Dad Hyde asked, as he wrapped it around his arm, “What is it?” I answered, “My mom calls them yarn necklaces.” This is a scarf out of Ellen’s handpainted merino-silk from Half Pint Farm in Vermont, bought at Stitches East last fall. One of those little projects for stuffing in the purse and carrying around that somehow, to my surprise, actually got finished when I wasn’t paying much attention to it. (When the yarn’s gone, it’s done.) Just add water and block it–except, um, maybe not now.

The silk and cashmere shawl in Constance’s shawl pattern (with some playing around with the yoke) continues only slowly; I’ve got company. Richard and Kim have internships for a month in DC and are staying at my in-laws’ house; my in-laws are doing various jaunts to keep themselves out of the way of the newlyweds. They’re camping out here for ten days.

Camping out is more of a description than we’d intended, as we wait for the sewer services folks to show up this morning. My pipes are barfing. These things never seem to happen when there’s nobody around to enjoy the excitement but us. I think I’d rather go to the Aquarium if I want to show them an interesting day.

Thank goodness we live in a time and a place when such things can get fixed pretty fast.

Twenty-four years and about, oh, a week ago, I called and got told, We can’t possibly fit you in for at least four days, ma’am.

I stewed a few minutes, called again, and asked to speak directly to Dennis, the owner of the shop, who knew me. Dennis: my baby is due in four days and my battery keeps dying on me.

Dennis knew we only had the one car, and he told me, You bring that thing right here. I’ll do it right now.

Little kindnesses are huge and they reverberate forward through the years, remembered. And so it was that I found myself, about four months ago, suddenly thinking of Dennis and how much less stressful he’d made Richard’s arrival into the world. I googled and found that Hansen’s Automotive Service in Nashua NH was still there, wrote him a note telling him do you remember when–and thank you. When we needed your help, you were there for us.

And wondered. I don’t know what brought him to mind or why his being thought of now from afar for the basic goodness of the man–and he was a sweetheart–needed to happen now. But I felt I needed to speak up, right now, don’t wait, enough so that I did and snailmailed it off to his shop.

All I know is, whatever battery needed fixing over there, I was glad to be able to help.

Twenty-four years ago, I dialed my OB’s office and asked the nurse which doctor was on call that day. Mind you, I had never said anything to anyone there, but she immediately called me on it: “Why? If it’s the wrong one, are you going to go out of labor?”

I hadn’t even told her yet that I was IN labor; what could I do but smile and answer honestly: “Yes.” There were two doctors in that practice, and by nine months I had come to admire and enjoy being around the one much more than the other.

Which is why I found myself apologizing to my dad that we’d missed his birthday by a day, but it was for the best. We were just stretching out the birthday celebrations a bit–we gave our new little boy his grandpa’s name.

Twenty-four years ago, we brought home a new son. Happy birthday, little guy. And now, Richard has brought us a new daughter. And the joy grows forever.

First–happy birthday, Dad!

I love this town. My folks lived here the first year they were married, before they moved to Maryland in the early 50’s, and when they found out we were considering a job offer here, worried quietly–but didn’t tell us till we’d accepted the offer–that if we moved here, we’d never leave and we’d always be far away.

They were right. It’s been a good place to be.

My husband and daughter and I on impulse ditched the all-week leftovers last night and went to a place new to us, Thaiphoon, for dinner. You have to love a restaurant that introduces itself to you with a pun while referencing Real Weather (and the food was good). We do miss having a greater variety in the sky and air; it brings you, as one friend noted, closer to nature when the weather’s bad. The interesting nature award will probably have to go instead to the mountain lion that was sitting on our orthodontist’s fence a few years ago. Or the golden eagle eyeballing me as I got out of my car at home. I’ll take the eagle, thanks.

As we ate, there was a small toddler at the next table who looked very much like my sister’s twins did at that age, with very strong opinions and a gregarious charmer when he was happy. He’d fit right in. I thought, let his mom have a good night out with her friends; one Peruvian fingerpuppet coming right up. Happiness won out.

There is a local artist, Greg Brown, whose late mother-in-law used to play the organ at our church, her territory for decades–till a young teenage upstart of a show-off started horning in on her turf a few times a month. If he goofed, she let our son know with a grin: “Great improvisation there, Richard!”

Greg is famous for his murals on some of the downtown buildings. Check out this one, my favorite. Or this one, up in San Francisco. Or this.

This is also a town where once upon a time two new Stanford MBAs looked at the pet rock craze, where someone had just made a fortune peddling plain old pebbles with fun packaging, and they were sure they had a one-hit wonder in them, too. So they wrote, “Juggling for the Complete Klutz,” making good on their goofing off, expecting that that would be that. Thus Klutz Press was somewhat inadvertently born: the authors, like us, stayed. Klutz is a local institution whose one vividly-painted retail store is named “Klutz Intergalactic Headquarters.” Where they sell, should you need it, extra rubber chickens.

We walked from Thaiphoon last night towards Couppa Cafe for some hot cocoa as the evening foggy chill set in. We saw a jewelry store a few doors down. With a rubber chicken standing guard just inside the window: don’t steal the rings, or you’ll be henpecked.

I so love this town.

Meantime, just for fun, given all Richard and Kim’s wedding festivities of late, I had to share this picture I shamelessly stole from cuteoverload.com:

It was just making sure there’d be lots of leftovers for it, too.

We’ve got a few leftovers from Saturday. Gee, I bet we could come up with some interesting recipes–lox of luck… Hang on, hang on, I think we’re getting carried away here.

If you ever want a book with all kinds of interesting tidbits, “No Idle Hands: the Social History of American Knitting” has everyday life over the centuries pulled from journals held by the Library of Congress. I used to use it as my reference to make history more interesting to the fifth graders in our school district, bringing my spinning wheel, my carders and some wool for the kids to card while I talked about the level of work they would have had to do back in Colonial times in the US: there was one town, Hatfield, Massachusetts, where the town selectmen came in and assessed each family a fine if they didn’t produce the amount of yardage of handspun, handwoven woolens that was required of them. And we’re talking many hundreds of yards in a year.

Woolen goods were the prime export of the colonies, but the Woolen Act of 1699 suddenly forbade anybody in America from transporting by horse, cart or carriage any wool or anything made of wool between plantations, much less selling it overseas: you could only legally sell what you could carry in your hands on foot from your home to your buyer. England’s enforcement powers, however, were for the most part very far away.

My favorite story is of Old Ma Rinker, whose relatives owned a tavern and whom the Brits thought were loyal to the Crown, so they’d go there to discuss strategy against General Washington over in Valley Forge. The relatives would pass the word on to Ma, she’d write it down, wrap a ball of yarn around it, go out into the sunshine and knit while her flax retted, and toss the ball of yarn to the American soldiers riding by on their horses.

Or, as my hubby puts it: how knitters saved the Revolution.

Not to mention the feet of more than a few shivering soldiers who needed warm socks in that Valley.

I’m suddenly picturing their potential bewilderment at the concept of chocolate brownies, much less whipped cream in a can.

Sometimes, a project gets started and then it stalls out. It was too boring, when I needed something more interesting to work on; it was too interesting, when the rest of life was being too distracting and I needed something brainless. Either way, it got started–and every time you start a project, it is an affirmation of life and of looking towards the future–but then it got put aside.

I want to defend the lowly WIP here. (The TOADs, Trashed Object Abandoned in Disgust, not so much.) If you really don’t like it, let it go, just rip it, rip it, let it go back to being a ball of yarn full of possibilities. How many other parts of our lives do we get to rewind at will and have a do-over?

But there is value in having something on the needles simply waiting its proper turn, or, if you run shy of needles, you can always run a thread through the tops of the stitches, leave a note re the needle size, put it in its own zip lock and set it aside. It is not mocking you. It is simply waiting to be able to tell you why it is there.

I once knitted a sock and a half, before all the self-striping yarns came out that helped grab the imaginations of sock knitters. Plain and beige, boring and terribly practical, in the most basic pattern, no lace there. But size 1 needles and my hands aren’t friends to begin with, that yellowish beige was deadly (and it was right after knitting a very large pair in dark charcoal); after awhile, I just couldn’t make myself pick them up when there were other, brighter things to work on.

Till the day I badly wanted to knit a pair of socks for one of the nurses who’d taken care of me at Stanford, to thank him for his compassion and his willingness to walk in his patients’ shoes. A man. Boring beige and no lace, plain and practical. Perfect. Yes, Brian, this is a bit of a confession here. Knitting him a hat or a scarf in this climate was a little silly. He was about my height, so I imagined his feet weren’t that far off from mine, and since I’d been making them to my EE width feet, they had some lengthwise stretchability built into them. I felt swamped, because I was knitting something for all the medical personnel I could find who’d been involved in my case: in just over two months, I made 14 projects to go back and say thank you with.

And to do what I really wanted to do for him anyway, all I had to knit was half a sock. Done. He absolutely loved them. I mean, how many people get to see, much less own, a pair of handknit socks in their lives? I well understand wondering why anyone would want to bother, but put that first sock on and you instantly know. You never want to have to settle for a machine-made pair again.

A sock and a half for a year and a half, so close to being done, that had so bugged me–till I knew why I was glad I had them. Had I finished them earlier, they would have been well worn, had I declared them a TOAD and frogged them, I wouldn’t have had them to give. There’s a reason for everything. A small stash of WIPs is a very useful thing.

I have two shawls for which I’ve done the yoke but gone no further. One, the color just wasn’t right for me, and I still don’t know yet whom it is to be for; when I do come across the right person, it will feel like a very fast project because the first day’s worth of work is already done. The other, I picked up today, counted the stitches to be sure I’d done the final increase and to make sure on the stitch count–I’d eyeballed the lace pattern and was sure of myself, but best to check–and now off I go with it. I had cast on just as the wedding preparations were starting up; I simply ran out of time for it.

And now I know exactly whose face I can’t wait to see lighting up. I’m tweaking the pattern for the body; this will be a custom job. The first day’s work is preknitted, and off I go, delighted to be ahead of the game.

Just an FYI for anybody who might enjoy knowing something I never would have thought of, had it not been for my friend Phyllis: what we did for Saturday’s flowers is we ordered them straight from the grower, freshroses.com. They’ll send you a sampler of colors to choose from in person before ordering for the big day, if you want. Five of us arranged them that morning into a few large arrangements and a small one for each table. Remember that the eye likes things in odd numbers: flowers high, medium and low in an arc, (there were five red roses here, not four.) Tuck some limonium (I know, it sounds like flooring material, and this arrangement lost some on the left in the car on the way home) and tree ferns around and behind, tie a matching ribbon at the neck of the vase, and there you go.  It’s much easier to pull off than I would have thought.

My camera’s on the fritz, so this is from my phone.

I have to show off my mom a moment. I wanna be like her when I grow up. (I’m amused that I get to invert the cliche of someone waving at the camera and going, Hi Mom! at the vast TV audience.)

Picture it, since I have the photo but don’t feel I can post it without asking–I got a wonderful shot yesterday of the small boy (maybe four?) reaching up and his great-grandpa, bent way over, reaching down, doing a “give me five!” together with great glee on both their faces.

I snuck in that photo of Kim yesterday in the time I had between helping set up the hall and the reception we held here for the newlyweds. Decades ago, the Catholic Church in Menlo Park (Kim’s mom’s family is Catholic) sold some land, including a few existing buildings, to the local Mormons. They kept the surrounding acreage and joked to our leaders, “How do you feel about being surrounded by Catholics?”

To which, I’m told, they were answered with a laugh, “How do you feel about having Mormons in the heart of you?”

The centerpiece of the property is a huge-trunked redwood that was honored as the best one in the city a few years ago. Both churches kept it for the treasure that it is, and it will grow on long after all of us are gone. It’s too big to fit in any one picture, and somehow that goes well with a wedding celebration.

We built our own church building, kept their cottage to house a genealogy library which is open for anybody and everybody’s use, and kept their reception hall. It’s a lovely old exposed-beam building with high ceilings and tall windows looking out on very old oak trees, and yesterday, that was where we celebrated.

It is also where our friends Conway and Elaine invited us to the wedding reception of their son fourteen years ago, where we first met another of their sons and his family–whose daughter is now in our family. Kim was ten.

In San Diego Friday a week ago, a couple who were friends of her parents sang, “Sunrise, Sunset” together, and everybody nodded yes at the “When did she get to be a beauty,” and laughed very much (he’s 6’9″) at the “When did he grow to be so tall!”

Introducing Kim, my new daughter-in-law, in her wedding ring (except for the reinforced neck edges) shawl, the Nina pattern in laceweight Fino baby alpaca/silk. A wedding ring shawl is any one that can be pulled through one.  My son emailed me this last night.

The roses’ colors go well together in real life.   Lene and everybody, I will do my best: this time I hope to have my own camera going.

Our new daughter-in-law’s parents both grew up in this town, so did our son, and now it’s our turn to celebrate.  And believe me, we will.

The last amaryllis of the extended season, a Picotee–the last bud just opened.

Mom and I went to Purlescence tonight, where I showed her off, got to hold Nathania’s baby (this is a picture from about a month ago that I finally got to work) and tried to make friends with my shawl project again, which kind of sputtered out in the wedding preparations. But when we got home, I ended up pulling out my drum carder. This box finally came yesterday, after the post office had lost it, and I wanted to play with my new toy.

Nancy and I had gone in together on an order of Seacell/merino 70/30 mill ends: wonderful, soft stuff, and cheap. But what you don’t pay in price, you pay in time and effort, this being not smooth roving but the stuff that didn’t quite make it that far and got put aside. Well, about time I put that drum carder to good use. (Are you still sure you wanted to sell it to me, Laura?…I can always mail it to your new house if you change your mind…)

I’ve never seen undyed Seacell before, much less spun nor dyed it. I am going to find out. (Tomorrow, as I glance at the clock. Or maybe next week, as I glance at the calendar.)

“Begin: the rest is easy.” Don’t remember where I read that in high school, but it’s stuck with me ever since. And now I have.

My daughter and I had some discussion last weekend at the hotel as to what this looked like, triggered by my delight at the trilobyte posted on the wall. And no, that is not a computer term.

I got told that clearly it was a screw. Looking again, I see a nutcracker. Maybe a lobster that lost its claws in an argument at a restaurant.

An extra bit of joy to share this week: you remember this post? Writing it is what got me to finally go google Jonathan, his last name being common enough in the US that I had long thought the idea of finding him absolutely laughable.

He was right there in plain sight. Third entry in today’s results and on the second page the day I went looking. He got his PhD after all and did his postdoc at Harvard, his area of study and his whole life having been changed by the experience I wrote about; he’s been able to bring much good into the world through his work. (I’m the one saying that, and he’s out there blushing.) I wrote him, it took a few weeks to get past his university’s email filters, but he got it and I now have his permission to tell you all, it all worked out for him after all.

And just to make it a bit better even yet? His mom’s a knitter.

Ask and ye shall receive: wedding photos.

When my son explained to his then-future mother-in-law that I needed to stay out of the sun, Ann booked the reception inside the Loews resort overlooking the water, letting us safely see the beach in all its glory, hibiscus and roses and honeysuckle blooming all around the windows. It was very kind of her and her husband. The tall picture windows were in a series of squares with a circle in the center, as is so often seen in Californian architecture: the image of the sun framed right into the building.

During the ring ceremony, someone sang “You Raise Me Up,” and as his voice rose with the high notes, a small bird just outside from us flew suddenly upwards in perfect synchronicity, disappearing from view by flying in front of the sun.

Meantime, visit your favorite veteran today and tell them thank you. I wished a silent one across the bay towards the naval base there, and hugged my dad, a veteran of WWII, grateful to have him around, telling bad puns and fun stories and making us laugh.

“You may now kiss the bride.”

You may all applaud me on my restraint: it was all I could do, but I managed not to jump straight up from my chair and shout, “YAY!!!!”

If you drove on I-5 in La Jolla yesterday and saw a group of happy people snapping pictures right at the bottom of where the beam of the car obscures the view in this picture taken from that freeway on the way out, that was us.

If you remember Kathy from my book, that was her town in California, and I tried to figure out how to drop by and say hi to her mom for the first time in 28 years, but my time was too short and just too tightly choreographed.

There were moments every wedding ought to have: the old friend of my mom’s from long ago in Maryland, long since moved to San Diego, walking in the door, seeing my mother, having no idea she was the grandmother of the groom, and her jaw dropping on the floor: “FRANCES!!!”

There were other delightful moments: ain’t nobody can dance like my son-in-law. My oldest kindly lent her husband to our young niece, who danced beautifully with him and then looked way up at him with the widest Bambi eyes that said, That was wonderful, did I do that right? Can we do it again!? And then they did.

There were ohmygosh moments, like when the wait staffer suddenly grabbed the bride’s bouquet off her table and blew fiercely on it: the edges of the flower spray had caught in the tea candle. Close one. Then the groom later put his dinner napkin on the table to go dance the first dance, suddenly realized he’d covered over another tea candle and grabbed it off quick before they had a matching set of moments.

There was the groom’s friend who danced Cossack-style.

There were the two sides of the bride’s family, getting a rare chance to come together again and renew acquaintances again as they all included us in on their joy now, too.

There were many, many people clearly having the time of their lives. I tell you, we were CELEBRATING! To LIFE!!!

There were very kind words from the father of the bride, thanking us for raising such a fine son. And you both, too, we told him and his wife. You too. Well done. So very well done. Your Kim is a peach.

There was a husband-and-wife photographer couple who so much belonged to all of us in the moments of the day as we did to them and each other and everybody and…! Such a gathering of hearts! The wife of the couple came over to me before they left to give and receive a hug goodbye, with a fervent wish from me that they lived near us, felt likewise. We would have beautiful pictures forever, not just in photographs. I certainly hope someone snapped some of them, too, for me.

There were pictures in other people’s cameras that haven’t gotten to me yet; I kept either forgetting mine or being unable to manage its clunky presence. If ever I wished I had something smaller and definitely lighter, but that was okay, there were other cameras in abundance.

There was the bride’s elderly maternal grandmother, wishing to me that she had the energy of these young folks to dance with her husband like that. I guess that was a declaration that became intent: a few minutes later, she and her sweetheart were swaying gently together to the music with the rest.

There was a friend’s musical piece playing in my head, “Sail Away,” a tune that has always spoken to me of love and belonging, in the quieter moments as I watched the boats going past our hotel room’s deck overlooking the bay from Coronado Island. My friend had no idea what a perfect future backdrop he was creating for me when he gifted me with his CD. Hummingbirds and terns flitted past our window as boats swished through the waters and on out of my sight.

There were two young people dearly and deeply in love, who laughed for sheer joy many times in the day, and a whole flock of people come to tell them how much we loved both of them and how glad we were that they’d found and come to cherish each other. And how grateful we were that they’d brought the rest of us together in their doing so.