There are shelves to either side and there used to be a high stack of bins up the center blocking one’s access to right or left or any of the yarn without wrangling each bin sideways one by one to get it entirely out the door there and over the furniture and into the room. And then the next. And the next.

Now you can just pull the one you want straight onto or above the middle of the open closet floor.

She did the lifting, I did the sorting, and two friends have made initial claims on the better of the old yarns.

So much space had been taken up by half-empty ziplock bags inside the bins. On the other hand, the only sign of moth damage after all these years was to two skeins that inexplicably were not in one; they went straight to the trash outside.

I found that I did in fact have leftovers of possibly all the colors from making a llama/wool (remember Classic Elite?) baby-cabled sweater in the 90’s in which each half of each cable was a different color, a la Kaffe Fassette. I’d long wished I’d made it a cardigan. There is one untouched skein in the background color and all those accents; I could actually cut it open and do that now.

Naaahhhh… It’s not soft enough to put in the time, but it’s good to know I could.

I found the front of a more elaborately cabled handspun sweater in two colors (should have taken that picture) from my very earliest spinning and dyeing days. It’s fabulous. But I knew halfway through that it would never be finished: the teacher I was taking classes from had us try dyeing with unsweetened Koolaid, more or less on a lark and because she knew we would hear of other people doing that.

I got some pretty nice colors! And I used them in that sweater.

So then I tried dyeing small batches in lots of flavors to see what range I could get.

Which led to my calling my neighbor and apologizing if she found any pink hairs on her cat because it kept insisting on lying on my wet wool–and I knew my teacher’s light gray cat had dyed itself green by climbing into the actual dyepot she’d set out on her porch to cool.

I have long chuckled at the idea of the neighbors doing the dishes and looking out the window to see a green cat waiting for its hair to grow out!

Next, I wanted to see how colorfast this stuff was. Using commercial dyes that are meant to be dyes made more sense to me, but on the other hand, any summer grocery run will net you some of this when you need it. So I left little bits of it outside in direct sun for two weeks, the neighbor’s cat notwithstanding.

Three things happened: some of it changed very little or not at all. One color blanched at the thought and faded fast into the palest of grays before the time was up.

And the rest (or what I could find of it)?

Our kindergarten teacher found the nest when it blew off the roof of the school: it was made of bright pink koolaided wool woven with twigs and leaves and a downy feather or two. But the pink! The wool! She knew I’d be interested and waited to show it to me and I instantly knew exactly where that had come from–and we’re a quarter mile away!

I wondered how many others there were out there. Clearly it wasn’t just the wind picking the stuff up.

So, yeah. All that colored cabling work, cherry I think was the darker one, that one… Well, at least it held up in a dark closet for 31 years.

But I’ve had an inherited half of a cotton sweater front serving time as my favorite dish towel for a long time. I can rip this thing back to the start of the armscye (or just leave it as is) and shrink it into a trivet. Or a dust mitt. Or a dishtowel. It deserves to be used and enjoyed; it’s waited long enough.

Let me go read the new inscriptions on those bins so I can figure out which one it went back into.

Out of the eleven, there are four empty bins now.

That green and blue that slipped onto the other side of the back of the bag.

Mo-hair, Michelle remembered with a laugh from one teenage recipient asking me quizzically thirty years ago. MO-hair! Tell me, he demanded, What kinda animal is a MO!?

He was in foster care and admired Richard’s and my Kaffe Fassette coats of dozens of colors and in his enthusiasm ended up with a vest of his own from the leftovers.

I saw him recently and thanked him for changing my life: his reaction to what I’d made was what got me started on seeing how important it is to knit for others.

There might still be a few other skeins in there all these years later, here, let me see.

Backing up a bit: I was thinking some of the bins in the family closet had some empty space by now that could surely be put to use, but it’s really hard to wrangle them out of there and heavy lifting was out of the question.

A certain someone was happy to dive in there for me if I would go through them. It would make it easier to get at the puzzles and games, too.

Consolidation has begun.

Five games (how did we end up with three Balderdashes? Answer: because people kept gifting it to us) and a stack of puzzles that still had the original shrink wrap on them (no missing pieces on those!) all got claimed by friends today.

Some of the yarn… Showed its age. Not by its condition–I store wool well–but by the archeological dig of my knitting history as I went through stuff.

Thirty-five years ago really soft wool yarns were hard to find.

I remember the first time I found baby alpaca. The late Robin and Russ sold it in–I think it was 25 gram skeins. (Edit: 40g.) Today I re-found some of that, all dyed by me because at that time you could have it in brown or you could have light brown but I didn’t find white anywhere till later.

Back then, too many of the really fine-fibered alpacas were being turned into shearling rugs rather than sheared, while the farmers were paid by the pound for the wool, and spikier thicker fibers weighed more for less work.

But as the hand knitting market for the good stuff grew, the quality improved. I thought my discovery was so great then, and compared to the rest of the market it was. But (picking up skein after skein today) I’d hesitate to even grade it as baby alpaca now. It’s okay, it’s just not swoon-able.

So I’m stuck with the same problem I had the last time I did a major overhaul of that space: what do I do with these? I have them because I liked them but to actually sit down and knit I’m always going to reach for something that my hands love as much as my eyes do. The really good stuff is stored in the other room.

In particular (eyeing one bag of white loopy boucle and measuring it at 1.23 lb including its ziplock) what do you do with this (it came out of the alpaca bin but I’m sure it’s wool) that just isn’t getting any more enticing over time? How does one in good conscience keep the good stuff for oneself and fob the lesser off on someone else?

And yet, at the time I bought it, I was that someone else who was delighted to find a natural fiber yarn I could afford.

Oh, and, the seven ounces of aran weight purple-blue wool/angora. Who put meh wool with angora in 2002? Or: given that the words angora and mohair were at the time used interchangeably to describe mohair goats till the trade association came down on it to stop the confusion, is there actually any rabbit in there at all? And yet, it does have that softness mixed in. Hmm.

I’m not driving yet, re the post office, and Michelle’s flying home soon. Hmm.

Michelle looked around at all those bins and exclaimed, clearly trying to undercount it to be nice, You need to not buy any more yarn! And the stuff in the other room–you have enough for, for, like, two years!

We both heard Richard guffawing quietly in the other room. Oh honey.

I knew better. I knew better. I thought I’d checked. Surely I’d checked.

Maybe eight years ago? Colourmart had a 50/50 aran weight cashmere/cotton yarn at a very good price, and then they put it on sale.

I bought a bunch, and then a bunch more. I made four afghans out of it (note to self: Amy Jessie Lucia Colette) and I pretty much used it up–oh wait there’s more, so I used that, too.

And then the price went up but it was the same best-of of those good fibers, and now it was 66/34 cashmere/cotton. Hey! Washed and wound some of that mill-end up, too, another huge ball ready to go.

Can you see where this is going.

I was about to bind off the top of the afghan and then start in on picking up the sides to match. I compared it to the beginning edge, wondering at how different the gauge was from when I’d started all this, when…

Do you see it.

I suddenly, finally did.

My one consolation is that the slightly beige one has to be the one with more cashmere in it, because cashmere does not naturally come in the bright pure white that sheep’s wool and of course cotton can. And it is cushier. So clearly it was the cashmere-ier yarn at the end and the 50/50 at the start.

I would have mitered the darn corners if I’d known I would have to do all four edges at once.

I could simply get rid of the edgings altogether, though that would make the afghan shorter than I’d prefer and the stockinette green and blue would curl.

But knitting in a backwards direction from the connecting row at the starting edge will jog that whole new part sideways by a half stitch and look funny. (Will a non-knitter notice or care.) But I don’t know that I have enough of the 50/50 to do the whole thing.

Well fudge.

When I was a kid there were some shows on TV that had, across the bottom of the screen, the lyrics to the music being played, with a dark little ball bouncing off each word as it conveyer-belted away off the screen in a single line with the next ones incoming. As an adult I assume that was to help kids learn to associate the sounds with the letters and help them start to read.

I’ve got the little (smaller than yesterday!) bouncing–well, more like wobbling–dark ball at the bottom. But my eyeball just doesn’t have the built-in captions to match. Someone ought to get on that. I mean, this is Silicon Valley and all that, right?

Saw the cataract surgeon today; he took a good look around and was quite pleased with how well all of it was healing.

I had one last burning question: when was I going to be able to wash my hair.

Don’t let any soap in your eye whatsoever and then the answer is whenever you want to.

You know those times when you can’t shout YAYYY!!! at the top of your voice while jumping up and down like a maniac because you’re expected to act like a grownup?

The rolled-up towel against my back to keep me from rolling over at night, the little bit of eye pain, the no exercise/no bending over/no lifting over five pounds, the waiting for my vision as it sneaks back into view slowly–I think emotionally it all kind of summed itself up simply in Man, I just badly want to be able to clean my hair.

It actually pulled off a surprisingly not bad job of faking it in the meantime. I was surprised.

I finally finished the last peach tree. Now to finish the top and the border.

I kept squinting at the thing in the sunlight today, staring at the colors I was never able to see completely accurately during all these months: not crisp yet, but cleared out. Cataracts add yellow to everything, and I’d say gray, too. So with the one cataract out, the retina part has months of healing time left but I think I can see now how bright that green actually is and at long last that yes, it really does go well with that blue. It always did.

I did better than I thought I did.

Wonderful talks, wonderful people, loved the guy from Louisiana talking about his momma’s home cooking and how adding that metaphorical good dose of spice that comes from G_d, the spice of loving and understanding and compassion, makes everything go down better for everybody.

I do confess to being occasionally distracted by the fact that not across the house in person, and yet on the screen, I saw people double–in different colors. White shirts turned deep pink, complexions reddened greatly, a yellow and green tie turned plain orange, left vs right eye. So strange.

I finished my cowl and, with memories of New Orleans in mind, wished I could try the beignet Dad never quite got around to when we were there.

It’s the weekend of the World Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with three two-hour sessions today and two tomorrow. Look for the tallest man (I think) in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and wave hi at my cousin Jim with me.

Last year, a month before the election, one of the songs the leadership chose had the line “The scepter will fall from the despot’s grasp when with winds of stern justice he copes…” Loved it.

The opening segment today began with a heartfelt plea to choose to be a peacemaker. To follow the teachings of Christ, *the* Peacemaker, who tended to all, women, children, occupier centurions, the much-married and now not bothering with that part Samaritan woman at the well whom he did not judge but simply told her, now that she had felt the immense love and acceptance of his presence, to go and sin–to separate herself from that Love–no more.

The next speaker was a Black woman. The next, Hispanic. There was this unspoken, Do you get the message yet. We are all children of our Heavenly Father and all deserve to be treated with respect and honored as beings created by G_d no matter our faith or our background.

And that last talk of the day! Where a man blamed himself, he was sure it had to have been his fault, that clearly he had not done a good enough job of fully checking out the small plane that his pilot wife and her friends had crashed in. He was in agony.

If someone has wronged you, was the message, forgive. If you have wronged someone, take responsibility for it, fully repent to G_d for having done it, do all that you can to make amends to any who have suffered because of your mistakes.

And then honor the Divine by accepting what the Divine has offered to you: forgive yourself.

A year later, all at once and unexpected and yet in response to fervent prayer in deeply missing his wife, that gift washed over him. He felt her near, felt G_d near, saying it was okay.

And it healed him.

When my kids were teens there was a shop at the mall that made me wonder why a place that sold bath salts and the like smelled like a cookie as you walked past.

Turns out vanilla was their most popular scent.

I like vanilla too but I don’t want to bathe in it. (Man, can you imagine what that would cost now? With shortages and crop failures, vanilla was the most expensive spice in the world last I checked.)

Fast forward: Trying to come up with a solution for me, Michelle was talking about dry shampoos.

Me: Yeah, I tried one of those–about 40 years ago; I wasn’t impressed.

Well, she said, they’re basically just starch.

Me: I know! The potato starch in the pantry!

You should have seen the look of horror on her face. I had to assure her quickly that I was totally joking.

But I was thinking of that shop as I said it: Man, *sniff* isn’t it a little early for Thanksgiving? If I walked around smelling like mashed potatoes because I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet, how would you even be able to wash it out at the regret of it.

If you’re going to be weird, yeah, I’d go with the vanilla first.

Day four: without thinking about it, I had both eyes open while knitting, whereas yesterday I kept the one closed without even thinking about it.

It made me think about it: I suddenly realized what was bugging me so much. The visual image at center, such as it was on the right, didn’t quite entirely come together properly with the left. Like one hand was off by an inch or so towards and away from me from each other, like trying to put a torn page back in the book and getting it wrong. It was so strange. I had to force myself to keep going. But Aftober, the annual finish your UFO by the end of the month race, is on and I want this afghan finally done. By the third long row I let go and just went with it and let it amuse me.

One more week till I can wash my hair. That eye cannot get wet.

One more week till I can take the hospital warning bracelet off announcing I have a gas bubble in my eye.

I was told I could not go above 1000′ elevation. If I wanted to go to Santa Cruz, I absolutely was to take the long way around across the valley and not over the mountains, and the doctor said with more emotion than he probably intended, Don’t! Go! to Tahoe!!

I wondered which one of his patients had decided to use his medical time off to go skiing with an eye mask on and what had possessed him, but apparently someone did and it was a notable enough case that all such patients at that clinic are now specifically forbidden Tahoe. High elevation changes the gas. You do not want to mess with what that gas bubble was put there to do.

I wondered what on earth people who live in Denver do.

Poking around, I found a story of an elderly woman who’d come to NIH because she’d had retina surgery and then a cardiac event. The ER saved her life but didn’t know about her surgery and so didn’t contact the surgeon, and the treatment they used forced her gas bubble into her brain. It recovered. But her eye was blinded.

The bracelet says, Contact opthalmologist on reverse side before treatment.

I took a peek at the inside edge.

Nobody had filled it out.

I was amused. (The doctor probably wouldn’t be.)

Day two at the post-op appointment: the nurse covered my left eye and asked how many fingers he was holding up.

All I could guess at was that he was standing in front of me. Pretty sure. I mean, his voice was, so…

Day three, at lunch today I took the patch off to put drops in. I looked at the mirror. Hey! I could tell where the mirror was and where my reflection was, even if I couldn’t have told you for sure it was mine or even a person except that, well, duh, context and all that. But still. What a difference! We’re up to lava lamp vision.

Three hours later I was sitting knitting. Mostly with my right eye closed because it was such a distraction.

Something caught my attention and I stopped. Closed my left eye. Looked at the afghan in my lap through all the little holes in the eye patch, and I imagine that helped with the focus?

But I did: I saw the brown trunk of the tree. Where it split off into three parts, the limbs climbing up from there–it wasn’t sharp but I saw it! With my operated on eye! I couldn’t make out the peach stitches nor the leaves at all, just that I could see the darker-ness of the limbs against–whatever was where.

I had to go back after dinner to do it again to convince myself I really had seen the form of the tree.

And because, having gotten this short small taste of what real blindness can be like, I wanted to celebrate all over again that it had changed so much so fast.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

What I remember of the two surgeries while coming under the knife: the comfort of the unseen voice saying, This is Dr. M, right before he got to work on the cataract.

And then the comfort of the unseen voice, This is Dr. R, just before he started to work on the retina.

I was drugged out enough at that point that nothing else really entered in, but those two moments, those two decisions to connect with their patient, felt, when they did it, like it made all the difference, and that stayed with me.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

To my sister Anne: don’t look.

I’m debating adding a splintered-off base of the tree to the end of that top log on the beaver lodge, and if I get really determined and if it works out okay, maybe the beaver itself. Maybe. And add a stitch to the turtle’s front leg on the far side to balance it a little better. Etc etc.

And of course eventually it will have a border all around. I don’t usually do white for a border but in real life it matches bright for bright and I quite like it. The only thing is that the gauge of that particular yarn came out looking looser than the others in the body of the thing. But hey. Ribbing can have its own character.

My memories of West Virginia are of gleaning huge peaches two weeks after the commercial harvest (for $2/bushel if I remember correctly, Mom?) and of visiting Harper’s Ferry and standing above where our Potomac River and their Shenandoah River come together in a huge rush of water.

I knitted in that little beaver lodge anyway. Just to let nature speak up for itself.