My daughter in Vermont wanted to see pictures of the plum tree she’d instigated, and the emailed picture didn’t go through, so I’m putting up shots here of the day it was planted and what it looks like today, two months later.  Sprouting like a teenager–it’s already taller than me.

My children gave me a new summer tradition, and they didn’t even know it.  About 8pm each Wednesday, I figure it’s late enough in the day that the UV levels are probably not a problem.  And I go out in the back yard–such a simple grace to be granted to one’s soul–and I water my trees.

The most amazing thing happened when I did last night: it was quiet as I walked out the door.  No counting to see how long it would take before I got squawked at (two steps, on average), no bluejays flitting noisily just above my head.  I’d seen two out there earlier in the day, but territory-wise, the back yard was all mine now.  Double-check those hearing aid batteries…but no. All was quiet on the western front. The little ones must have fledged.

And I feel like the proud momma as if I’d raised them myself.

Nice idea.  Spent a lot of time on it today.  Good thing I swatched before I launched into it on a grand scale.  Watch me frog.  Watch me hit the delete button. ‘Bye.

Nice idea #2.  Spent a lot of time on it this evening.  Realized it won’t work well with the idiosyncracies not to mention the quantities of the yarn I’m wanting to use.  Nope. Try again.

Nice idea #3. Hey. I like this one!  Careful consideration of yarn qualities and quantities taken into account. I think I got it this time.  Nope, haven’t swatched–I ran out of day.

I guess it’s the squirrels on this one?  A few days ago, I found a redwood seedling popped up among the azaleas.  Which is all well and good, but, give it a few years and in the coming argument between the eaves of the house and the redwood, the house loses.  So I pulled it out.

And roots came with it.  I looked at it a moment and thought, well hey.  To paraphrase the old saying, Give trees a chance.  I imagine I damaged it too much for it to recover, but I plunked it in an empty pot outside the kitchen for the time being with some water, where I can wonder how I’ll get it out the next time if need be.  You never know.  Some things recover that you’d never expect.

Or, ask and ye shall receive. I can’t believe it. Now to figure out if I can somehow help straighten out the stalk-that-will-be-a-trunk so it doesn’t take out the fence–it kind of leaned against it while trying to reach some sunlight amongst the plants in the box there. See those big leaves on the left?

I’ve wanted a fig tree for years. Not a completely practical thing to want. It doesn’t get hot enough here long enough for them to get terribly sweet in our microclimate–same with oranges, which can come out tasting sourer than lemons unless you’ve got the right exposure, and maybe heat reflecting off the side of a house or fence. Still. My friend Marlene used to live down the street, and she had a fig tree leaning over the fence from her neighbor’s yard: she loved it. She loved the shade and being able to reach right up and eat a fig anytime, and she was terribly upset when the neighbor declared it had to go, that they were cutting it down.

Those figs were good enough to make Marlene delighted with them–hey. So I wanted a fig tree myself. Look at those leaves, and you can see why, when they’re toweringly tall, they tend to dominate the postage-stamp yards around here. I grew up in a house in the woods, and those huge leaves, so different from what you see in California in general, really appealed to my inner forest.

I went outside just now to photograph the lemon tree, laughing over the silly bluejay that tried to argue with my father-in-law that he was trespassing in her yard and to get away. I was going to share a good laugh over the bird.

And I saw the fig tree up above the six-foot-tall fence. None of us had any clue it was growing back there. We certainly didn’t plant it. The bird, instead, got the last laugh, and I am delighted.

“We need to bake a cake! An angel food, maybe.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“We need to bake a cake!”

“Okay, Mom, I am *not* quite following what you’re saying here.”

I explained that slugs and snails can’t climb over broken eggshell jags, and since that was way better than poisons, we needed to put some around the new base of our tree he’d just planted for me.

He allowed as how he could handle that type of tree treatment. Bake a cake. Right on.

Later, thinking I ought to use the tree I’ve got going already, I looked at the Meyer, picked some lemons, and pulled a lemon sponge cake out of the oven a few minutes ago instead; that’s the way the eggshells crumble sometimes. (I took the picture first while it was still semi-light out.)

Back to the shawl on the needles for his wedding.

I just spent five minutes outside at 10:30 am, talking to the guy working on my roof, and my left eye sight was starting to get wonky. It’s a very good thing we didn’t try that walk to the Faire, however badly I wanted to.

This faster-version Julia shawl took about eight hours to do, and it’s a good pattern for when I only had a single skein of Casbah merino/cashmere/nylon 80/10/10, because it repeats every right-side row: so you can stop at whatever row you need to and still have it look right. Since it’s a superwash-treated yarn, I’m thinking of it as the Eight Hour Mom Surprise (I’m suddenly picturing Elizabeth Zimmerman fans pelting me with small leftover balls of yarn.) Celebrate the mom as well as the baby, with something that won’t get outgrown. I do feel every new human that enters the world ought to have something created just for them, but I also know how much it can lift a mom’s spirits to have something pretty but that doesn’t require babying–she’s got enough on her hands. Although I would put it in a pillowcase before throwing it in the wash, definitely, and no dryer.

Meantime, yonder elder son is flying home shortly, but the letter just beat him to it. I was shaking my head, going, how can they summon a kid at university in the middle of their studies, when they’re a thousand miles away? How can they require the kid fork over for the plane ticket? He told me the real reason he was flying home now was, he was coming home to play with his mom for the little time we could have together and to “drive you to your little yarn stores and take you to see your little knitting friends.” Kid. 6′9″ you may be, but, I used to be bigger than you…

The letter came. He had me open it and read it over the phone as he waited. Dear… You are hereby excused from jury duty.

I guess they agreed that sequestering him during his honeymoon was going to be a bad idea.

When we bought our house in ‘87, it had this red climbing rose that resembled the ones lining the fence at the edge of Stanford campus. I had always thought of roses as the most fragile of flowers, and yet theirs grew in the middle of a dried-out area and climbed and bloomed happily and freely. My red one, on the other hand, was in terrible shape with black spots and I didn’t expect it to last a year.

Which shows you what I knew about them. It’s grown into a magnificent plant.

Meantime, the Picotee has opened up, and I moved it to where I could see it better looking out my window here.

Every good family photo album has to have a set of bunny ears in it. This amaryllis is coming up next.

Not much UV at this hour. I ventured forth. Curious how many buds have opened up alongside the window on the azaleas, while the rest further away wait awhile longer: is it the extra warmth? The extra sunlight from the reflection?

The allium from outer space (don’t know if the squirrels planted it or the birds) doing a Bill-the-Cat impression:

And inside. My tall Dancing Queens look different each year they bloom. From orchestra to jazz to a simpler folk melody sung along to a guitar, whatever may be playing, they dance freely with the tune.

It’s a beautiful day out there.

And inside, as well.

Snowing in March. California style: shovel-free.

Sitting here in our family room, these white flowers whose name I wish I knew suddenly required of me that I look up out the window and notice them. That I notice that it’s November and that they’re blooming and that there are things about living in northern California that I enjoy very much.

So I picked up the camera, walked outside–something I, with my lupus, too seldom do–but it was 3:30, the late-fall San Francisco fog had rolled in, and the sky was darkening; the exposure seemed like it couldn’t be a risk. The flash went off repeatedly as I was snapping pictures. The leaves on the apple trees are a beautiful bright yellow. The lemons are turning color to match. I picked one, and as I sat here quietly typing away again on my email, its lovely scent was on my hands, so much so that I went back out and picked more and now a lemon cake is happening in my kitchen. I will cook down some frozen mixed berries with just a smidgen of sugar to pour as a sauce over the slices after it cools.

My mother and mother-in-law were newlyweds together, friends living across the street from each other in DC proper, before they bought houses and moved their growing families to the suburbs. They both owned the then-recently-released Betty Crocker cookbook, and Mom Hyde told my mom that the hot milk sponge cake was a great recipe to try.

When I was a teenager, I stumbled across that same cookbook, 1950 edition, at a sale being held as a school fundraiser. I recognized it, and since I was about to go off to college, it seemed a good idea and I bought it.

Mint condition. Original edition. Looked like it had never been opened. I have since been told it would have been worth a fair amount had I left it like that, but like our mothers before us had done, I put it to the good use it was meant for.

And when we moved here, I pulled out that same hot milk sponge cake recipe that I remember my mom making more often than any other cake, for a treat for my kids, except, I made a substitution. And later told my mother-in-law about it.

Why, she asked me, even if it was so good, why would I want to use fresh lemon juice for most of the milk? Wasn’t that, like, hideously expensive?

She’d forgotten we had that tree.

Tart and not too sweet and the top with an intensely lemony melt-in-your-mouth texture like the filling of a fine pastry. Almost no fat nor guilt. You can have your cake here, and enjoy it, too.

I was going to clip a gladiolus stalk and bring it inside yesterday after we got home; we have a patch of them that my mom planted for me a few years ago. A bag of bulbs on sale, late in the season, while my folks were visiting that year, hopes that something might still grow from them, a risk and a chance taken, a morning’s hard work on her part, and here we are now.

Just as I went to open the sliding door, a hummingbird appeared and buzzed the flowers. No way was I going to take food from a hummingbird!

Last night we got a rare summer rain, and today a lot more stalks opened up. Two of them, however, toppled of their own weight and snapped over. Fair game. There were a lot more for the hummingbirds than me at this point, and those two are now inside in a vase. Glorious. Thanks, Mom!

I promised Lene a shot of our tree to go with her tree photo. This is the flowering pear that nearly died after the woodpecker ringed it, but recovered; there are no brown leaves this year. Hale and hearty and tall, it lifts my spirits every day to see it.

Meantime, I seem to be able to get large or quite small photos on WordPress, but I haven’t quite found out how to get that perfect size yet (but at least you can click on them).

I planted a small patch of baby gladioluses, years ago, and the plant that I will forever now think of as the Orchid Tree (I like that, Karin!) grew its leaves around their spot. 

This popped up and grew from under the neighbor’s side of the fence to come and chat with the flowers on mine.   Seemed appropriate for the holiday weekend.