(Got it now.)

We were among the bunch of Nina’s friends who took her out to dinner Saturday night to celebrate her birthday, which is today. She grinned at me at one point, and said, “You need John! John’s your best hyacinth hunter.”

It was about a dozen years ago that I was out looking for a birthday gift for her, and I happened to come across some hyacinths blooming in pots. I didn’t know why they seemed just the thing, and I wondered whether they were blooming in more my colors than hers, whether buying one would be a donvier–pronounced DON-vee-ay, a gift you give someone else because it’s what you want for yourself, not because it’s what they want–but still. They appealed strongly to me and I chose one. It was just a little thing, but it smelled so heavenly; you couldn’t carry it in your hands without having it make the day a bit brighter.

Now picture me ringing Nina’s doorbell, her opening the door, and then her standing there speechless. Nina is not the speechless type. But she was dumbstruck.

Finally, she exclaimed, “How did you know!”

Know what? What was she talking about?

“My grandmother!”

It turned out, her grandmother had given her hyacinths for her birthday every year as she was growing up in New York City. It was a tradition between them. Her grandmother had passed away, and here I was showing up on her doorstep on her birthday with…hyacinths.

And you know that after that day I could never, ever give her anything else, even if I have to do a bit of hunting around to find some. I don’t have a picture up yet, because I always feel better as the day goes on and it’s still a tad early for me to get out and about to go buy some. But I will. I just wanted to jump in first and say–happy birthday, Nina!

Sue’s amaryllis today: yes, the same plant that was blooming the first week of December. It just keeps on lighting up the place.

(Added later): The mail just came, and with it, a copy of the second edition of my book–it’s in reprints already. Woohoo!

Another toddler story while I’m at it.

A half dozen or so years ago, circumstances were such that my teenage daughter was pushing me around in a manual wheelchair at Costco. At one point, something caught her eye and she gave me a bit of a push forward and parked me mid-aisle to go look at it.

At the same time, a dad pushing a cart with his little boy in it did the same thing and stepped over to the opposite side of the aisle. And so I found myself on a Saturday afternoon suddenly looking up at this toddler who might have been barely two, with his seatbelt on, a big boy now who didn’t need an infant seat anymore.

I smiled and waved hi.

There was this look of absolute bewilderment on the kid’s face, and you could totally read his mind as he stared:

There’s a grownup! In a stroller! Being pushed by…a KID!

Blew his mind. It took him a moment to decide whether it was okay to wave back: wave, oh, right, I remember waving, um, okay. And so he gave me this very funny half-wave with this expression of, I GUESS I should.

And then there was the time I used Costco’s motorized chair, and at the far end of the store, it suddenly stopped dead. The battery indicator read fully charged, but hey, try to tell it that. My hubby went to go grab the manager, and when the guy came over, he took in the scene and told us, “The problem is it’s thrown the dead man switch. You’re too lightweight. It doesn’t think anyone’s there. Put your purse in your lap, maybe a ten pound bag of rice or something so it knows there’s someone actually sitting there.”

That’s me. Always messing with their minds.

Went to church with a mask on my face for my protection and for other people’s. I wasn’t the only one coughing, and being hypervigilant to what that can do to those of us there on chemo, I wondered why it’s such an unusual thing to do in our culture.

It’s the little kids that make that mask hard, though. You can smile with your eyes to the adults, and they get it–although I watched several people in a row clearly having to come to terms inwardly on the spot at the sight–but the toddlers stare. They don’t know if you’re trying to play hide-and-seek–but then where’s the seek part? Why the blue thing? And can they have one too? So I did pull mine up and down for just a minute or so with one 15-month-old. At first, her reaction was an ecstatic look of, Yes! You ARE playing by the rules! Then, when I left it on, she just wasn’t sure she approved. Do it again. Prove you know how to play this game.

I didn’t.

The thought suddenly occurs, I hope she didn’t go home and play with covering her face with random things to try to figure out what all that was about.

My friend Pam gifted me with a surprise: a pair of fingerless gloves with my Rabbit Tracks pattern knitted into the backs of the hands. In a yarn with a colorway named “Red-tailed hawk.”

I was sitting in this very seat, working at the computer one day a few months ago, when a red-tailed hawk flew into the tree outside my window here. I stood and watched it for several minutes; when it spread its wings and tail feathers wide and flew off, it was absolutely breathtaking.

My friend Robert, who lives in the mountains nearby and is the weaver of my medicine blanket, rescued a red-tailed hawk about a year and a half ago, injured by the side of the road. He took it home and nursed it slowly back to health over several months. He sent me an occasional email along the way, telling of the progress she was making, of how he’d won over her trust and she would come to him. He described the thick leather gauntlets he wore to protect him from her claws as she would climb up his arm towards his shoulder to get closer.

Then came the day he decided she seemed ready to return to the wild; he thought her wing was probably strong enough now. He took her outside, on his heavy leather glove, and waited for her to fly off.

This was a new thing. She had to decide to stay with him or go. She did not immediately take off, but when she did, she flew to a tall tree close by (proving to him she could fly that far again)–where she perched and regarded him for half an hour, as he waited to see, as he couldn’t take his eyes off this beautiful bird he’d put heart and soul into caring for.

He described it all to me. Then, at last, she lifted her wings and took off into the sky.

I still have this cough bugging me. I still have a fair amount of nausea, and my weight’s down six pounds from the beginning of last week. It’s a little too easy to feel crummy.

And then I got a package in the mail yesterday, red-tailed hawk fingerless gloves to keep my hands and heart warm. The beautiful and unexpected gift of Pam’s time, thoughts, and yarn lifts my spirits high.

Talking to my brother Morgan… When Dad mentioned to him that the baby of the family that used to live across the street from us, when we kids were growing up, was THE Steve Colbert, Morgan went out and got a DVD of some of his shows, curious.

And when Steve mentioned “my sister Margo” on that DVD, Morgan exclaimed out loud, “*I* know *Margo*!” He called me a few days ago, and we wondered whether, with our 40-year-old memories, Steve looked more like Jay or Paul did as kids. Not Peter; Peter had sandy hair in my mental image and a rounder face.

So. What brings all this up. I got some Ben and Jerry’s “Steve Colbert’s Americone Dream” ice cream, and looking at the list of ingredients was one to catch the eye of any knitter: bamboo fiber. Bamboo fiber? In ice cream!? Do I eat it with chopsticks? Can I sharpen their ends and use them to knit it, too? Was it in the waffle cone part? Should I knit a waffle stitch?

Colbert has a fear of bears. (Wave a California flag and ward him off?) So, what do we read into this: do we finish what’s on our plates for the poor starving pandas in China? Is he trying to get the bears to go after our ice cream and leave him alone? Is it a VastRight-Wing Conspiracy?

Ah, my. Life is so complicated. Pass the ice cream.

When Nina was here, I was experimenting and frogging. I woke up the next morning with a mental image of exactly what I really was trying to knit: not this ribbing pattern, not that drop-stitch wave that I’d been trying the evening before, but what I really wanted to knit. For that male nurse.

Baby cables and ribbing framing, in the center of a soft scarf, a knit-purl-patterned hypodermic needle. Such a basic part of his everyday work, and yet something that has been so vitally important to my life the two times I’ve seen him. And he has such a deft touch with them. I pictured the whole thing and worked out the stitch count across the scarf as I lay there–all of which I promptly forgot when I got out of bed, but I later sat myself down on the couch and made myself work it back out again. My brain had it once, I could do it again. I did.

I really, really like it. It’s one of those things where, if you know what you’re looking at, it’s obvious. If you don’t, it’s a pretty pattern. I’m knitting it in the worsted-weight Misti Baby Alpaca Royal I bought at Stitches West a year ago, that I’d wondered why I’d bought such a (for me) heavy yarn. (I know why, it was one of the softest yarns in the whole show and that was the weight it came in. Period.) It’s not spun so loosely that it’ll fall apart at all, and yet, because of the fine micron count and fiber type, it is nevertheless exquisitely soft–the spinners at the mill got the balance exactly right. It’s perfect.

And then I’ll do one with x cables in the center for the x-ray technician.

Meantime, here is the bouquet from Nina, the roses from Phyl and Lee, and the last flower on Sue’s: which has been blooming, with a one-week break in the middle, since the first week of December. Wow.

I wrote in my book about Nina’s Seder; the other family she invited was Phyllis and Lee’s that day, nearly 21 years ago. Nina and Phyl and I have all been good friends ever since.

Phyl and Lee came by Monday night for a visit with a bunch of flowers for me. They weren’t going to let me be sick and be stuck by myself. They also weren’t going to let me get too tired; they left after about an hour, with me pleading for them to stay longer, and them explaining that they didn’t want to overtax me, Lee grinning, “Always leave them wanting more.”

Then Nina appeared on our doorstep last night with, bless her, a bunch of flowers and her knitting in hand (I would show you pictures of both bouquets, but my camera batteries both died snapping shawl photos–I’ll try later), pulled up a chair with me and sat and knitted and kept me company for the evening. After a week of playing solitaire, other than those two visits, I tell you, they weren’t afraid of my germs and they were more concerned about me not getting too lonely–I can’t tell you how much I love those guys.

My Dr. R assumed Phyl was my sister when she and Lee came to visit me in the hospital. She almost is.

I spent the evening chatting, knitting and frogging. I had a project I’d thought about but not started, because I couldn’t decide how I wanted to do it, so with Nina there, I simply tried out one idea after another, over and over. Didn’t get a thing accomplished; I was back to the cast-on when she left, but–I did, though. Now I know what doesn’t work.

And here is why I needed a new project.

I kinneared it.

Lara, it turned out, is one of those people that you meet and instantly adore.

My nephew Elliott called last year at the start of spring break, saying he was thinking of jumping in the car, driving the 800 miles from BYU, and playing tourist with a friend of his: San Francisco, the redwoods… Would we have space for them if they came?

Would we! Watch me jumping up and down! Yes!! It was while I was getting the house ready that one of my kids, who also goes to BYU, mentioned casually, You do know that his friend is likely going to be Lara? That he’s got a girlfriend?

Oh. Okay. He didn’t mention that little fact. Two rooms… (Hey. We’re all good little Mormons.)

And so we had a far too short but absolutely delightful visit. I asked Elliott at one point how they’d met, and he said they were old college friends; he mentioned some to-do where he was supposed to bring a date, and he didn’t have a date, and he just thought, eh, I’ll invite Lara, why not. He had never thought of her as a potential date before–but when he agreed to the thought, “I was just..so…HAPPY.” He kind of shook his head a little at the memory of it, with this big and slightly bewildered smile on his face.

Have you ever had the experience where you see a couple and you instantly know they were meant for each other? But I was careful not to say anything too presumptuous sounding, because it wasn’t my decision to make.

Months later, I got another call I loved: they were engaged, and he wanted me to know that their visit here was what got them each thinking of their old friend as, actually, the person they couldn’t imagine not spending the rest of their lives with.

Lara is from Fairbanks. The date was set for last week. Um… They looked at it, and realized that for almost everyone that would want to be in attendance, it would be a destination wedding because of the remoteness of where she grew up, and–who in their right mind heads to Alaska in January?

And so they went for the opposite idea. They kept it very small (although, with a large reception to follow in Salt Lake City). For the actual wedding at the Mormon Temple, I know on his side, there were his parents, his three living grandparents, and his brother playing photographer.

In Hawaii.

My sister Carolyn, his mother, forwarded me some of her older son’s pictures and gave me permission to put them here. The first is one that Joel snapped not knowing why he was getting the expressions on their faces he was, but he caught it just immediately before the surprise big wave on the calm day swamped him and then them. The second is after the wave.

And a good time was had by all. Happy forever, Elliott and Lara, I love you dearly. And I am SO glad you came!

(Sorry for the wrinkled-towel background; it was the color I needed, and for today it has to do.)

I have a nearly-finished silk scarf for my daughter I need to get done and mail, but it’s staying safely inside its ziploc bag and away from me, germ free. I have a shawl I want to photograph before I mail it off, and, ditto. Even if other people don’t get Crohn’s flares when they catch a bad cold, it’s still a bad cold.

Today is the first day I feel like I could actually hold up the needles for awhile, meantime, and the knitting bug is getting to me. I wanted to show something: in person, the Kid Seta (the bigger ball) and the Orenberg handspun “kidd/silk” from Russia are a little bit off from each other, the one more to the brown side, the other more to the vivid pinkish-purple. But knitted together, they’re absolutely stunning. They were so made for each other.

I bought the Kid Seta from Warren at Marin Fiber Arts http://www.marinfiberarts.com/ last summer while I was doing my second booksigning. I adore Warren. Every yarn store owner should be like Warren, not only as kind a soul as you could ask for, but his yarns! Chosen by how good they feel, as far as I could tell: wonderful. At the time, I just bought two balls, thinking I’d do a scarf or two, nothing major, a souvenir of my coming to his shop. But every time I went to go work with it, it just felt like, nah… It hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

My friend Margo Lynn totally surprised me with the gift of the Orenberg about two weeks ago, just to make my day, which she very much did. I pulled out Warren’s yarn, curious, and instantly knew. Yes! This is what it had been waiting for!

Neither yarn alone had enough yardage to do a shawl, but together they could. I thought, let’s see, I got two shawls out of 1000 yards of Lisa Souza’s fluffy Kid Mohair (the turquoise Julia shawl in the book), and the second one was pretty long, at least for me. Two balls of 230 yards of the Kid Seta, and the label says 50 g and approximately 600 yards on the Orenberg–yeah, that’ll do. I’ll just have some Orenberg left, that’s all.

It’s not working out that way. Handspun is of course variable, but the Orenberg appears, calculating by the weight of what’s left of the Kid Seta, to have been about 350 yards long. But oh, such gorgeous yards. And yet–I think this thing will still be long enough to keep me happy. And I’m thinking that silk has a tendency to stretch over time, which couldn’t hurt. I’m just glad I’ve got a scale in grams so I can see if I can get one more row, and another, out of it, and one more after that. I’m so close to being done.

Design-wise: I chose the smaller-stitch-count Julia to try to stretch the yardage as far as possible using 7mm needles, but past the yoke, I ditched the Julia stitch pattern for a different 6+1, doing the pattern from the main body of the Michelle shawl from there instead. I’ll show you when it’s blocked.

I can’t wait to see!

Okay, I think I’m ready for a nap. Knitting later.

And yet by golly it was time to grow, so there!

I found this under the sink of the kids’ bathroom last night, having no memory of putting it under there months before. Somehow it had decided it had waited long enough and it was just going to go do what it was born to do. I found the dried top of the stalk wrapped around the pipe under there like a cartoon of a guy in cowboy boots on the desert gasping, “Water!” at a mirage. And still–with only its inner reserves from last year’s careful care–there you go.

And yes, I’ve now cleared off the debris and added water. We’ll see what it can do now. I like this one. I’m going to baby it for awhile while it gets its strength back.

Sue’s amaryllis put up a third stalk, taller than the first two. The bud on Lene’s took awhile to get past that first peek at the world, gathering up strength like they sometimes do, and is now on its way up day by day. I can’t wait to see it when it grows up.

Yesterday was, abruptly and unexpectedly, a blender-hair day. I got to see this guy https://spindyeknit.com/2007/02/nurse/ and this guy. https://spindyeknit.com/2007/02/people-placed-along-way/

I guess I overdid it going to Karen’s, and I apologize to everyone there whom I inadvertently exposed. I woke up yesterday morning too sick to sit up, much less stand; it was everything I could do not to pass out. But eventually I had to try, because I wasn’t staying there. Going from the bedroom to the car, I grabbed my knitting…and then threw up, repeatedly.

“You’re NOT going to be knitting!” said my husband, firmly.

Yeah, I know. But it was my insurance policy: if I didn’t take it, I’d end up being admitted to the hospital. If I did take it, they would send me home from Urgent Care.

Five hours and one IV later, a little liquid, a little Zofran, they did send me home, but none of us was quite sure that was the right idea. I did, however, get taken care of by that same male nurse, who didn’t at first recognize me from my bout of pneumonia awhile back–I’d had a mask on the whole time both times–but who again looked so gently in my eyes that I knew I would heal. Which, yesterday, was not feeling like a sure thing. The x-ray tech was also as kind and as gentle a soul as you could ask for. It helped, I think possibly even more than the IV did.

Today’s a little better. I’ve managed to stay upright this long so far.

It was out of the blue–and yet I could see it coming a long way off. My friend Karen calling today, with a stunner: she was closing her yarn store. Oh, Karen, I’m so sorry; when?…

After today.

WHAT?

She’s been doing two fulltime jobs for I think six years; I’ve wondered for a long time when something would have to give. And abruptly, yesterday, she looked at the lease and decided it had, and that was that. She was making lots of phone calls, asking people to spread the word. We did.

The end result was an impromptu get-together party of many an old friend: friends of Karen’s, friends of each other’s, friends of the shop’s, after 20 years. Karen is the friend who taught me to spin and dye, working out of her home for a few years after her first location was destroyed in the Loma Prieta quake. This is the friend who gave me one of just the best stories that didn’t make it past the editors into my first book, for lack of space, but I tell you, her cat that dyed itself green will be in the next one. This is the woman who, when I called her after my car accident, saying, my sister wanted a navy afghan for Christmas and no way no how was I able to drive right now, did she do mail order? Responded with, “Yes, but I can do better than that,” packed her minivan with navy yarns, DROVE TO MY HOUSE 25 minutes away, and then insisted on giving me a discount. Gave me a hug, as I stumbled dizzily, and told me to get better.
This is…was…the store of my friend.

And I will miss it. But now she’ll have time to actually knit for the first time in years, and I hope I’ll actually get to enjoy more time with her, not less, because of the change. It’s hard to let go. But it was clear she was ready.

One more mention about Jo: she’s the only person I know with leopard-print hearing aids.  If you’ve got’em, flaunt’em.