My neighbor said she was picking her plum tree and did I want some?

I’d love!

Don’t return the bag, she told me, just come on over and pick it up from outside the door. (She is not someone you want to potentially expose.) So I did, and was tickled that it was from Medecins Sans Frontiers–Doctors Without Borders, and anybody who’s read Stephanie Pearl-McPhee for years has probably helped donate to the over a million she helped raise for them. It did not surprise me that those neighbors were involved with MSF, too; good people.

We both have Santa Rosa plums, and yet every single year hers from her much older tree on a bit of a rise from mine always ripens a week ahead.

Meantime, Jeremiah gave a gas barbecue grill to David when he moved in April and now David is moving and he offered it and our old one is long dead and other-Dave volunteered his truck and time to get it to us after calling this afternoon to confirm. Dave and his daughter rolled it on back to the patio under the Chinese elm.

A small-world aside: I knew Dave when he was a teenager in New Hampshire when we lived there and we are all definitely old friends.

Would you like some homegrown plums, I asked by way of thanks.

His face lit up. “YES!” His daughter looked pretty happy about it, too.

And he wanted to see our fruit trees, so I took them on a tour of the yard.

He was intrigued by the mango. When I said it really needs that Sunbubble off it for the summer, the lack of air flow at the back has let a fungus do a bit of damage, his instant response was, We can do that!

It’s about fifty pounds, I warned.

C’mon! We can do it! And so before Richard could even step outside to help the three of us undid the stakes and lifted it and Dave had it over the mango and set it down over there and insisted on putting at least a few stakes back in so it wouldn’t balloon away just for fun before we can get it taken apart.

I got my first real good unobstructed look in two years at the entirety of that tree and what it had grown to and how the Sunbubble had to some degree restricted it, plus that one shoot straight up at the center where the greenhouse’s ceiling had been highest. There is definitely some pruning coming, and I’ll be able to reach that now without a wall in the way.

But it’s done, it’s done! And we have a new-to-us grill! I had something to send them off with in thanks (freely admitting the plums had come from next door.)

I need to find out if the first David likes plums, too.

Jeremiah, I’m afraid, is way too far away now to share ripe ones with.

And I need to thank the neighbor again for making a whole other family happy, too.

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Edited to add just for fun: dolphins with mirrors.