Melanie’s passing ran front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times both. As it should. I never knew her last name before, nor that her parents were Ukrainian and Italian.

I told my husband I was going to knit–and I’d wound up the now-dry hank and another one besides and was ready for it–but it was the purple cowl project I picked up, the other being too many strands to untangle if you move it around much. I sat back down at the computer.

That voice.

That intensity, that sincerity. Singing with Johnny Cash, talking to Johnny Carson. Clips of concert after concert.

What surprised me was how instantly the earlier ones took me back to more than just the music of that era: that beautiful velvety boho dress. Just one dress, in sleeves of orange and brown, silky, shimmery and substantial in the skirt, again and again, venue after venue. Clothes were expensive back then and all you have to do is look at closets in older houses to remember that people didn’t own a lot of them. If you wanted something for best you saved up for it first–and it would last.

She did tell Johnny Carson that she’d been told she had to get a new dress, a blue dress. She’d been told not to sing and not to bring her guitar while she was being interviewed.

Carson joked that they must have had the same publicist–and then he invited her to play that guitar.

She was wearing her favorite dress. It was not blue. She wore what she liked.

And then her voice sang her love to the world.

I sketched pine trees. They were going to be pine trees.

They said no they’re not.

Which is why I didn’t knit a stitch of them today: one of them is further along than this one, and I hadn’t planned on needing peach or apricot colors. I had to stash dive, wind off the cone, scour, and hang to dry.

And wait.

I looked wistfully over at my knitting project and then called the good folks at Boomerbenefits.com. It wasn’t just my hearing that made that phone call go on for ~70 minutes, but it was very productive. Richard had a break in his day and was able to talk to her directly with his own questions.

The woman explained that their services are paid by insurers across the country, so no fee to us (and they know they are answerable to them) and made a point of saying if there is every any problem with any of it, to call her. During enrollment? After? A problem with the company? Call her. She’s on it.

Then she emailed more info and asked for more questions.

So, hmm, do I want the extra that pays $5k towards hearing aids after two years when mine cost $8k and last longer than that? Etc.

She told me the brochure PDF from that company says $1k max on aids but they’ve upped it and haven’t changed the description yet, but five it is. Just so I know.

I like this lady!

I was talking to a friend on Sunday. She was wearing a mask due to her husband’s health, which meant my hearing had to depend on my ears only but we did our best.

But one of the things she said was that, like us, her husband hadn’t signed up for Medicare because he had coverage through his work.

He was hospitalized. He had turned 65. His insurance refused to cover the hospital part of the bill on the grounds that Medicare should be covering it.

But nobody tells you that! I wanted to protest.

She also said that if there is a gap in your healthcare coverage and then you sign up for Medicare, you pay a fine–and she emphasized this–every single month for the rest of your life for that.

Medicare was insisting they had had a gap of two weeks.

They had not. But they had to prove it, and she spent hours each time waiting in line at the Social Security office and then the IRS office and then back to the SS one. She had to show them physical proof.

You know those medical cards you get every year from your insurance company? she asked me. SAVE THOSE. They are your proof that you had continuous coverage. Get an envelope, keep them in there, put it in a safe place, but never throw those away and never lose them.

After she got home she emailed me this link. Boomerbenefits.com. Because nobody knows what they’re doing when they suddenly have to decide on what to choose among the bajillion Medicare plans out there while insurance agencies cold-call and spam you mercilessly.

I started trying last year (not too persistently, because it was so discouraging and because I thought the work coverage was fine) to find out what the difference is between Medicare Advantage and Medigap plans and why one would want one or the other and what the difference in costs would be. That site has the point of the whole thing right there front and center: one makes you use a doctor from their plan, while the other lets you go to any Medicare entity whatsoever. That’s Original Medicare. You then pay a Medigap policy not to have to deal with the 20% co-pay bills nor (assuming you choose a good plan) the paperwork.

There are far more details than that but I’m just getting started.

Basically, for the first time in all these months I feel like I have a good source of information. Medicare’s own site was definitely less helpful as far as I was concerned.

So I thought I’d pass the good word on for those coming up on this soon.

(Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”)

I was talking to my mom tonight and at one point she was marveling: her great grandson lives with her.

Right, right…

Looking at time in the other direction, her great grandfather was in the group of pioneers who with their covered wagons went ahead and scouted out the Salt Lake valley and reported back to those gathered in Iowa that it was a good place to move out to.

(A side discussion, yes I remember about the Missouri Compromise balancing free states and slave states, and how the Mormons were growing in number in Missouri enough to risk outvoting the slaveholders and thus overthrowing slavery throughout the country at the ballot, thus their homes were burned, they were shot at, their leader was among those killed, and the governor issued a decree that all Mormons were to be shot on sight. That law stayed on the books until the 1970s, when a drunk driver who killed a young mom tried to get off on the grounds that she was Mormon–which embarrassed the state into rescinding it.

So.

Her great grandfather was born four years after the War of 1812. He was not only later the first mayor of Salt Lake City, he was there before Brigham Young.

And his great granddaughter, now 93, takes good care of herself and still does volunteer work. Her great grandson gives her a lift to the grocery store every week.

A meeting tonight at the church, and someone was quoting our old friend Rob who moved away a year ago:

‘We are all standing in the river of the love of God. Let’s make it a work party with shovels and pickaxes and clear out those channels for the water to reach others.’

It’s love that makes the difference. It’s the love that is what it’s all about.

And we know that, we all know that, but the discussion that followed where people told of people who’d made a difference to them made such a difference.

The wild violets of my childhood, the irises out back, purple flowers it is.

The stash cones said cashmere/silk but turns out they are a grabby, snaggy, nubbly cashmere/tussah silk. Not bombyx. And super thin, so I’m using four strands in the two shades, two and two. The effect is quite pretty in real life.

Three tree trunks here, one river, two sandy sides to it, another tree trunk the other side, random boulders at water’s edge, and scattered around, many with their individual strands rather than carried all the way across were twenty bleeping four-stranded purple snaggy flowers.

Even though I was pulling each strand through every time I changed colors, those still snarled and I spent over an hour doing a single row.

Till I gave up and broke parts of the tangled wad off. It takes a lot to get me to do that but those things needed a time out. I could wind more ends in later if I had to to make up for it.

Turns out I hadn’t noticed that I’d already finished most of those violets and all I had to do was run their ends in and now they were sitting there primly waiting for it.

After that the whole thing straightened up and flew right down the needles. Three flowers I can handle. There may be more later. We’ll see how it looks and what the eye will demand.

Four rows today, I figure about 320 to go. Eighty days? Let’s see if I can beat that.

Four rows, close to a thousand stitches, two hours, new colors in seven places, making it up as I go along, I love how it’s coming out and I want to knit some more–

–on something else.

Where I don’t have to make any decisions for the rest of today other than what to start off with. An ordinary, soothing, calming little portable knit. I’m on it.

Edit: Coming back after a bit of stash-diving to say that the purple cashmere/silk dk from Stitches 2019 is now an inch’s worth of soft cowl, and it will be a great foil to the intensity of the intarsia.

Tart cherries out of the freezer, pie into the oven, dinner on the table, good times.

We were waiting for it to finish baking. Then he told me a story that, if he told me forty years ago well it’s new all over again to me now because I sure didn’t remember it.

I had made some reference to the Hostess Fruit Pies of our youth: they sold them in the vending machines in the dorms but I couldn’t afford them on my budget, and they were always, always sold out anyway. I managed to snag one twice my entire freshman year–but that’s okay, since they didn’t have more than about a single actual cherry apiece in them. (My mother was a master of pie baking and those were always such a disappointment.)

He looked at me funny. They had cherries!

Was he sure?

He was.

Did he have a lot more of them than I had to make that observation by?

So that’s when he told me.

He was a teaching assistant in the computer science lab and people were constantly coming to him for help. He told me, The problem is people think computers are, are, magic! It’s ‘the computer’s not working,’ not, I told it something wrong.

GIGO! I said. I remembered that phrase! Been a long time since I’d heard it, though: Garbage In Garbage Out re computer commands.

So he would ask them, Tell me what it’s not doing for you. Then when they explained, without even going and looking he’d tell them, I bet you a cherry pie that the problem is in the…

He told me, They’d have like a typo in their code that they were sure they didn’t have; it’s easy to do, you just have to find it. Or something like that. Once they had to explain what the problem was he knew they could find it, they just needed to know they *could* find it. His job was to help them learn that, not do it for them.

And he gave them a little extra incentive to want to. Plus he got a hand pie out of it.

I could just picture some poor sod hitting every vending machine on campus looking for a danged cherry Hostess.

He told me, I never–not once–lost that bet.

Then he mentioned an old friend of ours at the next grad school who said to him one day, Every time you come in here and we talk I always, always find the bug. You never tell me what it is. You never go looking for it. But after you leave I always find it. How do you do that?!

The answer was, (You find the confidence and then) You think it through. That’s how.

And with that, we decided not to wait till our Definitely Not Hostess tart cherry pie had set, much less cooled down. Straight out of the oven. A little whipped cream for a little cooling and we dove in while it was still, frankly, a bit soupy.

We figured out we wanted it right now enough not to let that bug us.

Oh you guys. Look what I found. If she doesn’t have your breed of dog she’s probably working on it. There are some cats along the bottom row of the first page of patterns.

That Chinese Crested Cup Cozy is hysterical–but then there’s the gray Poodle that looks like Keith Richards wearing a headband.

Now we just need some knitted ones. Oh wait–a chocolate bar one!

The new intarsia afghan: I promised myself a minimum of two rows a day no matter what else might happen. And so a boulder in the river is almost done and a tree trunk has started growing on the bank, but it’s all just barely begun.

Meantime, last winter’s atmospheric river pattern is returning. I will try not to complain about the cold because I know what the real thing is and how many people would rather have to drive in ours than shovel theirs. Brrr. Stay safe out there, you guys.

Which brings us (with thanks to Margo Lynn) to the results of some snowplow naming contests; my favorite is CTRL SALT DELETE, but Cleerance ClearRoad Survival’s pretty good, too. CNN link here. Catch My Drift?

Oh, *I* know how to make a pompom! said the woman on the plane at Thanksgiving, and I rather regretted having cut and run both ends in because that left her with less yarn to work with.

I thought of her as I didn’t cut the yarn just now.

But I really do need to finish it. You never know when it’ll need to be right ready to go.

Years ago there was an article about a woman who got a McArthur Genius Grant that made it possible for her to continue her research into why some women get so ill in pregnancy that they can’t keep food down. Or certain types of food.

One of the things I remember was her delight that that money meant she could indulge in buying papayas, her favorite–and not even have to worry about the cost! I always wondered if she ever got pregnant after that and if she could eat those while she was. Because you know sometimes life has a twisted sense of humor like that.

So here’s my Genius-wannabe take on another aspect of womens’ health: why does insomnia become so prevalent after menopause?

When our second child was born, my mother-in-law came to town to help out after my own mom had left, and one of the things my MIL did was to get up when the baby cried at night, wait while I nursed him, and then show up in the doorway and tell me to go back to bed while she burped and changed him.

Sometimes I was desperately grateful for the break, sometimes I didn’t actually want (though I would never have said it) to hand him off because it was my alone time with him without a two year old bashing a book in my lap while the babe was in my arms nursing demanding that I read to her (ie, pay attention to ME, Mommy, ME!) but I knew my MIL’s time in which to get to make those offers was short, so of course I let her have some baby time too. Zzzzzz.

I couldn’t believe she would wake up like that for me, night after night the week she was there. That she was willing to wake herself up and be sleep-deprived along with me when she didn’t have to be.

What follows is in no way meant to downplay that sacrifice on her part because of course that was far, far more than rolling over, looking at the clock, and rolling one’s eyes at it.

But here’s my theory: that evolution designed us to help the next generation survive those first few days or weeks or whatever of motherhood and get more rest so that there would BE a generation after that, while increasing the bonding between all the generations at that most tender of times.

Which is why I was telling my stupid body at 2:34 a.m. (and 2:36 a.m. the night before that) that the youngest grandchild is now four bleeping years old. There’s nobody to go help in the night. Knock it off, willya!

The doctor started her day by making mine: the biopsy results were in, and they were negative.

I was getting ready quickly because there was a funeral at 10:00 and I was picking up a friend who lived in the opposite direction, and one is not late for those.

Agnes was 87 and had passed quietly in her sleep.

When we moved here, we were young parents far away from family. Agnes was this tiny woman from Puerto Rico who loved to laugh, who with her sweet accent called me Daughter, so I called her Mom. We would laugh some more when I would say Mom and we would see someone who didn’t know us do a startled double take and try not to stare while trying to figure it out. Good times.

Her son and daughter-in-law had toddlers in the nursery at church just like we did, and I remember their Nathan was always looking out for his little sister. Protecting her. Helping her. Being her big brother was something he took great pride in. They were so adorable together.

The whole family moved to the next city over a few years later.

Nathan, at twelve, was made an honorary fireman by the firefighters there while he was fighting cancer.

And here I was today, in that same building where his funeral had been attended by enough firefighters that their red trucks parked lengthwise had filled the back of the parking lot.

His mother was so inspired by the loving care her son had gotten that she went back to school and became a nurse at that hospital so she could be that and do that for the next families walking in those shoes.

After the remembrances, the laughter, the heartfelt musical solo that left my face mask damp, I talked to my old friends about their mom.

And found myself asking one 30-something a question he probably had not been asked in a very very long time.

Are you Nathan’s brother?

He was.

I told him how Nathan had always looked out for his sister, and his face just–someone remembered! Nicole, he answered, eyes moist. Yes. Yes he did.

When we love someone they are part of us forever. His grandmother will be remembered. His older brother is remembered, and now he knew that. The good that we do does in fact live on.

So, there’s two ways to do it, he was saying: take twenty years while you carefully weigh every possible variation of every possible part or event or choice–or build fast go smash blow things up and learn and then go do it again.

Like Elon Musk on the latter? I asked.

Exactly. NASA vs SpaceX.

This from a man who’s quite proud of having been part of a software group that worked on the Mars Rovers, so I guess he does have some idea of what it’s like to work with NASA, actually. (You should have seen his excitement over that perfect landing. But I digress.)

He was thinking I’d Musked it, but, no, not at all. I explained that (while knitting lots of hats and a few cowls) I hadn’t just dithered over it these last three or four months–I’d drawn, redrawn, googled for images for inspiration, drawn some more, but I just couldn’t picture it in my mind; that brain function was lost to injury years ago.

I told him, I pulled out the–remember when I made that landscape of Alaska in a completely impractical baby blanket for Lillian, out of baby alpaca and silk, and then made it over again in washable wool? I still have the original. I looked at it again today and again worked out how I could riff on it.

I even dreamed the silly project a few nights ago and got some of that visualization down and it has stayed with me.

I had collected so much cashmere for it from Colourmart’s half-price sales (and had quite a few lace weights plied into the weight I wanted for an extra $5. The offerings are few this month but there are some.)

So I felt like I had NASA’d the thing to death. I had long had the bottom edge finished and waiting.

But what it came down to was, I was afraid of it. I was afraid after all this build-up of totally botching the thing. (Thinking of Carolyn’s tire swing that I embroidered lawn scuff marks under so it would not look like–yow and never mind and I was thrilled when one of her neighbors marveled in delight, Is that the tire swing?!)

It felt like a huge triumph today when, first the Alaska, then pulled out the latestest sketch, the yarn, then lined the balls up together, okay that no no that one okay and that and put that back that no that’s going to be sky not river that won’t go but that one…

…and at long last I committed to it and sat down and knitted that first row of color work. It felt like cutting into one’s first steek (man, could someone who writes Autocorrect go learn how to knit?) But it just didn’t have to be that hard. At all.

I’ve wanted to do a creekside and it has wanted to be a mountain landscape for all this time.

Mountains it is.

For the first inch, anyway, unless it decides otherwise–proving that my yarn is still the boss of me–but I think. I think. I’ve got it and I can take it from here.

(Let’s draw it in colors rather than purl stitches, and change those antlers) okay, where should I put the elk?