And to think I considered not going to that dinner.

I had biopsies–“just one more?” the doctor said apologetically this afternoon–to rule out uterine or endometrial cancer. Probably just autoimmune related but worth making sure.

I was bleeding, I was tired, all my body wanted to do was rest, or barf, and what on earth that had to do with anything from that procedure I do not know.

But there was to be a get-together of half a dozen women friends this evening that I’d baked a chocolate torte for. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks and I knew that it would be energizing to go. I had a ride.

Man. We had such a good time. I feel so great. Laughter really is the best medicine.

And everybody took a piece of leftover torte home to their husbands so they wouldn’t feel too left out.

I walked up to the tall drop box at the library as an older woman was coming up from the other direction. I got there first, read the instructions plastered on the thing, figured out where/how you open it–and then couldn’t quite tell for sure if my ballot and Richard’s had gone all the way down inside there and out of retrievable reach or not. That thing is designed not to let anything in that shouldn’t be in there but a few years ago I did encounter one so overstuffed (even though it was emptied every hour) that there were edges of a few envelopes poking out.

So I was hunching down to see below its protective overhang while tapping with my fingers in that very tight space to make sure they’d actually fallen. Go on, git!

At that point the other woman arrived. She chuckled as she watched me.

We had ourselves a small celebration as our eyes met that we were there together making our voices heard. It didn’t matter what each other’s ballots said, it was the fact that we got to say it and we got to witness our fellow American speaking up alongside us and the power of that shared humanity and the power of having our say was so joyful.

Smiles, a sentence or two, and then having made instant friends on the spot we nodded a happy good day to each other and headed back out to the rest of our unknowable lives.

The power of suggestion while eating lunch and looking up.

Below was a line of dark, dark cloud with its upper edge gone wavy on the wind current, above it, another dark dark cloud with its lower edge likewise as wobbly as a Romaine leaf edge. And in between so much brightness bursting out of the bun!

A sun sandwich.

If you take a bite does it rain tomato seeds? (Looking at that waiting Burpee’s packet calling out to me.)

Another week, another row of trees ascending the hill. Slowly but surely.

And on an intermittently rainy day it was nearly reaching my ankles as I knit, keeping me warm. I am so enjoying this project.

I once saw a very old cookbook in a used bookstore with the exciting news printed across its upper cover that, Yes! It had recipes! For this rare tropical fruit. Are we excited?!

Bananas.

I remember that every time I think–or used to think–how glad I am that rambutan is so rare. Not so sure about that now; dragonfruit (is that a transliteration? Marketing?) is showing up in the local Safeway these days. I haven’t started carrying an epipen to restaurants but the day could come. The memory of my mouth and throat being on fire and my airway closing so close to entirely shut like that–yeah, you don’t risk that again.

I have family with allergies to foods they have to actively avoid on a daily basis, far more than I ever have to deal with, so I read this with great interest.

The FDA has approved a new med that interrupts the inflammatory cascade, stopping it from becoming fatal. That doesn’t mean go eat a peanut butter sandwich, but.

Being able to eat out without fear on the menu. That’s huge.

Man, am I glad my taxes help pay for medical research and oversight and, as a dusty old page for Democracy declares in Article 1, “provide for…the general welfare.”

The fourth row of peach trees on the left is coming along…

Wow. Linda Greenhouse nailed it.

When a woman wants an abortion, for medical reasons or social no matter how dire, it’s her fault and her problem.

When a couple is denied in vitro while trying to have a baby, there is a man being denied what he wants–and that is why Republicans in Alabama and the like are scrambling to affirm and reinstate in vitro in spite of their Supreme Court judge’s invocation of anti-Constitutional theocracy re zygotes.

I will say it again, the Mormon Church’s official stance on abortion is that it is between a woman, her doctor, and her God. Nobody else’s opinion should rule re pregnancy but the one who has to live it.

He asked us, and nobody knew.

He asked them, and they knew who.

He grew up where I did and went to the same Cabin John Regional Park that we knew well.

They changed the subject (I remember that discussion and thinking, but that’s not what he’s asking, folks) and talked about climbing in the fighter jet or riding the train. I silently remembered being able to watch a beehive at work from inside the train building and being reassured the bees could only exit to outside.

Everybody remembered the Porky the Litter Eater‘s trash-mouthing: you push a button and you get to hear the recording of Porky telling you that he likes to eat trash. You put paper in his mouth and it whooshes away. I remember us kids standing in line to get a chance to feed him and listen to his loud Oink oink oink!

And there was a totem pole.

As a kid I wasn’t sure what to make of all those faces looking woodenly over us: did they approve? The grownups said it was carved by hand, and that was cool, so, okay.

So here’s this guy who paid more attention to it than I ever did, who now lives in Alaska and credits some of his interest in the place to that totem pole, and who had always wondered what the story was behind how a children’s park just outside Washington, DC got one installed. A genuine Native totem pole. What it had meant to–somebody, enough to get it there.

Fifty-eight years later the history of it seemed lost to time.

So he posted to a group in Alaska, and right away got, My father-in-law helped carve that! They had not only not forgotten there, they still had the program from the ceremony.

Alaska Public Media has the story. And a photo of the guy at Cabin John Park, and man does that take me back.

So then I found this description of why totem poles were built and what they represent. The art of creating them started making a comeback after it finally became illegal to loot them and sell them to museums out from under the communities.

The Cabin John one was commissioned and paid for and that father-in-law got to work on it as an 18-year-old apprentice. I hope he made many more. I just love that he was right there when his daughter-in-law got to tell him, Hey, Dad, people in Maryland want to know about that one you made them!

It…looked like maybe a sunflower plant was coming up in the fabric pot I’d cleared the dead ones out of? But in December?

It had its own take on that.

Huh. I was in the middle of emptying and getting rid of those pots; they do help plants grow great root structures as advertised but they dry out every day and we just can’t spend water like that here. But I decided that one stayed for now because I was curious–which was easy to do as I left it on its own. This rainy season was off to a worryingly slow start (even if it’s made up for it since.) But still, there it was, and in that fast-drying environment no less. I tried to move the pot under the safety of the awning–but even though it was not tall, the roots had grown through and into the soil, and they held. Ah. Now I understood. It stayed.

We had frosts, and of course the low light of winter. It survived.

According to The Internet That Thinks It Knows All, sunflowers can take 25F temps as long as it doesn’t stay that way too long; the flowers and buds won’t bloom nor produce seed, though.

And yet. The big bud on top, the one that took every frost, it’s even trying to seed, too. So we’ll see how it goes. But of all my summer plants, to see this one come up, to watch its uncommon and unexpected resilience against the coldness and the diminishing of light, it does me good to see that it is the flower of Ukraine that made it through the winter. Blooming, despite all that says it can’t now. Because that is simply what it’s going to do. 

Form signed, face normal, days’ worth of intermittent fever over, and back to the Social Security office at long last.

This time, a mom with two kids came in and the younger one was getting antsy. My specialty. A pink panda and a hippo and the mom and I made friends on the spot.

After weeks and weeks of carrying it around I finally got that purple cowl to the point where I just need to finish the repeat it’s on, bind it off and call it done.

They seemed better staffed this time and they had the thirteen people ahead of me out in less than an hour.

The woman who handed me that form to fill out last time was dour and efficient. The guy who took care of me this time was young, cheerful, helpful, and efficient.

I walked out of there so giddy at having the thing done done done! that it surprised me. I hadn’t realized it had been bugging me that much. One letter in the mail from them and the classic Medicare+supplement plan will officially be a go.

As my friend Donna marveled out loud to me yesterday, How did *we* get to be the older ones?

And then, just before getting in my car, I told the middle-aged guy who was struggling with a walker and trying to get his dad out that the door to the building was a long way down on the other side and the parking over there was open now, including handicapped spaces. He might want to drive over there instead.

He thanked me very much and was putting the walker back in the trunk with his dad’s door closed again as I turned my wheel and out onto the street.

Eleven years. So she was 79 when she drove here from Woodside.

Mary (her website) was a musician, a composer, and a woman much admired for her gentle graciousness. She was also a knitter. That post is about the day we got the call that my mother-in-law’s cancer had finally taken her, and Mary’s showing up for us, having no idea, meant so much.

She was 90. Her funeral yesterday was overflowing with people come to pay their respects. I went, but there were so many stories to be told by the speakers that I just could not wait to mingle afterwards; I absolutely had to get home and take my next antibiotics dose. I’m not messing up on those, and I didn’t have it with me.

Thus my surprise at church today when I did a double take, stopped dead in my tracks in astonishment, and then threw myself into Kim’s arms. Then Karl’s. Thirty-two years since they’d moved to Colorado, thirty-two, our kids were babies together! But they had come. Because of Mary and all the love she had brought into their lives, all these years later, they had to come.

We’d lived here about six months when Karl had mentioned to someone that the person they were talking about was actually his great-grandfather. Richard heard that and went, wait–that’s my wife’s great grandfather! And that’s how we found out we were second cousins.

And old friends too, catching up. Man, it felt so good.

One last gift from our Mary, and you could just see her smiling up there over it.

Mid-afternoon we found ourselves having the first warm day of the year along with our first peach blossoms. It was 75F.

I celebrated by knitting a few more of my own on the left after snapping this picture (a bit scrunched together on the 40″ needles.) Side edges to be added later.

Since I wasn’t the first patient of the day this time and I happened to be at a point in the afghan where it had fewer strands than usual, I decided to take it with me. I figured there would be more waiting time. (There was.) I don’t usually consider it a portable project but I wanted to–show off, yes, but also to sort of introduce myself with it now that we were seeing each other for the third time: this is who I am. This is what I do.

The lab report had come in this morning. Staph.

I am really lucky it responded to those antibiotics. I promised I absolutely was going to continue to follow through to the end on them.

She worked on the site some more and I’m to come back next week and the next and to wear this tape over my eyebrow for a month. It absorbs the topical antibiotic for you while protecting the incision.

I have wondered if she’s blamed herself for my picking up that infection three weeks after that biopsy. But it was in no way her fault. She had prescribed that same ointment then and I’d thought, A, it’s just a pinprick, B, antibiotic overuse is not something I want to contribute to, and C, I’m allergic to so many of those that it would just blow up and itch and we wouldn’t know for sure if it was an allergy or what and why go through all that.

Actually, in normal life I’m really good at following doctor’s orders or speaking up with questions but wow did I blow it on that one. I’m using the stuff now, that’s for sure.

Given how much she had exclaimed over the afghan when she walked in, I totally had my confirmation re knitworthiness.

So as she was getting ready to go, trying not to take too much extra of her time I told her that I’d finished this one this morning (I’d finally run the ends in) and then offered her a choice: a soft Mecha hat in earthy oranges and purples with an Arrows lace pattern to it or a leaf lace infinity scarf in a soft off-white. That one was cashmere. (I didn’t say the secret-knitter’s-word cowl because I’d had to explain that an afghan meant a blanket. Her accent is slight but that meaning for that word had escaped her education to that point. And that was okay.)

She chose the cashmere, as I was sure she would, swooning over the both of them and in disbelief that I was sharing it with her.

And now she will never have to wonder how I feel about her work. She cares and she’s good at what she does and man did it feel great to be able to offer that view of herself back to her.

I thought about it for about a nanosecond, but, nah, you don’t want to see a picture.

In the morning I’ll be back at the doctor’s who did that little bit of surgery. I’m hoping to get a little less Frankensteined.

She sent me the new biopsy results in great detail, some of which I will have to run past the family microbiologist for translation. Basically, it was a benign tumor of a hair follicle with the complications we already pretty much figured out–inflammation and infection, as I read that. But she made sure I knew that that particular one was never going to turn cancerous. Even though, rarely, that general type can.

Having had a squamous-celled growth removed from that same eyelid decades ago, that was very good to hear.

I’m knitting all these peach and apricot trees and wishing for summer fruit.

So: take a bag of frozen fruit, berry mix, peaches, cherries, whatever grabs you. A typical one here is 12 ounces. Mix about a tablespoon of cornstarch (depending on preference, size of the bag, juiciness of the fruit after thawing–it’s all a guess anyway) with sugar. A quarter cup sugar with 12 ounces of tart berries begged for ice cream, a generous third cup sugar was too sweet for me and he thought it was great. But I interrupt. Sugar+cornstarch, then pour in your bag of frozen fruit and mix it all up really well in that two quart bowl made by Mel and Kris since you want to do visual justice to the goodness to come.

Cover with a plate and microwave. Stop and stir every few minutes, especially at the beginning. Remember that the cornstarch will thicken as it cools, especially if you put enough in but the amount really doesn’t matter all that much, you just want to make sure you get that fruit good and cooked.

Spoon it into pretty bowls. Mentally thank friends Kris and Mel again.

Take the good excuse you have right there for buying those Trader Joe’s cinnamon graham crackers that are so crunchy they shatter: break them up over the top of your bowl of what’s essentially now pie filling. Eat it before they get soggy.