Day four: without thinking about it, I had both eyes open while knitting, whereas yesterday I kept the one closed without even thinking about it.

It made me think about it: I suddenly realized what was bugging me so much. The visual image at center, such as it was on the right, didn’t quite entirely come together properly with the left. Like one hand was off by an inch or so towards and away from me from each other, like trying to put a torn page back in the book and getting it wrong. It was so strange. I had to force myself to keep going. But Aftober, the annual finish your UFO by the end of the month race, is on and I want this afghan finally done. By the third long row I let go and just went with it and let it amuse me.

One more week till I can wash my hair. That eye cannot get wet.

One more week till I can take the hospital warning bracelet off announcing I have a gas bubble in my eye.

I was told I could not go above 1000′ elevation. If I wanted to go to Santa Cruz, I absolutely was to take the long way around across the valley and not over the mountains, and the doctor said with more emotion than he probably intended, Don’t! Go! to Tahoe!!

I wondered which one of his patients had decided to use his medical time off to go skiing with an eye mask on and what had possessed him, but apparently someone did and it was a notable enough case that all such patients at that clinic are now specifically forbidden Tahoe. High elevation changes the gas. You do not want to mess with what that gas bubble was put there to do.

I wondered what on earth people who live in Denver do.

Poking around, I found a story of an elderly woman who’d come to NIH because she’d had retina surgery and then a cardiac event. The ER saved her life but didn’t know about her surgery and so didn’t contact the surgeon, and the treatment they used forced her gas bubble into her brain. It recovered. But her eye was blinded.

The bracelet says, Contact opthalmologist on reverse side before treatment.

I took a peek at the inside edge.

Nobody had filled it out.

I was amused. (The doctor probably wouldn’t be.)

Day two at the post-op appointment: the nurse covered my left eye and asked how many fingers he was holding up.

All I could guess at was that he was standing in front of me. Pretty sure. I mean, his voice was, so…

Day three, at lunch today I took the patch off to put drops in. I looked at the mirror. Hey! I could tell where the mirror was and where my reflection was, even if I couldn’t have told you for sure it was mine or even a person except that, well, duh, context and all that. But still. What a difference! We’re up to lava lamp vision.

Three hours later I was sitting knitting. Mostly with my right eye closed because it was such a distraction.

Something caught my attention and I stopped. Closed my left eye. Looked at the afghan in my lap through all the little holes in the eye patch, and I imagine that helped with the focus?

But I did: I saw the brown trunk of the tree. Where it split off into three parts, the limbs climbing up from there–it wasn’t sharp but I saw it! With my operated on eye! I couldn’t make out the peach stitches nor the leaves at all, just that I could see the darker-ness of the limbs against–whatever was where.

I had to go back after dinner to do it again to convince myself I really had seen the form of the tree.

And because, having gotten this short small taste of what real blindness can be like, I wanted to celebrate all over again that it had changed so much so fast.

They had me come back today to measure the pressure in my eye and make sure all was well and for me to ask questions.

Was it normal to see, when we turned the lights off last night, a blazing half-circle of light?

The retina specialist chuckled. Yes, it was. And this and this and this: everything was as it should be. But be careful: he counseled sitting on the couch and acting like a slug. Yes, knit, definitely, no, four pounds of wool is not too heavy a project.

Michelle and I were walking to the parking garage when I suddenly stopped. Coming as we were going…

Mrs. M? I asked.

She didn’t quite stop but she didn’t quite answer.

Shirley M? I asked again. The woman who had asked me about twenty years ago, Do you remember in this neighborhood in 1952 when….  And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet. She had expressed annoyance at my making her feel old.

She stopped. Wait–that name I’d just said. That WAS her!

I saw that I needed to explain who I was. ‘Your old neighbor across the fence’ didn’t quite do it at first. As Michelle described the encounter later, “She was a little confused.” But she eventually caught on and was delighted. We got to meet her son, who was bringing her in just like my daughter had been bringing me in and who was clearly delighted that his mother’s outing was turning into a reunion with the old neighborhood. (He was grown and gone by the time we showed up in the late 80’s.)

I knew she’d moved into assisted living when her husband had died; email sharing of stories is different from in person, though–and clearly, things had changed since that conversation. She told me again.

They both wanted to know if I’d met the new people who’d bought their house, and it was clearly important to them. I said I’d dropped off homegrown tomatoes but so far, I’d missed them.

Which means I need to go try again, and not only that, I now have an excuse to show up to do so: Mrs. M wants me to make sure you’re properly welcomed into the neighborhood.

And all was right in her world in those moments. It was great to see.

What I remember of the two surgeries while coming under the knife: the comfort of the unseen voice saying, This is Dr. M, right before he got to work on the cataract.

And then the comfort of the unseen voice, This is Dr. R, just before he started to work on the retina.

I was drugged out enough at that point that nothing else really entered in, but those two moments, those two decisions to connect with their patient, felt, when they did it, like it made all the difference, and that stayed with me.

There are no words.

My first thought when I heard the news was to my friend who had been through this before and how it must feel for her to see this again. Her cat had suddenly taken ill and instead of going to services she had taken him to the vet on emergency, where he died in her arms, while, unknown to her…

Someone in my Zoom knitting group tonight asked, with others nodding, Didn’t they have security?

The frank answer could only be, Mormons haven’t personally been put through this before.

(Well, the then-governor of Missouri ordered all of us to be shot on sight because we were threatening to outvote the slaveholders which would toss out the Missouri Compromise and end slavery hopefully peacefully, but that’s been awhile.)

I mentioned that our own ward had once been picketed by a group looking to intimidate.

But they got our start time wrong and almost nobody was there. Then there was a sudden hard downpour of cold rain and who was there to even notice they were even there? They left.

Then the sun came out for everybody arriving for church in the hour after that.

If only…

Meantime, my retina and cataract surgeries are in the morning. I have heard about bubbles and head angles and one person lying in bed for a week and a week of not looking up and not lifting anything–there’s a maybe on all of that, it depends on the doctor and the specific procedure–and I have no real idea what the next few days are going to be like.

To my sister Anne: don’t look.

I’m debating adding a splintered-off base of the tree to the end of that top log on the beaver lodge, and if I get really determined and if it works out okay, maybe the beaver itself. Maybe. And add a stitch to the turtle’s front leg on the far side to balance it a little better. Etc etc.

And of course eventually it will have a border all around. I don’t usually do white for a border but in real life it matches bright for bright and I quite like it. The only thing is that the gauge of that particular yarn came out looking looser than the others in the body of the thing. But hey. Ribbing can have its own character.

My memories of West Virginia are of gleaning huge peaches two weeks after the commercial harvest (for $2/bushel if I remember correctly, Mom?) and of visiting Harper’s Ferry and standing above where our Potomac River and their Shenandoah River come together in a huge rush of water.

I knitted in that little beaver lodge anyway. Just to let nature speak up for itself. 

Curious. This Supreme Court just in effect nullified its own Citizens United ruling.

Because it ruled in a shadow docket case, meaning one for which there were no hearings, was not aired publicly, with a decision that does not even have their names signed to it to hold themselves accountable to the public–that the president can decide to withhold funds that Congress had decided on a bipartisan basis to spend.

In this case, on foreign aid.

One of my high school friends was laid off from her USAID job months ago and she could tell you many a story about just how effective a peacemaker we were in the world in helping people learn to farm and feed each other better and in establishing public schools where there had been none. She saw it. She lived it. We were perceived as Good Samaritans. The Anya apricots that I go on and on about how intensely flavored and juicy they are? That’s how that original seed ended up here: a farmer from California working on behalf of the State Department befriended people along the Silk Road, who offered him their best to show the world what they had and that not everything there was about war. The good that’s done when individuals help individuals across cultures and backgrounds goes both ways and USAID, with little publicity or public knowledge, is how it happens.

And every year for decades, Congress has voted from both sides to sustain those efforts.

Power of the purse? Separation of powers? Constitution? Voting as a representative of one’s constituents on the matter? Pffft, who needs that. Wiped away with the swipe of an anonymous pen.The president controls all. And you know the only thing this one cares about money is how much of it goes to him.

So, since they can pay for nothing and do nothing now no matter how they vote, why would anyone donate to the campaign of any member of Congress again? (Or at least, of those who are going along with this.)

Besides, there are so many of them. Why bother when there are only six to have to deal with on the Court who have shown that they can be bought off.

The third and final peach tree is four rows into the untangle all five doubled strands stage. The peach is 50/50 cashmere/silk and sliiiiiiides right out. The grabby twisty overspun cashmere tree trunk, not so much.  Photo taken at the point where I only had those two left to extract from each other before the next go-round. It’s getting there!

Last week I went in with Richard to his appointment with the wound care specialist.

The doctor barely made eye contact with him, and me not at all. He dealt with the problem at foot, competently so. All business, all seriousness.

He had a follow-up Tuesday this week and again I came in in case there was anything the doctor wanted to teach me about taking care of those injured toes, since he had changed the protocol a little and who knows if he might again.

This time, I was wearing Galina’s gerdan with the small beaded bird perched on a Ukrainian bandura, singing its heart out. (Wow, that article: there was a time when you could be shot by the Bolshevik Russians for being a Ukrainian playing one. No wonder Galina used that imagery!)

The doctor came in, nodded hello, and did a slight double take as he seemed to be taking in the heart of that bird for a moment. Something in him seemed to let go of I could only guess what, and he exhaled.

He talked to us. He made eye contact this time. He took off the bandaging. He saw that all the open wounds but one were now healed and that that one was making progress, and that was very gratifying to him: last week he had said this could still go either way (meaning he could still lose those toes), but now, six weeks in, he said with clear relief that we were finally getting there.

We have an apparently fairly large mystery yardguest whose new digs were discovered today. I wondered whether I could borrow the neighbor’s dog to bark at it, since the thing probably moved in here to get away from it over there. Although, for the dog’s sake, maybe not: it reminded me of a friend’s tale of skunks having territorial fights under her living room to the point of soaking her rug above them with their spray. Let’s not.

The dirt got shoved back to where it had come from and a large object was placed on top of the hole to encourage the thing to move elsewhere.

Definitely needs a trail cam.

But meantime I got six rows of afghan done so far plus a new cowl cast on at the doctor’s waiting room that I continued on while waiting for his doctor across town, and the thing is 1400 stitches along already.

So what I’ve been told is that if your apricot tree’s growth tips get disturbed for any reason they stop right there and that’s it till the next spring: no side branching from below that point, no new leaves nor fruiting tips, nothing. And it’s easy to tell, because the new leaves and limbs start out red.

It went from pot to ground in the spring and almost immediately that was that. Would the limbs or trunk stretch out a bit, at least? I took a measuring tape out every so often but the answer was nope. August was the same as April. I figured after four years in a large pot, it was concentrating on stretching out its roots in their new digs. I certainly hoped so.

We had a heat wave of a few days and then a couple of cool nights and maybe it decided to call it good, that’s a winter, it’ll do. Maybe?

Because a few weeks ago it started doing this. Not the whole tree, just these two limbs. A few days ago  the upper one started adding a side shoot.

The lower one, meantime, got its end chomped off by a bug and I thought, Well, that’s that, then.

It took a deep breath for a couple of days and then sent out a do-over from the node.

I don’t know what I don’t know why it’s doing all this now, but I like it. Did it get its equinoxes flipped? It does make me wish I had the botany degree I almost chose in college.

Turns out I didn’t squint well enough at the fine print and got the name of the sock knitter wrong (there are only so many of us avid knitters there.) All straightened out now.

One more week till I get to start the months of recovery from retina surgery and I am ready for it.

We don’t have collection plates nor fundraisers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he reminded us.

With the exception that the youth are allowed to have one activity every year to raise money for camp: locally, that’s at the church-owned campground up in the mountains that the kids put many volunteer hours into cleaning up after the CZU Complex fire burned the facilities down a few years ago. Most of those redwoods have begun to green out again, thank goodness.

They have really earned getting to go and to see the forest renew year by year after the devastation.

Last year there was a carwash.

Today was a party. Balloon animals for the little ones and showing them how to make them, cotton candy, come have fun.

We had baked goods by volunteers. Those, you paid for, one of two prices: Original, and Generous, trying to meet everybody’s budgets. First claim first served.

And a silent auction: a picture of the thing offered and a sign-up sheet to put your bid on. Dog walking by one of the teens, water your plants while you’re away. Lessons in various languages. A tour of Filoli Gardens.

Sue likes to knit socks and offered to knit a pair to fit.

I offered a Malabrigo Mecha hat.

The dad of the now-grown Eli, who used to take care of my mango tree when we were away and who loves the teal hat I knit his son, took one look at the blue twin to it and made sure that that was going to be his and made my day.

Someone wrote down $10 for Sue’s socks and probably thought they were being generous for a pair of socks.

She was going to have to bid a whole lot higher than that if she wanted those. After the huge expenses of this past week I hadn’t been going to spend a dime but I knew she wasn’t offering even the price of the yarn (unless it was a really good sale and/or old stash.) But how would she know that.

How about a different number to look at. After that it’s up to her (and hey, I would dearly love a pair from Sue’s hands.)

I got pulled away to family errands before I found out if I’d won but I was assured I would be emailed and could take care of it then if I did.

To quote the good doctor (as in Suess), Who sees who sew whose new socks, sir? You see Sue sew Sue’s new socks, sir!

Sue’s note said pick your size and color. I think forest green sounds good.

That 7mm kidney stone that they hospitalized him for five weeks ago and then it moved and stopped hurting but wouldn’t go away?

It finally, finally got laser-sprinted out of there today.

A few hours later, we took him to the wound care doctor he sees twice a week, who looked at his foot and was pleased at the improvement.

There’s a batch of chocolate in the melanger in celebration. And typing this I just realized–it’s being stone-ground. I’ll see myself out…

Saw a little boy at Costco, alone in the aisle in that initial blink of time but knowing where his mommy was and steadfastly heading her way, slowly dragging the near-size-equivalent to a favorite blankie bunched up and trailing across the floor behind him.

It was a plastic outer bag holding two quite large loaves of bread and he was going slowly as he pulled about 10% of his weight along.

Are crusts allowed on peanut butter sandwiches? Jelly or honey? These are the important questions one needs to know.