Meantime, the cinnamon sticks disappeared. No crumbles, no shards, gone. Huh. The cinnamon branch against the peach tree was left untouched but above it one of those sticks had been jammed between clamshells where the squirrels couldn’t reach it even if they’d suddenly stopped avoiding the stuff. No sign.
I finally got it: birds’ nests.
I wonder if they had any way to intuit that the non-native cinnamon would keep mites and ants away from their babies? Squirrels will line their nests with bay leaves to keep fleas away if they’re lucky enough to find any.
Or maybe they just were attracted to the size and shape and color and smoothness and light weight. I don’t know.
Meantime, after very rarely ever seeing a single one, (like, twice, I think) –but I don’t think it was the cinnamon that called them–today I had a flock of fourteen elegant birds crowding the patio. They dwarfed the mourning doves, who kept well clear. According to Sibley, band-tailed pigeons are 13 oz to our Cooper’s hawk’s 16 oz–they are big. Beaks with a bit of a curve downward with dark coloring at the tip rather like a hawk’s. Cool.
They were skittish and didn’t stay long (Don’t move! You moved!) and I got no pictures, but, wow, my birdfeeder has never seen the like. (And no you can’t land on it–one tried.)
The third thing. I got the call from the UCSF researcher and we finished up our annual lupus survey but just before she could go I told her what I had done.
She was stunned. She was thrilled, and she loved that the color matched where she worked. She was so excited for her mom to be getting that soft chemo cap made just for her and she completely made my day by how grateful she was–she has no way to know how many more people will get knitting done for them rather than just thought about after she so thoroughly fed my soul in those moments.
After I hung up that did it: I sat down and undid the last ten rows and redid them to take out that one single non-decrease row right there that was making the back poof out funny. Yes it did. Out it goes. Should have made them all decrease rows as of one step sooner. Now it’s nice and rounded off at the top the way it needed to be and now it’s good enough for her mom and now it’s reblocked and tomorrow, now that it’s perfect, tomorrow it goes out in the mail.
It’s amazing the difference one single step can make.