You only get to turn 80 once and yesterday was a milestone day for my mother-in-law.  So I’m going to say it out loud here, too: Happy Birthday, MomH!

The Cooper’s hawk caught my attention this morning with a successful hunt. This time he (she?) took its kill up to a tree and disappeared just below the center of that first picture there (no, that’s a leaf, he’s behind there), the occasional small bit of fluff floating down in the breeze.

He swooped through again about three hours later, highly unusual in the middle of the day and it was a hot one at that. He perched in the olive tree (second picture), fanning out his feathers and turning to catch a breeze between them just so. That’s his tail below the limb. I did not see a second hawk at the time, although it sure looks like it from the camera–if it is, it’s standing behind the chopped end of that big limb and leaning left and up towards its mate.

And a few hours after that, one zoomed in a half circle around the first birdfeeder, straightened, immediately did a right-angle turn and swooped its 31″ wingspan within the 10′ foot-wide foot-of-the-L part of the covered patio and around Kim’s feeder just perfectly so and back out to a tree. And then, before even two minutes were up, he did it again! With a pause somehow at the end of that last circle, as if he were trying to scare a squirrel out from hiding. (And there is one that darts under the barbecue smoker over there. Clearly, it’s not fooling anybody.) But wow, what an air show!

My first thought was, now come on, you know no prey flew in there in between; are you really that impatient and hungry?

But the next time Coopernicus dropped all pretense of stealth: he flew to the most exposed branch jutting out into the yard from up high, the sun radiating off his chestnut front, as if to proclaim to all the world–

–and that’s when I finally got it.

Glenn Stewart of UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has mentioned that at fall equinox, birds display some of the same behaviors they do at spring equinox, and that the peregrine falcons, specifically, make a particular show of guarding and announcing their established territory.

My yard was being announced as off limits to all comers.

And they’d been challenged on it yesterday. Yesterday, I had a small crowd of crows fly overhead for the first time in a long time and the Cooper’s pounced on prey in front of me not long after. Those crows will attack hawk young in the nest in the spring–so today I guess they’re not taking any chances: not of the crows and definitely not of any other hawks. From that king-of-the-mountain limb, something overhead bothered him and he flew off after it and over my head, not at hunting speed; that flight definitely felt different. Just don’t get in his way.

Dinnertime, a little later–and there, a Cooper’s, yet again, and away to the left. And again and to the right! Swoop! Swoop!

I had a shawl I’d knitted out of random baby alpaca laceweight a few years ago that I’d lost some of my notes for and some of what I did find was fairly scrambled, definitely not the copy meant for keeps. I’d been wanting to reknit it, definitely writing the pattern down and writing it right this time. It was going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided it all this time.

Today I sat down with my birdwatching and my Lisa Souza baby alpaca laceweight in Sapphire, gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous, in the color of the deepening sky well before the dark, and worked that pattern out.  I have written it. I am knitting it to test it. I’ve got it.

I was finishing up the laundry in the early evening, thinking it was about time to start on dinner, and came around the corner just in time to see the last of the speeding tilted sweep around the feeder and the landing in the yard.

Uh oh, she’s back–Coopernicus looked up at me.

Then his right wing fluttered and he struggled, a second flutter like he was catching his balance–and then a firm stillness. (Cooper’s hawks kill their prey with their feet.)

He watched me.

I watched him.

He let me flash a camera at him and then go over to the couch and peer over the edge for a better look.

The squirrels had disappeared, cowering; one has lost the end of its tail of late. They’ve learned a little respect.  I wondered if the one on the patio had ducked under the lawnmower blade again–I don’t know how he managed that squeeze, but there was one time I bumped the handle and had an explosion of black fur dashing out at my feet.

The hawk and I took each other’s measure for a long, long moment. But one black squirrel, unable to stand it any longer, moved in the trees, and at last he lifted off to get his dinner ready elsewhere.

He’ll take his with some Fall seasoning: a finch assault and pepper.

Or clearly, buyer beware.

Meantime, the fourth hat for Vermont flood relief, with apologies for the flashbleaching. In real life it’s a triple-braid allover cable.

I bought some $8.99+ship mink/cashmere laceweight via Ebay awhile ago to see if it really was what it said it was–having once ordered $.99 silk/cashmere from someone else in That Big Country that a bleach test declared to be mostly-bamboo at best. You don’t get what you don’t pay for.

The American proprietor of Great Northern Yarns, looking to establish a world market in mink yarn awhile back, flew to China to verify the source of the fiber and the humane care they take of their animals to his satisfaction, and I’ve tried his. It has a distinct hand and is very soft, so I already knew I quite liked the stuff. His, too, has some cashmere blended in.

The new stuff seems to my hands to be a good enough match. I should note that if you want dk weight, though, ya gotta buy it from GNY.

So as I was finishing up the last of that fourth Vermont hat, with worsted and dk running together on size 5 US needles and cabled, tight tight tight and warm warm warm but hard hard hard on the hands, I escaped for a few minutes by admiring that mink stuff online again. I’d been wishing they had more pale-person-friendly colors; couldn’t hurt to go see.

And there it was. A picture of a display of every color the stuff seems to come in, from a new vendor, buy any lot size and name your colorway. A caution: one of their listings says “This is not mink this is not cashmere” but the rest of their English is so fractured that who knows what they meant to say.

100 skeins 5000 g mink yarn iceberg ferrets

Condition: new

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want old ferrets. Okay, it took me awhile but I found a listing with the 90% wool of ferrets 10% cashmere part. Got it. Weasel? Ferret? Mink?

But iceberg? Anybody?

(Ed. to add.  I looked again. I’ll take them at their “This is not” word and stick with what I’ve got from whom I know, product-wise. The “partner” yarns sound to me as I think about it like they’re being marketed as strands to run with the ones that actually are the blend I’m looking for. I wonder what they’re made of!

Oh. There’s a sheepish picture on the ball band. Never mind.)

It took me longer than it should have: for the little girl, I was saying a prayer pretty quickly. But her mother too needed serious help and they clearly needed intervention.

It took awhile last night for me to acknowledge the sense of being tapped on the shoulder: Ahem.

Yes. Yes, I do hear You, I’m sorry, I’m on it. And I added a prayer for the woman who pushed me yesterday, and then the older woman with them and then all three of them together, but to be honest, it was with a sense of reluctance and of giving up on the one.

I wrote that post, I said that prayer, I knitted, I did my treadmill time, and as I racewalked, I kept being drawn back to the mystery of them: how had they come to this point? Was there anything anyone could do to make a difference? Thank heavens it (presumably) wouldn’t have to be me again–but the one thing I could do is say another prayer and mean it a little more from the heart this time.  And so I did.

It became easier to.

The thought settled in, as I hoped that maybe that was her lowest point at a bad time in her life and that perhaps it might shock her into seeing what she had become: she had assaulted the one person around whom she couldn’t just brush it off later as Oh, I bumped into someone. Rather, she pushed hard the one person around whose sense of balance was via tactile feedback, so that there was a very large and very public display of danger to that person in direct consequence to her actions and that she had to have had to dodge, although at that point I was suddenly not paying any attention to her to be sure of that. (As Richard on the other side turned to see and grabbed to steady the suddenly projectile cart.)

Lots of people saw. She could walk away but she would not be able to get away from herself on this one. Nobody yelled at her, nobody stopped her, nothing else she could project the blame onto.  Just her. She has to live with it.

I see two potential paths from there: either she refuses to acknowledge to herself any fault for anything anytime.

Or if only. She wishes she’d done better and tries to make up for it by treating others better from here on out. Maybe not now, maybe later; I think of a story Rachel Remen tells of one of her older patients glad for her cancer, wishing for retribution for the many evils she wished now at last she hadn’t done in her life, finally acknowledging them out loud. Dr. Remen heard story after terrible story of this woman who’d been a child in a war zone trying to survive alone, carrying that anger into adulthood, and realized, “I am her first witness.”

What a horribly long wait to begin to heal emotionally.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you pray for someone, the answers don’t always come fast, they don’t always come in the ways you expect or even understand at first, and they very often come through other people.

May that woman encounter the other people she needs in the way she needs at the times that she needs. Starting right now seems to me would be good.

As I continued to say those prayers last night and today, I found myself increasingly able to give the whole scene up to God and, as far as anything concerning myself, to let it go.

Not your usual Costco shopping trip. We had checked out and were heading towards the door and it was actually less crowded than many a Saturday, when a woman we’d seen earlier, her small daughter in her cart and her mother (I assume) with her, was haranguing them (still) in their language; our guess was it sounded like Chinese.

We had not at any time made eye contact nor interacted in any way except that I had, on the far side of the store a little earlier, smiled briefly at the little girl as we passed by.  She was being well behaved.  Her mother reeked of anger.

I guess I was not walking as fast as the woman wanted me to. I barely saw her coming up from behind just a moment before it happened. There was plenty of space to go around. She instead actively pushed me hard (and my cane, since she was on that side) out of her way. There is no question it was a deliberate act.

Richard was on the other side of the cart and didn’t see till I went flying, totally akimbo, balance blown, grabbing the cart with my other hand to keep from breaking a hip: *I* know what my bone scan looked like after that mega steroid treatment in the hospital, (200 mg/day) even though she could not have.

Everybody behind stopped in horror while those women marched determinedly on, ignoring the fuss.

It was an interesting discussion on the way home: Richard was telling me that co-workers of his had described to him how, in the open-air markets back home, the old women were the worst–they would simply snatch what they wanted out of your hands and didn’t care whose toes they stepped on.

I love that we live in a diverse, culturally rich area. But those people today live here now and you do not assault disabled strangers.

We were too stunned to react (and I was too busy trying not to fall), but for any next time should there be one, my husband and I now have an agreement: next time he will plant his 6’8″ not-small body in front of the woman, who made a point of acting as if she had nothing to do with that and no knowledge of it, and tell her that she is going to wait with us while he calls 911. Because next time I will probably break that hip. I was very fortunate.

Now pardon me, I have a back to go put an icepack on. Good knitting time, at least.

————-

(Added a few hours later, after I’ve had time to process the above and settle down.)

The report I got is that Judy Sumner‘s daughter put on her favorite music this morning, and at the third song, Judy quietly slipped away to be with her waiting husband Len. She would laugh out loud if she heard me say WIP in peace, dear Judy. Thank you for everything.

And then there were three. Judy’s yarn knit with navy, with a turquoise-green Manos Silk Blend, and doubled on itself. I find myself hoping they go together to a family.

I had a concert to go to early–it was festival seating–and no time to run to the LYS to get another skein of just the right weight and color to match up with it next. Stash don’t fail me now. Nope, nope, too thin and three strands is not a carry-around project, nope not that one either. Who around here keeps buying all this lace and fingering weight?

There was one: but it wouldn’t cost me the $12.50 price of the ball, it would break up a shawl’s worth of seven of them to replace.  I probably don’t need that seventh, but I am adamant about having too much rather than possibly not enough before I start. Still. I almost…and almost again, but no, keep looking.

There! Inside that bag, out of sight, forgotten about–the discontinued (darn) Misti Royal Baby Alpaca! Oh, that is going to be SO soft and SO warm and it’s the lighter color I wanted this time. Got it!

I got the cast on and one and a half rows done before the show started.

So I was talking to someone at Purlescence tonight who used to work for a major bank, and she told me that every time they did an upgrade, a few accounts somewhere got totally messed over.

That made me feel better because at least it made sense. Not that it happens at all, but that it had clearly happened to us.

Ours did a major upgrade just yesterday, as it turns out; I found that out when I tried to log in today, tried again, tried again, got a Contact Us message only, and finally gave up and called the number.

I got told the unbelievably-bad-PR line that I had to have my husband vouch for me, either on the phone or in person, that I had his permission to use our joint account.

Wait, *what!?*

I said we had had that account for 15 years, not to mention it was a community property state. Besides, all I wanted to do–but that I really really wanted to do for now–was to transfer my son his college tuition money.

The woman on the line took care of that for me but told me I needed to come in in person with proof of my social security number: the one I was giving her was not accepted.

They’d clearly assigned me a random string of numbers to replace mine and that’s all their computer would take. I still don’t even know what it was, since I couldn’t see it. They did the same thing to the login ID.

I went in, glad we had a local branch. Not what I’d planned to do with my day, but glad that I’m mobile, at least, so that I could do it. I told the woman who ushered me over the first thing I’d been told on the phone, and she exclaimed an indignant, “WHAT?!”

Got that one on my side!

She could not fix it. She tried again. She called over to her manager for help. She said I would get a confirmation email of my new password, and she called our son to get his okay, but apologized that it would have to be followed up with a signed form he would have to turn right around in the mail for me to be able to put money in his account.

Twist his arm.

Hours later.

There is still no confirmation email.

The email they said they sent Richard yesterday informing us of the changes never materialized.

Neither of us can get in.

They have all our money and we have zero access. I imagine that could cause some excitement at the state regulator level if it’s not fixed fast.

And the kicker?  I was going to get to the post office afterwards to mail in two hats and a few good warm sweaters for Vermont flood relief. I was at that bank so long the post office would have been closed before I could get there. I was afraid I would be spending a lot of time watching someone staring at their computer screen (and I did) at that bank, so, looking at my shawl project and going, no way, I grabbed yarn and needles and headed out the door. I needed something small, portable, and mindless.

I cast on while she stared at her screen. I continued at Purlescence, in between holding and playing with babies and knitters.

…And there will now be a third hat going out to Vermont, again knit from Judy Sumner’s giant merino/silk hank. And I am finally admitting to myself that I felt all along like there had to be at least three with the same yarn in all of them or I would feel quite disappointed later. Another person needed one like that, someone somewhere out there, known to God.

And that’s far more important than any silly computer nonsense. But it took the computer nonsense to get me to put aside what I thought I wanted to do and sit down and start it. It had felt compelling but I had ignored the feeling–it is such a relief to watch it coming to be after all!

An “if only I’d had the Flip camera…” moment.

There’s a difference in how all the birds hanging around the feeder flit away in the triviality of nothing at all,  just because someone else did, and then amble right back a moment later, vs when it’s for real.  When they move that fast in a straight line, they’re all about the intense escape attempt.

That kind of movement caught my eye and I turned to see: the squirrel in the tree leaped away just in time and the Cooper’s, which had to have been right there all along unseen by it or me, apparently decided to go after something on my single-story roof above my head.

It swept out of that tree, not even paying attention to the bushytail that was trying so hard to get away, and swooped down low for stealth, then pulled up right before the awning to snatch whatever it was going after, all of it in an instant.

But what that means is that I glanced up just in time to see a brilliantly lit up, beautiful big hawk as it burst into the sunshine from the trees–and then it was heading right straight towards my face!  Till the last second. I got to see at warp speed my Cooper’s from a flying angle totally new to me and to see its determination eye directly to eye as a squirrel would for the last time.

I froze in utter awe at the force of Nature that it is. I felt quite the empathy for those squirrels. I hope it was a great meal.

————

p.s. (Photo from August.) There is nothing in the world like a Skype chat with Parker and his parents now that he’s old enough to remember us and to break into gigglefits when we smile and to wave back at us. Love it. Love him. Our daughter-in-law and son are doing a great job.

Did the cardiology stress test and echocardiogram this morning; I messed up their test by being too used to a treadmill. (Not complaining!) Two weeks of on and off chest pains–granted, it was during air alert days–and today they couldn’t induce a single one, not a single cardiac cough nor shortness of breath.

Well then. Might as well combine trips like a responsible driver during Spare the Air and finally go order my new glasses across the street.

The possibly-as-much-as-40-ish fellow taking care of me asked about insurance blahblahblah, the usual, and then took me completely by surprise by asking if I were a member of AARP.

Okay, I must be getting old, that took me straight back to a mental connection to it, fair or not, now, that I have never been able to shake: to the scene in the news of well-dressed well-to-do old people rioting–there is no other word for it–with Dan Rostenkowski, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, cowering in his car in Chicago as they pounded on it. They were angry at his quite reasonable bill proposing to modify Social Security benefits for those who have utterly no need of the money. (Let’s see…checking Wikipedia… A version of that bill passed in ’83? Sounds about right.) They found it the highest insult that their monthly checks might become tainted in their own minds as, you know, welfare, their pride more important than any appeals to generational fairness. Tax their benefits?!

Right. And Warren Buffett needs those SS checks too. We’re still arguing over that, aren’t we.

Threatening to throw Rostenkowski out of office wasn’t good enough–they started rocking his car to the point he thought they were going to flip it over.

(Side note, added later: from that Wikipedia page, I’m guessing my memory was wrong and that it was actually the seniors being asked to help pay for their new Medicare prescription coverage that caused that scene. Anyway.)

Knowing it would take far more words and time to relay or explain any of that than the situation at all called for, I stifled, swallowed, nearly lost it, and then finally said in just the very mildest voice you could imagine, “That would be a loud No.”

He’d been watching my face, waiting for an answer, and at that the guy lost it, laughing, and then I did too, adding, “And besides! I’m only 52!”

He tried throwing in a “You can sign up at 49 these days” and I motioned, Cut! Cut! Noooooo!

He was rolling.

And dang.

There it was. Chest pain. Just enough. (And how’s that for irony.)

I tell you, the thing is as wily and obnoxious as a squirrel with an open jar of peanut butter in sight on the counter and the kitchen door left open. Thank you very much, with the help of my doctors I am keeping that lid on tight and the door firmly closed.

I spent the afternoon puzzling at great length over a pattern idea that had been bouncing around in there for a year, reacting to the day by trying to finally get that unfinished idea to become one with the yarn.

Got it. Good. Time to buckle down and get to work.

p.s. I have to come back and add: watching your heart valve on a screen is really, really cool. You’re seeing the physicality of your very life in front of you, and it’s clapping its hands for joy.

Two hats finished for Vermont flood relief. An attempt at diving into a third: playing with colors, four strands of fingering and lace weight on 3.75mm needles, creating a Monet effect and a very dense fabric like I wanted–till the hands screamed Stop!

Oh. Well. Be that way.

Frustrated, I went looking for something easier to do.

Which is how, four or five months after the fact, an abandoned shawl that had needed a ton of tinking and that I dared not frog, not in that yarn and pattern, finally got rid of its botched edging. And yes, the woman who taught in her lace book how to do lifelines did not run a lifeline and yes, without one I was hosed and I knew it.

But fixing it was a chance to feel like I was still making progress and going forward on something, anything, while involving mostly the hand that wasn’t bothering me, so, that I could do. And now, a tedious hour+ later, it is finished. What a relief.

It was one of those projects where nobody was going to see the goof but me, but that was enough. I knew.

I still need a small, mindless, portable–but comfortable!–project to take to wait for a doctor appointment tomorrow, and that doctor runs notoriously late.  Pardon me, I’ve got to run go cast on.

I posted this on Facebook a few hours ago:

“Ten years ago, we all came together. Today, I have been knitting a second warm hat for the people in Vermont who lost–belongings, for the most part, but still, the comforts of home, gone. I will never be a firefighter, but I can at least try to be a flood fighter.”

This time it’s more of Judy Sumner’s yarn, knitted with a strand of navy merino/cashmere 50/50. I want it warm and I want it soft. It’s something I can do about it and in honor of Judy’s good name.

————–

Coopernicus. I do think that would make a great name for him. I saw my male Cooper’s hawk this evening! After lamenting to my daughter on the phone minutes before that it had been awhile. He was standing on the barbecue grill, watching the birdfeeders, watching me, twitching his tail side-to-side and shuffling foot to foot, perhaps unsettled by my having moved. A moulting flank feather was prominently askew–here, let me brush that cowlick for you.

There is a point on the back of the awning pole where the squirrels have recently learned to try to tear a seam in my taped-up parchment paper, just enough to get a toehold they can leap to the feeder from. Word got out fast; the flashmobs returned. I finally put a chair back under the Brome yesterday and that brought an abrupt stop to that behavior again.  Curious, that.

And so, considering the supersoaker briefly, I decided to ignore the black one gleaning on the ground; it’s Sunday, let him alone. It’ s just one and he’s behaving. Should he hop up on the chair and up to the feeder, he’d be coming from immediately below it: no swinging, no seed, no waiting crowd hoping for the pinata to spew, cage closed. Have a good meal, little guy.

His sudden scurrying later caught my eye and that’s what got me to turn to see. (And if I’d opened that glass door and used that soaker it never would have shown up.)

I held obediently still now for the hawk. He eyeballed me, then the feeders again, doing the head bob that helps a bird judge distance just before takeoff. I thought there was still an oblivious finch on my daughter-in-law’s feeder and chanced a glance behind me.

At long last he swooped–doing a sharp turn, to my surprise, not around a feeder but around the exact point on that pole to see if that squirrel was hiding on the tear-the-paper spot.

Nope. But it was a clear sign that he’d been studying their behaviors closely.

Blink and he was gone. Such a beautiful, beautiful bird, lit up in the lowering sun, blue- and near-white faced and chestnut brown, then bluegray wings wide to the wind, flying free.

Knitting two strands of soft merino/silk dk on 3.75 mm needles in tight cablework was like knitting at sock density and took me longer to finish than I thought it would. But it will be warm.

Ellen of Half Pint Farms in Vermont named this colorway Evening Shadows. We were in the Green Mountain State three years ago, just before the leaves turned, and I fell in love with how the fog and shadows from the mountains painted the world in purpley blues across the pined forests–add in the Judy Sumner connection to this particular hank and nothing else would do for knitting for Vermont relief.

As I finished it up today, I was distracted a moment by a California towhee outside my window, a Claude Monet study in browns: when you get a chance to see them up close in direct sunlight, there’s actually a surprising amount of other shades mixed in there, even a bit of brick red. They are designed to fade into the landscape, and yet they are a fair bit more complex than one expects at first glance.

They are not skittish birds. They never fly into the window, even when a hawk threatens, they just head straight for home. They never try to crowd onto the feeders, whose perches are too tight for them anyway: they know what they want and they know where they want to go to find it. (I should be so lucky when I’m stashdiving, said the woman with scars on her arm from going through a window as a kid.)

And I promised to show Karin‘s yarn: here’s her Atlantic color sock weight she gifted me with; it’s deeper and more intense in real life. Pretty stuff.

On to the next project!

We’re still in the dry summer season, this place that alternates rain/drought on the six month schedule every year, and the air across the valley was brown and hard to breathe this afternoon. Thick enough to muffle thunder.

We decided to beat the Saturday crowd and get some grocery shopping done this evening.

“Did you hear that?”

Coming home…

You know you live in the city when at first you’re looking for the source of the light beam going upwards: who’s advertising what?

And then it happens again and, as your husband drives, you can see the clouds that weren’t there earlier charcoal-doodled against the dark sky and that flash of light against them is brighter this time.

By the third time, one right after another, the two of you are talking about heat-lightning storms, but there’s not a drop from the sky.

Then you pull in the driveway and start to unload the groceries and it’s strike after strike, right there right above your heads. Breathtaking–but not something to dawdle in. A former in-law’s grandmother died of being hit by lightning.

The young teenage neighbor is standing in the middle of the street with his buddy, the two of them watching the sky, and I get that; it IS cool, it’s part of Nature and therefore inherently interesting and it’s very very very unusual to see around here. But–

–and having raised four teenagers, I walked over towards them and asked them about what they’d seen, maybe the parts we’d missed while we were in the car. “Sorry, I’m being too deaf, say that again?” and I walked closer.

Having a middle-aged woman join your conversation when you’re keenly aware of the need to be cool around your friend: we’re out of here! They answered once to be polite and then left, quickly back inside.

Cue the Kenny Rogers, Mom version: You gotta know when to scold’em, know when to embolden’em, know when they’ll walk away, know how it’s done…

I came home from Knit Night to an email that was a huge surprise. Much cause for cautious, tempered joy–we’re not done yet.

But to me it is one more example of why every vote counts.

They’ve been back. City Hall fight, round three.

The San Jose Merc printed my letter to the editor recently asking why on earth, with so much housing having gone up in the last two years here with no thought to the impact on schools and no place to put the children, didn’t our school district buy the almost three acre daycare site that was up for sale? It abutted school property. It was a logical fit. There was no other parcel around with an undeveloped field like that to be had anywhere else; why sell it to a developer and increase that very problem? My children had had room to run around on the playground during recess, but now they were adding multi-story classroom space there. Just where is my grandson’s generation supposed to play?

Now the developer is saying they want to put in ten houses and comply with zoning this time, having said previously they would walk away from it all if they didn’t get their twenty-three. (And they threatened to sue, too, but that was all bluster, no court would have upheld them.)

But. The law says they have to provide low-income housing with any new development. Can’t they just please buy their way out of that one, they want to know? (Rules? What rules? Since when did rules apply to them? They’ve already shown what they’re made of.)

I like to think that by speaking up in a way that was visible to all, I in my very small way helped give the school district the certainty they needed that the public was behind them: because now, at long last, they have announced they do indeed want to buy the place for future school space. In the expense and the race for it, they have asked not to be required to submit an environmental impact report, in that they do not plan to change the field nor the structures for now but simply to have it to bank towards future needs.

A neighbor saw an article in the town’s small paper and made sure everybody else around here did too.

Yo school district dudes. You are so late to the party. But finally, finally you came.

Now, newspaper, take it further and tell us what time that planning commission meeting is going to be held–I want to be there. The Brown Act gives me the right to be there. This is the same planning commission of whom Greg Scharff, one of the City Council members, asked in May, when Council was to vote on the 23-home proposal, “You’ve spent a lot of time on this. Haven’t you?”

The fellow he was looking at in the Commission’s seats, the same one that had talked to our neighborhood group earlier as if the proposal were all a done deal all along and he was just trying to ease us into it, looked back at him and nodded yes.

“May I ask: WHY?”

I wanted to jump out of my seat and exclaim, Yes! Yes! THIS is why I voted for you, Mr. Scharff! THANK YOU!!

Now we need another round of the Council’s support.

A few years ago, I wrote a little bit of a book. (Purlescence still has new copies at the cover price, signed for you if you’d like if you wait for me to show up for Knit Night.) And it sold well.

My friend Judy Sumner, whom I had known via the Knitlist and KnitTalk yahoo groups for lo these many years, had had a sock book idea in her head for a long time. She had already been successful in getting a number of her designs published; her name was already out there in the world of designers and via the thousands on those lists; she wondered if she could do it too. Passing along the gift of Gracie Larsen‘s having believed in me and the great good it had done me, I thought a collection of Judy’s sock patterns would be a wonderful thing to have out in the world and I encouraged her to go for it, one voice among many others.

Twist her arm. She sent me regular updates on how things were coming along. I thought that was very cool. She loved her editor. I loved that.

Judy’s website is here, her book, which came out as beautiful as I knew it would, has been selling out the last copies fast of late here.

Then Judy not only surprised me with a pair of handknit socks, just because she’s a knitter like that, but she also gifted me with a hank of yarn.

And not just any hank of yarn. She had no way to know: I had seen Ellen of Half Pint Farm‘s offerings at Stitches West many times, (Judy I believe went to Stitches East), I had oohed and aahed especially over the huge hanks of merino/silk Ellen dyes and hangs in her booth. But I would look at the price, fair though it was for 13.5 oz, and leave them behind. Those were a lot of sportweight.

So now here coming out of that box that I had no reason to expect was a gorgeous hank of that very yarn. In one of the very colorways that I’d liked so much. Judy had no way to know that; she had just wanted to do that and could only hope I might like it. If only she could have seen my exclamations of gobsmacked WOW!!! in person!

(One of my tall daughters loves her socks and they fit her beautifully. And they helped me be subversive: if you want more that feel like that on your feet, you knooooow, I could help you learn howwww…)

But I didn’t know what to do with that hank. I wanted to repay the gift in the best possible way, but I was stumped on where to start. I have taken it out and petted it and admired it and pondered it many times over the last couple of years.

The time is right. It took me, with distractions, over two hours to wind it all up yesterday, but at least and at last I finally knew: when I asked here a few days ago if anyone wanted to knit for the people who had lost homes, jobs, everything they owned in the floods in Vermont? Who could no longer reach for a favorite hat or blanket when the cold sets in?

That yarn was handdyed in Vermont.  I’m using two strands of it right now, knitting it tight and warm and dense in a cabled honeycomb pattern to make pockets to hold the warmth on someone’s head out there. It’s a start.

Judy has moved into her daughter’s house and is under hospice care now with pancreatic cancer. Her mail is being forwarded; her daughter watches over her email as well as her. If you want to thank Judy for answering knitting questions or just plain for being a friend to everybody she ever heard of, now would be the time. Don’t hope for an answer; let your peace bless them and let it be enough.

It’s very much the least of their worries, and yet, I still hope she gets to see this post to know that someone out there facing so much loss is going to be hugely comforted that someone needed to repay, and took the time–because someone else gave the gift–because someone else had the artistry to dye the yarn–and it will all have come full circle and returned to its home state.