I remember as a kid being warned to put sunscreen on or I’d get skin cancer–at a time when nobody I knew actually wore it and getting a tan, which I could never have pulled off even if my freckles had decided to unionize, was something of a social requirement.

Sunblock was not even the word yet.

Whatever anyone said to me about sun exposure hazards at the time, I remember a mixture of inability to believe in it because being actually old enough for that to happen was beyond my imagination, and of feeling a little bit indignant at this vision of a future me I’d never met who was old. Which I most emphatically was not.

But who would want to hold me accountable for what I was doing as a kid, ie, running around and playing outside. As one does. How could I ever be her? And who was she to boss me around? Or to make me feel guilty?

Granted, Sandy down the street liked to sunbathe on that vinyl chaise-lounge by her mom’s rose patch and I knew all I would do is fry and hurt if I tried that. Not to mention I was not one to hold still. Hiking in the woods was my favorite thing.

I wonder if this would have worked better: laughing at pictures of how funny future me could look like. Still with my hair below my shoulders (go me!) but with this scar at the top of my scalp, imprinted like a baby’s fontanelle. (Here, feel that. Like a thumbprint!) And what it does is, any remaining hair there starting a new round of growing shoots straight up into the sky. Which looks really weird while the rest is mildly curly. Finally, months later, it gets long enough to flop over but it still wants to go left instead of right.

I happen to be sporting the hedgehog look just now, conditioner additions notwithstanding.

The photos of me holding Parker as a newborn nearly 14 years ago show that that basal-cell was present nine months before I finally let Richard talk me into taking seriously this spot that wasn’t going away, and got it looked at. I’d thought it was discoid lupus. I lost a fair amount of hair to that procrastination.

Two weeks ago, I found myself scratching at night at maybe a mosquito bite on the side of my head.

Today I finally asked Richard to look at it for me and take a picture (nah, you don’t want to see it.)

I’m sure the thing my dermatologist most wanted to do during the countdown to T-day was squeeze in one more patient appointment and a surgery when she just saw me last month.

Last time it rained as much as it’s supposed to tomorrow, a year ago, I had an appointment with her but the roads were closed and the floods were high and there was no way to get there.

I’m getting ahead of myself. She has to see the message first.

All I can do is wait. (As my brother waits for his melanoma recovery to attain five-year status. One of my children had it at 29 and is fine. Nah, mine’s just going to be basal again if anything. Looks the same as last time.)

It had not occurred to me that this was a thing you could buy (thank you random Etsy prompts): cane socks. Or, how to be a walking yarnbombing project.

Meantime, I stumbled across Gene Weingarten’s essay on Katherine Graham, who was the owner of the Washington Post for years; her children sold it to Bezos long after her death, after he promised them he would not interfere with the paper.

The second half of the piece is about Bezos’s refusal to let the editorial department publish their endorsement of Harris, old and regretted news at this point.

But the first half. I had not known–or possibly had long forgotten–that when faced with the lawyers saying which of the staff would go to jail if the Post published the Pentagon Papers, Graham said then send them to my house. Make me personally responsible for exposing what they’re doing, not you.

I read that and thought, integrity and courage. The one word repeats the other.

It was going to bug me till I did it, so I did it. I went to the cast-on row, picked up the first stitch, then the second, slipped the first over the second, pick up cast on cast off across, and so reinforced the beginning of the baby afghan.

Little hands do hard pulls. It needed to be ready.

A little potato chip knitting for the day. Arroyo yarn, a dk washable merino from Malabrigo, needles US 6. Started out as 10 st per repeat, now 11, may become 12 for the last third if I feel like it.

She was tired. She is maybe three by now. She was on the floor, arms wide, making herself as big as she could. The dinner part of the potluck last night was over and her daddy had her baby brother in his stroller quiet and content, while he sat at a little round table with a small group away from most of the crowd getting some adult in-person time.

Since she was lying there quietly and in view he wasn’t paying the least attention to her, or as far as she was concerned, and I could see her watching him with his face turned half away and her wheels turning and the meltdown that was just about to start. If she was going to be tired enough to lie down it was going to be in her own bed with her own nighttime rituals and this would not do!

I had a new baby and a two year old three times in a row. I remember.

I apologized to her mom this afternoon, saying, I broke my own rule. I always give to the parents, not the child, but I handed that tiger directly to her.

She laughed and said it was great and thank you and that they had several of those finger puppets by now.

Their little girl had LEAPED up in excitement holding it high, running to show it to her daddy.

I love how easily and instantly little kids can cheer up. She helped me be a bit of a one too last night.

Had I stuck with the game of yarn chicken I would have come up short halfway through the last row with nothing for the cast off, unless I used that slightly mismatched third of a ball.

So instead I used the new skein for that very short bit, wondered how that last of the original ones had turned into Super Skein! Able to leap large gauges with a single bound! (almost)! and had a good laugh at myself.

And yeah the shading wanders around a bit; I figure that’s a plus when you’re trying to put an older baby to bed and they’re not falling immediately asleep. Gives them something interesting to look at quietly.

I’m really really happy with it.

If college students can pull all-nighters can knitters claim all-day-ers?

It wasn’t quite that, but close. It’s not finished, but close.

That inner debate as to whether it needed the seventh repeat? Looking at it almost done, I’d say it’s not even close. That one’s definitely a yes.

Just slow, steady progress on that bright red.

I told him in the course of the conversation, I have enough yarn now that I could actually do three more repeats and make it beyond a baby blanket to a real throw. But would they want that, I mean who needs their neighbor decorating their house for them and if I leave it baby size does that obligate me to make another if they have another child so I’m not creating jealousy and yeah I don’t expect they’re going to have half a dozen more or anything but this could get expensive. And this other neighbor didn’t get any when her kids were born because she was having hers at the same time our kids were having some of theirs and what about hers being left out. But oh well.

He was smiling at this point: “You’re overthinking this.”

He told me just do what you planned to do, let life play out however it’s going to and take it from there when it does.

Of course.

I guess all I really was asking was did I have permission from myself to cast off now, which looks like it would leave it an inch or two wider than it is long (as far as I can tell pre-blocking), or do one more set.

That shape bugs me. The number six bugs me–the eye is pleased with odd numbers. Request denied. One more set. Because I’m the boss of my knitting (my stash just guffawed) and I said so.

I wonder how her life turned out. She would have been able to reach people nobody else could have.

When I was at the end of my first semester of college in 1977 at BYU, facing my first finals, my dad surprised me with an amaryllis bulb kit in the mail for my birthday.

He had given one to my mom every year for hers. To be included in that celebration felt like my dad telling me quietly that I was an adult now in his eyes. And that because of his faith in me, I was. Finals? I could do this!

One of the girls on my floor in the dorm asked me about that box with the pretty flower picture on it and was so taken with the idea that my dad would do that that we got to talking.

And talking.

We found ourselves walking the campus. Around town. Walking, walking, till hours past our bodies ached to be sound asleep. There was no way to stop.

I was her first witness. She had to tell someone.

When she was younger, her parents had lost a child in a house fire.

Her father, well regarded in their community which had rallied around the family, at home was someone who beat her mother. Often.

The day came when Becca stood between them to make him stop. He knocked her out.

And again.

At one point, and I don’t know how she met him, some older man told her he loved her and would protect her and brought her home to his place, where she was his plaything for a week. I think she was 17.

At the end of that week, though, she considered all the Sunday School lessons about waiting for marriage and knew she hadn’t done that and the ones about loving your family and she knew her father hadn’t lived up to that–but that this wasn’t how she wanted to live, either. She went home. College was coming soon anyway.

My father had sent me a flower bulb, simply to surprise me and make my day, and because he believed in me. There were actually people out there who loved their kids and lived that way. That, that was what she wanted ahead of her in her life. Love. Kindness.

She confessed to me then that a few nights earlier it had all become too much and she had sat in a tub with a knife in her hand, looking at her wrists, prepared to do the deed.

But something had made her hesitate. She felt an intense empathy reaching out for her personally, with a question, and I will never forget her saying these words describing how it felt: Yes. This life *will* be hard. Do you want to continue it?

She felt a promise holding her in its loving arms that she was not alone, that it would be so hard, but worth it, worth it, worth it, if she did. And so she lived.

Then she saw my amaryllis box.

And knew that good, loving people were out there, that they were more than just a Sunday School wish, that they were trying to live up to what they profess about following the teachings of Jesus to love one another. They were real. That could be her. She could want others to feel that same sense of being offered rescue that she had.

Yesterday morning, surely from the stress of what last week’s election means for the whole world and worried sick over my friends in Ukraine, I woke up from a nightmare. In it I had relived the pain of her telling me what had been done to her.

Becca–her parents had called her Rebecca when they were mad at her, which had never made sense to her because they had in fact actually named her simply Becca–had, shortly after our long nighttime walk, gone home at Christmas break to her folks in the South and she never came back. She told me just before she left that she had decided to go home, trying to reassure me that it was okay to now.

I never heard from her again.

I have never known if she was okay, and all my adult life I have wanted her to be, wherever she is out there.

She could be there for others going through what she had had to in a way I could never know how to. We opened up each other’s worlds. If we saw each other now we would be throwing our arms around each other and telling how this whole life thing had all turned out for us.

I told Richard the gist of that long walk.

It was a hard story for him to hear on top of the overwhelming grieving going on re the election outcome, wherein half the nation had returned to its abuser.

I had a thought–and went and pulled out the Nautilus puzzle of a sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Pouring out the pieces. Getting out the cookie sheets to sort them into. Heads bowed together, turning each one over to see its true colors, searching for the edges, finding where it turns its corners, slowly, slowly over two evenings going from setting up the boundaries to filling in the center, the rocks and the sky and the river coming to be, slowly and painstakingly at first and then faster and faster towards the end till the picture was complete.

The laser-broken pieces now a glory of a view.

That was the question I wanted to ask.

So.

That third of a ball: in the sunlight, it just wasn’t enough of a match.

(Tap tap tap.) Yarn store number one in that color: zero inventory.

Yarn store number two: three skeins. It was a long way to go to check dye lots for that little of a chance.

Yarn store number three, and the one I’d most want to go to anyway even though it’s a trek. I knew I would have to call to find out, but Kathryn has a lovely deep voice that is easier to hear than most on the phone.

Rios in Ravelry Red? Wait just a minute while I go check. …Lots!

So I gathered up my project, my last skein attached, and headed to Cottage Yarns. Where they don’t have space for classes or gatherings because there’s just too much yarn to squeeze them in. Wasn’t it Mae West who said, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”?

They had a full bag all ready for me when I got there. I explained that mine was a couple years old and I knew Malabrigo tends to shift the shades slightly from year to year so it was a bit of a long shot.

They were a bit too pink. Mine was more on the orange side.

How about this bag?

Oh, much closer, and I almost bought two of those but then Kathryn’s husband found three skeins that had found their way into a bag with another color altogether (so that they would stand out and could be found while staying mothproofed) and once again stepping out into the sunlight and back under the store lights for comparison, that was what I wanted.

Meantime, while I was focusing on that, the shop’s phone rang.

He went off to wind the two balls for me while she was answering the call, which didn’t take long.

They wanted to know, she told me, trying really hard not to laugh because everybody’s a beginner at the beginning and sometimes non-knitters buy presents. Did we have any red yarn?

Just, red yarn.

High-frequency hearing loss, ie from age or in my case from being allergic to aspirin, wipes out the consonants of speech but not the vowels. So unless you get hearing aids you can hear someone talking but the words themselves are not clear.

I finally opened a box that came Saturday. One expected thing, one unexpected thing.

I pulled the latter out and looked at it, puzzled. I had no idea what this thing was supposed to be and its packaging didn’t say as far as I could tell.

I handed it to him, asking.

It’s a ah eh i uh.

Me, using my best lipreading skills: It’s a camel biter?

Him: A candle lighter. (Electric, he added afterwards.)

Me, wondering how on earth this thing is supposed to match that description: A candle lighter? Do we need this?

Him, grinning and knowing the answer was going to sound silly: Yes.

The camels will be relieved to hear that.

(Photo from two years ago. I had no idea this one was going to be so huge when I ordered my first gerdan, I had no frame of reference yet.)

I wore all-black to church today. I’d asked after one of my friends in Ukraine and had gotten an anguished message back wondering where would they go, whether they would even live, how would they get through this.

I knew in my bones that only the color of mourning would do. And my very large, bright yellow sunflower gerdan: there have been Ukrainian refugees living next door to that church and I wanted them to feel seen. I wanted to bear witness to the importance of supporting the innocents whom American voters just sold down the river. It was my I Protest outfit. But anyway.

There are two people in that congregation who–well, one once showed me her official socks with that name on them.

The monthly senior potluck was this evening and I looked around and thought, hey, look–we’re not the youngest ones anymore!

People were chatting, the hostess was trying to get people to get started; Richard motioned me over to where he had a seat at a table ready for me.

Ms. Socks was to the other side.

Note that she and I do not discuss politics because it would do no good–but I have noted that as her guy’s behavior got worse and worse over these past few years she avoided me more and more, which is a shame, because other than that one (very big) thing I consider us old friends. More and more though with a sense of wistfulness and loss.

Why should I let him of all people call the shots in our personal lives. So I turned to her and asked her about her house and how the remodeling was going.

She seemed surprised that I would want to talk to her, which struck me as terribly sad, but answered my question and we went on to have a normal conversation like it should always be and she enjoyed a bit of my blueberry cobbler, too.

I think Bill of Penzey’s Spices has a point: Cook. Feed people. Love them.

It helped.

Why I usually do short repeats when my amount of yarn is limited, but I didn’t this time–I like that tree motif, I wasn’t ready to quit doing it. Besides, it’s a pun: red woods.

So I thought I’d run the math by him.

Me: See, I’ve used 33 g of the current 100 g and done 15 rows for it so that means I get 45 rows per skein. Maybe 46. It’s 38 rows per motif repeat. I have a full skein after this plus 33 g, left over from Ryan’s baby’s blanket, I started those 15 rows at four rows into leaf set #5, and I want seven sets of leaves. And I bought the yarn–how old is Margo now? Two and a half?–so matching that shade of Ravelry Red would be hard. Do I have enough to do that full last motif?

The resident computer scientist: Your what hurts? No seriously, you’re breaking my brain here. What?

Well, hey, I thought that was all pretty straightforward, but then knitting requires being good at math.

Heh.

Actually, I think that means I’d come up 5 g short plus the cast-off. Alright, let’s see how it blocks out to after the sixth set. Which I’m about to start. (And yes, the eye prefers odd numbers visually. Maybe shorter trees on top for the seventh?)

—

Edit: I just finished the fifth repeat plus a purl row and weighed the yarn: 175 g total left. If 100g=45 rows, then 175g=78.75 rows, two motifs are 38×2=76 rows, plus the castoff. And preferably a purl row beforehand. So: maybe?

May I borrow four and a half minutes of your time to contemplate Beethoven’s Fifth–if Beethoven had grown up in New Orleans. Jon Batiste released this a week ago.

In every note I hear his joy at the success of his wife’s bone marrow transplant two years ago. To life!

I know you’re going through the same grief I am, and if you don’t want to read below, I understand, and may I distract you a moment with a video courtesy of Meg Swansen of SchoolHouse Press.

————-

The price of eggs. The price of gas. (There was a bird flu that killed the chickens and there was a pandemic where nobody was going anywhere so the latter went down for awhile because nobody was buying much of it, and then it went back up when they did. Econ 101.)

A million people died in 45’s gross mishandling of the pandemic. Children were put in cages on hard floors and lost to their parents–even the Nazis did paperwork to document who went where, but not these guys.

The stealing of national security secrets.

The promise to use the military against Americans who protest against him.

The agony Ukraine is feeling.

The malignant narcissist with dementia.

The selling off of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Pebble Mine that will destroy the salmon fisheries forever for a short-term payoff, both of which the Biden administration was able to put the brakes on.

The promised mass deportation. The “enemy within.” The destruction of the rule of law, and it won’t just happen to people who don’t look like those voters.

The demonstrators in Texas today holding up signs claiming they now owned women. And slaves. (Those photos will stalk their lives forever. As well they should.)

The price of a box of eggs.

I have had an intense visual image of the eleven remaining disciples of Jesus staring in disbelief as those thirty pieces of silver were counted out one by one into the grasping hand of the betrayer.