We seem to have talked the hand splint people into restocking. Good, and thank you for the help. If my husband should ever happen to step on one and explode the beads everywhere I know where to go, and I’m glad others can get those, too.

Meantime, I walked into the main post office about 4:00, looked at the long line of people stretching across inside the building and starting to double back, masked, but, Nope! Nope nopeity nope, not today.

My family of origin does a round-robin at Christmas, one sibling each each year. There are six of us.

I can never remember whose turn is whose–except that Morgan, when offered, loved the idea of a peach tree for his new house last year and proudly told us this summer that he’d eaten his first three Kit Donnells from it already: they were small but great.

One of my older sisters had a huge pine fall in a big wind storm a few months ago. It missed the main part of the house but there was a crane involved in lifting it off the destroyed patio awning and they did some remodeling in the aftermath.

So there was this big bare newly sunny spot in her back yard.

I asked her what she thought and got a good bit of enthusiasm back and so a bare-root Baby Crawford peach tree will be coming her way, a variety that ripens a few weeks off from Morgan’s so they can extend each other’s seasons in the sharing–and I sent her a pound of Andy’s dried extra-ripe Blenheim apricot slabs to hold her till it comes in a few months.

That Baby Crawford variety exists thanks to Andy. My siblings have/will have the varieties I most love from his farm.

So. I was all done with the Christmas shipping and I recycled a bunch of boxes I’d been saving just in case anything else popped up.

My little sister happened to mention on my birthday Sunday just to make sure I knew it that it was my turn to give to her this year.

Wait–but I thought–

–she was right.

Thanks, no trees for her–what she *really* wanted was some of those apricots. She knew how good they were.

She clearly had been really looking forward to them.

I’m quite glad I got it wrong because trees need all the head start you can give them and I would have wanted to give that one anyway and Christmas gave me an excuse, so, no regrets–more like total glee that two of my siblings get to grow their own peaches now, three, because the oldest already has her own.

And that is how I ended up back at Andy’s today.

I picked up a bottle of poison oak honey there, too, because that deep caramel not too sweet flavor and how else would she ever find out it existed? Or trust that with a name like that it would be okay to even try?

I don’t know how often the Honey Ladies rescue bee hives from that particular plant or want to and that is the only variety of honey I’ve ever succumbed to utter squirrelhood over: there’s a half gallon bottle of it buried deep in the cabinet to make sure I never run out.

Which I keep sure of by occasionally buying another small jar to actually, y’know, eat. But this one’s going to Anne.

Tomorrow. Along with three pounds of apricots. Hopefully there’ll be a less busy hour to ship them out.