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.