(Foil at bottom to thwart slugs.)

The ordinary weekly chore of dragging the hose around the yard, pointing it towards a tree, setting a timer, BRAAAAAP then the next then the next then the next, repeat, while taking the time to closely see the changes: some week by week, some from even just this morning when my tomato was an inch shorter and the netting tent was tall enough.

This is why I haven’t put in an automatic system. There’s calibrating to varied sizes while knowing the sizes will change but also I seem to want it to make me have to go out and spend one-on-one time with the outdoors in the evening, when I finally can in the day.

Everything’s growing. Everything’s reaching up and out to what each plant or tree was meant to be. The best of the sun to them all.

These are the moments when I think having something living to watch and nurture and see responding to care, even a seedling in a paper cup, is as necessary to the soul as the air that we breathe.

It’s not just twelve. It’s not even just 34. It’s 408 individual decisions, after hearing and observing and considering all the evidence and asking for a repeat on salient points and then coming to a unanimous decision of unanimously guilty.

Even from the guy who at the outset said he got his news from the former guy’s website: thirty-four of those decisions were made by him.

As Doonesbury cartooned re Nixon years ago, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!

Knowing all that the little mobster’s minions were capable of, those jurors chose to vote what they knew to be true for our children’s children’s children’s sakes as well as ours. They are heroes.

An hour later, my phone rang.

A driver had zoomed through a right-on-red and suddenly found my kid on the hood of their car, waved hi as the pedestrian slid off, and kept on going.

The car coming up behind him was an ambulance. A picture got taken of the guy’s license plate and they called another ambulance and the cops.

The ER said no breaks found, and that is a very very good thing, but it’s going to hurt for awhile.

Meantime, the jury in New York City decided that there would be no breaks in the rule of law no matter what the defendant’s former title was–not on their watch!

Jamie Raskin, former Constitutional law professor, later impeachment manager in the House, wrote a piece for the New York Times.

Most of us have heard of the insurrectionist flag Samual Alito flew at his beach house and the upside down US flag (also a symbol co-opted by the January Six-ers) at his home. He claims the latter started after his wife had had a tiff with a neighbor and that she did it; but his story keeps changing. (Edit: new details here.)

Meantime, the Supreme Court majority has refused for months to rule on Trump’s absurd claim of absolute immunity, including, it was spelled out, the right to assassinate his opponents.

Which, a year from now, could include the Supreme Court itself.

Senator Durbin wrote to John Roberts asking that Alito recuse on the immunity case.

Alito himself wrote back defying him.

For those who don’t get the Times, Raskin said that there is another option: the Justice Department can request that the other members of the Court require Alito to recuse.

And here’s why that’s possible: there was an elected Chief Justice in West Virginia fourteen years ago who had a case before him of a coal executive who had donated millions to the campaign that got that judge that judgeship. Not cool.

So Congress passed a law stating that in cases where there is a reasonably perceived lack of impartiality, judges and justices–specifically including those on the Supreme Court–can be required by law to recuse themselves and it spelled out how that is to be done.

The Supreme Court Justices can do it themselves, whether Merrick Garland moves on this or not, but if he does, then, by law, they must order that recusal.

And it wouldn’t just be Alito. Clarence Thomas’s wife allegedly funded transportation for busloads of insurrectionists and Thomas was the sole vote backing Trump’s effort to keep his Presidential records out of the hands of the Congressional January 6 investigative committee.

So now we’ll see whether the other members of the Supreme Court will choose to uphold the Constitution and the law. Now that the rest of us know what that one says.

Or not.

VOTE. Our democracy depends on every single vote.

It’s been a long time since someone yelled at me like that. I was not supposed to be out there. I was not supposed to be in their space. I most definitely was not supposed to be picking the strawberries and blueberries that they hadn’t been able to get at underneath that bird netting.

I looked up. The mourning dove on the telephone wire tucked its head under its wing: Not me!

That mockingbird was somewhere but I wasn’t quite sure just which tree. Loud, insistent, and incessant! I was surprised that a bird could make a person who has such a terrible time hearing on the phone know just how big a piece of its mind it was giving me. Nonstop. I almost wanted to apologize to the neighbors, while at the same time, it was totally making my day. Look at this! I’m hearing a bird!

Here, I offered, looking at one strawberry and then tossing it to the ground, that one you can definitely have. And that one. That’s probably the bug that chomped them–that’s definitely for you, too.

I finished picking the ripe ones and headed on inside so it would know I was no longer–what, a threat to its babies somewhere above my head? Did I accidentally chase off its one chance at a late mate this summer? Beats me.

Meantime, my plastic container of sourdough starter had fallen out of the freezer and shattered and my good friend Sue fed hers last night and brought over a half a jar, ready to go.

And so for the first time in too long there is a loaf of cranberry pumpkin vanilla orange sourdough bread that will be ready by lunchtime tomorrow and we are so looking forward to it.

With berries at breakfast to tide us over till it’s ready.

So so so much faster than intarsia.

Teasing about being twelve aside, I’m really liking how this is coming out. Four more rows and then I get to start the next set of pine trees.

The camera keeps making the house on up darker even though it’s all the same dye lot, and in the daylight it all matches. Curious.

Bright, cheerful, blinking, and suggesting a tree underneath: the new neighbors put up a set of Christmas lights from the get-go. It’s actually kinda cool. And they leave them on all night about every other night.

I figure if nothing else, sheer curiosity will get me to walk around the block when the sun is safely low enough in order to introduce myself to the folks behind our house.

But there is the unwanted temptation to ask, what on earth?–nicely, while trying not to be all in their business.

I do think though that I should ask if *my* lights are bothering *them*. There’s no curtain on our transoms. No light pointed out the window, either, but you never know how it looks from the other side.

My goal was to finish the roof today, but it looks like I won’t quite make it. Still, pretty good progress.

There is not a bobble on that door, just some light that got caught on a stitch and it decided to go Ta daah! for the camera.

Barbara Walker’s version has a chimney. Only a few minutes ago did I suddenly realize that, oops, mine does not. Well then but it’s new construction, right? And California has outlawed building chimneys in new housing: something about live embers going up them that the state just somehow thinks is less than desirable a possibility these days.

That house…

Okay, when I was twelve we visited a childhood friend of my mom’s, and the friend’s kid my age had a pixie cut. All the rage. Her mom had done it and I thought she looked adorable and I wanted that haircut.

The friend wasn’t about to touch someone else’s kid and Mom said that that was not something she’d ever done.

I insisted she could. (She was Mom, she could do everything!)

She resisted.

She gave in because I was so sure I wanted this, she did the best she could–and I hated it. HATED it. All she did was make everything really short! (Well, duh, kid, she did not say, what do you think a pixie cut is. It probably helped that I was her fourth kid and she’d had serious teenager-mothering practice by then.)

Mom had been cutting my hair and my bangs all my life and I never let her touch it again and grew it out from there to two years of high school, scruffy bangs at the half-point and all. The back even reached my waist if you brushed the curls straight while it was wet–just don’t let go.

That house is twelve-year-old me staring back at me.

Well, hey, the baby is due October 31st. So a haunted house is just the thing. Right?

Leftover strawberry pie filling (I know, you’re going what even IS that? Left over? How?) but there was: blendered strawberries, just enough sugar, cornstarch, boiled and now well cooled.

I quietly threw some blueberries in for my beloved who, inexplicably to me, likes to eat small fruits that are frozen, spooned it into mini molds (Bakedeco.com has lots) and threw them in the freezer for, I dunno, whenever.

It was worth it just for the look on his surprised delighted face after I pulled them out today and he asked, What IS this?

There were some quirks to the Barbara Walker “Enchanted Cottage” pattern that were why I’d never knitted it: two bobbles on a baby item? You know exactly what’s going to happen to those, right? And the roof. Why are there two styles of roof on the roof.

Well, I can just skip those bobbles.

Oh. That’s why she did that. Well, I’ll have to do some make-ones to account for that kluge. Huh. Came out looking like–a bobble! But it’s not, and it won’t say Chew me! above the door and window, followed by, Pull me! as the baby gets bigger, and I can ease that ease right out of there. I was trying too hard not to let the make-ones shrink up the fabric.

Like that Daisy Stitch did. We’re going to need more photos.

Oh. That’s why on the roof. I still won’t knit it that way, I’ll draw two sets of diagonal lines meeting in the center…

Oh. That’s why you can’t.

I put it down for the night.

I picked it up this morning and a classic metal roof is going in on that gingerbread of a house, with all the lines slanting one way together. Helps roll those hailstorms right down it. I started on it after this picture.

Wherein the sunflower in its preblocked state kind of looks like a Narnia lamp, but actually I like that. (I told me it should have had leaves, though.) 

I was on the fourth floor of the satellite clinic, approaching the elevators. Beyond them the wall is a window, and a woman was over there standing staring out at the scene across the valley.

So I stepped forward a bit to catch a glimpse of whatever might be so interesting. And found myself staring, too.

She saw me and decided to turn away from it, enough. We got on an elevator together.

I hope you’re not having to go home that way, I told her, breaking the silence and acknowledging what we had just seen.

No, no, she said, sounding relieved, I’m going the other way.

I’m heading south, I told her. Should be okay.

But I was mentally charting reroutes, just in case. It should be far enough away. Hopefully.

The huge plumes of black smoke billowed over the freeway and the wind was carrying it southward, so once I got past it it seemed to follow all the way. The hills on the other side of the Bay became a faded-out gray/brown, almost hidden–but gradually, the smoke got lesser and lighter in color and I knew then that the firemen were on the job.

I had a pretty good guess as to just which business was on fire over by the Bay, and it was, and memory is that they got hit with a massive fine last time and I imagine they will be again. Our lungs deserve better.

I think maybe tomorrow I will just keep the car in the driveway and avoid all further excitement.

There’s a road about five miles long that ends at a preserve near the Bay in one direction and runs towards the mountains in the other, sloping upward but never quite reaching that far. On its western end it takes you through what were once endless apricot orchards; now there’s just the Heritage Orchard by city hall and the library. Most of its apricot trees were replanted in the last year or two because the prior ones had had a bad case of old (or it may have been their roots drowned in all those atmospheric rivers.) The new ones are growing nicely with lots of the redness of baby leaves at top and they are in lines facing that road, spaced closely.

Which, on the other side, has Main street and its shops angling away like the arms of a Y.

I was at the front in the right-most of the three lanes coming down that hill while stopped at a red where the two roads come together. A woman was walking across towards the apricot trees but kept turning back and motioning a clear Come on. Come on! to someone I couldn’t see through the taller cars to my left.

The wave of an arm in return and then I saw who she was gesturing to. I had assumed he was standing in the median waiting for the next walk sign, which would mean standing there through another cycle with all those lanes of cars whizzing by, and I didn’t get why he wasn’t just racing to catch up with her–but now it looked like he was actually in the road. That was nuts.

The light turned.

I inched forward.

He waved me emphatically on: GO. GO!

So I did, slowly, not knowing at first why.

Only then did I see.

The car next to me started to then quickly thought better of it. The car in the left turn lane wasn’t going anywhere.

The man was trying to protect what I now knew he knew we wouldn’t have seen in time. It was easily six feet long or more, the shades of gray of the pavement, and as the snake twisted its body in the sun, in those half-rolling motions there was an unexpected glistening, the lighter belly accenting the dark upper.

I have never in my life seen such a huge snake in the wild. Though it seems almost a perversion to describe the widest part of that commuter road in that town as in any way wild.

I will never again hear the phrase herding cats without thinking of that guy trying to encourage a snake to cross the three lanes plus bike lane of that nice warm road.

How many of those baby apricot trees could it climb all at the same time?

—

Conversation later at home: The only native snakes that big around here I think are the rattlesnakes, he told me, and some of them are quite dark. Did you see the patterning?

The right-eye retina scarring got the better of me, I told him. I was the farthest car away and I couldn’t quite see that level of detail to be sure.

Edited to add: after Googling snake types in California? He was apparently right. Rattler.

I’ve been checking the one apricot seedling that had aphids for any sign of them coming back. The plant’s not very big yet; it doesn’t take long to check it over.

This evening was a complete surprise: two leaves at the top were browned, drooping, and curled up. Those were completely healthy two days ago!

I lifted one a bit to try to see–and a little green worm crawled out.

Which is how I learned about leaf roller worms and the moths they turn into. The gardening sites said to destroy all leaves affected.

Well, it already did a good job of that, but here’s my scientific experiment (we’ll see how long it lasts.) If I disturb the growth tip at the end of the branch–and this was the main branch–then its entire length will cease to grow until next spring. No side shoots. One of the idiosyncrasies of apricots. But. Would tearing those leaves off do that, and is the growth tip already damaged.

How would I know if I don’t wait to find out?

And it’s not like the worm stage could have laid eggs.

I will be watching that thing like a–wait. Not a hawk.

Let’s say robin.

The monthly potluck.

Go around the room, Hank said, tell us a story of 1. how you met, and/or 2. something in history relating to your family.

I suddenly realized I never did know how a particular set of dear friends had found each other. I think they were living about two hours apart when they did.

She turned that part of the answer over to him, and what he said was, There was this conference. The usual tech stuff; she was representing her company, I, mine: and it suddenly came to me that in all the places in all of the universe to come it would never bring the two of us to the same place at the same time again. Ever. This was it.

Unless.

And he realized, having chatted with her awhile, how much he wanted it to.

Forty-two years. They are each other’s life, the universe, and everything.

One small corner of the sour cherry tree, making promises. You should see the rest of it!

A solid bit of progress on the baby blanket.

And…

A neighbor had a spot prepared and pots ready to go in–of some beautiful trees and an ornamental grass that is invasively free-seeding, something I’ve been fighting in my back yard and despairing over and that shreds your skin if you try to pull it out once it’s gotten bigger, but she couldn’t know that. It’s marketed as drought–resistant. I saw it as we were getting in the car for a grocery run.

On the way home my sweetie said something that turned into comparing Costco’s new employee who was clueless but trying to be helpful to the CVS employee who’d stood there arms folded smirking as she ran out the six minutes on the clock while a pharmacy customer begged, to tears, for her to just fill her prescription, knowing the place would be closed on the morrow. I later filed a complaint and so did the customer.

“She should have been fired,” he said, and he was certainly not wrong, but I was like, let’s change the subject. Living through that once was enough.

Got inside, started putting groceries away, and the freezer with the broken shelf erupted. When I tried to rescue everything, he came in the garage just at the wrong moment, oblivious, and got in the way by trying to hand me something else to add and did I want to take one of these new macarons out of the box first? They were good!

Just. (Steam, meet ears.) Wait.

Got that dealt with, came back in, and told him, I am in a crabby mood. I don’t know why I’m in a crabby mood, I don’t want to be in a crabby mood, but I am.

I will go hide in my room, he said mildly.

We had run out of almond flour. I needed it for what I wanted to make for a potluck tomorrow. That was one of the reasons for the Costco run, and once I had everything in place and done at last, I opened a bag and started the familiar pattern. A cube of boiled pureed organic seedless mandarins out of the freezer (not THAT shelf), two cups of almond flour, eggs, butter, plain yogurt, panella sugar (might as well use the last of it up), set out the blueberries, too…

When suddenly I heard the words spoken softly, but carefully just loud enough for me to hear, coming from down the hall:

“Sneak.”

(Wait what was that? Did he say?)

A little closer. “Sneak.”

(He DID say that. Where is he.)

“Sneak.” He scootched just around the corner into sight. “Sneak.”

(What ARE you doing.)

“Sneak.” And this time he reached in for what, when my parents did it back in the day we kids would grimace and tease, Ooh, mushy-gushy in the kitchen!

And I laughed and laughed and kissed him again and that was that.

I knitted most of one of those skeins of Rios today and finished the five trees.

You want a taller tree than the typical Christmas tree lace pattern? Knit every branch twice.

Onward!