After our remodel, we had a long bare spot in front of the windows along the front walkway. I bought a packet of silver dollar flower seeds on impulse, and scattered them along there and told them basically to fend for themselves, while trying to figure out what to really put there.

Never buy flowering bushes when they’re not actually flowering: the pink azaleas we followed that up with there? Regardless of the tags on the plants, the one on the end turned out to be white, like when a dyer ties the knots too tight on a hank before throwing it in the dyepot. (Guess who learned that lesson?…) Maybe that’s why we never took the white one back out. It fits, somehow.

Meantime, the silver dollars established themselves here and there among the azaleas, particularly here on the corner, with the white azalea behind them, hanging out with the oddball. Their name comes from what their seed pod looks like after the flowers are gone; they’re biennials, coming back year after year. They’re also called Honesty plant. Never knew honesty was a color. And a majestically purple one at that. Curious.

I remember reading once that the color royal purple was, anciently, derived from mollusks, and that it took something like 10,000 of them to produce a pound’s worth of dye; hence, the only people who could afford it was royalty. We, in our day, being able to buy clothing of any color whatsoever, have no idea how privileged we are. I’m sure one could overdye indigo on top of brick-red madder root–and I have seen ancient Egyptian cloth that still had a touch of madder redness to it, thousands of years later–and get a brownish-tinged variant. But a true purple would have been vanishingly rare. (There are natural dyers out there who know far more on the whole subject than I.)

There are artisans in South America who still go to the shore, gather sea snails, squeeze the purple out of them, and then put them back. It washes out of their cloth to a soft lavendar over time, I am told.

At Stitches West a year ago, I bought a half pound hank of Lisa Souza’s handdyed alpaca laceweight dyed in Shade Garden, a soft purple/green/blue mix. I dyed some Misti baby alpaca laceweight in lilac last fall and knitted the two strands together into Kristine’s shawl; recently I took some light blue merino lace yarn to the rest of the hank and made the second one shown here.

I put it on, after blocking it, and felt like royalty indeed wearing Lisa’s work.

First, let me say that by a combination one particular day of chance and of decision on my part–and then hers–this woman and I became friends in an instant, and all was healed. Enough said: I don’t want anyone to realize, oh, her! It’s been 20 years and long gone.

We had just moved 3333 miles, as the moving company bills, and went to church for the first time in our new ward. We had moved from one that had 40 toddlers under the age of four to one that was mostly elderly people and had very few children of any age. Being in a strange place, ours, ages 11 months, 33 months, and just shy of five, were–well, reasonably good and not crying that first day, but not totally silent through the whole meeting, either. They were little kids, plain and simple. Actually, I thought they did a pretty good job of being quiet.

I of all people should understand, and do, what background noise does to make a meeting difficult to follow for older folks with any kind of hearing impairment. I have also learned that sometimes that’s just the way it is, after the hearing aids and the lipreading classes and the what-all-else. You learn patience.

Afterwards, a woman we had of course never laid eyes on before came up to us and gave us what-for for our having disrupted the meeting with our little ones, and ordered us to haul them out next time.

This was absolutely not your normal meet-the-new-folks greeting one encounters in a Mormon church! We managed not to say a stony, Welcome to the ward to you too?

Like I say, there’s a follow-up story, and she, who at the time, it turned out, was going through terrible things in her life that I have never had to go through, and I, eventually became good friends. It required a conscious looking for the good and wanting to move forward. But we both did.

But the flip side to that day, and the reason I tell the tale, is what came from it. It had been one of those moments that epitomizes how small children can be very unwelcome from time to time simply because of who they are, and the hugeness of that encounter in my life to me just then as a thoroughly-isolated stranger made a radical difference to me: I didn’t want any young mom to ever feel like I felt right then. Ever. I wanted every small child to feel treasured and welcomed. So when there’s a new mom at church, I make a point of celebrating her little ones. There’s always a smile and, should it be helpful, a knitted finger puppet in the purse to cheer them and charm their parents.

The last two weeks, there was a woman with a husband and a one-year-old who had just moved in, and I noticed her outfit: bright red, both weeks. Got that color in my stash, cool, so I knitted her a lace scarf from the ball pictured above. Today I gave it to her, putting it in her hands with, “This is just a little bit of cashmere and silk I made for you.” She was wearing a different dress this time, but again it was bright red; clearly a favorite.

She was stunned, she was delighted with the color, she was thrilled at having been noticed when she didn’t really know anybody yet, and thrilled that she mattered to someone enough that I would spend the time and that kind of fiber on her. Every emotion I had hoped she would feel in the moment I gave it to her, she felt. It was intensely gratifying, and a strong reminder of why I do this.

And I have to say, I am grateful that that older woman took out her frustrations on us, all that time ago. Because of how important it made it to me to actively do the opposite. And especially because I know that now, she would want to be having that same positive effect herself; she grew and changed over the years and became a much happier person. And that is something to celebrate most of all. I am so glad and so relieved that I did not lose myself in my hurt and turn away from her and the possibilities she had to offer of friendship after all.

Stanford Hospital holds a concert series in its wide open atrium, and I got an email from Karen Bentley Pollick that she and her friend Dmitriy Cogan would be playing there today, he on the piano and she her violin. Given that she lives on the East Coast now, and that she’s in my book, I–well, I basically moved heaven and earth to be able to go hear her. If you live in the Bay Area, she’ll be playing Sunday as well in San Mateo; details on her kbentley.com website (not to mention access to her exquisite playing).

So I got a chance to show her my galleys with her story in it, which is way more fun than just an email of the story. And I got to show it to her proud mom, visiting from Seattle! Very cool.

Near the end of the concert, my eye doctor suddenly appeared, stopping to watch and listen, leaning on the rail of the floor above us. I caught his eye from way below and smiled hi. Last time I’d been in to see him, he’d told me his mom had taught him to knit, and that he’d done one row. She had never told him what to do next, how to turn the work and continue on, so he didn’t know how and had done just that one row, but–and then he was suddenly shy about being proud of having given it a good try. Hey. I bet it was a great row.

Karen’s old high school buddy was there, and the three women invited me to join them for lunch; quite the honor to be included, and it was my turn for being shy. I thanked them but said I was on my way to go look for some of my old doctors and nurses.

There was one doctor, from last October, that I never did get anything knitted for. It had bugged me. So I went looking, but missed him; he’d been there earlier. I said to the nurses, well, then I’m afraid he doesn’t get to choose a color; generic white it is. We labelled the lace scarf, whom it was for, whom it was from. Dr. B., if you see this, look behind the monitor at the nurses’ station, it’s waiting for you.

And this is what Stanford looks like just outside that atrium. Healing and rest for the eyes, while the music provides healing for the soul. My thanks to every musician who has ever played there. And thank you, Karen, for the heads-up and the invite!

(Last year’s amaryllis, blooming again, late in the season under the skylight in the bathroom.)

I have a friend I owe several favors to, who picked me up last night to carpool to our knitting group. Remember when I posted about bold and red and big? I thought I had just her color. Yeah, well: without showing what they looked like, size or width or pattern or anything, just the colors–because color is everything–I offered her that or that spring green scarf I’d just finished. I kind of pushed the red a bit, I realize in retrospect.

“Well, I really like the green,” she answered. Green it was, and it looked perfect on her. I’m so glad she got what she really liked! Didn’t take long for those lace-knit leaves to go to the right person.

Awhile ago, I bought one skein of Misti baby suri alpaca/silk, knowing that was emphatically not my shade of green, but somehow, it just leaped into my hands anyway. Yesterday, the first day of spring, it leaped onto my needles immediately after the red one and danced up and down, going, me! Me! Maybe it was how the color matched the new leaves outside. I have learned to just go with it, that I will find out soon enough why I needed to have a project in exactly that color ready to go, for… ? Part of the fun is in the anticipation, waiting for the rest of the story to come to be. Right now, I don’t have a clue. Who are you out there that this demanded to be knitted for, that the yarn wouldn’t let me be till I did?

One more scarf, ready to block and send on its way. Somehow, for the first day of spring, it needed to be in a bright color to celebrate.

Last night my husband was posting a link to my book on Amazon on my website, while I was in the other room working on the taxes. I pulled up a window to check how he was coming along, and–hey! Where’s the other photo on my blog entry?

Turns out Blogger had inserted “local host” on it, meaning it showed up on the one computer and nowhere else. Richard fussed with it and couldn’t get it to go up; he finally added the tilted car photo with the wet flower petals all over it, and warned me it had taken him an hour to get that one to work. And he’s a software engineer.

Yeah, well, so, I should have listened. Today, I thought, hey, I have an easy answer to that, and simply re-loaded the photo to Picasa, which is the photography arm of Blogger.

Blogger has lupus. It’s rejecting itself. I got to where, in the drafts, I had his tilted picture and my correct one, side by side, ready to publish. Phew. Now just edit out the tilted one.

And that is when it decided it didn’t want my photo now. Matter of fact, it rejected the whole post. I will take a deep breath and try again later. (But you *can* go order my book from my site now! Not that I’m hinting or anything.)

Edited to add: okay, tried again. It will let me post it with the tilted car but not the other one. Weird.

When our moving van finished up and drove away, 20 years ago, the retired neighbor across the street, who’d been casually watching off and on all day, sauntered over to our side and said wryly, by way of introduction, “I saw them taking a snow shovel off the truck. What do you think you need THAT for??”

Well hey, if it ever snows here, we could rent it out for a hundred bucks an hour and make a killing, right?
(Our tree, the neighbor’s car.)

I had just one skein of a bright red baby alpaca fingering weight from Pacific Meadows Alpacas, bought at Stitches. I had someone for whom it was just the right color–but there wasn’t enough of it. Unless… I put it together with some Jaggerspun Zephyr in garnet, and–perfect! Make it thicker=bigger needles=stretches farther.

I learned via Kaffe Fassett years ago to look at yarns with an eye towards putting two slightly different colors together to create a third. In this case, the silk content and the lighter color of the Zephyr really sets off the PMA’s red.

I don’t remember that I’ve knitted Barbara Walker’s English Lace before; her much-simpler English Mesh lace, which makes for good carrying-around knitting, certainly. Unblocked, this one seemed like an awful lot of extra work to get the same look; blocked, it was, oh, now I see! English Lace is unusual in that it has places where you treat a yarnover in such a way that, instead of creating a large round hole, you’re creating one with a slash through it–kind of an anti-lace warning sign, with its appropriately red slash mark through the circle. Cute.

Three repeats, 27 stitches, size 7mm needles, 7.5″ wide x 53″ long as it lies flat on the floor. Started last night a little before dinner, cast off at one minute after midnight. For a friend who likes bold and red and big (I wish I’d bought a second skein! But it’ll do.)

I don’t know who might be needing to read this, but I have been feeling strongly that I needed to write this down today. I have one memory of my Grandfather Jeppson, who died a young grandfather from the effects of the rheumatic fever he’d had years earlier. It was from the last time I saw him, at three and a half: of sitting cuddled up in his lap, with him rocking me in a rocking chair on a wooden-planked floor. When I was little, I frequently had that image come to mind, and it was as if I were wrapped in his strong arms again. I was deeply loved. It comforted me greatly. As I grew into a teenager, the image came far less often, and I decided there was no way to tell if it had been a real memory or a three-year-old’s remembered dream, given that at the age I’d first experienced it, it would have been hard to tell the difference–and I pretty much dismissed it.

It wasn’t till I got quite a bit older that I realized that it didn’t matter which it was; that it had been a comfort and a feeling of the presence of my grandfather whenever I’d needed it as a child. With that, the memory of remembering it became a comfort to me again, now that I am someone facing what he faced way back then: the knowledge of a damaged body that is not likely to see my grandchildren’s children grow old.

In this life or the next, I do believe we look after our loved ones the best we know how.

I came across a poorly-worded, complicated lace pattern that I really liked and wanted to incorporate into one of the shawls for my book. I’m certainly no beginner, but there was a definite disconnect between what it said and what the results I wanted would be.

I thought of a friend who can knit lace in circles around me (hi, Chris!) and wished it were a time and day I could reach her. But it shouldn’t be so hard… But it was hard, definitely. I thought in frustration, I don’t GET it!!

And found myself, to my surprise, instantly thinking about my Grandmother Jeppson. I had barely known her before she’d passed away. She had headed her local Red Cross chapter’s knitting group during WWII, and once wrote that she felt that if she could just knit enough fast enough for the troops it would somehow bring her three sons home sooner. (They all made it back okay.) Grandmother.

Suddenly, it felt somehow as if she were standing right there over my shoulder. I looked down at the work in my hands. There was a sense of brightening and then a delighted, Oh! I GET it!! I immediately did that pattern in full, correctly, despite the typos and problems in the original. I did it!

I never did put that pattern in my book, though; how to do what I did was not easy to describe, and if my write-up turned out not greatly better than the original, how on earth exactly would I send my grandmother to go help others out?

Every piece of our handknitting carries a history of our days within it.

Sandi is one of the co-owners of Purlescence, and the person who gifted me with that lightweight, collapsible scooter recently. How do you thank someone who offers you your mobility back? I went into her shop last week and bought (among other things) four skeins of Kidsilk Haze and a matching Alpaca With A Twist’s Fino baby alpaca/silk laceweight. I loved how the two strands played off each other.

My son’s doctor blithely told him he would be home within two to three hours after his arthroscopic shoulder surgery. Three hours after, he still had a breathing tube down him, out cold. I knitted and knitted and knitted Sandi’s yarn, keeping the generosity of her spirit present in every stitch as I did. I knit his recovery into those stitches, and of course, he’s fine; it just took patience and time. Like (what else) knitting.

Three days ago, I showed my friend Nancy what I had so far. It was a guess exactly how much the lace would stretch downwards once I blocked it. I thought I had enough; Nancy said no, keep going. So I did a few more pattern repeats, mostly to keep Nancy happy. Then, as long as I was at it, what the heck, I kept working till I was about out of yarn. I blocked it, checked it over, and thought, Great. Now I just knew it was going to be way too long; Sandi is emphatically not a tall person. Twenty-seven inches–on her?

Nancy gave me a lift over to our first time at Purlescence’s knitting group last night. Before we headed off, I showed her the shawl. I was sure I’d blown it, and I told her I was going to start over with another yarn I’d bought from Sandi, so she’d have a shawl that wouldn’t just totally swamp her.

Nancy said, You made this for Sandi. The color will be perfect on her. She will love it. Give this one to her.

You know how sometimes someone with some sense says just what you need to hear?

Yeah. Sandi loved it. Like there was a question?

This is Edgar.

The cop, who’d only been a block away, leaned in the window of my car, where the change drawer and the glove compartment were thrown open and the contents spewed and the mirror completely skewed sideways, and whistled, “He hit you hard!” I have no memory of the second impact, just of a sense of flying airborne through a crazily-kaleidoscoped Alice-in-Wonderland scene. Somebody far away screamed. It was possibly me–I honestly don’t know. Seatbelts, but no airbags: we had held onto the ’88 Accord for teaching our teenagers how to drive without ever worrying about scratches and bumps.

I arrived for my first appointment for testing that was to try to pinpoint where my brain and visual damage was and to set up a therapy program tailored around that.

Rob came into the waiting room. I had the blue version of the Strawberry Pie shawl in my hands, a shimmery silk/wool mix, the one pictured on my website, and to my delighted surprise, he took a moment to admire it and to say how much he loves it when people create something by hand. It was the day before the first anniversary of 9/11, and yet somehow he was fully focused on his patient and fully there for me. I was charmed.

He then put me through the various tests he had at hand, wrote up his recommendations, and handed me off to the person who was to do those therapy sessions.

But that hour and a half with him had a tremendous impact on me: because, not having ever laid eyes on me before, it mattered deeply to him how I did, and he hoped I might recover my balance. His was a warm and soft touch to a hard time in my life. He had no way of knowing, but my accident was the least of it to me just then.

And so, I went back to that office later with a sheep, twin to this one.

I’d gone to a handweavers’ conference and bought, by feel, the softest kid mohair fleece that Buckeye Farm had had in their booth. When I chose it, the owner picked it up in its bag, exclaimed, “Oh! Edgar!” and rubbed a handful of the locks blissfully against her cheek before parting with it. Edgar was her pet, and now I got to go home with his fleece, which was finer and softer than most cashmeres. She tried to show me how to spin it so that the ends of the locks would fluff out a bit from the yarn. Cool.

The brown is baby alpaca, the eyes cashmere. I had two weeks before my next appointment. I wanted a way to tell Rob:

That he heals the people around him in ways he could never know, by who he is and how he holds them in great tenderness in his work. He had no idea I had a friend dying the day I walked into his office, and another friend’s son had just passed. That my own daughter, with ITP, the autoimmune equivalent of hemophilia, had had her platelets drop by 25 to 25 that week, and since she was away at college, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again. My accident was the least of my worries just then. But it was all he knew about.

But somehow, through the gentle words and motions with which he put me through those tests, he made me come away feeling like it would all come out okay. There might be loss, but I could bear up under it now.

Feed my sheep. So I knitted up Edgar into an Edgar for him. I found a card with a beautiful Ansel Adams photograph and quoted that phrase for him: saying, to me, it means, look out for one another. Be there for each other. I thanked him for helping me deal with far more than he could possibly have known, simply by who he was.

And I gave him, as a testimony to the power of his goodwill, the sheep I had knitted for him out of the Buckeye Farm’s kid mohair fleece and two other, nameless animals.

Technical notes on construction: yes, Afton, I made this second one so I could write up the pattern for you, and then I promptly lost the piece of paper before I could enter it in the computer. The bottoms of the legs are single crochet, eight stitches, with the knitted stitches picked up and worked up from there. Bulky yarn, as small needles as you can comfortably work it on, you want it good and dense. The legs are worked separately and put aside, then the main body knitted, adding the legs on as you go. Robert’s was done starting at the tail end. Note that it is far more fun to look at a sheep’s face than its butt as you’re knitting–so I did this one face first. Attach the eyes before you stuff the face with wool roving. Ears are done with short-rowing. One other thing: I tried to make a third sheep with the color scheme reversed, got the head done, and it looked like a Mexican Day of the Dead festival participant. It freaked me quietly out, much though I assured myself it did not, and I never finished it.

The last time I was in that office, Rob showed me his sheep, perched happily at the top of his cubicle for everybody to see. Ansel Adams was on his desk.

There were once three Modesto ash trees towering over our backyard here. One died well before we arrived, and the former owners had left the thick trunk lopped off at about eight feet high. Woodpeckers nested near the top of the dead wood every year, and if you were still, you could watch the parents flitting in zigzags from the branches of the remaining trees above it, never flying directly into the nest but always feinting right, then left, then darting in at the last. Sometimes you could even see them feeding their babies; we held ours up high so they could look in and see, too, from a safe distance.

Those other two trees, though, were attacked by the clouds of unpredatored white flies that hit California not long after we moved here; borers moved in for the kill, and a quarter of one ash fell across our yard and beyond in a storm. They were a danger. We had plans to add onto the house anyway, and they were in the way. Down they all came.

The next spring, our woodpeckers came back. Where were their trees? Hey! And so, they ringed the ornamental pear out front: they pecked a series of closely-connected deep holes, most of the way around, to cut off the flow of the sap. A naturalist explained to me why: it wouldn’t be ready this year, but by the next it would be dead and easier to carve a new nest out of. Just the natural order of things adjusting to the new circumstances. The sap oozing out attracted ants, which would provide food for the birds.

I heard them going at it, but didn’t realize till later where they were and what was happening. The pear tree suffered, badly; half the leaves turned quickly brown and we were sure we were going to lose it. It is hard, at times, for someone who grew up in the woods like I did to live in such a city place as it is here, and I need every tree; I didn’t want to lose this one, too.

The next year about a third of the leaves that came out grew to only half their normal length before giving up and turning a shrivelled brown. There was just not enough sap getting through with that break line in the trunk.

Same thing the next year.

But by now it has been a dozen years. I hope the woodpeckers have long since found a new spot; this tree was far too close to the ground for them anyway, the neighbors’ cats could have reached them where they pecked it. But. Somehow that flowering pear, not much more than a sapling when it got ringed, survived the process, and it grew and bloomed more and more just the same.

And look at it now.

Happy Spring.