Dad took the paper and the comics to Mom for her to laugh by and reported to us children on her progress, and I know they’ll be making her walk on that knee soon.  She did not finish all her hospital food. I commend her for trying.

And here, quietly, as I knit…

Squirrels have this imperative need to go up.  Which is why they’ll do things like jump on a wobbly plant pot that certainly offers no protection to scan the skies for danger.

The lemon tree with its thorns growing next to the Tropic Snow peach, though, is not something I’ve ever seen them in and in 26 years they have stolen one, maybe two lemons ever–one bite and that was that.

So I don’t know if it was one of them that had just been spooked and went for the closest fur-friendly trunk or if possibly a bird tried to land on a perch that wasn’t ready for it yet; all I know is, everything was fine when I planted this and sometime after it started blooming, one branch became bent down and a few days later a second was half snapped at the base.

And yet. Still attached. Since then, both limbs have started leafing out just fine; how, I don’t know.  But to a peach tree, it is imperative that it bloom and leaf and that it grow so it can give. Already the tips of those branches are reaching in the direction of the sun: up!