Scene: after dinner.

One hand holding an It’s It mini ice cream sandwich (with an oatmeal cookie! Healthy, right?), one hand texting a friend back, one hand trying to put puzzle pieces together without getting any ice cream on them.

When you’re doing the three-handed Mom special, you know the end of the germ is closer.

That and I supposedly got to the end of the cowl, weighed the last of the yarn, did the calculations, and decided I could play yarn chicken for a last half-repeat after all.

Maybe I should actually go finish that before I say that.

I spent most of the two hours of watching church by Zoom with a cowl project on the needles. Nothing big and heavy, just that one-skein project, wondering with each row how long my hands would hold up. How long I would.

They were ready to quit at the last amen. Me, I went and took a nap.

But man did it feel good to actually create visible progress while anticipating the reaction of the future recipient. Another two hours of work and it’ll be done.

Oh look, I got the date wrong in yesterday’s header. Figures.

That blood pressure reading was actually taken after I got the first 8 oz fluid down yesterday, which helped raise it enough that I could at least move; I was too wiped to go back and word that more precisely.

A normal sick day today was such a relief. Drank my hot cocoa out of a paper cup because the stoneware was too heavy and enjoyed every sip. Meanwhile, the covid tests are on the way.

Thank you, everybody. Please get your shots updated–trust me when I say they’re worth it.

Richard told me calling an ambulance was the next step if I couldn’t get fluids down after I said there was no way I could sit up, much less walk to the car for IV rehydration in Urgent Care. He took my blood pressure: 84/46.

It is a relief to be able to be up and slightly about again. Yay for sleep and for kids’ milk boxes with straws in the earthquake supplies–that’s about as no-effort fluids as you can get.

I felt fine yesterday.

Covid cases have been high here lately. I’ve been waiting for the latest update on the vaccine, figuring I’ll do that and the flu shot together. At the same time, though, I wasn’t checking every day to see if it was out yet because I’ve been fighting off the edge of a Crohn’s flare for three weeks–they ruled out 17 pathogens last week–and I hoped my immune system could settle down first before giving it a jolt.

Oh look, the FDA approved it today, with shipping holding its breath for the word. Let the mad scramble for doses begin.

My GI doctor retired, the next one quit Sutter Health, so did the one after that, and as an officially new patient to the new guy he can’t get me in till November. Although I did get told to, if I need it, go see my primary care to get her to get his attention to get me in sooner. Said by the person I saw because I couldn’t get in to see my primary care doctor. Still. Seventeen tests: we got that bit of diagnostics out of the way.

Things are better than last week and it is definitely not bad–I’ve lived through bad and this is not it–so I’ve been keeping that thought as a backup.

I just hope the unexpected sore throat that started last night didn’t reach anyone else.

She came home last week. She saw Holly’s lemons on the table: not Meyers like our tree but the classic Eureka type. Cool! She called dibs. With a great big pretty please.

We had enough sweets around…

She really really wanted that lemon chiffon cake that had so many good memories wrapped around the thought.

Tonight we squinted through the copy of the copy of the copy that had the instructions part mostly cut off–she knew I would just know because I was such a baker all her childhood. I cheated: I compared it to my 1952 Betty Crocker to find out how long I should have it in the oven. And I substituted some of the water with the extra tablespoon of juice the lemon offered up.

I finally baked it for her. And I would brag and tell you how good it was except that we’re not cutting into it till breakfast, so all we’re doing right now is admiring its pretty face.

Call it a fruit omelet, yeah, that’s it.

As I sit down to type: we just got back from the hospital, now that he was up to visitors.

He and his wife told us he went from fine to, two hours later, her asking whether she should call an ambulance–but they got in the car and she raced for the ER. They wondered out loud between them whether he would have made it if they’d waited for a 911 response. He described what happened next as staggering in the door there knowing he was dying and he had no idea why.

They had no idea triage could work that fast.

The first surgery was in the middle of the night. The second was the second day. The twisted paralyzed part of his intestines is gone now and he was actually eating a liquid bit of dinner.

Plain chicken broth is the worst, she said.

Actually, it’s pretty good, he said, glad to be able to get anything that wasn’t through an IV.

She said she knew he was feeling better when he started wisecracking at the nurses to make them laugh.

My rule of thumb is never stay more than an hour; let the patient rest, and so it was. But he looked way better than I expected.

After all the times they showed up for us it felt good to be able to be there for them.

Nope, it won’t let me save the photo, I’ll just have to hope the link still works.

A house by the same builder as ours has just sold. Most of theirs was in its original 1950s state, although the wood-panel walls in the master bathroom were replaced with tile: those did tend to rot.

I’m having flashbacks at how much of it is like what we saw when we walked in this place the first time, right down to the white kitchen tile. That bar across the entry to the kitchen hit Richard at forehead level and the woman across the room said into her phone, Oh, these people are not going to buy this house!

She and her husband were fixing it up for his parents to sell. They were Japanese and had changed the master shower to be nice and low. I was a little too tall for it at 5’5″. Richard was 6’8″. It was such a small stall that he couldn’t kneel down to get under the shower head because his legs were cut in half by the metal runners the door slid across on. The daughter-in-law knew whereof she spoke.

That showerhead was the first thing to go. The bar in the kitchen went when we remodeled seven years later.

Our kitchen cupboards were–this was the latest thing in the 1950s–pressboard on wooden runners: you don’t pull them open, you sliiiide across, lightweight and easy.

Except that after the Loma Prieta quake, if you tried to slide them they simply fell down on your head. That got old.

In that listing they’ve given the upper cabinet fronts hinges instead. They’ve put in a double oven. In the original, the oven was up high, singular, and so small that when I bought a Thanksgiving turkey the first year, I got it home and suddenly realized it might not fit in. Good thing it was a small one. And in ours, the kitchen had been painted sunflower yellow and avocado green.

I’m mostly typing this because our youngest was six when we started remodeling and I don’t know how much the kids remember of how it was. It’s fun to see it. We still have those hanging sphere lights; they’re great for telling if a sudden rumble is a new earthquake or not.

And that kitchen makes me really appreciate our oak cabinetry.

There’s so much depth of color that the camera refuses to see because it’s too busy staring at those bright orange poppies. Which in real life are striking for that very brightness in the context of the fog and surf obscuring the view.

Can you just hear my Iphone going, Told you so!

Monterey Cypress trees can be all kinds of shapes in adapting to wind and drought or water; a flat-top effect like this is more likely the closer you get to the beach.

My thought has been to pick up the sides of the stitches that are at tidal edge and knit a billowing feather-and-fan surf in a near-white fingering or even laceweight yarn, reaching sideways from the direction of the rest of the stitches.

But we’ll see how that tests out. When I do it, I want to do it all at once and the rest of where it would go needs to come to be first.

I’m wrapping the unused colors within the tree across the purl backs of every stitch, as I do. (Don’t mind the untrimmed ends.) It’s slow going, but there are no floats to catch on future toenails or for small curious fingers to get under and yank.

It looks like the backs of my dad’s tapestries. Solid.

It is one-third done.

I try to always have some small snack in my purse. You never know.

I was coming out of CVS on a beautiful 72 degree day. A little ways down the sidewalk from the door there was fabric on the ground, but there was so little depth to it that it took me a moment to realize that there was in fact a person under there.

Sometimes instinct screams Stay AWAY! but this time it felt like the opposite.

I sat down in my car a moment and went looking and hoping, but I could only find one of these.

Sir?

His face suddenly appeared as I was held the raspberry oatmeal fig bar pack out to him.

It’s not much, I told him, but it’s what I could find.

The radiance in his face! He loved me for it in that moment as if I were his own mother. I was a little staggered. And yet not a further word was said.

I glanced back as I walked towards my car: he was back fully underneath. The bright pink package was lying on the drab concrete against the outer wall of the store just past his head, where he could reach for it at any time but so could anyone else if they happened to be hungry and needed a bite to eat.

Six rows, one inch. At about twenty-five minutes per row it felt good to get that much done but for now, I’m kind of done having to make any more stitch-by-stitch color decisions today. I do like that the wide swath of ocean to the right is just straight-across blue, a nice break from the intarsia.

Hmm. Should I put a whale tail or a pod of breaching dolphins in the middle of it further up? In this older project, I simply sketched and knitted the whole dolphin but I’m not convinced that works for me this time.

Maybe bits of twirling i-cord in light sky blue for it to be bursting out of the curls of spray?

Man, those would make a great cat toy out of it!

US News and World Report came out with its high school rankings, I just happened to casually mention to him: Mine was #3 in the state.

He looked at me, knowing that that big grin meant his no longer scored higher.

#14!

He put on a face like Stephen Colbert about to mock a politician and said, Clearly, their information sources were incomplete and out-of-date.

#3! #3!

Hah!

But then, his having been built on an old cow farm, their mascot was The Mighty Moo. When you yell, Gooo, MOOOO at your sports teams you know that those were kids who could laugh at themselves and then get back to the books.

The plane was delayed. There was not a cab to be found at that hour. We went to plan B, rolled out of bed, marveled at how little traffic there was (duh), and got her home.

Later I found myself at Safeway staring at the locked cabinets that are a silent testament to The Great Big River Company’s lack of competence at policing the sale of stolen goods on their site.  Man has that part of living changed since I last bought this stuff when she was a teen.

Push This Button For Help.

I thought of all the reasons I had never had to do that before. Alright then.

A guy showed up with a key.

I told him, My daughter flew in at 3:30 this morning and realized, Mom, I need my contact stuff! (And she was on Eastern time.)

His face softened. In that moment, he was looking out for her, too, glad to play his part, and then walked off smiling.

It is amazing how much we give each other when we can see each other. Shop local, indeed.

Her plane is in the air, I can’t wait!

One of the things Whole Foods is good for is allergy-friendly food. I picked up a number of her favorites.

I found it. Yes! They had a dairy-free chocolate hazelnut spread. I debated on various cream substitutes for the rest of the ice cream batch I was plotting but realized I’d better let her tell me her preferences first.

You have to read every ingredient every time. Manufacturers make changes all the time.

The tired clerk looked like he was just counting the minutes till his shift was over and he could get out of there as he rang my stuff up.

I looked at the conveyer belt as he started to bag it up and told him, My daughter’s flying in from Boston tonight. So: all the chocolate!

He laughed and he looked at me with joy for my joy that I was going to get to see her. He was young but old enough to really know comings-home. It made his day, and that made mine: it was one of those moments that takes you by surprise and almost takes your breath away because all the sudden the love is right there, totally out in the open, we were strangers no more.

I told him Thank you! as I headed out of the store.