I am changing her name here.

The whole way along, Jo hasn’t been entirely sure about this whole aging thing. Californians are supposed to stay young forever.

Picture a woman with white bouffant hair, holding tight to the high style of her youth, and a well-preserved old Mustang muscle car that she’d babied for decades as well as any hobbyist. She used to laugh at young men who would roar up alongside her at red lights and start to offer to drag race when the light turned, till they got a good look at the person in the driver’s seat. A woman! An OLD woman! As the first female to get an MBA from her university in the 40’s, she enjoyed lobbing other peoples’ expectations back at them like that. I think she was into her 80’s before the hair deflated, after she’d had a stroke, and her beloved car was totalled by her ex-husband, whom she had stayed friends with and who had borrowed it.

She goes to my church. Her stroke turned her into an instant little old lady, and she was not happy about that. There was a Sunday morning when I asked her how she was doing, and she, from her wheelchair, declared, “Heavenly Father forgot about me!” She didn’t care much for this dependency thing, not one bit!

From there she seemed less and less often lucid; sometimes she didn’t recognize me anymore, despite our having moved here in ’87. But she still had good days, just, none recently, when I made my decision.

I didn’t know how she would respond to my knitting for her, but I decided to do it anyway. I took some baby alpaca in white, white being about as generic a color as you could ask for, one that wouldn’t freak out the caretaker if her patient played dress-up with too-wild and crazy abandon; I knitted Jo up a bit of a scarf. Not too long, since she’s seated these days, you don’t want it catching in the wheels, and besides, she might not notice if it did. But oh so very soft.

I took it to church. I put that scarf around her neck and kind of patted it in place on her shoulders, telling her I’d made it for her and what the yarn was made out of. (Ever the fiber artist here.)

She’d been feeling down for some weeks, and that day, she was just plain out of it. She reached one hand absent-mindedly upwards towards mine, but she didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. Some of her elderly friends swarmed her as I stepped out of their way, exclaiming over her, exclaiming over her new bit of adornment, telling her what it was and how wonderful it was. Jo’s face went from blank to mildly bewildered.

The next Sunday, there was Jo. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She was with it. She greeted me cheerfully. She totally knew who she was and where she was, she was her old self again, and she was ready to challenge anybody to a drag race in her wheelchair, scarf flying.

It was startling to me how changed she was and how much of a difference a simple gesture had made in reminding her that she really was thought about, honest!

I thought of all that today, about a year later, as she sat parked in her chair waiting for her ride home to pull up near the door. She waved hi and laughed. I didn’t put her on the spot by asking her my name or hers; she recognized my face and was glad, and that was reward enough.

The kids we put on the plane yesterday were heading home to a foot of newfallen snow to have to haul their luggage through.

Later in the day I got a note from my friend Gigi, one of my testknitters for “Wrapped in Comfort,” who grew up in Iran: she was off on vacation and enjoying new snow, too, and mentioned quite gleefully what the word for snow is in her native Farsi language:

Barf.

She was cc’ing her note to a bunch of us back in California, saying she wished we could all come play in the barf with her.

Ahem. Moving right along. I got totally blown away by a surprise package in the mail yesterday, handspun handdyed yarn, Cherry Tree’s Orenberg in Raspberry Sorbet. Wow, thank you, Margo Lynn! You have to love a yarn that gives employment to handspinners in Russia trying to keep a tradition alive that goes back to Catherine the Great; google Orenberg shawls if you’ve never heard of them, they’re gorgeous. They have geometrics that remind me of Persian rugs. Although, traditionally–this is an aside to the laceknitters reading this–their patterns have one quirk: the decreases are all of the knit two or three together variety. There are no ssk’s to lean the other direction to keep the fabric from biasing. The Orenbergers blocked the heck out of their shawls, with the fact that they’re made of cashmere plied with silk–not wool, so there’s much more limpness and much less memory–making up for that inherent biasing.

The hank was small enough around that I’m guessing it was wound from someone’s hand to the crook of their elbow, what I think of as a vacuum-cleaner hank, because it fits best on the handle of one when you want to wind it up. But this one I was able to do most of the winding simply by putting it on the floor with a flashlight in the center to make sure it didn’t tangle inwards on itself, so that I could sit and read emails as I wound. It worked.

I pulled out the bag of yarns I have from Stitches East, marvelling at how Margo Lynn’s color choice matched so well with some of mine. Her yarn is cobweb fine, and I’m going to knit it with a strand of merino laceweight from Shelridge Farm that slightly contrasts so that the two colors add depth to each other.

Right now, I’m thinking I should knit a scarf in a snowflake lace pattern, wad it up into a soft big ball, and throw it at Gigi.

I looked at the sky before we left to drive our oldest and her husband to the airport this morning. Note that this photo was taken at twenty minutes before noon: see the truck in the picture yet? And yet, today’s storm was far less, I kept thinking as we drove.

Several years ago, one of our children lost her sheet music the day before her high school concert where she was to perform a solo. No time for letting the mail bring an order. The only place in the whole Bay Area that sold that music, as far as I could find, was in Berkeley–across the San Francisco Bay and 50 miles up the most congested highway in Northern California. The sky looked very dark that morning: my husband urged me, worried, Go early. The kid was pretty upset at herself for losing her music and fairly frantic that it be replaced. I thought, only for love…

We had this ’88 Honda Accord, the sort of well-aged car you own when you don’t ever want to have a scenario where your kid with the new license comes home after crashing the car and you blurt out something stupid that makes them think you care more about the car than them. It had a mildly bashed bumper before we even got it. I felt it was a good antidote to the intense materialism of the area we live in, and that that was a good thing when you’re trying to teach your teenagers what’s important in life. Embarrassing the heck out of them had its definite points. I mean, what teenage boy is going to drag race to impress his friends in…that? Right.

So. The skies started pouring before I even got to the Dumbarton Bridge, (the day was later given 100 Year Flood status) and I could barely make out the truck in the next lane over. It was some of the heaviest windblown rain I had ever driven through, and I kept going, This is California? East Coast, sure, but California!?

And then, when I was most of the way there, my windshield wiper got the hiccups. One side started going slower. Spastic. Erratic. I held my breath, not sure I could even find my way to the side along the soundwall, and if I did, I’d be a sitting duck in the breakdown lane. I tried turning the wipers off, but that was just too blind in that horrendous rain, I had to have at least one side I could see out of; I was leaning way over to look out the passenger half. And then the one wiper caught on the other and they both came to a heartstopping halt. Fini.

What happened from there was the scariest drive of my life. The blinkers the other drivers couldn’t see. Trying to get off the highway. Trying to find someone to help me fix this. Knowing how far I was from home. This was just before I bought my first cell phone (I got one soon after!) It was several miles before I found a garage off the freeway.

And when I did, the guy at the gas station said, Here. Pull into the bay here, get yourself out of the rain. Let’s see what we can do for you, lady. There–and he found the loose screw on the wiper, tightened it up, and said, There you go. Have a safe drive home, lady.

The whole thing took him less than two minutes from when I’d pulled in, fighting tears, and he waved away any payment and my fervent thanks. I filled my car. That, at least, I could do in return. Two years later, I filled my car there again, on the way home from Stitches West back when it was held in Oakland, making a point of telling whoever was on duty that day why I went well out of my way to go to their station.

Because I wanted to take that good man’s graciousness and bless the next worker at that station with the story of it. Let them know that when they help a traveller out, it is not forgotten. It is remembered with great gratitude. And that can even be good for business. For years!

p.s. The band teacher had a spare copy of the music.

Knitlist subscribers, forgive me–it’s too good a pun not to put here too.

Someone on Knitlist had mentioned a day at the doctor’s that had gone on and on and on, with technical problems with the x-ray machinery and the like.

To which my answer was, Thank goodness for knitting.  Maybe that x-ray technician was trying to stall you long enough for you to become fond enough of her to knit her some socks.  You know, Sockholm Syndrome and all that.

I debated quite awhile about writing about that boiling pot, and I didn’t want it associated with Dr. R’s afghan at all, matching pattern notwithstanding. But I did confess to that splash because it felt like there was a universal experience in there, that it was not all about me. Last night, I was tossing and turning, thinking about it.

It involves something I haven’t mentioned on the blog: that a few days before our trip to Salt Lake City three weeks ago, I found myself suddenly at my cardiologist’s. There’s got to be a word for when your heart’s arrhythmia knocks the air out of you so hard you cough, you can’t help it, it’s a reflex. Over and over and over. It took me a few days to get past the receptionist and the sub nurse, and when I finally did, I got told I should have gone to Urgent Care that first day when it was bad. Oh. Well, I’d seemed okay to me.

That little flareup is much better, and the cardiologist isn’t worried. Still, the thing was on my mind when I was trying to lift that overfilled and overly heavy pot with my daughter’s afghan in it, and the distraction might well have contributed to the splashing.

The thought I keep coming back to is this: we put our hearts on the line for our children from the second we see their tiny faces for the first time. Sometimes (writing as the mother of four people who have recently gone through teenagerhood) they don’t get it.  If they don’t get What They Want Right This Second they don’t see it as us as doing What They Really Need, especially when it’s Vitamin N–the word no.  But we know.  Sometimes we wait for the day when they have their own children–not as revenge, but simply because there are some things that can only be learned through one’s own personal experience: like how much a human being can love another human being, from that moment and for every moment of the rest of their lives. We would do anything in our physical or emotional power to make things right for them.  To make things work out for their good.

My daughter had hoped for an afghan the color of her brother’s (pictured above) and I was going to do everything I could to make that happen so she would be able to cuddle up in it and know that her mom loves her. Not that she doesn’t. But we never, ever stop teaching our children that we do.

And it feels lovely to be able to tell them yes.

I seem to be in writing mode today…

My daughter was cleaning out her closet, came across this, and asked me if I recognized it.

The I-pod of my teenagerhood. Not only a radio–with FM too, which conveyed an air of sophistication above the teenybopper AM market–but a cassette deck player. Not 8-track, but cassettes! The word “boombox” I don’t think had even been invented yet, but hey, this was really cool–even Sandy down the street liked it. Instant time warp, as my daughter held it up and we brushed the dust off. Did I want to keep it?

Nope.  Out.

Doctor R, if you see this, yes, this is the same pattern as your afghan. After I gave you yours, I knitted it again a few months later to keep close the memory of your face as you reached into the bag, stunned, thrilled, speechless, feeling the softness of the baby alpaca and cashmere and finally exclaiming, “Did it take you very long?” And I answered, “About an hour an inch.” Never has the acceptance of a knitted gift from me meant so much to me as what you gave me in those moments.

It was 72 inches long. He had given me every one of those hours by saving my life a few weeks previously. I was sharing some of my newly-gifted time back with him to convey the depths of my gratitude at his caring: there was never a knitting project more deserved.

Now, for the day-to-day part of this post: at least one of the dye manufacturers says helpfully in their literature that although the dye is more colorfast if you simmer it, you can easily dye in the washing machine; that way, the machine can do the heavy lifting of the water. I’m sure they thought that if they made it sound easy, more people would buy their dyes.

Yeah well. I tried doing it that way once about five years ago. Don’t. Worse, I tried it with their cotton dyes. Had it been an acid dye for wool, those just wash right out of cotton anything, but no such luck. Picture the machine in the spin cycle: now picture every little crevice a droplet of colored water could get flung to, and trying to obliterate every last bit from the inside and outside surfaces of the tub. Which is why I have a set of pink pillowcases with blue blobs on them and a freckled tencel jumper: I was so sure I’d succeeded (including running the thing with water only in it). Later, while I was in the hospital for ten days, my family brought me my own pillow and we used those pillowcases–if they somehow disappeared into the hospital’s laundry or trash, nobody was going to cry.

Afterwards, I went thankfully back to normal life, and, as part of that ordinariness, to using a dedicated dyepot like a good little girl.

That second afghan I made in this pattern was for my daughter, who later decided that she’d rather have it dyed burgundy than the natural light brown baby alpaca I’d knitted it up in. Okay. Hmm. Dr. R’s, I’d dyed in two batches, one to each fiber, to get a heathered effect when I knitted them up together. I didn’t have a pot big enough for this one.

The one bathtub in this house is old and crackled, and I didn’t want to risk dyeing the cracks, so I set a large plastic tub in there, filled it full of water too hot to touch, put the afghan in, took the afghan out, stirred the dye in, and put the afghan carefully back in. If I’d put the afghan into the dyebath dry, most of the dye would have schlurped up into whatever part hit the surface first, regardless of any amount of stirring; it needed to be wet for the dye to distribute properly. And I wanted the afghan hot so it wouldn’t cool the dyebath down when I put it in.

But that still just wasn’t enough heat to set the dye, I found. It wasn’t taking up. So I poured a goodly amount of the dyebath into my biggest dyepot and put it on the stove to simmer. I figured the dye was already well distributed by first using that big tub, where it had room to be stirred; I just needed the extra heat.

By the time the thing was ready to come off the stove, nobody else was around. It was New Year’s Eve, the kids were off. It was way heavier than any dye pot I have ever dealt with. I went to lift it, and it didn’t lift. I had this moment of, hey! If I say lift, lift! I can do anything if I try hard enough!

Thank goodness for the thick cotton sweater I was wearing when the boiling water hit.

I was going by my usual premise that it’s always better to start with a smaller amount of dye when you’re not sure; you can always add more later. But this time, I’m not going to. It’s beautiful; it’s much closer to the color of Dr. R’s than the deep shade I was aiming for.

Cool.

I get to spare you the picture because there is none. At the time, it would have been, don’t you dare photograph this! Now, I kind of wish we had, because I assure you there will never be another chance.

For several years, I had my hair dyed professionally: I figured I knew nothing of what was inside those boxes at Target and I wasn’t going to be one of those people whose hair glowed a vivid purple halo in the sunlight–I was going to do it right. Someone had asked me if I was the mother of the bride when my oldest was 13 and I was 36. Yikes.

The stylist liked to play with my hair after she was done, just for fun. One time, it happened to be New Year’s Eve, and I mentioned we were going to a party that evening. Well, hey!

When she grabbed a can of hairspray, I wondered; earth mother is so much more my style, but whatever. I can be adventurous. She started combing my hair straight upwards, lacquering every little strand. She emptied the can, while I tried to breathe. She grabbed another, and I think she emptied that one, too.

I went from there to pick up my drycleaning to get the dress I was going to be wearing to the party. I’d been going to that drycleaner for years. The woman there stared at me as I walked in, and it took her a moment to realize that having her jaw hanging open probably wasn’t leaving the best impression. She thought to shut it. But her eyes couldn’t leave that space floating just above my head, and I felt them following me back out the door. I tried to think, don’t I look smashing?

I got home and went straight to the mirror. This was around the time when Trump was called The Donald by his first wife Ivana, and she had this huge bouffant hairdo. Which somehow was now sitting transplanted onto my head.

I declared to my husband, “Only the truly rich need to pay to look this bad.” With an eye on the time and the start of that party, I ran into the shower and scrubbed that hairspray out and turned back into plain Alison, the glass slippers kicked off and the pumpkin carriage collapsing in the compost bin. Before the clock struck midnight’s celebrations.

Row by row. Gonna make this garden grow. Gonna take the rake and hoe, sow the seed on fertile ground… Was that an Arlo Guthrie song? I heard it on a folk-rock album by I think Stan Rogers, back when CDs were a new technology and my kids were babies, and thinking at the time how it applied to every moment of being a mom to these brand-new people: I kind of made it my personal inner theme song for awhile there. Part of me wonders, if I sang it to them now, would it somehow feel familiar to them?

But it had receded ages since into the far-away background, and then I suddenly realized that’s what I was humming as I was looking at this wad of circular knitting. (A shawl. Whodathunkit.  Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ “Silkie” in Turquoise.)

Hmm. I held it stretched out, squinty-eyed. I weighed the ball and I don’t have enough to finish another half-repeat, it would have to be this long (however much that means once it’s blocked) or spend more money to make it longer. I need to rinse it still on the needles and lay it out to dry overnight to see; then I can cast it off. Or not.

It’s been sitting in my knitting bag the past couple of days. There was nowhere in the house to lay it out without someone tripping over it.

We just put one kid on a plane, and his fiancee, who’d been staying with her grandparents and visiting them and us; they’ve arrived at the visit-both-sets-of-parents stage, and it’s her folks’ turn now. I can go spread my knitting out in his room. Part of me wants to say wryly, Oh joy–I’d far rather have my children around than their empty space.

Which is a good kind of problem to have, definitely.

Nancy’s husband made Grendl a cage, and she sent me a picture. It suddenly occurs to me as I write this, I still don’t know yet where to find the pattern.

Last night, Kim, our daughter-in-law-to-be, flew into town, and today’s our son-in-law’s birthday, so we celebrated both by taking the whole crew out to dinner.

To the restaurant where Sue works. The Sue whose story leads off my “Wrapped in Comfort” book. And she was there.

Our kids were 11 and 32 months and turning five the first time we went there, with the youngest not yet on the way. Now the youngest is away for his two-year Mormon mission, the oldest two have found the loves of their lives, and we got to show off the three Sue knew then and what they have turned into over the years. And I got to thank her in person for her white amaryllis, which is still blooming three weeks later (I took this photo a few minutes ago), and tell her it has a third flower stalk coming up.

She came over, hugged me, and at one point told me a funny story about a onetime grumpy customer, and then went back over to a table she was serving–I thought about it… There was an older woman at a table near us who was looking fairly grumpy herself. She didn’t see me; there was no eye contact involved. I simply found myself saying a prayer for her, whoever she might be, as she and her family got up from their table, done. I was silently thinking, Lady, you have just had a fine meal and a dinner out with your loved ones, the day after Christmas. The peace of the season to you from my heart–God be with you. And I asked God to come.

To my delight I saw her turn back to the man I assume was her husband, her face and demeanor relaxing, and then she actually smiled! Success!

I love doing that. I love being unseen and quietly saying a prayer for someone. I love seeing them becoming more happy. It certainly doesn’t always work, but it does surprisingly often, and when it does, it is so wonderful. People don’t always have to actually see you smiling for you to offer them one of yours.

And then I turned my attention back to my own loved ones and enjoyed our fine evening together. And got one more hug from Sue before we headed out the door at the end.

My in-laws’ gift to me was this brochure saying a sheep had been donated in my name to Heifer International. I am intensely grateful–I can’t possibly think of any material gift I could have enjoyed more, and Heifer International is one of the best charities out there in terms of using donated funds for the actual purposes the money is raised for.

Tracy Kidder’s book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” about Paul Farmer, a Harvard doctor who set up a health clinic and school in Haiti, is part of why my in-laws’ choice is so meaningful to me. Farmer is the type of man who, at one point in the narrative, drives through a riot and pulls a man he watched being injured into his car to take him to his clinic for treatment, ignoring the thugs on both sides of the fight and both sides of the car. Someone is hurt. Not to help is unthinkable.

At one point in Farmer’s story, an armed soldier bursts into the compound he’d built, making threats and demanding, So what are you going to do about it?

And Farmer smiles gently and calmly answers, “Treat you and your family when you’re sick.”

That stops the soldier in his tracks. Totally disarms him. He leaves. No more soldiers come.

We can change the world by giving of who we are: Farmer is fortunate in that he can be there in a place like that in person, knowing he is making a difference.  (And he has the courage to do so, which I frankly do not.) For the rest of us, Heifer International is one of those entities that will do so for us. Thank you, Mom and DadH!

Nancy finished this and had to show it off to another knitter before her small grandson opens his present tomorrow. What to wrap it in? Her husband had an idea, so he was spending part of today making it a cage. Of what, I’m not sure, maybe she’ll tell us in the comments.

I would pose Grendl here with the cookies Nancy baked us, but you can tell by that satisfied patting of his tummy that he already helped himself to them all. (Sorry, Santa; maybe Nancy can get him to toast some marshmallows for you.)

Merry Christmas and the peace of the season to all.

Giving thanks…

For the memory of a Great Blue Heron lifting majestically into the air in slow motion, right in front of a friend of mine and I as we got out of the car at the C&O Canal; for parents who taught us a reverence for the natural world.

For the gift of having had parents who raised their children with a love of music, and the piano, flute, violin and guitar lessons by which we learned both how to produce our own music and the discipline from living through that long process.

For the light of the Love in the world.

For the wonder that arrives with each new baby, God’s reminder to love wholeheartedly.

For family gathered around in celebration of what our own babies have grown into. (Awright you guys, who cut into the next row instead of taking the one on the end?)

This is for every harried parent of a small child, trying to survive the last-minute shopping thing:

I had four kids in just under six years, and I well remember what it was like when I had to drag them all out to some mundane thing such as grocery shopping or trying to keep them on their best behavior in, say, an interminable DMV line before online anything existed. Christmas shopping! I remember how quick other adults were to scowl at them and me. How much it meant to me when someone smiled: often, it would be a middle-aged woman, remembering the days. An actual compliment from a stranger could carry me for weeks.

That 40-something (I still get to say that) woman is me now. There are perks to this motherhood thing. I was in a big box retailer one time a few years ago, and coming out of checkout, there was a bench for customers and a young dad sitting on it.

He was holding his little girl with long black curls, who was maybe 16 months old? Old enough to walk, too young to really talk but old enough to understand enough to surprise her parents from time to time. Mine did.

She was at that stage of exhaustion where some kids get to, of flailing in a no-holds-barred screaming tantrum, arching her back hard to try to throw herself on the ground, knowing her daddy wouldn’t let her fall anyway and heedless of any consequences. She wanted her mommy and she wanted to go home and she wanted dinner and she wanted bed and she wanted it NOW.

Somehow, as I approached them, I managed to make eye contact with her. Focusing on her, totally ignoring her father. I think that part was crucial to what happened next–she noticed. Still, this was unusual: just like adults, when little ones are upset, they don’t want to look you in the eye. But something caught hers and she saw me as I slowed down, thinking, what an adorable child! I stopped just far enough away not to be too close, and affirmed happily to her, as if I’d just run into an old friend, “Yeah. I’ve had days like that.”

She stopped immediately. She looked at me, suddenly silent, eyes wide. I was smiling back. She eased down in slow motion into her daddy’s lap, put her thumb slowly up to her mouth, and looked up quite shyly at me but with a little smile now too. She was SO cute. My own smile got bigger.

And then it was her daddy’s turn; just before I left I gave him a quick glance, a smile and a nod. He was looking up at me, too, by then, with this, “Oh thank you. THANK you!” in his face. His daughter watched me leave the store, waving bye-bye just before I stepped outside out of their sight.

The whole scene took so few seconds out of my busy day to let happen. But I will never forget those two. They brought out the best in me, and I am grateful.