn’t, you don’t have to worry we’ll find out your name is in the Epstein files: you’re already making it clear.

Two days ago I thought he’d spilled a glass of water  (“No…”) and dabbed it out with a towel. Yesterday my sock got wet again when I stepped on the edge of the carpet there. Today it was Houston, we’ve got a problem. The soaking went several feet wide now.

This house was built with the water pipes running under the slab but ours failed years ago. The then-plumber explained that the reverberations from one leak can make a weak old pipe give way in more places and in fact we had, suddenly, 16 of them. We could jackhammer the entire length of the house–or we could run new pipes across the roof.

Done.

And so here I am 32 years later, going, yeah we had a freeze, but there’s nothing under the house. The wall is dry. No sign of dripping through the ceiling. Somehow water is seeping up through the concrete from the ground, is the best we can tell, even though it hasn’t been raining. This is going to be $$$.

We tried to figure out who we should call for a problem whose cause we don’t know.

Well, a plumber would be able to pinpoint the sounds of the water if it has anything to do with pipes.

I’ve been pushing towels at it all day and the washer is running a load of them as I type. But I think at the very least we’re about to lose the carpeting in the living room.

So I did what one does in such circumstances: I went outside this evening, looked at my oldest Anya tree (2019) that didn’t get to go in the ground because it didn’t look as healthy as the other, but that could be because it’s been potted too long, and finally, a year after I bought a bigger pot and soil, did that transplant. By myself. Without telling anyone.

Those branches are fragile and so am I. It was heavy. That rootball was an impenetrable mass, no easing individual roots apart like I had intended, not while trying to keep it from falling over and crashing. I hope I didn’t leave bare spaces between it and the new soil underneath because air prunes off roots but I’m sure in some places I did. I ended up pushing the mass down with my knee from trunk to pot edge, around and around to try to connect it to below. And then threw those pants in the washer with the towel load.

It was all frankly a stupid thing to do because a friend told me he was going to get some kids from church to come do it for me, but I never got a firm time nor day. I didn’t want to pay another repairman, I didn’t want another major home repair (termites were $79k) and in that moment what I wanted most was the satisfaction of getting this one thing done that had bugged me for over a year so my plant could go live happily ever after and maybe even give me some fruit.

Besides, what are back exercises for.

It feels so good to have gotten it done.

I half-apologized and warned the friend from church so the kids wouldn’t be disappointed, and thanked them for the offer.

So, if you’re thinking about the shape of Half Moon Bay, our local coastline, and you take a classic feather and fan and stretch it out a bit and then run an outward-purl row immediately after the yarn overs so it looks like the crests of incoming waves and the closer to shore you take it the closer together those two rows come to the next set of two, while dropping one repeat to the right every eighteen rows, turning those into plain stitches (which I just did again, hidden under that needle)…

…and you graph out a starfish in purl stitches…

…and it comes out looking more like a lobster but what the heck…

…Then it turns out that, as usual for me, the more I get done the faster it goes because it’s actually starting to BE something.

The mill-end yarn (50/50 cash/cot) is not pre-washed. It’s going to bloom and look a lot softer and denser.

You might even be able to see that there’s a starfish down there near the corner.

There was going to be a Barbara Walker’s turtle, too, but it’s just too many rows to scale right in there.

There will probably be a redwood above. I’ve debated an apricot tree (they have one of mine) and even adding apricot colored apricots but you know baby fingers would put a lot of effort into trying to pull them off. So maybe. I have that color, I could. Or all just cream like it is. Got awhile before I have to decide.

An officer’s body cam footage of handcuffing an emu on the lam is the video we all need right now.

Meantime, I have a question. Macy’s was selling a cashmere turtleneck for $43 plus a $10 off coupon, in a color I liked. $33. I sprang for it. I figured it wouldn’t be the best quality but cashmere at the price of cotton, hey.

It arrived quite perfumed. I don’t know if it was worn and returned or just happened to be next to the warehouse’s moth repellent efforts, but it looked fine. I debated returning it but there were none left to exchange it for so I thought, nah, I can wash that out.

Several spots refused to get wet. On both front and back but not the sleeves. We’re talking blotches an inch and two inches high or more.

I held it under. I soaked it in unscented suds for hours. I defied the ‘don’t agitate the water’ rule of hand washing woolens and squished soapy water through those spots again and again but they stayed looking exactly how they had: bone dry. Huh. If it was mill oils repelling the water the soap would be breaking that down by now. If it was super wash treated, ie the yarns coated in the thinnest film of plastic so it can be machine washed and dried, they would have used it as a selling point (without admitting to the plastic part.)

What gives? I’m a fiber artist, I should certainly know. A fraudulently synthetic-cashmere blend that spun out into clumps of just synthetic?

I tried working water into it during the rinses, too. (Tepid water not cold thankyouverymuch.)

I didn’t spin it out–if it turned out blotchy I wanted to be able to say it had not touched the washer nor dryer.

Hours later, while laid flat to dry, those gaps slowly slowly closed up and the thing became a solid color again, darker of course because it’s wet but at least now it all looked wet.

Huh.

Well, the mill oils with their dried hair mousse effect are definitely washed out now because the sweater has softened up beautifully.

I like it. Hey Mikey.