“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.

She liked it! Hey Mikey! Jade Sapphire cashmere in lavendar, fingering weight, four skeins, the Bigfoot pattern.

So would this be Niagara Falls as seen from the Canadian side or the American? (No, no, that’s not where my son and his bride are going on their honeymoon–at least not as far as I know!)

Meantime, back in knitting, last fall at Stitches East in Baltimore, I bought some merino/bamboo/nylon yarn from the lady at Maple Creek Farm; she had a whole long rack of hanging loops of hanks, ready to be fondled by passersby, color after color after color, like a tapestry on display half-imagined, half done. This is the start of the smaller Water Turtles shawl, and my two skeins will get more length than I need. The yarn is a little thicker than my usual, although it doesn’t appear heavy like some might, so a shawl with a somewhat smaller stitch count was just right–and that pattern to me is mindless knitting, which is definitely a plus this month.

Meantime, here’s my attempt at photographing the MOG shawl. (No, that’s not the dress).

The amaryllis dyebath having been great fun, I went searching to see if I could do much with my fading Mother’s Day roses, too. Hey, what say we make a whole wardrobe of shawls out of flowers.

The site I found advocated doubling the water to the amount of rose petals and adding mint and lemon juice; it promised me I could enjoy it as pink lemonade when I was done!

Oh joy.

Trader Joe’s had large basil plants yesterday for about a dollar and a half more than buying the same amount of basil leaves picked and dead; was this a trick question? So let’s see, basil is a member of the mint family, right? Nah, we’ll just skip that part… I squeezed a lemon into the pot after stripping the bouquet, which was well past its prime.

Bright pink. I wanted to ask whoever wrote that, wait a minute! Roses come in all kinds of colors! These were deep red almost to black, with small, vivid gold stripes, very striking, very regal looking; who knows what I’d get?

Next time I do this, I want to buy some cheesecloth first, definitely: the amaryllis flowers mostly stayed intact, but those roses had far more pieces and petals and even seeds to deal with. The bath they created was deeply golden at first, not pink at all, and I had visions of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Gradually, though, as I kept the roses boiling away for an hour, the reddishness came out. It looked like it would produce pink or maybe burgundy after all once I added the wool.

My daughter came by the kitchen and when she saw what I was doing, groaned, “You are SO weird!” just like she did when she was a teenager. I laughed and told her she was right. (So there.)

Notice that the last bit of stuff that I couldn’t quite seem to get out floated nicely to the top as soon as I got the pot back up to a boil, making it easy to skim off right after this pot shot was taken.

But you know? I do draw the line somewhere. I don’t care what that site said. I refuse to drink my sheep.

If one were to get married in the middle of the street, this is what I’d go for, flower petals circling down in the soft breeze on a glorious spring day.

This was one of the streets we drove through on our way to my piano lessons, which were held twice a week as I was growing up. I saw this photo and instantly heard the classical piece whose name escapes me but which I could go play the intro to right now, that came on on radio station WTOP as Mom drove home: announcing that it was 5:00 and time for the news.

But Mom made a point of exclaiming over the blossoms and making sure my friend Kathy and I took them in, too, as we went along, not getting too distracted away from the moment. It would be over all too soon as it was, and then you’d have to wait another year.

These cherry trees, 1200 of them, were I believe the same variety as the more famous ones planted along the Tidal Basin. This is the Kenwood neighborhood in Maryland near the DC line, and one of my fellow piano students lived just off to the left. Photo from http://www.pbase.com/bryan_murahashi/image/15389068

Did it again. (As always, don’t miss the captions.)

I think this is like how, when I was a kid, I picked up the habit from my friends for a time of dotting my i’s with smiley faces, practicing a great deal on the sides of my notebooks so they wouldn’t look like grimaces. Sometimes I added curlicues sprouting off all kinds of random places on my letters as if to pull attention to the words themselves, wanting to shout visually, I wrote this! I put language into effect, I made this marvelous tool of writing carve beautifully ornate statuary out of my thoughts, come see!

Oh. Wait. That’s what a blog is, too. Never mind. Well anyway.

I often, when I get to the end of a shawl, leave the cast-off, just the cast-off, to do the next day. I have no real reason for that. It’s as if it were to flourish and curlicue and smiley-face it into an exclamation point: I did it! Look at this, totally effortless!

As if the one final row were what creating the whole of it had been about or the whole of the effort involved. C’mon. I can’t fool me, not that easily.

Or maybe it is that I don’t want the shawl to have any whiff of a slogging, endless grind attached to it. Rather, to have it be like a young girl holding it over her head, running into the wind with it Superman cape-ing behind, or her twirling around and around with it till she gets dizzy and falls down laughing, the silk turning into a landing parachute settling down around her.

I think I’ll run the last end in tomorrow.

My newly-tuned piano is heavenly, as is the rare treat of time with my son to listen to him playing it. With great verve and energy. That piano was handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me.

When I was a kid, the house rule was, piano practice absolutely took precedence over any TV watching. Being one of the younger children, from the time I was eleven on up I was the only one taking piano anymore. And it wasn’t exactly an instrument I could carry into a separate room and shut the door, like my sister’s flute or my brother’s violin.

So if I were mad at my siblings, I could take out my stress and vengeance, both, by practicing, like, real loud, drowning out their entertainment. And believe me, I did.

What goes around…

Three of my kids took piano lessons. (The oldest opted for oboe.) No rules about the TV, because there was no TV here, but still, there was one time about ten years ago that I called my piano technician because a key didn’t play. He came, took the lid off, and pronounced that someone had hit that one so hard as to break the hammer clean off.

I knew exactly which kid it would have been, too. So much my child. Although I should rescue him here and say the instrument was a good deal older by then and more fragile than back in the day and had suffered through two sets of moving companies since when we got it.

You should hear the kid play. He did his practicing over the years–he’s good.  Music to my ears.

Mom was right: do your work, and it pays off all your life and on into the next generation.

Sheila also asked where I’d lived.

While in college and far from home, I used to enjoy stumping the occasional clueless classmate by telling them I was born in the United States, but I wasn’t born in a state; where was I born?

I would get, Puerto Rico? Guam? On a boat? On a plane? Nope, and not the Philippines, either (I’m not that old!)

And then there was the day my sister, away at school in that same town, got told by the postal clerk that she didn’t have a state birth certificate and Washington DC’s didn’t qualify; they refused to process her passport application for her semester abroad.

Okay, now, that’s like when the aide to the Senator from New Mexico (Domenici, if I remember right) once asked for information from another Senator’s office and got the response, ‘We don’t give out that information to foreign countries.’ (Hello?)

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, lived in Provo, Utah (that answers where I went to college), then West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University), Merrimack, New Hampshire, and now California. I’ve traveled to most of the states in the US–46, I think–and been to eastern and western Canada and, for one afternoon, Juarez, Mexico. Watched an armadillo raiding our marshmallows in Florida as a kid. Saw it snow on the Fourth of July in Banff later that summer.

I noticed Sheila had Topanga Canyon on her list of places she’d lived, and that quite got my attention: Laurel Lee had lived there. Years after I’d gotten her first book, “Walking Through the Fire,” out of the Merrimack Library, I’d stumbled across Laurel’s later ones (I’ve got “Godspeed” around here somewhere, too), and Topanga Canyon was where she’d lived for awhile after “Walking” ended. She wrote of visiting her parents in Fremont. She had grown up in the same not only town but neighborhood as Tara’s dad: the Tara whose name graces one of my shawls in my own book now, whose late Grandma, who would have been Laurel’s old neighbor, I knew. Small world.

When I read “Walking,” I had three kids under five years old. Laurel wrote of her having three kids about those same ages as mine at the time she found out she had Hodgkins, and her husband’s reaction to her cancer being to cheat on her and then ditch the family altogether. Her courage, cheerfulness, and strength were something I wanted more of for myself, when all I had to deal with from day to day was simply to run a young family.

I had no idea… And I’m glad we moved near Stanford before it hit me.

I looked around last night and found out that Laurel had survived longterm after all. Yay! That she’d written another book I hadn’t heard of. Double yay! And then, to my wonderment, that she’d finished college, taught creative writing on the college level, and had married the author of one of my kids’ all-time favorite books in elementary school, “The Teacher from the Black Lagoon.” The man who had truly loved her. Who had stayed by her side as she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer eight months after their wedding.

Had I googled her sooner, I could have told her she’d made a lasting difference to me. I have kept her example of cheerfulness in the face of illness close by for eighteen years now of my autoimmunity. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to see a picture of her and do a doubletake: in that particular photo, she looked a lot like me or at least members of my family enough that I relate it to me.

“Tapestry” is now on its way to my mailbox. I will strike up a reacquaintance with an old friend in these older pages as I wait.

I’m usually not one for memes, but I’m going to use Sheila’s as a jumping-off point. Maybe I’ll answer another of her questions tomorrow. This is a bit stream of consciousness, but here goes.

What was I doing ten years ago? Driving, constantly driving. No school buses here, and I had four kids in three different schools, soccer games (we may have given up on soccer by that point, I’m not sure) and oboe, piano, piano, piano, clarinet, and saxophone lessons, later organ too, and for that one summer, trumpet tutoring thrown in as well. “Make a joyful noise.”

Ten years ago, we had a big family reunion coming up. When my Grandfather Bennett had died, Gram, at 94, watched all of us cousins having a grand time being reunited en mass for the first time as adults and asked us when we were going to do that again. Nobody could bear to say out loud, When you die, Gram.

Two years later, what was left of her hip, which had been replaced at Johns Hopkins when I was a kid, crumbled, and she became bedridden. My cousin Katherine’s husband, a cardiologist (trained here at Stanford), quietly told us that in general, once a very elderly person can’t get out of bed, they’re gone within about six weeks.

Gram would last about twice that.

Gram told her oldest son she wanted money not to be a reason why any of her 29 grandchildren couldn’t come to her funeral: he was to send $5000 of her money to each one right now, and promise to reimburse them for any hotel expenses they might incur as well. He did, and about two weeks later, after considering living to see three different centuries and deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, she slipped away.

We came.

We had such a lovely time together. We lined up by order of year born, and everybody pulled out cameras and snapped pictures of each other.  (I had at the time, for a winter coat, my Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds in two strands of wool and mohair knitted on size 9s, quite dense and warm, but it definitely seemed a bit bright for the November occasion, happy/sad as it was. I have no doubt my cousins remember me standing in the snow at the gravesite wearing that 86-color piece of clothing. I later bought a somber charcoal coat, a little too big, not realizing immediately that it was a horse-after-it’s-left-the-barn effect. Once I did, I gave it to my tall daughter to take to college in the snow, where she needed it far more than I, and it fit her better anyway. I had my handknit one; in my climate, why would I want more?)

And so, a few years later, it was decided that we needed another reunion, one with no funeral attached to it, just purely for the sake of joy. It was July 1998, the year Grandpa would have been turning 100. As a central gathering place in the country, Katherine decided to schedule us at an offseason ski resort that was within a stiff hike of where our grandparents had owned a mountain cabin near Brighton. (I can see the ski afficionados nodding their heads.) That cabin had a small back patio overlooking the creek with an iron railing around it, deeply bowed in; my grandmother had once told me that it was from the weight of the snow there.

Grandpa used to like to go that cabin to get away from the pressures of his US Senate seat; to get to a phone, he had to walk a mile to the little general store. Nobody could reach him unless he chose to be reached. When he was on vacation, he was on vacation, walking that mountain, listening to the icy-cold water of the creek going over the pebbles, seeing chipmunks dart and eagles soar. I used to feed those chipmunks, the times I got to go to that cabin in the summer, growing up; it was a lesson to an antsy child in being still and waiting, trying to teach a tiny animal not to be afraid of me.

My sister Anne and her six boys decided to drive from Atlanta for that reunion, and since they were coming that far anyway, went further and came here first. We got to spend a joyfully noisy week or so with them at our house before they continued to Yosemite and then on over to Utah with us joining them there. Muir Woods, Chinatown… That was the visit where I gave her copies of my photos, and she asked her identical twins gleefully which one of them was in this picture in her hands. They both claimed themselves. “See! You can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anyone else!”

My kids had loved Tim Robblee, the best music teacher any school ever hired; Tim announced ten years ago that he was leaving to go back to school himself. He had led our high school’s jazz band to a national high school competition in Monterey, where they did so well that his kids were invited to play as professionals at the famous Monterey Jazz Festival in the fall!

I knitted Tim an afghan in many colors, a picture as best as I could do of the Monterey Bay, complete with waves of water at the beach, in remembrance of how he’d believed in his students and what he’d helped them achieve. I took a roll of pictures of it before I gave it to him.

I later found I had a roll of film that had been double-exposed: Anne’s kids at Stinson Beach. Tim’s beach afghan. Superimposed on each other, so that in one wonderful piece of kismet, Anne’s boys were reaching down into the water, their feet submerged in wool and water in the tide. I got not one single good picture of the afghan, in the traditional sense, but the ones I got–after the initial disappointment, because Tim had moved by then and the afghan was out of my reach–delighted me.

Oh, and, one funny thing about the reunion? Katherine, the one in charge, kept emailing me re the arrangements and kept getting antsy about getting no response. I heard through the grapevine, and protested that I had received nothing. She insisted to my brother that the emails didn’t come back to her, so clearly, I was simply not remembering. (This is often a very valid thing to say about me.) But no, I’d been waiting and looking and getting nothing.

Christmastime, five months later, Katherine sent out an extended-family email, and at long last she got a response: from an Alison Hyde in England, saying she’d been enjoying all the emails, almost felt like a part of our family now, and how had the reunion gone? Had we had a good time? And where in the world were we? Were we in Spain for that vacation? (I guess it was all those Californian place names when Katherine wrote to me.)

It let me off the hook, at least!

If you remember this post: on Tuesday, I was knitting an early portion of a new lace pattern, ie a part where I had to pay attention to the instructions I’d written out because it wasn’t visually established enough to just wing it yet. My kids had just planted that plum tree (did anybody catch the earth shoes caption on its bucket?) and the whole wide world just felt so…joyful. And I found I suddenly couldn’t see the page clearly for how my eyes had watered up. Silly eyes.

It took about the space of a heartbeat, and then it hit me: wait. My EYES watered?!

And then yesterday they did it again. My eyes haven’t been able to water for at least five months due to inflammation, which is how I tore my cornea so badly a few months ago.

One more piece of remission slowly catching up to me. One more splash of joy.

My Picotee amaryllis is still blooming! It’s too bright out there for a good photo, but I wanted to grab it before it faded.

The Zappos came: the more formal, more wedding-y looking shoes sliced deeply. I walked halfway across the carpet and couldn’t take them off fast enough. People actually wear these?! Zapp’em back.

The other pair, though. Wow. These were created expressly for my feet. And if you look at the style: picture the increases in a top-down circular shawl translated into a shoe. It’s as if I’d been in collaboration with the leatherworking designer in Italy. Success. Why, yes, actually, I did immediately order a second pair in pearl. I buy one pair of shoes, on average, every other year. Break the bank.

(Added later): I’ve been thinking for the last several hours how ditzy a post this is. Shoes? After writing about E? But… Other than Birkenstocks, there have been so very few times in my life when I’ve found any that fit well, feel good, look good, and that I really like. Although, I’ve got to say, overall, I’m glad of that. My weird feet have totally saved me from ever being a shoe fanatic, since there’s no chance. Leaves the money for important things, like yarn–which I can use to center myself around others rather than myself. Thank goodness for 9″ long EEs.

Sometimes.

“We need to bake a cake! An angel food, maybe.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“We need to bake a cake!”

“Okay, Mom, I am *not* quite following what you’re saying here.”

I explained that slugs and snails can’t climb over broken eggshell jags, and since that was way better than poisons, we needed to put some around the new base of our tree he’d just planted for me.

He allowed as how he could handle that type of tree treatment. Bake a cake. Right on.

Later, thinking I ought to use the tree I’ve got going already, I looked at the Meyer, picked some lemons, and pulled a lemon sponge cake out of the oven a few minutes ago instead; that’s the way the eggshells crumble sometimes. (I took the picture first while it was still semi-light out.)

Back to the shawl on the needles for his wedding.

I wanted to show E here how her roses are opening up today; she grew these herself.

My son Richard arrived home last night with a gift for me from Ann, his about-to-be mother-in-law. Ann lives near the beach, and at one point told me she was looking forward to showing it to me. I had to explain, to make sure she knew, that it would have to be getting towards sunset for me to be able to safely go: lupus and UV and all that.

Richard handed me one-day-delayed Mother’s Day chocolates from him and his fiancee, and a box from Ann. I opened it up, and…

Wow. It was SO perfect.

She had gone down to the beach and collected some sand dollars. She had carefully wrapped each little one, fragile as they are, so it could make it through the flight unbroken and without damaging the next one over.

She had brought the beach to me.

First, the plums. This is two stories, really, but a lot happened yesterday.

Our house came with an ornamental plum tree that a previous gardener had experimented with and had grafted in a branch of a producing plum tree; it was the oddest looking thing. Burgundy leaves, a graceful shape, and then this one awkward green thing shooting happily off to the side like a two-year-old brought to a formal adults-only party. After a few years, though, that branch got what looked like the mumps and died. Some kind of borer, apparently.

I missed it, so a neighbor gave us some of his plums, and I returned the favor with a jar of plum jam. He thought that was great! So he went back in his yard, picked more, and I made more and gave him a jar from each batch. I had to weigh those plums first, I was dying to know: 45 pounds. His wife was appalled when she found out and apologized to me, while I just laughed it off, saying, hey, I would never have had them to play with otherwise, don’t sweat it!

I’d ignored the recipe that had come with the jars specifying that one had to laboriously remove the skin from each plum. Bag that. For me, everything but stem and stone: the tartness of the skin adds so much depth to the flavor, like sour cherries, only better. You take the bitter with the sweet.

I’ve wanted my own plum tree for years. It would involve digging and putting in a drip system to a far corner of the yard that didn’t have water. We never got around to it.

Part two, written last night:

All the times I’ve said a prayer that I wouldn’t forget. I’d planned this for a year; well, actually, ever since I first got my manuscript accepted.

And yet somehow, on the actual day, I forgot. Given the circumstances, that’s breathtakingly awful, but I did. But I got saved, and so by extension did E, by an offhand comment by my son, who’d called in the evening after the phone had been busy all day yesterday.

Isn’t that the way it so often is? We ask God for help, and He nudges some other person to do some random thing that was just exactly what we needed, while they have no clue and often never will if you don’t speak up and tell them. Although, in this case, it was immediately apparent to both of us.

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!” And then my son happened to mention that he’d found out that his future mother-in-law had gone to high school with my friend E.

E!!! Oh my stars, and it’s nearly 8 pm!!!

From the other end of the line, there was the sudden, “‘Bye, Mom, you need to go.” He knew. And go I immediately did, without stopping to comb my hair, just run!

E’s son, who had gone to elementary and middle school with my oldest, while he was away at college, his folks had gotten the phone call no parents should ever have to get. The rest of that story is theirs to tell, not mine. My oldest and I attended his memorial service.

After a great deal of thought as to what would be appropriate, I knitted her a lace stole in navy blue: a color that acknowledged the darkness and the hurt, a color that spoke of the dawn that I promised with each stitch would still be able to come, however long away, and yes, it would be a long way away, I understood that. I wanted to be there, an arm reached around her in warmth and presence whenever I was not. Her son had been artistic and giving, and I wrote a note to go with it saying that I was sure he wanted to comfort her, too: I wanted to be his hands for him in creating this.

That soft lace was nothing, it was everything: it was what I knew how to do to say I cared.

I wasn’t sure when the most appropriate time would be to give it to her, and somehow I dragged my feet. But one day, after praying to get it right for her sake, the answer came in the sudden strong feeling: NOW. Go *NOW.* So much so that I made my kids wait on the lunch they were preparing for me till I got back, and I simply rushed out the door and made that delivery right then.

It was Mother’s Day.

The following spring, I was at Kepler’s for a booksigning by Rachel Remen. I bought an extra copy of her “My Grandfather’s Blessings.” One of Dr. Remen’s patients had gone through similar circumstances and I knew it would help E to feel she wasn’t alone; someone else out there somewhere knew what it was like, more than I, with all my best intentions, ever could. I explained briefly to Dr. Remen, who inscribed it just for E, hoping, along with me, to offer her comfort.

I brought it to her on Mother’s Day.

And every year since then, I have gone to her house on that day with something by which to say, I remember. I’m thinking of you. I want to see you and I want to be with you for a moment on this day. The first time I ever got an amaryllis to bloom in May, its timing was just right, and I took it to E. On Mother’s Day.

Some pains are forever, but over time, the years add up, and E has the delightful distraction now of two small grandsons and the fact that her daughters live nearby, so she gets to see them all often. One of them pulled up with her family as E and I were talking. The joy has been quietly growing, and it’s been good to see and to be just a small part of it by making sure I visit on that day. Without fail. For this year, my plan had been to bring her a copy of my book.

“‘Bye, Mom!”

E had a vase full of flowers ready and a waiting dish of food she’d made me to gift me back with, and thank goodness I got there in time before the day was up. There was still daylight outside. Thank you, God, for speaking to my child when I wasn’t paying attention.

My attention might slip. But His hadn’t.

And now, what my children gave me for Mother’s Day: my own plum tree. My older son is flying in tonight and will be installing the drip system. It is a gift not only of fruit but of the attitude of looking to a future it once seemed I wouldn’t have, a chance to make plum jam from my very own tree again.

I absolutely can’t wait to bring some to E with the first crop that’s big enough for a batch.

Nordstrom’s: zero. Zip. Nadda. Ain’t got’em. Doesn’t even carry Birkis anymore. (What!?) The guy was a prince, but he got desperate and tried fancy flipflops–you know, it being a Californian wedding and all, right? Mellow? Casual? Uh, sir… Didn’t matter. Couldn’t get my feet squeezed through and Cinderella’s wicked stepsister was out of luck. There simply was not. one. pair. Not even that he could put a rush order on, not at any price.

I’m debating putting in an aside here: pointy toes? They’re bringing back pointy toes? My stars, do you know how dainty pointy toes look on a double-EE foot, how far forward you’d have to extend the toe box for visual balance? Dudes. Errol Flynn could swashbuckle his way down the castle steps with those as backup swords. For him, though, they could be well heeled to the hilt. Heh.

So I went home and googled my size. Looked for the flats. Zappo’s had one pair left in this shoe and three left in that. I actually got to choose. Done.